Newspaper "Rabochiy Kray", Sunday January 8th 1928.

When the United States need oil, they send forward soldiers.
The interests of capitalists are above all.
The whip is stronger than "democracy".

2013

(This takes 3.75 minutes to read.)

Fiume, for those of us unaware, was a disputed territory from 1918 to 1920, then a microstate under League of Nations and Italian supervision starting in November 1920.

On September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio and various other Italian ultranationalists (legionnaires) entered the territory and established a protofascist state, with the ultimate goal of making Fiume a territory of the Kingdom of Italy.

Here are a few glimpses of this rule:

Fiumian workers — both pro and anti‐annexationist — submitted a set of requests to D’Annunzio, which ranged from economic claims to the withdrawal of politically motivated expulsions, the re‐employment of dismissed workers and the right to opt for Fiumian pertinenza for those who were already residents before the war. […]

D’Annunzio was initially open to negotiation, siding with the workers against the National Council and proposing to limit expulsions to individuals regarded as “anti‐Italian,” rather than those promoting “socialist propaganda.”

However, no compromise could be achieved and the workers proclaimed a general strike based on claims regarded as political on April 20. The repression was harsh; hundreds of nonpertinent workers were to be expelled, including the leaders of the Socialist Party.

[…]

On July 11, a list of over one hundred shop owners, who were members of a pro‐Yugoslav League of the Fiumian Industrials, was circulated by D’Annunzio’s command. As had already happened in February, expulsions were preceded by an investigation that aimed to detect their target.

The next day several shops owned by pro-Yugoslav merchants were plundered and the boats anchored in the Dead Channel that flowed between Fiume and Sušak were set on fire. These attacks were followed by expulsion orders against pro‐Yugoslav nonpertinents.

[…]

However, formal expulsion orders were not the only measures that pushed Croats to leave. D’Annunzio’s command reported that legionnaires or civilians disguised as soldiers threatened Croats, telling them to leave if they wanted their life to be spared.

Legionnaires later settled in the houses of evicted families. The image of luxury apartments destroyed by Italian soldiers further fueled frustration and led some expellees to resort to corruption to avoid having their apartment confiscated.

The Regio Esercito evicted D’Annunzio in January 1921, and most of his legionnaires followed. But not to worry, there were others to continue his glorious legacy of freedom:

During a long phase of instability that ran from D’Annunzio’s eviction to the annexation to Italy in 1924, expulsions never ceased to play a rôle in the political struggle.

While the Free State of Fiume was officially established by the Rapallo Treaty in 1920, it was in power only for a couple of months. Before and after this, the city’s reins of power lay in the hands of temporary bodies that increasingly pursued Fiume’s annexation to Italy.

Those bodies continued to use expulsions to get rid of political and social undesirables, as did many of their predecessors. Similarly, implementing the expulsions was more wishful thinking than reality.

(Source.)

And of course (quoting Dominique Kirchner Reill’s The Fiume Crisis, pgs. 226–7):

[The Fascist bourgeoisie’s] official annexation of the city to Italy in 1924 instigated a remaking of Fiume along textbook nationalist, Italian centralist lines. Gone were programs aimed at making Fiume look and feel Italian while keeping it functioning much as it had before the war. The pragmatic exceptionalisms Fiumians had hoped would give them a leg up once they were reabsorbed into a big state never came to pass.

Crown‐lire exchange rates never arrived at the 1 to 1 everyone had hoped for; by 1924 the now meek and exhausted Fiumians gratefully accepted the 2.5‐to‐1 rate Italy offered. Laws were no longer a mash‐up of Hungarian priors, Italian additions, and Fiume‐only innovations: now the laws enforced from Palermo to Venice were instated en masse in Fiume, regardless of community wishes.

Women lost the vote, divorce became illegal, and tax codes benefited Rome, not Fiume’s regional trade. Pertinency disappeared from the citizenship rolls: with the 1924 annexation, Fiume pertinents had to opt for Italian, Serb‐Croat‐Slovene, or some other citizenship, with nothing in between except statelessness. Fiume pertinents who chose not to become Italian lost the right to state employment.

Under these conditions, many Croatian‐ and Slovene‐speaking Fiumians moved across the river to Sušak, where their ethnic identification bolstered their rights instead of impeding them. Name changes were no longer voluntary—there were specific Fascist protocols about how they were enacted. Fiume’s textbooks and geography lessons were replaced by the national curriculum.

Under Mussolini, Habsburg Fiume was decisively annulled in a way it had not been at any of its earlier crisis points—not the dissolution of Austria–Hungary, the arrival of Inter‐Allied troops, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomatic pronouncements, the takeover of the Italian National Council, the arrival of D’Annunzio and his followers, the Christmas of Blood, or the international recognition of the Free State of Fiume.

Though the majority of locals remained, the contours of their world now reflected the desires of their new empire in formation, the Fascist one, and not the old one, the Habsburg one, whose legacy had lived on for so long.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Per The Adriatic Sea Encyclopedia, representatives from the Kingdoms of Italy and Yugoslavia convened on January 27, 1924 and agreed to the Treaty of Rome — a.k.a. Italy-Yugoslavia Treaty — which partitioned(!) the microstate, assigning the City of Fiume to the Fascists and the City of Sušak to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; the border between the countries passed along the river Rječina. The International League of Nations recognized the partition as legal on April 7, 1924.

