In Europe

fled, in the end three quarters of even Milton Wolff's Abraham Lincoln Battalion were Spaniards. On 15 November, 1938, the foreign volunteers held a farewell parade in Barcelona. The crowds cheered, flowers were thrown, tears were shed. Dolores Ibárruri, known everywhere as ‘La Pasionaria’, spoke to the women of Barcelona:‘Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are staunched; when the cloudy memory of the sorrowful, bloody days returns in a present of freedom, love and well-being; when the feelings of rancour are dying away and when pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards – then speak to your children. Tell them of the International Brigades.’
    The years of war did not pass. By mid-January 1939, almost 5,000 volunteers from 29 countries had left Spain. The remaining 6,000 – Germans, Yugoslavians, Czechs, Hungarians – stayed. They could not return home, there was nowhere for them to go. They went down with Catalonia, and finally with the republic. Barcelona fell at the end of January, Valencia in late March. Then it was over.
    Czechoslovakia is the best-known victim of the ‘appeasers’, Spain the least known. The Spanish Civil War was decided from the moment the democratic countries withdrew and imposed their arms embargo. The war would not have been won either if the ‘Red’ revolution had succeeded, as the anarchists and Trotskyites claimed later. Franco soon had access to a professional army and the most modern weapons, and those cannot be compensated for by manifestos and nationalised factories. Germany's and Italy's support for Franco was practical and immediate, support from the democratic countries for the republic was ambivalent or altogether absent, that from the Soviet Union riddled with opportunism.
    In the same way that the Vietnam War would mould the mentality of young people in the 1960s, the Spanish Civil War served as a reference point for the politically aware young people of the 1930s. You could say whatever you liked about the Soviet Union, the saying went, but when it came down to it, the Soviets had fought on the right side in Spain. In hindsight, that too proved largely a matter of appearances. Stalin acted primarily out of considerations of power politics, aimed only at advancingthe Soviet Union's influence in Europe. An intelligent czar, given the opportunity, would have done no different.
    When the Russian military archives were opened in the 1990s, a deluge of evidence was released concerning the hidden agenda of the communists in Moscow. None of the communist ‘aid’ was
given
. All of the Soviet weaponry had been paid for in hard currency, the prices ratcheted up to unheard-of heights, and in the end Stalin was able in this way to get his hands on a considerable share of the republic's gold reserves. A Maksim heavy machine gun cost the republic twice what it did on the open market, and a profit of more than fifty million dollars was actually made on two types of aircraft.
    In return for this aid, Stalin also increasingly forced the republic to adopt the shape of a satellite state, of a sort of DDR
avant la lettre
. This sorely undermined republican morale in the long term. Even in the first reports, the anarchists were referred to as ‘the pawns of fascism’, ‘
provocateurs
’ to whom ‘revolutionary justice’ should be applied. After that, Comintern agents and commissars began popping up everywhere in the army, intimidating, arresting and liquidating those who did not toe the line.
    Ultimately, the Comintern devoured its own children. By the end of the civil war almost none of the important advisors and commissars sent by Moscow were still alive. But not one of them had died at the front. They had been called home one by one, condemned to death by kangaroo courts or murdered in the course of one of the countless political intrigues within the international communist community.
    Spain became a backwater once more. After the victory, the nationalists killed another 100,000 political opponents, and no one lifted a finger to stop them. The country is still littered with their unmarked graves. A slave army was formed of at least 400,000 forced labourers, who were put to work until far into the 1960s for the construction of roads, dams and luxurious residential areas. No fewer than 30,000 children disappeared. They were taken away from their ‘Red’ parents and placed in orphanages, then adopted by politically correct