The Russian Revolution and Spanish Communists,1931–5

In July 1936, a military coup directed against the democratically elected Second Republic marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. As Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy quickly came to the aid of the rebels, Spain became the center of the largest and most ambitious, albeit unsuccessful, operation ever undertaken by international communists. The Soviet state worked through the Comintern to publicize – both at home and abroad – the plight of the Republic and the perfidy of its ‘fascist’ opponents. Over the next two years, some 35,000 volunteers, primarily communists, traveled to Spain from more than 50 countries to serve in the International Brigades. Until the end of the civil war in 1939, Spain constituted the romantic heart of international communism, the focus of hope and struggle in the ‘good fight.’ ¹

Although clearly accelerated by the war, Spain’s practical and symbolic importance in the world of international communism built on personal and institutional networks established after the founding of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931. When the Bolsheviks established the Third Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, they looked first and foremost to Germany as the likely revolutionary flashpoint. ² But their conception of ‘world revolution’ was capacious enough to include Spain. The newly organized Comintern sent its agent Mikhail Borodin to Madrid with the task of establishing a communist party. Scarcely understanding the complicated political situation there, the Comintern relied instead on an optimistic belief that revolution was ‘around the corner.’ The mission was a ‘fiasco,’ producing in April 1920 a small, weak, and divided Spanish Communist Party (PCE). ³

However, in 1931 Spain and the PCE begin to attract sustained attention from Moscow. ⁴ One indicator of Spain’s rising revolutionary profile was reporting in the Soviet press. In the summer of 1931, Mikhail Kol′tsov, a well-connected journalist and editor at Pravda, made a brief visit to Madrid and Seville. Perhaps because his account of the trip devoted substantial attention to criticizing the PCE leadership, which ended up being replaced in 1932 for its lack of militancy, literary historian Boris Frezinskii deems Kol′tsov’s trip a ‘mission.’ ⁵ In the fall of 1931, the Paris-based Soviet journalist I′lia Ehrenburg spent almost two months in Spain. His reporting emphasized the failures of the ‘bourgeois’ Republic that changed street names but left the murderous Guardia Civil in place and did nothing to alleviate rural poverty. He also expressed profound admiration for the tenacious, kind Spanish people. He took as emblematic of the ‘dignity’ of impoverished Spaniards a beggar breastfeeding her infant in a fashionable Madrid cafe, observing that in Paris or Berlin, or, he added in his memoirs, even Moscow, she would have been chased out. ⁶

In 1934, the Soviet press described the uprising in Asturias, a coal mining region in northern Spain, as an incipient proletarian revolution. The insurrection was organized on the national level by socialists but locally in Asturias by socialists, anarchists, and communists. Only in Asturias did it win massive support from the working class. On 6 October, the Asturian insurgents captured the capital Oviedo and established a revolutionary ‘commune.’ The following day Pravda reported, ‘Asturias is in the hands of the workers’ and, ignoring the contributions of socialists and anarchists, emphasized the local communists’ ‘initiative and leadership.’ The insurgents held out for almost two weeks, succumbing to brutal government repression on 18 October. ⁷

In an article published in Izvestiia on 7 November 1934 – the 17th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution – Ehrenburg represented the uprising as not only inspired by the Soviet example but also as reinvigorating the victorious Russian Revolution. Relying on the testimonies of Spanish refugees in Paris, Ehrenburg told the story of the uprising as at once panegyric and lamentation. The article drew on his earlier portrait of the proud and oppressed Spanish people, whom he now described as beginning to realize their world historical destiny. Explicitly linking the uprising to the 7 November holiday, he extolled the heroism of the miners’ ‘Red Army’ and noted that White veterans of the Russian civil war were among the most ruthless members of the Foreign Legion sent to defeat them. Dismissing the notion that the Spanish revolution was somehow organized and funded by the Soviet Union – what could rubles buy in Oviedo? – Ehrenburg affirmed that the ‘magic word “Soviets”’ inspired the Asturian miners. The Spanish uprising thus built on Soviet precedent, but also imbued the victorious workers’ revolution, symbolized by the lugubrious tanks parading on Red Square, with the romance and daring of miners from the ‘land of toreadors and castanets’ ‘defending the workers’ honor’ high in the hills of Asturias. ⁸ As Spanish workers joined the communist pantheon, the circulation of people, ideas, symbols, and values between Spain and the Soviet Union became more frequent and more complicated. ‘Revolutionary’ Spain clearly borrowed from the Soviet experience, but even before 1936 it was emerging as an emotional core of the international communist project.

To examine exchanges between Spain and the Soviet Union, I analyze two topics that are often treated separately: the revolutionary ‘brotherhood’ of Spanish and Soviet writers and the lessons learned by ordinary communists at the Comintern’s International Lenin School. I build on recent work on the Comintern that treats it as a ‘complex,’ ‘protean,’ and transnational organization with multiple branches. ⁹ These ‘branches’ are often studied in isolation. Communist writers and workers rarely crossed paths, and scholars often sequester their experiences in separate studies of, on the one hand, communist high culture and ‘cultural propaganda,’ ¹⁰ and on the other, the secret world of the Comintern apparatus in Moscow. I bring together these two distinct Comintern operations to highlight the complicated and multidirectional – if also Soviet dominated – networks that together constituted ‘international communism.’