(This takes 4.5–6.75 minutes to read.)

For the fourscore and eighth anniversary of Chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart proclaiming the Anschluss, I want to talk to you about the Austrofascists.

From 1936 to 1938, Austrofascists oscillated between cracking down on [German irredentists] and offering them olive branches, never really settling on one distinct response to the overbearing [irredentist] presence. Instead, Austrofascists sought to earn [the Third Reich’s] respect for Austrian sovereignty with a two-pronged response of both carrots and sticks, depending on the situation.

The constitutive contradiction between regionalism and nationalism drove forward the seemingly contradictory response of both “appeasement” and punishment (Starhemberg 169, 246). The unity among Austrofascists and [German Fascists] along theoretical grounds, from shared emotional fantasies of German nationalism to common fascist beliefs, authoritarianism, and zealous anti-Bolshevism, all created ample opportunity for cooperation.

The discord between Austrofascists and [German Fascists] along other fault lines, from regionalism to personal power struggles and the backlash to any specific solution to the Austrian question, also created conflicts that resulted in force.

[…]

Another discursive reconciliation between state separation and common national identity was the claim that Germans and Austrians were national brothers. An anonymous letter expressed gratitude to Schuschnigg for the treaty that preserved “economic cooperation […] with the German brothers, which will hopefully create more bread and work again” (Hochverehrter Herr Bundeskanzler!).

A Viennese teacher claimed that the “reconciliation with our German brothers” was nothing short of a “feat” (Weifs), while another letter thanked the Austrian chancellor for making peace with the “brother Volk” (Tertsch). One accepted Austria as the little brother in this fraternal relationship, expressing joy at the “normalization of relationship to our big German brother Volk” (Bürgermeister Klagenfurt).

Another labeled the [Third Reich] itself as the “Bruderreich” (Hauptgruppenleiter). This sentiment of two fraternal Völker also cut both ways: a letter from Heidelberg rejoiced at the “friendship with the Austrian Brudervolk. […] G-d bless this step for both Völker, who are of one blood” (Sturm).

Despite the strain on diplomatic relations, Germans and Austrians were seen as national “brothers,” blood-related and fraternal but not identical; as such, the best way forward for their joint prosperity was independence from and coexistence with each other rather than irredentist unity.

If the twentieth century was the era that idealized the creation of uniform nation-states (Weitz), then many Austrian inhabitants simultaneously desired national cooperation and clear-cut state autonomy.

[…]

The exasperated and flabbergasted local VF members complained to their Viennese leaders about the relaxed border policy, claiming that:

Austria displays in such [questions? illegible because of typological errors] a generosity, which sometimes really appears incomprehensible. So the strongly-punished National Socialists, who were reliably reported on by us, who had to serve long-term prison sentences on account of the bombing attacks, and who were pardoned as part of amnesty, were invited by NSDAP-sites in Germany to a multiweek recreational holiday. These persons were also awarded exit visas without any trouble. (An das Generalsekretariat)

The Austrofascist state offered 18,684 pardons to [irredentist] agents in the second half of 1936 alone (“Chronology” vol. 13, no. 15, p. 12). The porousness of the Austro-Bavarian border created anxiety and embarrassment for some VF officials, especially since many of these [irredentist] agitators could expect to face little to no consequences.

It cited a Linz newspaper that commented on how Austrofascist leaders demanded order in the face of [irredentist] uprisings while simultaneously showing legal leniency to [irredentist] agents: “patriotic Austrians who rallied to the Government’s anti-Nazi appeals now felt themselves dupes confronted by triumphant adversaries. Convicted Nazis, for instance, had been released from custody through influential intervention” (“Chronology” vol. 13, no. 13, p. 13).³

The Austrofascist leaders’ balancing act between stopping [irredentist] aggression without angering their fascist Germanic brothers left fellow VF members feeling resentful. As VF members began to place their faith in a hermetically sealed border as their only hope to end the strife of this intra-national borderland, their leaders continued to believe in potential großdeutsch solidarity.

Meanwhile, intra-national borderlands chaos in 1937 continued, varying from [irredentist] schemes to terrorize the borderland into a perpetual state of anxiety to actual physical contestations along the border.

The Salzburger Chronik discussed the revelation of a scandalous [irredentist] “war plan” that involved “throwing bombs onto the [Austrian] Federal Chancellery from an airplane,” in addition to [irredentist] ambitions “to marshal in all of Austria an existing shock corps of 2000 to 3000 men, which will first ‘purge’ the ranks of the NSDAP but then it should commit acts of violence of the worst kind.” The paper condemned [Third Reich] agents as “brown terrorists,” their machinations as a “terror campaign,” and the planned militia unit as a “terror shock corps,” leaving panic in their wake and increasing the volatility of the borderland (“Braune Terrorstoßtruppe”).

Two pages later the same paper reported on an actual border scuffle involving Austrian veterinarian Karl Zoller, who was visiting the Austrian town of Jungholz. On the map, Jungholz “belonged” to Austria, but because of the Alpine topography on the ground, the only way to access it was via roads that, on the map, “belonged” to Bavaria.

While in this Bavarian juncture between Austrian spaces, he refused to return the “Hitler greeting” to a group of five Bavarian [Fascists]. He believed that “as an Austrian he had no reason to answer with this greeting,” which led to him being “mauled.” The paper continued the story by stating, “The outrage of this egregious incident is very great in the Tyrolean border territory” (“Gestern, heute, morgen”).

