George Orwell; soldier of the POUM.

E; OK-just ordered mine-I am hoping Orwell waded through his war commentaries with the same hard eyed honesty with which he fought through the SCW. I am still reading Sudoplatov and YES-before the Hitlerite invasion "Trotskyism" was the number one enemy of the NKVD.
JeffinMNUSA
PS. Except for eliminating the Trotskyites, Spain was a disaster for the NKVD; what with Orlov defecting, their side losing, the Spanish gold affair badly bungled, and many operatives lost to Stalin's purge mania during the hostilities or upon their return. Sudoplatov does go on to say that SCW was a teeth cutting experience and the beginning of a brutal learning curve. I have done some extensive reading on the Partisan Wars in the occupied zones of the USSR and Spanish Civil War veterans keep popping up as significant players (usually dropped from airplanes and on special missions). There is a telling incident in the Florian Mayevsky account where a German SCW veteran turned Red Partisan operative is interviewing a captive who it turns out is a hard core NAZI. The vet kills the man up close and personal with a knife...
PSS. There was a program on Public Television here about some Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors and they are still repeating that twaddle about "fighting for democracy" (there are still some who insist that the South was NOT fighting to preserve slavery in the American Civil War). No matter what these guys were telling themselves, and how pure their intentions- the fact remains that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was fighting for Stalinist totalitarianism. How did it come to happen that the NKVD took over Spain? The Western Arms embargo forced the Spanish Republic into Stalin's camp-WHAT A HORRENDOUS BLUNDER!

 

This is the "oficial" point of view. Well as the government of my country allowed situations like seems in the photos linked. Without police repression ... It was easy to believe that the Spanish Republic would have fallen in any way of revolutionary marxist goverment. The popular front included, among others, the PSOE (marxist these days, till the Suresnes congress in the seventies) the PCE ... and the POUM. Have you ever heard about the "fellow travelers" ?

View attachment 16245

1931 ... 1934 (attempted revolution) ... 1936 ...

View attachment 16246 Upps, this was not in Spain . The latest fad is to blame anarchists as exclusively responsible for the terrorist attacks on the Conservatives. What do you think about the people that burn the other one´s churches?

PS ...an other anglo-writer in Spain ROY CAMPBELL ... he saved the original manuscripts of the works of St. Juan de la Cruz.

I look forward to your comments about the NKVD in Spain.

 

E;
Orwell witnessed some anti Church vandalism by the Anarchists, and shrugged it off as the result of centuries corruption in the Spanish Church and seemed to even tacitly approve. For certain anti clericalism in the Anarchist and Trotskyite movements was unwise, and played a large part in the Western Arms embargo. The real savagery began when NKVD elbowed aside the Spanish leadership; Axis History Forum • View topic - Other operations of the NKVD in Spain. Many in the Spanish Blue Legion signed up for the purpose of avenging the devastation the Soviets unleashed on their native land during the SCW.
To his credit Franco remained firmly in control of his forces and kept the NAZI at arm's length. To Franco's further credit NAZI never did invade Spain, though it seems to have been frightfully close (NAZI badly wanted Gibralter). It is fairly certain that the Wehrmacht would have rolled into Spain if there would have been an Anarchist or NKVD government there during WWII.
JeffinMNUSA

 

In fact whe wrote that they would have had to blow up the Gaudi´s "Sagrada familia" .

Kill people in the prison cell with hand grenades is an NKVD mark? Grandpa saw it in Ibiza. When he arrived there with the Nationalists he had to collect the remains of a friend with a shovel... I recall something like that in Ukraine.

 

No on the grenades-too expensive and some prisoners might survive the blast anyhow-standard NKVD executions were with a bullet to the back of the neck. The grenade must have been because they were in a hurry. The primary mission of the NKVD in Spain was to root out "Trotskyism" but plenty of others were liquidated along the way. These guys had years of practice in the arts of murder, torture and terror in their own country, and set to it with a practiced ease on the Iberian Peninsula. What was happening in Spain came to mirror the purge insanity that was happening in the USSR; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Skoblin To call the Spanish Republic a "Republic" after the NKVD takeover is a misrepresentation of the situation-they had become a Soviet Proxy state.
As a foreign writer fighting for an avowed Trotskyite organization Orwell would have had to have been high on the hit list.

 

In fact HE WAS IN the LIST and narrow escape from execution ... I don´t remember if I read it in "Homage to Catalonia" or in an article like "rememberances of the spanish civil war" ...he ran away when a friend warned him .. he drove non stop to the french frontier or something like that... Edited: Homage to Catalonia chapter twelve ...

Well, it was possible ... at the near end of the war grandpa drove his ambulance trough the still republican territory to Barcelona to protect his faculty members ... they never thanked him.

PS... The link to Nikolai Skoblin ... is simply amazing ... the Tukhachevsky affair ... the better USSR General "legally" murdered and so not there to prevent Barbarossa . ...

 

There were some vital military lessons learned on the Spanish battlefields; Luftwaffe Lessons Learned and Applied
Military Aspects of the Spanish Civil War: SOVIET LESSONS OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Soviet Tank Operations in the Spanish Civil War by Steven J. Zaloga
And the Sudoplatov account makes frequent mention of NKVD guerrilla experiments during the SCW.
Guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War - Barton Whaley - Google Books
Unfortunately for the Soviets the purges retarded the application of these lessons and resulted in the Winter War disaster and the subsequent Barbarossa disaster . The NAZIs failed to grasp the essentials of guerrilla war and the solution of mass reprisals was to set their rear areas on fire in the years to come. For certain the SOVs were able to put together formidable guerrilla forces in the enemy rear during their Great Patriotic War while the NAZIs were unable to return the favor in any significant way; http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/great-patriotic-war/pdf/guerillas.pdf

 

Efestos;
Well here is another SCW book I must order; BARNES & NOBLE | The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch, Counterpoint | Paperback, Hardcover
Someone else gets it that Ernest Hemingway was a drunken fool being used by the NKVD as a propagandist. Later....OK finished. Hemingway was a willing fool for the NKVD, being kept in the Florida Hotel and spoon fed by the NKVD only what they wanted him to see. The execution of his friend Robles barely rated a shrug and "Well that's war!"...WHAT A BUM! And yes he was a massive alchoholic, even to the point of tossing down the brandy during a morning shelling of the hotel. Too bad he squandered his massive talents serving as a shill for the Russians-who's presence controlling the Spanish State he bent over backwards to cover up. There was some hint that all was not well in paradise in "For Whom The Bell Tolls," but in the main this work should be seen for what it is-which is total wartime propaganda.
JeffinMNUSA