On the cultural propaganda side, I focus on the writers Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, two of the most prominent and influential communist intellectuals in Spain. Having won Spain’s national literature prize in 1925 at the age of 23 for his first book of poems ‘Marinero en Tierra’ [Sailor on Dry Land], Alberti was a famous surrealist poet before he became a communist. León, who left an unhappy marriage and two children to marry Alberti in 1932, was reportedly the more radical of the two. When the pair travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932, she and (perhaps) he were already members of the Communist Party. ¹¹ Upon their return from their first trip to the Soviet Union, they became, and remained throughout the civil war critical mediators in the dissemination of Soviet culture. During the war, León wrote, directed, and acted in works for the Guerrillas del Teatro [Guerrilla Theater] that brought plays to frontline troops in addition to overseeing the evacuation of museum holdings, giving speeches, and contributing to newspapers. Alberti, too, was a ubiquitous cultural figure during the war, producing political theater, politically engaged poetry, and, together with León, the stridently communist magazine El Mono Azul [Blue Overalls]. Moreover, the pair became important emblems of the Spanish cause, travelling to the Soviet Union to build international solidarity with Spain. ¹²

The story of Alberti and León’s participation in Soviet-led organizations of revolutionary artists, writers, and intellectuals can be understood as illuminating the ‘durable and thorny problem’ of the ‘enchantment of left-wing Western intellectuals’ with Stalin’s Soviet Union. ¹³ Here, however, rather than foregrounding the question of intellectuals’ relationship to communism, I want to emphasize that the effort to organize intellectuals – whether as speakers at writers’ congresses or representatives of International Red Aid – was one branch of a much larger, complex, often clandestine Comintern operation that enlisted not only celebrated poets but also (and in larger numbers) ordinary, sometimes barely literate workers. The rank-and-file Spanish communists who in the early 1930s travelled to Moscow to study at the International Lenin School, the Comintern’s most prestigious institution for training foreign cadres, had very different experiences of international communism and the Soviet Union than writers like Alberti and León. Nonetheless, both were vital parts of the larger Comintern world. Juxtaposing the intellectuals’ and the workers’ perspectives allows us to see the Comintern not only as a centralized, hierarchal institution run from Moscow but also as diverse lived realities embedded in distinct, multidirectional networks.

In Spain, leftist intellectuals like Alberti and León imagined Russia as at once familiar and a vision of the future. Like Russia, Spain was a ‘backward,’ predominately peasant country. Like Russia, too, Spain was perhaps not quite European. In a 1922 account of the Soviet famine that ran in El Sol, ‘the newspaper of Spanish intellectuals,’ Ricardo Baeza called for aid to a country with which Spain had a unique and powerful bond: ‘Sitting between Europe and Africa, as Russia sits between Europe and Asia, neither Spain nor Russia are entirely Western nations. This radical similarity leads us with some frequency to dream of a certain brotherhood of destiny.’ ¹⁴ Avid consumers of Russian and Soviet culture, Spanish intellectuals found in Russian music and literature shared sensibilities and an ‘artistic brotherhood.’ ¹⁵ Before Alberti became a communist, he recognized in Fedor Dostoevsky’s Demons common Spanish types, even members of his own family. ¹⁶ That such a seemingly familiar place had transformed itself into an icon of modernity raised hopes among Spanish scientists, teachers, writers, artists, and filmmakers who longed for a similar transformation at home. ¹⁷

This sense of ‘a brotherhood of destiny’ did not rely on direct contact with the Soviet Union. However, as in Alberti’s case, a visit might confirm, deepen, and politicize an already nascent sense of community. According to Alberti’s contemporary account, his and León’s 1932 trip to the Soviet Union was largely unplanned. The couple was in Germany studying theater on a travel grant from the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (Board of Advanced Studies), when they decided to visit the Soviet Union. They could afford to go only because Intourist offered inexpensive trips to ‘students and workers.’ Once in Moscow, however, they became guests of the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers (MORP), which underwrote a stay of more than two months. ¹⁸

More than 50 years later, in the second volume of his memoirs, Alberti represented the trip as transformative: ‘It was for me like undergoing a journey from the depth of night to the center of light.’ He ‘came back another person.’ ¹⁹ His contemporary account of the trip, a series of articles published in the Madrid journal Luz, did not explicitly articulate this personal transformation. However, it does suggest how the trip strengthened and personalized his sense of participation in the global Soviet project. Central to Alberti’s ‘Noticiario de un poeta en la U.R.S.S.’ [News from a poet in the USSR], but entirely absent from his later memoir, is a glowing, ‘propagandistic’ picture of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan that reflected less Soviet realities than the ‘growing attraction’ of the Soviet revolution for politically engaged intellectuals. ²⁰ In ecstatic prose, Alberti described the Soviet Union as a place where women were liberated, workers ran the factories, peasants had learned to read, and children were happy. ²¹

