Political commissars in the anti-Francoist armed resistance (1936–52)

This article describes the participation of Czechoslovak troops in the Spanish Civil War, between 1936 and 1939. The article focuses on Czechoslovak troops fighting on the side of the Spanish Republic, which were part of international brigades. In the article we will introduce the found the Czechoslovak units in Spain. We will focused in on the combat deployment of Czechoslovak units from their formation to the withdrawal of members of the international brigades in Spain. We will also focus on their commanders and political commissars from the ranks of Czechoslovak volunteers in Czechoslovak units in Spain during the civil war.

This article analyses the function of political commissars in the Republican Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. It evaluates the commissariat’s role in fostering soldiers’ political engagement with the war, as well as the challenges maintaining morale and discipline in a revolutionary army. It also examines the complex relationship between commissars and Republican soldiers, and considers political divisions within the commissariat, particularly the rise and domination of delegates affiliated to the Communist Party of Spain. The article argues that commissars were a central component of the Republic’s relatively successful, and heavily improvised, politicized wartime mobilization in the face of considerable challenges.

Este trabajo presenta y analiza la primera crónica periodístico-literaria escrita y publicada por Miguel Hernández: “Defensa de Madrid. Madrid y las ciudades de Retaguardia” durante la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939), quien inicia con ella una serie de crónicas bélicas que establece un género particular de periodismo: la crónica literaria -poético-política-. Miguel Hernández publica en diferentes periódicos del frente como cronista, con su nombre propio y con seudónimo, desempeñando también tareas de director y comisario político. Temáticamente, esta primera crónica muestra su compromiso, su deseo e incluso su estrategia para poder proteger a la capital de España. Metodológicamente, se aborda desde el giro lingüístico en Ciencias Sociales que permite explicar algunas de las peculiaridades del estilo personal del cronista Miguel Hernández. Todo ello pone de manifiesto que el llamado Nuevo Periodismo (narrativo y literario) que florece en la década de los 70, hoy así acuñado, ya había sido practicado profusa y eficientemente por Miguel Hernández 40 años antes. Por ello, Miguel Hernández merece ser no sólo incorporado al colectivo de los grandes periodistas-cronistas junto con otros ya rescatados hasta el momento. Su estilo y calidad literaria le sitúan por tanto en una posición destacada y pionero del género actualmente conocido como Nuevo Periodismo, que es, además, políticamente comprometido.

War and armed conflict — War — Definition — Whether limited to hostilities between States — Civil war — Whether capable of constituting war in international law — Recognition of belligerency — Spanish Civil War — Whether Germany a party to Spanish Civil War Recognition — Belligerency — Governments — Whether recognition of insurgents as belligerents required to turn insurgency into war — Collective non-recognition of belligerency — Recognition of insurgents as government of State — Whether equivalent to recognition of belligerency — Whether civil war then becomes war — Spanish Civil War — The law of the Federal Republic of Germany

Book Review| January 01 2011 The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. William A. Pelz William A. Pelz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2011) 5 (1): 135–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William A. Pelz; The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1 January 2011; 5 (1): 135–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal for the Study of Radicalism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Raymond Carr, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00 and Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by Tony White Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50 Get access Carr Raymond, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00. Broué Pierre and Témime Emile. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by White Tony. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50. Temma Kaplan Temma Kaplan University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, October 1974, Pages 1198–1199, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/79.4.1198 Published: 01 October 1974