[…]

Schuschnigg spent the day subject to verbal berating and power moves, culminating in an “addendum” to the Juli-Abkommen from 1936 (“Ein Zusatzabkommen”). Officially, Hitler again claimed to uphold Austria’s autonomy, but this time with one key exception: Schuschnigg had to appoint Nazi agent Arthur Seyss-Inquart (also born and raised in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) as Home Minister “with the police directly under him” (“Chronology” vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 18–19). With this administrative appointment, Schuschnigg paid a heavy price for an adulterated version of Austrian “autonomy”: one of his key chess pieces was now playing for his opponent.

It is very tempting to compare the Austrofascists’ largely benign treatment of irredentists with how liberal régimes treated fascists, or how neoliberal ones treat neofascists. Despite the serious dangers that they posed, the Austrofascists were gentle with most of the worst irredentists, much as they were gentle with Croatian fascists who plotted homicides. Anticommunists have demonstrated time and again that defending capital from lower-class revolutionaries takes precedence over imperialist competition, which was why WWI ended with the Entente turning its attention away from the Central Powers and onto the Bolshevik Revolution.

See also: ‘Making Austria German Again’

publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://hexbear.net/post/7913587

I've spent the past days reading extensively some modern historiographical works regarding the Spanish civil war and Soviet intervention, due to previous quarrels in this topic with lemmy "anarchists" (links on the writeup). Tl;Dr: go to the conclusions of the writeup if you want an extremely brief summary of what I've found out in my research, or just browse through the sources yourself to form your own opinion. Warning: this writeup is LONG. If you wish, first go through the quoted sections (excerpts from the literature) and read my interpretations on them. Hope you enjoy!

Intro: what led me to this

For the past decades and with the opening of the Soviet archives (which proved that the previously repeated figures for the Soviet deportations and great terror were overestimated), there has been an intensified campaign by European authorities to manufacture anti-Russian and anti-Soviet propaganda. Often times, this has taken the shape of promoting the Nazi-peddled “double genocide theory”, and revisionist interpretations of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When discussing the latter read my effortpost about it, I often like to bring up, being myself a Spaniard, that in 1936, while France and England looked the other way, the Soviets were the only European power to materially help the Republican and Anarchists in Spain in their civil war against Fascism, even if Nazis and Italian Fascists were openly carrying out military action in the region against the non-intervention agreement. When I bring this up, libs normally don’t have any response, but self-described “anarchists” will present the Soviet support in the Spanish civil war as a plot to destroy anarchism, and will bring up the “massive repressions” carried out by the NKVD after the May Days against the anarchists, as a form of the “ML stab in the back to anarchists” idea that’s so popular in western anarchist circles. Example here.

I considered that I may be wrong about this, and maybe the Soviets had carried out a massive repression against Anarchists in Spain, so I decided to ask the Anarchists themselves: I made a post explicitly asking for numerical estimates of such repressions in c/Anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com. The only response I received (more upvoted than my request) amounts to saying I shouldn’t expect to find such accurate historical estimates. Having read plenty about the Soviet repressions, I’m aware that the Soviets kept extremely detailed accounts of such repressions because, unlike fascists, they weren’t ideologically murderous repressors, they were just paranoid of a Nazi invasion but their purpose wasn’t to control people through fear. To this day, organizations such as Memorial from Russia enable people to scour through the tons of available data on their repressions and to find their ancestors and what happened to them. This kinda triggered me because, why would the Soviets keep such extensive records even during WW2 times, but completely negate this for the Spanish civil war? So I decided to embark on my own research.

My research: repression in the Republican side, and the Soviet point of view

Listening to the ProlesPod Episode 70 in which they briefly discuss the Soviet intervention in the Spanish civil war, they mention (around 1:18:18) that the modern estimates of repressions by the NKVD in Republican Spain amount to 20 people. After hours of searching through their sources (available on their Patreon to free-tier subscribers), I stumbled upon some interesting authors, books and articles, which I will cite in the following text. Note that my focus will be on the Republican and Soviet repressions. This is far from an intent at condemnation of antifascist repression in the antifascist side, far from that. I just believe that everyone reading this shares my antifascist beliefs and doesn’t need to be told how horrifying and unjustified the Francoist repression was.

As it turns out: there ARE modern estimates of repression victims in the Spanish civil war. In the Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War, a very modern, well-researched and well-sourced work printed in 2023, Chapter 15 is entirely devoted to it. The chapter begins:

The repression behind the lines during the Civil War saw the rebels and Francoists consign at least 100,000 opponents to an early grave, with nearly 30,000 executed after the end of the conflict. [...] The bulk of the victims’ remains continue to rest in an estimated 115,000 anonymous mass graves. Meanwhile, nearly 50,000 people perished in government territory: the vast majority in the first few months of the Civil War.