More convincingly, the account illustrates the process by which Alberti and León began to become part of an international community of revolutionary writers. On their third day in Moscow, Fedor Kel′in, a translator and MORP functionary, who Alberti describes as ‘a poet and professor,’ arrived at their hotel room. For the next two months, with Kel′in as their ‘best guide’ they lived a romanticized version Soviet life. Together Kel′in and Alberti translated into Castillan poems by Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Maiakovskii, and Mikhail Svetlov, author of the revolutionary ballad ‘Granada,’ and into Russian poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Antonio Machado. Kel′in also supervised a team of translators working on a Russian edition of Alberti’s Campesinos de España. ²²

While translation established a literary connection, Kel′in also mediated new friendships. He introduced Alberti and León to ‘Soviet writers read in Spain’: Aleksandr Fadeev, Vsevolod Ivanov, Fedor Gladkov, Vera Inber, as well as the avant-garde dramatists Sergei Tret′iakov and Vladimir Kirshon (both later killed in the purges). The pair also met poets with whose work they may have been unfamiliar, including Boris Pasternak and a number of poets associated with the legendary Maiakovskii: Nikolai Aseev, Semen Kirsanov, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Aleksandr Bezymenskii. The Soviet writers invited the Spaniards to their homes, where ‘we learned how they live’ in a country that published their work in enormous press runs and translated it into ‘countless dialects’ so that it could be read by thousands of newly literate people. ²³ Their Soviet hosts took care to emphasize that art and artists occupied privileged positions in the Soviet Union, a state of affairs that impressed and amazed visitors from the West like Alberti and León. ²⁴

The networks thus forged were at once artistic, political, and personal. In the account’s most engaging anecdote, Alberti describes the excitement and avant-garde flair of international communist culture in Moscow. At an evening hosted by Lilia Brik, Maiakovskii’s muse, the guests included her sister Elsa Triolet, and Triolet’s husband Louis Aragon, who in the interest of proletarian art had recently disavowed his association with surrealists. ‘Amid caviar, tea, and rare oriental sweets,’ the assembled writers recited poetry. The Soviet writers’ performances – Kirsanov ‘seemed more like a locomotive than a poet’ – prompted Alberti to improvise a ‘bullfight, fighting a chair that was in the center of the room.’ He was able to understand only Aragon, who recited in French the poem ‘Taking Power’ from his latest collection The Communists Are Right [Les Communistes ont raison]. ²⁵ The house, which seemed to preserve the ‘most intimate’ memory of Maiakovskii, provided the perfect setting for Brik’s reading of the poem he wrote days before his suicide and the ‘letter he left on the table, minutes before the shots rang out.’ After the reading, the guests – including ‘one of the chiefs of the GPU [political police]’ – remained silent, ‘feeling the presence of Vladimir Maiakovskii, the poet of the October Revolution.’ ²⁶ While both the lavish spread and the incongruous GPU man can be understood as clear signs that the gathering was carefully staged and surveilled, Alberti seemed to take both as indicators of a new world where artists no longer struggled to survive on meagre earnings and policemen appreciated poetry. ²⁷

Into the 1950s (with a hiatus during the Second World War), Alberti and León maintained a warm political and professional correspondence with Kel′in. Literary scholar Natalia Kharitonova has drawn on their letters to reconstruct the institutional history of the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers in Spain and to demonstrate that the journal Octubre, founded in 1933 upon the pair’s return from the Soviet Union, did not receive funding from the Comintern or MORP. The six issues they managed to publish relied on funds Alberti and León raised, although the Soviets provided content, including articles, essays, and photos. ²⁸ Alberti and León’s correspondence with Kel′in is often quite prosaic, outlining problems financing Octubre and asking when Russian translations of their work might appear. The letters can be understood as both pragmatic and political, expressing the difficulties of the artist working ‘under the silver moon of capitalism,’ ²⁹ who longed for the (imagined) freedom from financial worries and political repression that state-supported artists enjoyed under Soviet socialism.

What is particularly striking about the letters is that, despite their emphasis on practical matters, they illustrate the importance of personal connections in communist networks. Alberti and León often couched their artistic, political, and financial concerns in the emotional language of close friends and family. In the ‘Noticiario,’ Alberti reserved his most affectionate language for Kel′in, ‘one of the greatest friends that we left in the Soviet Union,’ and pledged that ‘Your Spanish family – as he called us when he wrote to us – won’t forget you and greets you from here, from the other end of Europe, so far away.’ ³⁰ Writing to Kel′in from Spain a year after their visit, Alberti lamented, ‘we are very sad, having not received a letter from you for a long while,’ and worried, ‘are you sick of us … your Spanish family?’ ³¹ In a letter written more than 30 years later, in April 1956, shortly after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes in his so-called secret speech, León reminded Kel′in that ‘we love you so much [Te queremos mucho], you are one of our beautiful memories.’ ³²

In 1934 Alberti and León’s return to the Soviet Union as Spanish representatives to the First Congress of Soviet Writers marked the beginning of a more complex, multidirectional relationship with international communism. The Spanish left’s electoral defeat in November 1933 produced increasing pressure on their avowedly ‘revolutionary’ journal Octubre and made a trip to the Soviet Union particularly attractive. In June 1934, Alberti wrote Kel′in that they ‘lived in a constant state of alarm’ and had ‘a great interest in going to Moscow’ in order to discuss their situation. He regretted that, despite their ‘desire to return to our beloved Union’ and see their ‘brother,’ León was too ill to travel. ³³ They soon reconsidered and decided to make the trip, although León was still in great pain. ³⁴

