ABSTRACT This paper analyses the anti-partisan war waged by the rebel forces during the Spanish Civil War and later by Franco’s dictatorship between 1936 and 1952. It argues that Spain constituted the earliest and longest-lasting case of anti-fascist armed resistance in twentieth-century Europe and, correspondingly, one of the first sites of modern counterinsurgency conducted by a fascist regime. Drawing on military orders, judicial records and internal security documentation, the article examines the main pillars of Francoist counterinsurgency, including the refusal to take prisoners, indiscriminate reprisals against civilian populations, hostage-taking, forced evacuations, deportation to concentration camps and the deliberate destruction of forests. By comparing the Spanish case with the anti-partisan wars waged by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and other Axis or collaborationist regimes during the Second World War, the article challenges interpretations of Spanish exceptionalism and instead places the Francoist experience within a shared European repertoire of counterinsurgency.

Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship by Christine Arkinstall (review)

This article examines the role of the German Secret Field Police (GFP) during the Spanish Civil War. Deployed prior to the arrival of the Condor Legion, the GFP's primary mission was to protect German military forces and Germany itself from any potential leaks of information that could jeopardise its strategic interests. Throughout the course of the war, the GFP underwent significant restructuring and initiated a process of collaboration with Spanish units. This article provides an account of the GFP's structural evolution during the war in Spain, assesses its operational performance, and analyses the results of police collaboration between Spain and Germany.

Reseña de Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century. Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship de Christine Arkinstall.

Arkinstall, Christine. Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023, 276 pp.

Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship by Christine Arkinstall (review)

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) activated many political circles operating in the Second Republic. It also influenced the activity of the communist movement and, after the dissolution of its structures in 1938, its former activists and sympathisers. The article is devoted to the manifestations of the field activity of communist structures and the influence of the Iberian Peninsula conflict on that part of the Belarusian society which favourably received the message formulated by local communists or coming directly from the USSR. Issues such as the propaganda illumination of the war in Spain, the reception of recruitment slogans for the army of the Republic, and the problem of inspiring a financial effort in its favour are addressed. The echoes of the Spanish conflict, considered in the context of the functioning of the KPZB and its supporters, make it possible to conclude that this was an important but not a priority direction in the Communists’ activities. At the same time, they were part of the trend of growing pro-Soviet sentiments observable among the Belarusian community of the Second Republic.

Obra ressenyada: Christine ARKINSTALL, Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century. Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship. Toronto, Buffalo y Londres, Toronto University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-4875-4626-7

This article addresses the unknown transnational practices of the leading party of the Republican government during the civil war of 1936-39, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Abandoned by liberal democracy and its international institutions, the PSOE broke diplomatic isolation by turning to its Labour and Socialist International (LSI) backchannel in an attempt to sway the policies of socialist parties, namely for the abrogation of non-intervention. Through this internationalist commitment, the PSOE revitalized a moribund network subjected to the appeasement and neutralist inclinations of its member sections. By shedding light on the PSOE’s transnational practice with the LSI and its French, Belgian, and British affiliates this article makes a contribution to the Spanish historiography on the internationalization/transnationalization of the conflict, while joining hands with Spanish historians using a more local lens. Moreover, and ultimately, it positions itself in the debate on whether labour history is internationally or nationally rooted.

Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship by Christine Arkinstall (review)

Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship by Christine Arkinstall (review)

The article analyzes the linguistic features of the novel Zumalacárregui by the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdos, first published in 1898. The novel opens the third series of the National episodes (Episodios Nacionales) and is dedicated to the First Carlist War in Spain (1833–1840). The protagonist is the Carlist general T. de Zumalacárregui, whose Doppelgänger is the priest José Fago. General T. de Zumalacárregui is frequently mentioned in periodical publications, in memoires and in fiction of the 19–20th centuries. The article analyzes nouns, adjectives and substantive combinations used by the writer to create the image of the protagonist. The semantic fields “war”, “politics” and “religion” are distinguished among the lexical units used in relation to the general. The image of T. de Zumalacárregui is analyzed separately in the direct speech of the characters of the novel. The most common lexemes used to describe the general are “caudillo” (“leader”), “guerrero” (“warrior”), and “héroe” (“hero”). These lexical units, commonly used with positive connotations, acquire a comic connotation in the context of the novel or serve to express a negative value judgment. The vocabulary related to the semantic field “religion” at first sight repeats the clichés of Carlist propaganda, according to which T. de Zumalacárregui appears as a “martyr” who suffered for the “Cause”. At the same time, by replacing individual lexical units, the author turns the protagonist into a parody of Christ. The vocabulary related to the semantic field “politics” is analyzed. T. de Zumalacárregui appears in the work as a supporter of “Absolutism”. It is concluded that B. Pérez Galdós, copying some clichés of Carlist propaganda, created a negative image of T. de Zumalacárregui.