The chapter continues with extensive description of Francoist repression in scope and methods, and follows with repression in the Government side. In contrast to the Francoist regime’s repression, mandated from above by General Mola, the book claims:

Much of the drive for the violence in the government zone that killed some 50,000 people emerged from below, as the Barcelona case helps to illustrate. Barcelona’s inner cities housed factory workers and groups living on the fringes of society such as street traders. Both workers and the urban poor shared the same experience of expensive rental properties, high food prices, and a dislike of state representatives such as the police. Together they often took part in raids on food shops and rent strikes, and banded together to prevent the police from clamping down on hawkers. Over time a firm anti-capitalist and anti-state attitude emerged within these groups which the anarchist CNT successfully mobilized. The same attitude rendered many CNT members hostile to the Republican state which continued to use the police against the urban poor and even placed those labelled as socially dangerous in concentration camps. The repression made conventional protest difficult and encouraged armed activists to take direct action which ranged from violent insurrection to ‘armed shopping trips’. When the July 1936 coup began, CNT activists forged in this environment took a prominent role in seizing tens of thousands rifles from military barracks and in suffocating the revolt. The armed activists, often joined by other political groups, began to purge their neighbourhoods of those they labelled reactionaries and fascists. […] This forms an important part of the context in which a total of 8362 people were killed behind the lines across Catalonia, a substantial number of whom were targeted as class enemies

The ground-up approach to repression of fascists in Barcelona has a very different character (and a strikingly similar scope) of the repression by Republican government forces against fascism in Madrid:

Trade unions and political parties feared the enemy in their midst and rapidly formed their own militia squads and set up security organizations. In confiscated buildings they created prisons which became known as Checas, after the Bolshevik internal police forces. By the high summer of 1936, there were 200 Checas at work in Madrid alone, although only around twenty-five took a prominent part in the violence. The most infamous operated at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Members of the Checas often tracked down their victims through anonymous denunciations. Prisoners judged to be rightists or to have taken part in fifth-column activity were often executed. Their corpses were found in Madrid’s streets and parks shortly afterwards. The killers even left notes on some of the bodies explaining that the person had died for shooting on the people. In total, 8815 people would be killed in Madrid during the war. Unlike in rebel territory, however, the bodies were, in many cases, identified and relatives were able to claim their loved ones. The General Security Directorate kept photographs of all the bodies found. […] Before the Republican state could fully take control and put a stop to most violence behind the lines, a series of horrific killings took place in Madrid between November and December 1936. These murders of prisoners transferred from besieged Madrid to other prisons in Spain and killed on their journeys in the towns of Paracuellos and Torrejón de Ardoz claimed the lives of between 2200 and 2500 prisoners. They are notorious for both their scale and the involvement of the famous Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo, who faced consistent accusations against him and the Republican government from the right for his role in Paracuellos

It seems that, after all, centralized communist repression (no mention of Soviet involvement in this) is well-documented, including exact numbers and pictures of the repressed except in extreme cases such as the polemic “matanza de Paracuellos” (quickly organized mass-murder of fascist prisoners upon foreseeing a fascist attack on the prison region). The chapter’s conclusions about this are very explicit:

Unlike the Francoists, rather than deny the violence, government leaders acknowledged it and campaigned against it. Moreover, bodies were recovered and documented and in some cases the authorities also oversaw the exhumation of victims and began investigations into the murders.

If the repressions are well-documented, where is the information on Soviet repressions? For this, I will move to Ángel Viña’s works. It’s useful to understand the Soviet policy with respect to the Spanish civil war.

The context is 1936. Hitler and Mussolini openly talk of extermination of “Jewish-Bolshevism” and make it clear, through policy such as the Generalplan Ost, that their intention is to eliminate communism and exterminate/deport all the non-German peoples between Berlin and the Urals. The Soviets have been pursuing the so-called “collective security policy” with France and England against the Nazis, meaning they’ve been using all their diplomatic tools to seek mutual defense agreements against the Nazis under the doctrine of People’s Comissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR Maxim Litvinov. The Spanish civil war has just started, and England and Britain hurry to sign a non-intervention pact with Hitler and Mussolini, which the western “democracies” will hold but the Fascist regimes will ignore and invade Spain together with the Francoists. The Republican government is therefore only left with one ally selling them modern weapons: the Soviets.

However, the Soviets do not desire to enter open conflict in Spain for fear of triggering a war against the fascists without the support of England and France. A Spanish republican diplomat named Pascua is sent to Moscow and received bv Stalin himself. The author Ángel Viñas, as explained in his 2007 book “El escudo de la república”, has recovered the notes of the meetings by Pascua. Stalin’s policy is clear: they do not wish to implement a Soviet-style government in republican Spain. This would directly make France and England not aid the Spaniards, and the hopes are that, when these western regimes react against fascism and see that they can collude with the Soviets against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in Spain, they can do it outside too. From Chapter 9 “Stalin da una teórica”:

Stalin demostró una notable consistencia argumental y un conocimiento exhaustivo de los problemas españoles. No es de extrañar ya que era un trabajador auténticamente estajanovista. […] Stalin insistió en las confiscaciones y la libertad de comercio. Con ello aludía simplemente a los elementos básicos que tipifican un ordenamiento económico NO socialista. […] No es nada de extrañar puesto que constituía un camino imprescindible para promover el acercamiento de la República hacia los países democráticos occidentales.

Stalin portrayed a remarkable argumentatory consistency and a thorough knowledge of the Spanish problems. This isn’t surprising, given that he was an authentically Stakhanovite worker. […] Stalin insisted on the expropriations and freedom of trade. With this, he simply alluded to the basic elements that describe an NON Socialist economic system. […] This is not surprising given that this constituted and unavoidable path to promote a reapprochement between the Republic and the western democratic countries

So, Stalins is clear: he does not want to impose Soviet rule in Spain, he wants the Republican government to prevail. In fact, he promotes popular-front tactics joining Republicans, Communists and Anarchists in the antifascist struggle, explicitly praising the Anarchists:

Aludió ampliamente a los anarquistas y señaló que en las filas confederales había buenos elementos. Preguntó si podría haber una plataforma común entre socialistas y comunistas a propósito de la CNT. La respuesta de Pascua fue afirmativa, aunque con matices.