Whereas in 1932 Alberti and León had connected with Soviet and international writers in their homes, now they became players, even if still relatively minor ones, in a public spectacle of international solidarity. Alberti’s contemporary account described being welcomed in Moscow as celebrities. Brik, Tret′iakov, and Ehrenburg met them at the train station where they were ambushed by photographers. They ran another gauntlet of photographers when they arrived at the posh Metropole Hotel. ³⁵ Although Ehrenburg later recalled that Alberti ‘was not even included in the list of distinguished guests,’ his picture appeared in Pravda alongside those of other foreign representatives, and he and León were included among the international participants whose impressions the paper surveyed at the close of the congress. ³⁶ Pravda also carried a transcript of Alberti’s speech, which emphasized that Soviet writers stood as admired models for writers all over the world. ³⁷ Some 30 years later, León recalled the congress as an ‘unforgettable’ time. But rather than dwelling on the newspaper articles or the speeches, she described the ‘grand ball’ and how under ‘glittering chandeliers’ she danced ‘without tiring, after having been at home ten months without the strength to move.’ ³⁸

Alberti’s speech and his contemporary account of the visit lauded the triumph of revolution in the Soviet Union. His ‘Segundo Noticiario’ emphasized that as a result of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union had entered a new and prosperous ‘phase of its life.’ ³⁹ Equipped with only three words of Russian – tea, ice cream, and cake – Alberti was nonetheless able to discern remarkable material and cultural progress. All over Moscow he saw new shops, new cafés, new restaurants, gigantic new buildings. ⁴⁰ A visit to the Park of Culture and Rest (better known as Gorky Park) elicited a paean to the ‘authentic Republic of Workers’ that – in implicit contrast to the Spanish ‘Republic of All Workers’ – ‘rewards the efforts of its men, putting in their hands all the means of culture, exalting work, simultaneously opening their eyes to the wonders of science, literature, poetry, the arts.’ ⁴¹ His speech at the congress drew a more specific contrast between the revolutionary writers’ ‘life full of anxiety and threats’ in Spain and the Soviet Union’s ‘calm streets,’ where ‘we began to fully understand the extent to which you are truly builders of a new life.’ ⁴²

Proclaiming that ‘the Spanish revolution must triumph,’ Alberti’s speech matched the Comintern’s ultra-leftist line, adopted at its Sixth Congress in 1928, that predicted an imminent crisis of capitalism. He ended his speech with the assertion that there would ‘come a day’ when he would be able to show guests from the Soviet Union ‘around cities where the red flag flies.’ ⁴³ A fuller version of the speech published in the Parisian journal Commune further suggested that Spanish writers might themselves become revolutionary models. Whether for reasons of brevity or ideological clarity, Pravda’s transcript omitted Alberti’s appeal to Soviet writers to ‘take a greater interest in Spanish literature, one of the most beautiful in the world.’ ⁴⁴

Revolutionary events that prompted greater interest in Spain, if not Spanish literature, came perhaps sooner than Alberti expected. As Alberti and León traveled from Moscow to Odessa, they learned, via articles in the Soviet press probably translated by their traveling companion Sergei Eisenstein, that an insurrection had begun in Asturias. ⁴⁵ A telegram from León’s mother warned the couple not to return to Spain. Their apartment had been thoroughly and destructively searched; León’s mother had been detained, and they faced likely arrest. After a brief stay in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, they decided to take refuge in more politically congenial Paris, where they remained in contact with Kel′in through the French-born, Russian-educated author and translator Vladimir Pozner. ⁴⁶

Unable to return to Spain, Alberti and León instead became ambassadors for the Spanish cause in the Americas. In her memoir, León remembered that they were approached in Paris by a certain Ercoli with the proposal that they travel to North America to call attention to the government’s violent repression of the Asturian rebels. They were in a position to do so because they had established contacts with Spanish refugees arriving in France. The couple immediately agreed, only later learning that Ercoli was the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti. ⁴⁷ They traveled as representatives of International Red Aid to New York and then Mexico and Cuba, where they worked to raise both awareness of the situation in Spain and funds for the families of the injured, jailed, and killed. ⁴⁸

Suddenly Spain was a front line in the world revolution. Alberti and León went from promoting the Russian October as a model for Spain to participating in the construction and worldwide dissemination of the ‘revolutionary memory’ ⁴⁹ of the Asturian October. In Paris, Commune published Alberti’s speech to the Soviet writers’ congress with a note from the editors: ‘The French Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists sends warm fraternal greetings to its Spanish comrades, who at the time of this publication are fulfilling their revolutionary responsibility fighting alongside the workers and peasants against the reactionary and fascist bourgeoisie and expresses its profound faith in the final victory of Soviet Spain.’ ⁵⁰ In New York, the Daily Worker published the speech. ⁵¹ In September 1935, León published an article on Asturias in the New Republic in which she praised the ‘[m]en and women [who] left their homes with guns on their shoulders and marched to join the battle’ and condemned ‘Moroccan troops and the Foreign Legion,’ who, putting down the uprising, ‘left murdered women and children in their wake.’ The article clearly articulated the political consequences of this repression, ending with the warning that ‘Vengeance, like the Revolution, is also being organized.’ ⁵² León’s conclusion echoed Ehrenburg’s prediction in the immediate aftermath of the uprising: ‘A snowstorm will soon subside, a snowstorm, but not a revolution.’ ⁵³