Background. The article is devoted to the problem of reconstruction of collective memory in Alberto Méndez's novel "The blind sunflowers" (2004). Méndez's book is a part of contemporary Spanish narratives that, since the 1990s, have witnessed the emergence of the so-called "memory boom", a trend in literature and cinema aimed at preserving, restoring and transmitting the memory of the tragic events of Spanish Civil War and Franco repression. The purpose of the research is to reveal the ways and mechanisms of reproduction and elaboration of traumatic collective memory in "The blind sunflowers" by Méndez. Methods. The study is based on the following methods: a historical-cultural approach and "memory studies", which made it possible to determine the place of the Alberto Mendez's novel in the context of the Spanish "literature of memory" beginning 21st century; the narratological and intertextual approaches were used to investigate various techniques of the author's creation of a polyphonic narrative in four stories that make up the book, and which represent different voices of the same past, functioning as symbols of restoring the memory of defeat. Results. The artistic recreation in "The Blind Sunflowers" of the traumatic experience of the events and consequences of the Civil War in Spain was investigated in dichotomies typical of the depicted historical moment: winners-losers, victim-executioner, death-life, memory-oblivion and voice-silence. The analysis of this traumatic context in the novel proved that writing (the voice of memory) functions as one of the main ways of preserving the experience of erased generations, restoring life after physical death, and as a guarantee of resistance to oblivion. Conclusion. The reconstruction of the memory of the Civil War in Spain and its consequences during the period of Francoism as one of the leading trends in modern Spanish literature demonstrates the still openness of collective trauma and, accordingly, the need to find ways to overcome it. In view of this, the approach proposed by Méndez in "The Blind Sunflowers" to restore and transmit memory through a collective discourse of defeat becomes a significant step towards healing the unhealed wounds of a society traumatized by war and a dictatorial regime, as it emphasizes not only the importance of the grieving process in overcoming tragedies, but also attests to the creation of literature as a space of memory, in which the past is reproduced as a voice that breaks the silence and overcomes oblivion, not allowing to turn the page and close the past.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 brought about a change of literary paradigm among the Leftist intelligentsia of the country. The experimentation encouraged by Modernism is thus gradually replaced with an increasingly ideological form of writing whose epic zeal and celebration of the virility of soldiers equally nurtured the works of those British poets who became involved by the Spanish antifascist cause. There exists nonetheless another kind of literature of the war in Spain written from the rearguard which examines the reality of the conflict from an intersectional angle. Such is the case of the political poetics of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Through a gender perspective, the contextualised study of the evolution of her poetics during the thirties can allow a revision of the dominant version of the Spanish Civil War imposed by the predominantly male cultural politics of the time.

Salaria Kea, the only African American nurse to serve during the Spanish Civil War, fought against racism and fascism her entire life. Her contributions during the war in Spain, as well as her legacy, have become complicated matters, as the veracity of her testimony found in archival materials is routinely questioned and at times blatantly negated. Kea's experience as an African American woman positions her at the crossroads of racial and gender hierarchies that mark her identity in complex ways. Through the lens of various theories of intersectionality, this article will grapple with the precarious modes of historical discourse found in the archive, and vindicate Kea's testimony, recognising it as making a crucial contribution – from a unique perspective – to the understanding of a more nuanced historical picture.

The article considers N. V. Gogol’s allusions to the history of the initial period of the First Car-list War in Spain in his story Diary of a Madman. The information about Spain that the author might have possessed while writing the story is analyzed. The ties between certain dates mentioned in the text and the real events of 1833–1834 are outlined. Poprishchin, the protagonist of the book, is compared to the pretender to the Spanish throne Don Carlos.

In the article, based on documents from the collections of the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), an attempt is made to analyze the process of understanding by representatives of the Red Army command the experience of the actions of Armored forces during local military conflicts at lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol river in 1938–1939. The conclusions made by commanders at various levels, in general, accurately recorded the main shortcomings and errors in the use of tank units and formations, which completely repeated those during the Civil War in Spain. It is concluded that by the time the conflicts began, that experience was unknown to tank and combined arms commanders. In addition, based on content analysis, the inability of specialists to assess the weak armoring of tanks is revealed as the main reason for heavy losses. Attention is drawn to the fact that while correctly recording the extremely low level of training of commanders and personnel of the tank forces, the final conclusions of the reports to the higher command contained exceptionally high assessments of combat effectiveness and assurances of readiness to carry out any order. At the same time, the country’s top military-political leadership received a sufficient amount of truthful information from its representatives from the conflict zone, but preferred to broadcast to the public a picture of the highest combat readiness of the armored forces, which was clearly and convincingly reflected in mass Soviet culture.

The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.

This paper originated in a testimonial on an incident that occurred in Alicante in 1812. The incident resulted in two legal suits for assault by a British officer being brought to a British court in 1815 and 1816. Thomas Moore, the victim of the assault, was also the author of a testimonial published in London in 1816. A thematic analysis of both the events that framed this altercation and the ideological background of the principal protagonists is carried out within the context of the Peninsular war in Spain. The themes include: the Irish merchant presence in Spain, constitutionalism, race, class and politics, co-operation and dissent, liberalism versus absolutism, and the more traditional narratives of religion and national identity. The context is given further complexity by the relationship between the British army and Spanish civilians and the political agency of the British in Cádiz and Alicante.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on something not previously addressed by the literature, labour inspection in Spain in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. Despite the Franco dictatorship’s fascist-style approach of regulatory interventionism, this research shows a relapse into an abstentionist conception of labour inspection that led to worker vulnerability. The study has not only found, as was already known, normative similarities with the contemporaneous Italian and German dictatorships, but also similar (although more severe) limitations to the functioning of the inspection service. The slight improvement registered from 1947 onwards and the effort to achieve a limited equivalence with Western democracies also failed to notably improve working conditions, occupational safety and worker protection. The Labour Inspectorate suffered from understaffing and a lack of resources up to the very end of the dictatorship, something which the incipient democracy then inherited. These human and material resource shortages continue to be a problem and are currently debated in Spain.