He extensivelty referred to the Anarchists and pointed out that there were good elements among the confederates [CNT, largest Spanish anarchist organization at the time]. He asked whether there could be a common platform between socialists and communist regarding the CNT. Pascua’s answer was affirmative, though with caveats.

However, Stalin also points out that the anarchist war tactics are failing, and harshly criticises them. After all, the Bolsheviks and Stalin had experienced something very similar during their own civil war some 20 years earlier, where initially the Reds attempted to organize horizontal worker militias as a form of fight against the Tsarist forces. This failed tremendously, and they were forced to conscript a regular hierarchical army with strict and disciplined command lines. Stalin is therefore very insistent on discipline. However he also understands that the path to discipline is not through violence but through ideology and common goals, as he explicits later:

Desde el punto de vista de la contribución al esfuerzo de guerra Stalin atacó duramente la táctica anarquista, propia de charlatanes, según la calificó. Durruti había sido un fracaso, por falta de organización y de disciplina. […] Reiteró que había que encontrar formas de acceder a las masas anarquistas e influir en ellas, lo cual sólo sería posible si los socialistas y los comunistas trabajaban juntos. Era preciso concienciar a los obreros de buena fe que seguían a los líderes anarquistas

From the point of view of the contribution to the war effort, Stalin harshly attacked the anarchist tactics, characteristic of charlatans as he described it. Durruti had been a failure due to lack of organization and discipline. […] He insisted that they had to find ways to appeal to the anarchist masses and influence them, which would only be possible if the Socialists and Communists worked together. It was necessary to create a consciousness in the good-faithed workers who followed the anarchist leadership.

Stalin continues warning against anarchist political intrigues and emphasizes the role of discipline:

Era necesario que el Estado se comportase de manera disciplinada y resultaba imprescindible que se incrementase la disciplina en el ejército. Los obreros comprenderían las ventajas. Había que desenmascarar la propaganda errónea y denunciar las intrigas de los anarquistas. Pascua anotó en mayúsculas el mensaje central: SIN DISCIPLINA Y SIN FUERZA NO SE HACE LA GUERRA Y NO SE CONSEGUIRIA LA VICTORIA. El armamento y la táctica no conducían necesariamente a ella. Los anarquistas habían ocultado armas de procedencia soviética, a pesar de que otras unidades carecían de ellas.

It was necessary for the State to behave in a disciplined manner, and that discipline increased in the army. The workers would understand the advantages. There was a need to unmask erroneous propaganda and to denounce the anarchist intrigues. Pascua noted down in uppercase the core message: WITHOUT DISCIPLINE AND STRENGTH WAR CANNOT BE MADE AND VICTORY CAN’T BE ACHIEVED. Weaponry and tactics don’t necessarily drive to it. The anarchists had hidden weapons of Soviet origin despite other units lacking them.

This makes the Soviet position in the conflict clear: the anarchists are valuable and necessary for the struggle, but discipline and unity are required in order to have a functioning government and army capable of defeating fascism. This position is far from the “repression of anarchists foremost” framework that has been presented to me in the past, and more in line with my thoughts on Communist and Soviet actuation during the war.

Repression against anarchists: the May Days, Andreu Nin and the NKVD

The main claim of Anarchist repression by the NKVD and the Communists is linked to the May Days, in which after some Anarchists in Barcelona in May 1937 forcibly took over some key businesses including telephone lines and weapon factories, government forces repressed the Anarchists using the force, disbanded them and turned Barcelona into a more government-controlled city rather than anarchist-controlled. This resulted in the deaths of some 500-1000 Anarchists. One of the most well-known episodes of this event is the arrest, torture and murder of Trotskyist party leader Andreu Nin (POUM party) at the hands of the NKVD, which we will get to later.

Often cited is Jose Peirats’s “The CNT in the Spanish Revolution: Volume 3”. Jose Peirats was a young CNT member at the time who lived through the May Days in Barcelona, and describes (without sources, as he generally does throughout the whole book) the activities of the Spanish republican secret police (SIM), which started operating in August 1937, some months after the May Days:

No one dreamed that a counter-espionage agency [SIM] could so promptly removed into a mighty political tool of one party to use against the rest. Nonetheless, this was the case with the SIM which turned from a government agency into the Spanish subsidiary of the Soviet GPU. For it is beyond question that the initiative originated with “Soviet advisors” […] like the Comissariat, the SIM too was of Soviet manufacture. […] The SIM also took care to probe state secrets in the realms of diplomacy, industry and armaments. The sole beneficiary of this sort of activity was the Soviet state.