León brought to an American audience the ‘campaign of memory creation’ that historian Brian Bunk argues was already underway in Spain. There, a wide range of leftist organizations, including the Comintern agency International Red Aid, promoted commemorations of the Asturian October that emphasized the ‘sacrifices and horrors endured by revolutionary martyrs … as both example and inducement for a future insurrection.’ ⁵⁴ A year after the uprising, in the spirit of the Popular Front officially adopted by the Seventh Comintern Congress in August 1935, Comintern propaganda downplayed political divisions on the left, stressing instead the ‘crimes’ of the Spanish right and the power of the miners’ revolutionary example. León worked to publicize this story of revolutionary martyrdom and redemption in the USA, where, as the editors of the New Republic noted, coverage of the 1934 World Series had overshadowed news of the uprising in Spain.

As they had in Moscow, in New York, Alberti and León forged political and personal relationships with ‘revolutionary’ writers and artists. Waldo Frank and John Dos Passos appear to have been the translators of, respectively, León’s article in the New Republic and her story ‘Acorns’ published in the New Masses. Frank in turn introduced León and Alberti to the avant-garde composer Edgar Varese and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. They also socialized with the journalist Matthew Josephson and his wife Hannah, whom they had hosted in Madrid the previous year. ‘It was,’ León remembered, ‘a New York of friends.’ Everywhere in ‘that year 1934, our American friends were so generous and so attentive in listening to the lamentation of the Spanish miners.’ ⁵⁵ These ‘friends’ had their own institutional links to international communism that may have predisposed them to giving the Spaniards a generous welcome. In May 1935, just a month after Alberti and León left New York, Frank, Dos Passos, and Matthew Josephson participated in the communist sponsored First American Writers’ Congress; Frank was elected secretary. ⁵⁶ León and Alberti were thus part of a complex revolutionary network linking Moscow, Spain, and New York.

While Alberti and León traveled to New York to promote the cause of the Asturian miners, many of the workers who had participated in the 1934 uprising traveled to Moscow, where they became students at the International Lenin School. ⁵⁷ Founded in 1926, the school was designed to transform foreign communists into Bolsheviks. It stressed rigid discipline and ‘conspiracy.’ Thus the students had a very different Soviet experience than the writers. Upon entering the school, students took aliases, and in theory they knew each other only by their assumed names. They were instructed to inform the cadres department about any contacts outside of the school, to avoid places where foreign exiles gathered, and to try to blend in when they went to the theater, movies, or museums. Particularly after 1930 school authorities strictly enforced these rules of conspiracy and largely barred communication between students and their friends and families at home. ⁵⁸

Before 1931, few Spaniards attended the school. In the first years of its existence (1926–30), more than a third of the Lenin School’s students came from Czechoslovakia (138 of the 903 students who attended the school in these years), Germany (106 students), and Poland (85). Large numbers of students also came from China (65), England (57), and the USA (52). By contrast, in these same years the small, fragmented, underground Spanish Communist Party sent a total of only eleven students to the Lenin School, including the party’s future secretary general José Díaz. ⁵⁹ After 1931, the number of Spanish students at the Lenin School rose along with Spain’s revolutionary profile. In the 1931–2 academic year, the number of Spanish students arriving at the school jumped from three (of a total of 349) in the 1929–30 academic year to 30 (of 633). ⁶⁰

The revolution in Asturias brought more Spaniards to Moscow. Escaping the violent crackdown that followed the uprising, some 200 Spaniards, many of whom were socialists and anarchists, fled to the Soviet Union. ⁶¹ Many of the communists ended up at the Lenin School. Most were not the heroic Asturian miners already being mythologized in the Spanish, Soviet, and international communist media. Of the 64 Spanish communists whose biographies were prepared for the school in June 1935, only 14 were miners, nine from Asturias and five from Vizcaya, where the general strike had been effective for several days. Nonetheless, miners constituted the largest single occupational category. There were six metalworkers and representatives from a wide variety of other trades, including two bakers, two sailors, two woodworkers, and two railroad workers. The group included three women: a seamstress, a waitress, and a domestic servant. In most cases, the biographies also noted family background, which did necessarily coincide with current employment: 20 came from ‘worker’ families; 11 non-miners from came from ‘miner’ families; seven came from ‘peasant’ or ‘agricultural worker’ families; five from ‘petty-bourgeois’ families; and four from ‘white collar’ families (iz sem′i sluzhashchego). One postal worker whose father was an architect was categorized as coming from a ‘bourgeois’ family. ⁶²

