Lisa A. Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War. Solidarity and Suspicion. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. XIII, 278 S., 10 Abb. ISBN: 978-1-107-10627-7

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War. Solidarity and Suspicion. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. XIII, 278 S., 10 Abb. ISBN: 978-1-107-10627-7.

Although the participants of the Spanish civil war, which lasted from July 1936 to April 1939, have almost all passed away, new perspectives on their experiences continue to resound; it is a war that still stirs passions. How could it not – with its communists, fascists, socialists, anarchists, orphaned children, brutal repressions, espionage, and its art (e. g. Picasso’s Guernica, Capa’s Fallen Soldier, marching songs). Indeed, of all possible gifts at his disposal, Spanish Podemos Party leader Pablo Iglesias presented then US President Barack Obama with a copy of the American Lincoln Brigade: A Picture History on the occasion of a visit to Spain coinciding with the war’s 80th anniversary.

Approximately 2,800 US volunteers – longshoremen, teachers, students, dozens of African-Americans and many first-generation, not least Jewish immigrants – joined some 32,200 other non-Spanish combatants as well as medical and technical staff from over 50 countries to make up the International Brigades (IB), all lending their support to defeat General Franco’s military coup against the newly elected Spanish Republic. As Gerban Zaagsma writes, the decision to go was frequently a mixture of political, socio-economic and psychological factors (Gerban Zaagsma: Red Devils, in: Eastern European Jewish Affairs 33 [2003], 1, pp. 83–99). The “Republicans” lost, however, and Franco – proclaiming himself “Il Caudillo” – remained the autocratic head of Spain until his death in 1975.

Lisa Kirschenbaum, a history professor best known for her path-breaking work on everyday life during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad (1941–44), has written an ambitious new study, incorporating and expanding an article she wrote on Dolores Ibárurri (“La Pasionaria”) in the Slavic Review. Her intention is to “put the Spanish civil war at the center of a history of international communism in order to understand the importance of Spain as a personal and political point of reference for individual communists” (p. 9). Using an interdisciplinary and trans-Atlantic approach that is influenced by spatial, emotional and material history, Kirschenbaum focuses on distinct individual as well as collective biographies (e. g. US commissars and commanders in Spain) and on institutions (e. g. the Lenin School in Moscow and Moscow News, with its American co-founder Anna Louise Strong and its ample female American staff). The result is effectively a selective comparative history of the United States and the Soviet Union (and eventually a few of its satellites) during “high” Stalinism (1929–56).

Kirschenbaum’s sources are extensive: from archival material in Russia, the US and Spain to a vast array of secondary sources. Two collections are particularly well probed: (1) the Tamiment Library at New York University – with holdings on the Communist Party (CP) of the USA, the IB and the rich Archive of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, from which we are also treated to a number of photos showing the everyday life of US brigadistas in Spain – standing around, singing, smoking cigarettes or receiving mail; and (2) the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow, with its trove of Comintern (Communist International) files. Short quotes from letters sent home by US combatants (many from: Cary Nelson / Jefferson Hendricks [eds.]: Madrid 1937. New York 1996) are also interspersed throughout the text.

The author’s objective is to reintegrate CP members (“international communists”) – especially those who had spent months if not years in the Soviet Union – into the histories of the IB and the Spanish civil war. After all, 70 % of the Republic’s foreign fighters were Comintern members, and in the civil war historiography from the 1950s through the 1980s, this hard-core Stalinist component was largely overlooked or else analytically slighted as Stalin’s “dupes” (p. 8). In revisiting this period, Kirschenbaum suggests “see[ing] Stalinism itself in a new way” (p. 243). Her focus is on “how the [CP] volunteers’ ideas of themselves, their cause, and the Soviet Union interacted with the unanticipated and often poorly understood military, political, and social context in which they operated” (p. 89), discovering in the experiences of these non-Soviets a “central paradox of Stalinism: simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions” (p. 12).

Although much research went into this study, a weakness is that it avoids sufficient scrutiny of several of its key issues, such as the term “international communism”, which is often evasively interchanged with “international solidarity” (and thus could equally apply to fascism). Commissars – the political arm of the Stalinist-inspired brigades – tend to be misleadingly discussed as if they were rank-and-file combatants. Indeed the term “volunteer” itself is unexamined, notwithstanding Chris Cappozzola’s illuminating work on “coerced volunteerism”. The Spanish civil war famously included a range of international volunteers – from transnational anarchists such as Emma Goldman, who like many of Kirschenbaum’s protagonists lived in Bolshevik Russia and visited warring Spain several times (as, by the way, did Elizabeth Dilling, an American Franco supporter), to Franco’s Irish Brigade. A discussion of what distinguished Comintern volunteers from the others would have provided more substance.

Moreover, non-specialists to Kirschenbaum’s narrow topic will require additional context: on the Comintern as a whole, the war itself and the complicated US history of communism. Further, the discussion of sex roles (mostly types of male bonding or in the context of male combatants writing letters to women at home) omits more rigorous gender history analysis: for example, a critical reading of Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai’s short story Love of Three Generations published (first in Germany) in 1924 and its international resonance. Whereas often clearly written, the book is also full of clichés (e. g. “nest of terrorists”, p. 29; “school honeycombed with Trotskyites”, p. 46; “politics saturated communist marriages”, p. 149) and the occasional over-complicated sentence (e. g. on pp. 54, 150, 180), along with many hesitant interpretations (exemplified on p. 48).

In short, the monograph is filled with informative anecdotes as well as engaging life stories and insights, and yet Kirschenbaum’s shift away from social-political history failed to convince me. In the end I thought she merely and unwittingly affirmed Tony Judt’s assessment – that so-called communist internationalists were “distinguished” by “the principle of authority, the acceptance of hierarchy, and the addiction to order” (Tony Judt: Reappraisals. New York 2008, p. 121), not least by pointing out that her protagonists’ main articulated reason for fighting in Spain – namely, to promote a “cause of all advanced and progressive humanity” (pp. 7, 87 et passim) – was a direct quote from Stalin, intended to spur members of the Comintern into action (in: Pravda, 16 October 1936). Meanwhile, Adam Hochschild’s new engaging social history (Spain in our hearts. Americans in the Spanish Civil War. New York 2015) covers much of the same American material. Kirschenbaum’s study, a valuable contribution, will not be the last international perspective on this endlessly intriguing episode in 20th-century history.

Laurie Cohen, Lübeck