Reviewed by: Hugh Garner’s Best Stories: A Critical Edition by Hugh Garner Emily Christina Murphy Hugh Garner’s Best Stories: A Critical Edition. Hugh Garner. Emily Robins Sharpe, ed. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2015. Pp. xxxiii + 281. $34.95 (paper). Emily Robins Sharpe’s critical edition of Hugh Garner’s Best Stories recovers the 1963 short-story collection of Hugh Garner, a Canadian modernist, non-partisan leftist, and working-class writer. Sharpe implicitly argues for the interrelated dynamics of historical persona and body of literary work as they materialize in Garner’s public persona and oeuvre. Garner emerges as a savvy navigator of the print industry, a self-fashioned pragmatic “writer-for-hire” (xix), and a champion for marginalized subjects. The collected stories have appeared in over 260 print venues in addition to adaptations for stage, screen, and radio. Composed between the 1930s and the early 1960s, the stories are compact in style and complex in their portrayal of “the immense flux of the midcentury, including the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and second-wave feminism” (xi). In recent years, Canadian modernist literature has been the subject of wide-ranging recovery projects like Editing Modernism in Canada and the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory, many of which have been facilitated by digital platforms. Part of the Canada and the Spanish Civil War sub-series of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection, Best Stories is the second literary work brought out in print as part of spanishcivilwar.ca, a more holistic digital archival recovery platform. In addition to the context of Canadian modernist recovery projects, Sharpe’s collection engages in the global recovery of leftist literature. Cary Nelson has elucidated the history of American revolutionary left politics and literature, and Valentine Cunningham has collected British leftist poetry on the Spanish Civil War. Sharpe’s collection joins scholarship by Candida Rifkind on Canadian leftist modernism and Michael Petrou on Canadian volunteer combatants in the Spanish Civil War. Her specific intervention demonstrates the integration of these contexts: international conflicts like the Spanish Civil War and domestic working-class leftist politics shape Garner’s modernist-realist perspective of Canadian life. Sharpe’s introduction concentrates on Garner’s representation of working-class conditions in the early- to mid-twentieth century and features the history of Canadian and international participation in the Spanish Civil War as a subset of working-class history. The introduction also attends carefully to the stories’ broad publication across mainstream, middlebrow, “slick,” and literary venues and accounts for the varied contemporaneous critical reception of the collection’s 1963 publication. Among Sharpe’s most skillful critical moves is a series of readings that contravene [End Page 268] Garner’s self-construction. By evaluating Garner’s self-fashioning as one of the many texts that constitute Garner’s cultural impact, Sharpe allows the persona and the oeuvre to mutually inform one another. One example is Sharpe’s treatment of the “sophisticated ways in which [Garner’s] stories evaluate the same classed technologies upon which he relied and frequently benefited” (xix). Garner’s “multimedia publication” in periodicals, short-story collections, and adaptations for stage, screen, and radio was, in part, a pragmatic adjustment to the changing demands of his profession. His writing also reflects that “technology accentuates class differences at the same time that it offers new routes of social access” (xix). By drawing upon Garner’s multimedia publication strategy, adeptly reading across and through his self-mythologization, and analyzing the working-class thematics of his writing, Sharpe recovers in Garner an intertwined body of literary work, historical personality, and navigation strategy for publication. Sharpe’s introduction and critical apparatus illustrate the centrality of the Spanish Civil War in Garner’s oeuvre. Himself a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln battalion of the International Brigades, Garner has cited the Spanish Civil War as the most influential event of his life. Sharpe indicates that the war in Spain is a recurring theme across Garner’s short stories, novels, non-fiction, and autobiography, that he participated in documentary and oral-history projects on the war, and that the content of the stories finds parallels in...

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticlesRecent Historiography on the Spanish Republic and Civil WarStanley G. PayneStanley G. Payne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 60, Number 3Sep., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/600405 Views: 27Total views on this site Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.

Reflections of a Civil War Veteran Abe Osheroff Dialogues between Painting and Narrative: From Goya to Malraux Countering L'Espoir: Two French Fascist Novels of the Spanish Civil War Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War Simone de Beauvoir and the Spanish Civil War: From Apoliticism to Commitment The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History Ramon Sender's Civil War Icons of War in Alberti: Madrid-Otono From Page to Screen: Contemporary Spanish Narratives of the Spanish Civil War The Failed Ideal in Leon Felipe's Poetry of the Spanish Civil War Two Spanish Civil War Novels: A Woman's Perspective Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers

Reflections of a Civil War Veteran Abe Osheroff Dialogues between Painting and Narrative: From Goya to Malraux Countering L'Espoir: Two French Fascist Novels of the Spanish Civil War Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War Simone de Beauvoir and the Spanish Civil War: From Apoliticism to Commitment The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History Ramon Sender's Civil War Icons of War in Alberti: "Madrid-Otono" From Page to Screen: Contemporary Spanish Narratives of the Spanish Civil War The Failed Ideal in Leon Felipe's Poetry of the Spanish Civil War Two Spanish Civil War Novels: A Woman's Perspective Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers

Reviewed by: Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War by Miriam M. Basilio Yves Laberge Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War. Miriam M. Basilio. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Pp. xvi + 304. $119.95 (cloth). In her first monograph (possibly a derivate from her doctoral dissertation from 2002), Professor Miriam M. Basilio from New York University positions her interdisciplinary research into three salient trajectories related to Spanish history: the visual culture and political propaganda; the politicized posters from the 1930s; and the memory of the 1936–39 civil war in Spain. These intertwined topics are not totally new if considered individually, but there are relatively few books in English that have centered these perspectives upon visual history in an effort to understand the dynamics and redefinitions of the nation in its transition into fascism. Incidentally, some portions of this substantial book have already appeared elsewhere, mainly in scholarly journals (cited on xvi, 276). Although this book primarily covers the years 1936–1940, especially in her last chapter Basilio also studies many recent retellings of the era. That time period marks the early days of modern propaganda, corresponding to the darkest strategies of public outreach practiced by Germany’s Nazi regime. Basilio’s main point is to conceptualize the Spanish Civil War through contemporary theoretical approaches, centered on citizenship, national identity, memory studies, and the public sphere (in the Habermasian sense): “I argue that rival political factions within the Republican and nationalist camps placed questions of national identity and historical memory at the forefront of visual-propaganda campaigns and exhibitions” (1). Despite the complexity of this situation, her methodological approach is nuanced, considering the various trends and influences of this era: Catholicism, the heritage of Spanish colonialism, and the sentiment of national pride (208). In her impressive corpus, Basilio has chosen a wide array of vintage images, posters, cartoons, and various advertisements, either pro or against the advent of a new republic in Spain. Most of these forgotten images are reproduced here in black and white, with a few exceptions in color. The author studies how various exhibitions of these images have been conceptualized, conceived, and perceived by audiences, as in the unforgettable Paris World Fair of 1937, for example, when “the Spanish republican government presented a remarkable modernist pavilion,” which included Pablo Picasso’s latest masterpiece Guernica (174). The analysis is broadly conceptualized into several theoretical frameworks, for example in Basilio’s study of masculinity in some sketches of the Spanish military junta (29). The number of combatants involved was impressive then: as tangible proof of these vast propaganda efforts, “the junta issued approximately 40 posters, many reproduced as postcards in editions up to 50,000” (29). This book comes into five chapters, highlighting the social construction of the imagined nation of Spain (Chapter 1); observing how art, museums, and world fairs were used as vehicles for propaganda (Chapter 2); analyzing how the new nation was redefined (Chapter 3); showing how roots and patrimony were recuperated (Chapter 4); and finally asking how the persistent memory of civil war can be revisited and represented in the twenty-first century (Chapter 5). As she attempts to address these complex questions, Basilio admits that she cannot provide answers to all of them: after so many decades, it is now almost impossible to know exactly how individual citizens really reacted to these propaganda campaigns and exhibitions—whether they adhered to or resisted them—in the early days of the Spanish Civil War (2). As such, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is not just a book about Catalan history. Chapter 5 concludes with questions about how these events are represented by contemporary Spanish artists in the twenty-first century and raises some issues related to memory [End Page 1049] (what we retain from the past), amnesia (what is forgotten or what remains undiscussed), and human rights (especially how citizens were manipulated by political propaganda and effectively forced into a dictatorship) in the context of images from artists such as Fernando Bryce (232–33). Recent images from Francesc Torres’s photography project, “Dark is the Room Where We Sleep,” such as a black-and-white photograph showing a hand...

The history of collectivization during the Spanish civil war has been controversial from its inception. Contemporaries who were sympathetic to anarchism and hostile to Communism authored the first accounts of workers’ and peasants’ collectives. Subsequent Republican and Communist authors dismissed or ignored this largely apologetic literature. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s revived interest and empathy for the revolutionary experience. In particular, Noam Chomsky’s polemical essay renewed the debate. Like his libertarian predecessors, he accused liberals and Communists alike of hiding the successes of anarchists during the civil war. Chomsky had no doubt that their collectives were ‘economically successful,’ and he attributed their difficulties to state hostility and the consequent restriction of financial credit. Although questionable, Chomsky’s New Left perspective was a sign of fresh interest in the question of the collectives. More scholarly accounts, based on original research, followed. Some researchers synthesized serious investigation with political concerns that were usually associated with 1960s idealism. In the 1980s Spanish scholars, armed with new documents from recently opened archives, tackled the subject with critical distance. They adopted a local or regional approach which delved into collectivization’s difficulties and dilemmas. Just as importantly, they began to move away from traditional political history from above to social history from below. The following pages attempt to develop this recent trend in the historiography by focusing on agrarian collectives in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. Aragon was part of what one agrarian historian has designated as the Interior, an area of relatively backward agriculture with low soil and labor productivity. The Michael Seidman

This article focuses on the importance of military factionalism in a nonconsolidated democracy: the Spanish Republic (1931–9). It builds a new micro‐dataset for over 11,000 officers during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) to study how professional and economic interests created divisions within the military and influenced officers’ allegiances during the war. Results confirm that distributional conflicts influenced officers’ decisions in Republican‐controlled territories: officers who gained from military reforms in the years before the civil war and those with more rapid promotions in the months predating the war were more likely to remain loyal to the government. This article also explores the behavioural determinants of officers’ propensity to rebel and finds that hierarchy mattered, as senior officers influenced subordinates’ choices of side.

So far the empirical evidence adduced in favor of my theory of wartime violence has been drawn from a single case, namely, the Spanish Civil War. For the purposes of lending external validity to the results taken from the Spanish case, in this chapter and the following I will compare it to other cases, showing that they are broadly consistent. In this chapter, I present a study of the Ivorian Civil War(s) (2002–2007; 2010–2011), with a focus on the subnational dynamics of violence in this African conflict. My interest in Côte d'Ivoire stems from the fact that this civil war was fought along clear frontlines and characterized by uncontested control over large territories on the part of each of the armed groups. As with other cases of conventional civil wars, current theoretical approaches cannot fully explain violence against civilians in the Ivorian case. Thus, despite the fact that Côte d'Ivoire and Spain differ extremely in many respects, their civil wars exhibit commonalities that are relevant for the purposes of this book.