The people being considered for admission to the Lenin School were young – their average age was 28 – but not necessarily new to the party. Overall, 25 of the arrivals had joined the party or its youth organization before 1931. Thirty-six, including some of the oldest arrivals, had joined in 1931 or 1932. A couple had joined only on the eve of the uprising. The oldest student, the postal worker, was 40 years old, and had joined the party in 1927. But the 29-year-old peasant Cristóbal Valenzuela Ortega, had, according to the school’s records, joined the communist youth organization in 1921 at the age of 15, and the party eight years later. The youngest arrival, Juanico Campo, was only 19, and had joined in 1932. A few biographies noted previous affiliation with socialist or anarchist organizations and, in the case of 25-year-old José Abella, a railroad worker from Asturias, both. ⁶³

What united this diverse group was participation in the 1934 uprising or its aftermath. Of the 62 biographies that provided information on the subject, 58 noted involvement in the uprising. Of these, 34 specified some kind of military action: fighting as a ‘Red Army’ soldier or ‘on the barricades,’ disarming ‘reactionaries,’ sabotaging troop transports, railroads, or power stations, or commanding armed groups of up to 80 people. Those who did not fight distributed leaflets and supplies, edited newspapers, provided medical aid, or served as members of their local ‘Revkom’ (revolutionary committee). One had undertaken the party-sanctioned murder of a ‘provocateur.’ ⁶⁴

Enrolling in the Lenin School, the former insurgents entered a branch of the Comintern that operated according to different norms than the networks connecting revolutionary writers. While Alberti and León’s wrote in order to arouse sympathy for the heroic miners who ‘revolted against fascism,’ ⁶⁵ many of the former insurgents, few of whom were actually miners, wrote about themselves as part of the school’s efforts to train them as effective rank-and-file Bolsheviks. What united these projects was both a sense of the international significance of ‘revolutionary’ events in Spain, and a commitment to developing this revolutionary potential via institutions and networks connected to Moscow. However, the networks themselves, their methods, and the artifacts they left behind scarcely overlapped.

Uncovering the everyday lives and interactions of Lenin School students is tricky. Retrospective accounts offer a sense of the school’s atmosphere, but few former students wrote about it later. ⁶⁶ A cache of 14 autobiographical statements written by Spanish students in February 1935 in response to the question ‘how and why I joined the party’ offers a suggestive but fragmentary sense of their motivations and hopes – or at least of what they thought school authorities wanted to hear. Writing such autobiographies was a standard communist task, and they were often quite formulaic, revealing less communists’ ‘true’ selves than the degree to which they understood and were able to reproduce the party’s norms and expectations. ⁶⁷ An added problem in this case is that the archive preserves only the Russian translations, not the students’ own words. The many respondents who emphasized their lack of formal education and their difficulty reading may have struggled with the task of writing an autobiographical statement. However, evidence of such struggles is largely invisible in translations that do not indicate errors in spelling or grammar. ⁶⁸ Nonetheless, by cross-referencing the narratives of joining the party with the brief biographies and ‘characterizations’ of these same students compiled in June 1935 and early 1936, respectively, it is possible to glimpse the disjunctions and overlaps in how students presented themselves and what their teachers or other school authorities saw or valued in them.

The autobiographical statements underscore that what appealed to the students about the communist party was its commitment to fight for the interests of the workers and the peasants. They reflected a particularly Spanish take on communist militancy. The Comintern’s Third Period line, adopted at its Sixth Congress in 1928, proclaimed the existence of a ‘revolutionary situation’ and directed member parties to implement the policy of ‘class against class,’ attacking other leftist parties as ‘social fascists’ who deflected the working class from revolution. In 1931, this put the PCE in opposition to both the Republic, which was supported by the socialists (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), and the powerful anarchist trade union movement that stood against any sort of state. Spanish communism defined itself in terms of a distinctive and uncompromising ‘revolutionary mission.’ ⁶⁹

By early 1934, the Spanish party was already moving away from this hardline stance; indeed, cooperation with anarchists and socialists had been a factor in the short-lived successes of the Asturian October. Nonetheless, the students asked to write their autobiographies in February 1935 framed their communist conversions in terms of a militant identification with the party of workers’ revolution. They distinguished themselves from both the anarchists, whom they characterized as impractical dreamers and from the socialists, whom they deemed tools of the bourgeoisie. Perhaps because the prompt asked them to explain why they had joined he party, only one mentioned the 1934 uprising, although 10 of the 14 had participated in the insurrection or its immediate aftermath. ⁷⁰ Instead, they focused on their earliest contacts with communists and their seemingly instinctive support of a party that was, as José López (school name Luis Dorado), a barber who joined the communist youth organization in 1931 at age 18, expressed it, ‘the most militant in the fight against the bourgeoisie.’ Both López and Justo Galán (Tomás Corrales), a poster artist who also joined the youth organization in 1931 at age 20, emphasized the appeal of the party’s involvement in the wave of church and monastery burnings that swept the Republic in May 1931, the latter glorying in his own participation among the ‘first ranks of the “ignitors.”’ Ramón Conde (Juan Reverdi) recounted that in 1931, as a 17-year-old metalworker who had ‘never read a book,’ he was taken in by an anarchist co-worker’s description of ‘libertarian communism’ as ‘heaven on earth.’ But the failures of the ‘bourgeois’ republic together with his reading of the communist press convinced him of the need to ‘fight for a worker-peasant government,’ and helped him to understand that libertarian communism was as fantastic as the ‘wonders from One Thousand and One Nights.’ ⁷¹ Whether and to what degree each autobiographical ‘public performance’ coincided with the author’s ‘true self’ ⁷² is impossible to judge. Nonetheless, the autobiographies suggest that despite the shifting ideological winds the authors expected and perhaps hoped that militancy would remain the defining feature of the Spanish communist.