This entirely unsourced bunch of information is purely the author’s belief. The author being a CNT member himself, it’s hard to consider this an unbiased account based on evidence. The entire book is unfortunately written in this fashion. Let us see the extent of the Chekas organized by the Republican government and their results:

One of the most ominous sections was Section 13. It had charge of the arrest, interrogation and maltreatment of detainees. For accuracy’s sake, it needs to be lkaced on record that the SIM rendered some remarkable services to the anti-fascist cause, and that on occasions it dismantled Fifth Column organisations. For instance, at the start of 1938, it uncovered the lists of membres and leaders of the Falange Española [fascist organization] operating in Catalonia. The arrests numbered 3500. But it needs to be pointed out that the success of the operation was made possible with the use of torture. And the same methods were also employed on anti-fascists who incurred the wrath of the SIM’s putative fathers. In every instance, the terror and tortures inflicted upon defenceless men are a repugnant and damnable monstrosity

Leaving aside the moralism and goodism of not wanting to have a secret intelligence service harm fascist prisoners during a literal civil war, these “3500 fascists” is the only figure provided in this chapter for the number of repressed. What follows are pages upon pages of atrocity propaganda against the antifascists who lost the war. Despite this, we have seen that modern historians place the majority of Government repressions and murders in the first months of the war, and largely due to grassroots violence (especially in anarchist-controlled regions like Barcelona). The author does not once mention this in the “terror in the rearguard” chapter of the book, proving his lack of intent of measuring and condemnation of violence, and instead his political attempt at disregarding anarchist violence and condemning only centralized one, even if both were enacted overwhelmingly against fascists. Peirats now concerns himself with the murder of Andreu Nin:

With Lenin dead, and Trotsky expelled from the USSR, Nin made no secret of his sympathies with Trotsky’s teachings and he in turn was expelled from the ‘Soviet Paradise’. He came back to Spain when the Republic was proclaimed, and promptly organised an anti-Stalinist faction, before joining with Maurin, against the wishes of Trotsky, to form the POUM. […] But the suppression pure and simple of this party was not enough. It had to be demonstrated by fair means or foul that the main leaders of the POUM were enemies of the people and of the world’s proletariat: that they were fascist agents and these charges, as serious as they were unfounded, had to be proved. Orlov, the GPU’s chief in Spain, took this repugnant task upon himself. The trap, according to Jesus Hernandez, was quickly prepared.

We will see about the “unfounded” nature of such claims of fascist involvement in the Anarchist revolts. The author continues with his atrocity propaganda of Andreu Nin’s torture and murder, with only one caveat: this is all entirely made up. The vast descriptions of Nin resisting torture and not confessing to false crimes are not from any historical document or any account of the Soviet agents who did kidnap him. In fact, Nin’s whereabouts were only found out in the 90s with the opening of the Soviet archives, and the Soviet agents involved couldn’t declare about this because they were killed in the great terror. All in all: Nin was kidnapped and killed by the NKVD under fabricated charges, but the accusations of torture are a complete invention that I will not reproduce here.

Modern historical evidence, however, has shed some light into this. We will now leave behind Jose Peirats’s biased and unfounded accounts lacking any historical sourcing of figures and completely disregarding Anarchist violence, and we will move on to contemporary historiography on Orlov (the Soviet head of the NKVD in Spain), both by Ángel Viñas and by a the Russian author Boris Volodarsky, the latter having accessed new documents from the released Soviet archives on Orlov.

On Volodarsky’s account of Orlov, “Stalin’s Agent: the life & death of Alexander Orlov”, we find out that the Soviet intelligence was actually aware of Nazi activity pushing for the anarchist revolt in Barcelona. As it turns out, the Soviets had a spy in Nazi Germany by the name of Harro Schulze-Boysen, reporting on Nazi activity in the Spanish civil war from within the German army. In Chapter 17 of the book, we learn that Orlov did indeed manufacture false evidence to convict Andreu Nin and eventually murder him after the May Days took place. However, we also find out that Orlov had information about the Fascist plot to incite the revolts. On the one hand, from Grover C. Furr’s article published on Wiley Labor and Society titled “Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona “May Days” of 1937”, we find the execution documents of Harro Schulze-Boysen by the Nazis once they uncovered him as a spy:

At the beginning of 1938 [the Nazis got the year wrong], during the Spanish Civil War, the accused learned in his official capacity that a rebellion against the local red government in the territory of Barcelona was being prepared with the co-operation of the German Secret Service. This information, together with that of von Pöllnitz, was transmitted by him to the Soviet Russian embassy in Paris. (Haase, 1993, p. 105).

Ángel Viñas confirms this in “El Escudo de la República”, on the chapter about the May Days:

[…] no parece nada inverosímil que elementos profascistas y profranquistas contribuyeran a incitar la revuelta. Obviamente, no fue su acción la que la desencadenó pero, en una situación inestable, tensa, cualquier chispa podía tener consecuencias imprevisibles y no hay que olvidar que el 2 de mayo desde las filas de Estat Català se abrió fuego contra los anarquistas.

[…] it doesn’t seem unlikely that pro-fascist and pro-Franquist elements contributed to push for the revolt. Obviously, it wasn’t their actions which unleashed it but, in an unstable and tense situation, any spark could have unforeseeable consequences, and one must not forget that on May 2nd from the lines of Estat Català they opened fire against the anarchists.

Discrediting the view that the repressions on Anarchists were directed by the Soviets, he writes:

Para toda una tradición historiográfica, Rodríguez Salas fue, simplemente, el ejecutor de los designios del lejano y topoderoso Stalin. Conquest (p. 410) puso encima de ella el marchamo de su incomparable autoridad. Pero no parece que fuese cierto.