Half of the autobiographers cited the victory of workers’ revolution in Russia as a factor in their decision to join the party. It is perhaps unsurprising that students at a Comintern school in Moscow drew connections between their support of the Spanish Communist Party and the example of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, some wrote in clichés. Campo (Dominico Salvador), the youngest of the cohort, a woodworker who joined the youth organization in 1932 at age 16, explained that he was drawn to the communists as ‘the only mass party that will liberate the world proletariat as it has liberated the Russian proletariat and is now liberating the Chinese toiling masses.’ But others suggested that they felt connected to the Soviet Union long before they arrived in Moscow. Valenzuela Ortega (Felipe Calaoro), recalled that in 1921, at age 15, he had been a member of the socialist youth organization that voted to align with the Comintern. At the time, he ‘little understood the differences’ between the Communist Third International and the Socialist Second, but ‘I understood two things … which I never forgot and for which I fought’: the ‘treachery’ of the Social Democrats during the First World War and the ‘position of the Russian Bolshevik party and the victory of their revolution.’ Later he read Lenin’s State and Revolution, and ‘although I didn’t understand 60% of that book,’ it confirmed his faith in the Soviet model. At the other end of the educational spectrum, Mariano Fernández (Ricardo Gallart), a doctor who emphasized that he came from a family of miners and managed to attend university only as the result of (unspecified) extraordinary circumstances, likewise joined the youth organization in 1921, at age 19. For him, both the Spanish general strike of 1917 and the Russian Revolution had been ‘decisive’ events, eventually leading him to seek out the works of leading Bolsheviks in Spanish translation and to back affiliation with the Comintern. ‘Our Russian comrades,’ the Spaniards affirmed, offered a practical model for building utopia. ⁷³

Written in February 1935, these militant statements were by August out of sync with the official Comintern line, the Popular Front against fascism ratified at the Seventh Congress. Rather than denouncing socialists as traitors, communists now had the task of cooperating with ‘all sections of the working class’ to build a ‘united fighting front’ against fascism. ⁷⁴ In December 1935, Spanish students heard a lecture on the application of the new line in Spain. The transcript identifies the speaker as ‘Gére,’ possibly Ernő Gerő, the Hungarian communist who had been a Comintern representative in Spain in the early 1930s, assisted in the preparations for the Seventh Congress, and returned to Spain to serve as a Comintern emissary during the civil war. ⁷⁵ It does not indicate the students’ responses.

The students, who just a few months before had represented the socialists as selling out the workers, were told that it was no longer ‘advantageous’ to call ‘left wing’ socialists ‘traitors.’ The new line required cooperation with left wing socialists to establish not government of workers and peasants, but a ‘Government of the Left’ that would protect democratic rights and perhaps offer a few ‘benefits for the working class,’ such as the 44 hour week. Revolution was not off the agenda, but it was not an immediate prospect. Indeed, the speaker advised Spanish communists to stop ‘exaggerating’ both their leadership of the Asturian uprising and its revolutionary accomplishments: ‘What happened in Asturias was undoubtedly a huge thing, but it wasn’t a Soviet Socialist Republic … There were red guards, red detachments, but not a Red Army.’ At the same time, the speaker highlighted Spain’s overall importance in the international communist movement. Granting that the Spanish Communist Party was not a ‘decisive force’ – it had roughly 20,000 members – the lecture emphasized that ‘the apparatus of the bourgeois state’ in Spain was ‘very weakened [quebrantado].’ Revolution might not come soon, but Spain was nonetheless closer to it than ‘other countries.’ ⁷⁶

The evaluations of Spanish students compiled in early 1936 provide one general indicator of how the Spanish students responded to the training provided by the Lenin School. Such assessments were usually prepared by the teachers in conjunction with the student party organizers. ⁷⁷ Although they are brief and formulaic, the evaluations suggest less the power of Comintern indoctrination than the ways in which international communists both learned from and resisted their teachers. Of the 14 autobiographers for whom I located evaluations, López, the barber who described the communist party as the ‘most militant,’ was among the most positively reviewed: He ‘actively participated in the life of the sector, always maintaining a correct attitude before the Party.’ The Russian version deemed his ‘discipline and conspiracy’ ‘good.’ ⁷⁸ The artist Galán received a more mixed but largely positive review. The Spanish evaluation deemed him to have a ‘high level’ of theoretical understanding, and a good attitude toward work and the Party. The Spanish version noted ‘some remnants of liberalism,’ while the Russian version praised his ‘discipline and conspiracy.’ ⁷⁹

At a time when ‘Trotskyism’ was the most serious deviation from the party line, Campo, the young woodworker who had written about the ‘liberation of the world proletariat’ emerged as perhaps the most politically dangerous of the group. He allegedly maintained, according to the Spanish version of his evaluation, ties with Trotskyite political emigres. He was, both the Spanish and Russian evaluations agreed, ‘very confused,’ with the Spanish adding that he failed to understand ‘discipline, conspiracy, and Trotskyism.’ ⁸⁰ The doctor Fernández also received a decidedly negative review. He was deemed to lack political ‘firmness,’ ‘putting personal friendships above Party interests’ and demonstrating ‘a great many remnants of petty-bourgeois individualism, tending in some cases toward an antiparty attitude.’ In his failure to follow the rules of conspiracy, the evaluator detected ‘a very pronounced liberalism.’ He did, however, do well in his studies. ⁸¹

Such evaluations hardly demonstrated that the Spanish comrades had been uniformly reforged in the Bolshevik image. The students were often quite young, but not always malleable, remaining, according to the evaluators, a rather undisciplined lot, prone to ignore or violate rules of conspiracy. ⁸² Still, many apparently worked hard at their studies, and whether or not they behaved in the appropriate way, they likely learned that that ‘discipline’ and ‘party-mindedness’ marked a comrade as a true Bolshevik.

Read against the evaluations, the biographies prepared about six months earlier, in June 1935, suggest that the school authorities (the compilers are not specified) valued, perhaps even learned from, their students’ revolutionary experiences. Did the fact that the 19-year-old Campo had commanded a group engaged in ‘active sabotage’ against troop transports in 1934 influence the evaluators’ decision to offer his ‘confusion’ as a circumstance mitigating his alleged ties to Trotskyites? Similarly, the positive evaluation of Margarita Salgado that described her as ‘party-minded,’ ‘healthy,’ and ‘loyal’ may have reflected both her hard work at the school and the fact that in 1934 she ‘built barricades, [and] fought’ in the Asturian uprising. Such comrades brought something important to the school and to the revolutionary networks of which it was a part, even if they sometimes broke the rules or retained, as the evaluation of the poster artist Galán charged, ‘remnants of liberalism.’ ⁸³

A comprehensive list of the Spaniards who attended the Lenin School compiled in 1936 indicates that most of the students who arrived in 1935 left in 1936, presumably after the Popular Front’s electoral victory in February. ⁸⁴ After that, most – unlike the high profile writers – are difficult to trace. In the few cases where I have found evidence of their later activities, the students, even those who fell short of the school’s standards for good Bolsheviks, apparently remained loyal to the cause. The poster artist Galán became an illustrator for Juventud Roja. The doctor Fernández returned to Spain and was shot after the fall of Republic in August 1939. The peasant Valenzuela Ortega, for whom I found no evaluation, served during the war as a political commissar and as an official overseeing agrarian reform. He was arrested and executed in August 1939. ⁸⁵

It is difficult to imagine international communist experiences more disparate than those of Alberti and León advocating for Asturian miners in New York City and that of the insurgents’ themselves at the Lenin School in Moscow. And yet not only did all operate under the auspices of the Comintern; all were important constituents of it. In Moscow and New York, Alberti and León moved among ‘friends’ in a cosmopolitan culture that valued, was perhaps dominated by, avant-garde sensibilities despite the articulation of the doctrine of socialist realism at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers. The communist students entered a new and unfamiliar world of discipline and conspiracy more clearly subordinate to Moscow’s mandates. Viewed together, these disparate experiences allow us to see the Comintern as a ramified, even sprawling, operation able to operate on multiple levels at once, producing and circulating propaganda, training cadres, responding to worldwide revolutionary developments. This was an institution defined by its ability to generate a report on prominent Spanish writers as easily as a Spanish barber’s account of why he joined the party. ⁸⁶

Looking at the Comintern from these different perspectives not only highlights the diversity and uncertainty possible within an institution that allies and enemies alike often characterized as monolithic and tightly controlled by Soviet leaders. It also illuminates the ways in which a wide range of individuals ‘made’ the Comintern, turning the abstraction of ‘international solidarity’ into lived realities. For the writers, revolutionary networks were forged in personal and artistic exchanges founded in a commitment to both social revolution and proletarian art – a term that, for international communists at least, remained open to debate even after 1934. In Moscow students at the Lenin School were integrated into a multinational, multilingual institution that sought on the one hand to turn them into Bolsheviks and on the other to train them connect theory to the specific circumstances in their countries of origin and to speak directly and effectively to workers at home. The Spanish students, were advised to take as a role model Dolores Ibárruri, whose speeches demonstrated how to translate what they learned at the school into ‘language understandable to the masses.’ ⁸⁷ Thus local concerns became part of a global strategy.

Finally, conceptualizing ‘international communism’ as constituted by these distinct and multidirectional networks helps us to understand how even as the Russian Revolution hardened into Stalinist orthodoxies it continued to inspire people of all sorts across the globe. The Bolsheviks’ victory in October 1917 served aspiring revolutionaries as a beacon and a model. Thus the Soviet Union dominated the networks that international revolutionaries drew on in order to make their own ‘Octobers.’ At the same time, these new ‘Octobers’ generated their own heroes, martyrs, and myths. ⁸⁸ Even before the Spanish civil war turned Spain into a symbol of the ‘good fight,’ Spanish writers and workers had become emblems and emissaries of a revolution that, in adapting the presumptively successful Russian model to new circumstances, contributed to sustaining the international appeal of an imagined 1917.