For an entire historiographic tradition, Rodríguez Salas [communist] was, simply, the executing hand of the designs of the far and all-powerful Stalin. Conquest (p.410) put on this the weight of his incomparable authority. But it doesn’t look like this was true

Well, if it isn’t Robert Conquest, the American anticommunist propagandist! Now we see the origin of such claims and why they’re repeated by Anarchists all over! Further discussion by Viñas describes the makeup of the Barcelona rebels, citing Orlov:

Orlov (p. 304) ofrece la composición de los levantados en armas: 1500 de la FAI, unos 3000 cenetistas amén de un millar de miembros del POUM. Obsérvese el pequeño número de estos últimos, quizá incluso abultado por conveniencias comunistas.

Orlov (p. 304) offers the makeup of the risen in arms: 1500 from FAI, about 3000 from CNT and some thousand members of POUM. Notice the small number of the latter, perhaps even inflated by communist conveniences

Viñas even directly and explicitly pushes against the pro-POUM anarchist version that has been so propagated:

Su tesis, coetánea de los sucesos y nutrida en el marco ideológico de la guerra fría, sigue coloreando la literatura. Los acontecimientos de Barcelona, afirman en síntesis, fueron provocados por Stalin en búsqueda de una confrontación que permitiera destrozar tanto a la izquierda comunista no estalinista como al anarquismo. […] Hasta el momento, sin embargo, nadie ha puesto sobre la mesa pruebas concluyentes

Their thesis [anarchists, trotskyists, POUMists], simultaneous with the events and nourished in the ideological framework of the cold war, remains colouring the literature. The events in Barcelona, they affirm synthesizing, were caused by Stalin in his search for a confrontation that allowed him to destroy both the non-Stalinist communist left and the anarchism. […] To this point, however, nobody has provided conclusive evidence.

The author explicitly rejects the anarchist and trotskyist point of view, which he claims is very represented in the topic’s literature and also sees as very influenced ideologically by the cold war. It’s a long chapter, you can read it if you want, but this section concludes:

Concluyamos esta sección afirmando que no hemos indicado nada que abone la tesis de una participación soviética en el chispazo del polvorín de Barcelona, según los documentos del NKID y del GRU

Let us conclude this section affirming that we haven’t indicated anything that supports the thesis of Soviet participation in the spark of the blowup in Barcelona, according to documents of the NKVD and the GRU

It’s worth it, in my opinion, to dedicate a little bit more of analysis to the topic of cold war propaganda influencing all of this. Where, then, have these unsupported ideas of machiavellian Soviet influence pervading everything originated, and who supported them? Back to the Bloomsbury Manual’s chapter 15 on the repressions, we see what the Francoists claim:

Franco claimed that 800,000 ‘martyrs’ had died in the government zone while denying the violence carried out by his supporters. He also maintained that his opponents’ violence was directed by the Comintern and government leaders such as Juan Negrín who became no more than the servile disciples of Soviet thugs.

From chapter 17 of the same book:

neo-Francoists have challenged this narrative, in the service of their efforts to rehabilitate the Nationalists. Thus, they have tried to minimize the Nationalist repression by challenging or parsing the numbers and to justify most of it as legitimate punishment. For the other side, they frame republican violence within a ‘revolutionary’ dynamic that could be traced back to 1931 but which culminated in a ‘totalitarian’ Soviet-style extermination carried out by ‘checas’.

[…] In terms of defining the identity of the Republican side, the neo-Francoist narrative of communist takeover revisits early Cold War arguments articulated by the dictatorship as well as in the memoirs of the disillusioned left in exile. It is hardly coincidental that a new Spanish edition of Burnett Bolloten’s classic 1961 book, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, appeared in 2004, to reinforce the conservative recovery of this narrative. Bolloten concluded that if the Republic had won the war, it would have been a preview of the Soviet-controlled ‘popular democracies’ installed in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. However, since the opening of Soviet archives after 1989, most academic historians who have begun to explore the vast repository of primary sources have argued for a much more limited view of Soviet intervention and control.

So: it was fascist and cold-war propaganda all along, which has been dismantled progressively after the Soviet archives opening up. As in the case of Molotov-Ribbentrop exposed originally, the origins are the same. Yet another case to the endless list of cold war propaganda molding the discourse of supposed people on the left of the political spectrum. As I often say: when you share your opinion on Soviet actions and attitudes with cold-war propaganda or Nazi/Fascist discourse, rethink your position.

[…] Likewise, those studying the behaviour and discourse of the Communist party within Spain have rejected the classic portrait of a monolithic, all-powerful and ruthless organization bent on destroying all its rivals as too one-dimensional and out of proportion to its modest resources on the ground

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum’s 2015 book “International communism and the Spanish civil war” also has sections devoted to this topic of the extent of Soviet control over the Republican government, and agrees with the extent:

Stalinism as an international culture drew communists together with shared narratives, heroes, holidays, emblems, and enemies. But for all they shared, local communist political cultures remained distinct. In Spain, officers and commissars had a penchant for labeling all sorts of behaviors as “Trotskyite” and for threatening to arrest or shoot malingerers, deserters, and malcontents.140 However, they rarely did – which is not to excuse or minimize the executions that occurred […]. The lower level of political violence in Spain underscores thefact that in the Spanish context, it was possible to think – or threaten – like a Stalinist, but it was not always necessary or possible to act like one.

Again, further support from modern historiography that the level of political violence in Spain was minor compared to the Soviet Union.

Conclusions

I believe I have provided evidence to affirm that the modern anarchist/trotskyist discourse on the Soviet repressions of anarchists are overmagnified, based primarily on unreliable sources that don’t use archival evidence but anecdotal evidence, and that the modern historiographic consensus demonstrates that the Soviet impact on Spanish politics during the civil war is very limited. The intentions of the Soviets are misconstrued and demonized through the usage of cold-war or directly Francoist propaganda, archival releases from the USSR period provide evidence of fascist influence on the May Days that justifies a certain degree of repression to maintain unity against the Fascist invasion and prove that the intent was not “the crushing of anarchists” as much as stability and discipline during wartime.

Sources

-International Communism and the Spanish Civil War, by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

-The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War

-Stalin’s Agent: the life and death of Alexander Orlov, by Boris Volodarsky

-El Escudo de la República, by Ángel Viñas

-Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona “May Days” of 1937, by Grover C. Furr

Though the assembly line is largely credited to Henry Ford in 1913, humans understood the mass production practice long beforehand. A study published in the journal Science Advances shows that the Neanderthals—our distant cousins—operated “fat factories” to extract bone marrow for their diets as far back as 125,000 years ago.

“This was intensive, organised, and strategic,” the study’s first author Lutz Kindler said in the press release. “Neanderthals were clearly managing resources with precision—planning hunts, transporting carcasses, and rendering fat in a task-specific area. They understood both the nutritional value of fat and how to access it efficiently—most likely involving caching carcass parts at places in the landscape for later transport to and use at the grease rendering site.”

Experts believe Neanderthals understood that there was a certain “fat quota” they had to meet in order to make the (literally) bone-crushing process worthwhile. The authors of the paper emphasized the sheer amount of herbivores that Neanderthals at Neumark-Nord must have been hunting, explaining that our “cousins” were likely able to plan ahead and use their environment effectively.

I want to see Ugh's Five Years Plan.

In any case, the fact that, here, the "more advanced" farming women married into hunter-gatherer groups, contrary to many archaeologists' expectations that hunter-gatherer women would "marry up", suggests that perceptions need to change.

You heard them, ladies. If you want a man, get to farming.

(This takes three minutes to read.)

There were two different types of armed resistance movements in which Jewish women were involved. The first was the almost all-male, primarily non-Jewish unit, of which there were thousands throughout the whole of Europe. They comprised hundreds of thousands of fighters. The second were the all-Jewish units which were relatively few in number but more accepting of women.

‘I was called and actually to the commander’s wife and she talked to me. I was a youngster, sheltered. Did not go out, didn’t have any boyfriends or anything of the sort. And she started talking to me and she said to me, “You’re a young girl. There are very few women in the partisans and I would advise you to select an officer. Life will go better for you.”’

[…]

Groups like Frank Blaichman’s Jewish unit had their own rules for the protection and respect of their female partisans.

‘In our groups, I feel we treated women very well, very nicely. When I first met my wife as a partisan, in the partisans, she was with me maybe two months, she survived together. I treated her like my own sister and she behaved like a lady. It was just mutual and I would never touch her because, you know, she was young and I know the reason why she wanted to be with us, because she had no choice.’

‘The Soviet partisans did not appreciate that women could fight… as well as the men. And indirectly, perhaps, they were right. In these conditions, it really was more difficult for a woman to fight. But there were opportunities. For example: When we’d go out to blow up a train, we’d have to carry man kilograms of T.N.T. So, for a woman it was really difficult to walk for fifty kilometers with the T.N.T. So the task would fall on the men, who then would have to take more. So our own people didn’t want to go with women, not just Soviets. Abba (Kovner) pretty much forced them on each mission to take a female.’

‘We took out the sentries by silencer. We went into the base and made a mess out of them. It’s like an atom bomb erupted. While we were going into the base, a train was passing by and we put it in the dynamite. The dynamite exploded and all of them were waiting with machine guns and machine gunned them and that was the end of them.’

‘We went [as] two girls, there was a little bridge that was... wood, and that little bridge connected the [Axis] to go from one town to another for ammunition, for food, for things like that. And we were supposed to burn that bridge. We came into the Russian village and we said, “We need kerosene and we need straw in five minutes.” “We haven’t got [those], we haven’t got [those].” We said, “If you don’t have [those], we’ll kill the hole town. Either you give us or you’re gonna be killed.” They gave us in five minutes, kerosene and straw and we put a fire underneath that bridge. The [invaders] saw it, a fire. They opened fire on us with all the ammunition that they could do. We didn’t chicken out. That bridge burned. When we came back, the commander said that we did it very good and we got Order Lenina, a medal.’

‘Sonia was our communications person. She introduced us to a policeman. And I went out, and walked with him like we were just taking a stroll. I was supposed to take a magnetic explosive and detonator, and stick it to the door of a power transformer. I placed three explosives. And after a few hours, we heard an explosion, and the city went dark. And that was a big joy for us, and it had a real influence on the [Axis]. Because they realized that the partisans had reached all the way to the city. But they didn’t know that it was just a couple of Jewish girls and boys.’

‘There were times when we had to cross a railroad and from all sides of us shooting. I didn’t even bend down my head. I wasn’t worried I was going to get killed. If I was going to get killed, I was going to get killed as a fighter. Not because I’m a Jew.’

‘I don’t remember ever being scared because… we lived for one thing. Either we’ll survive or… or we’ll kill a few [fascists]. I didn’t fear for my life. My life was nothing. Yet… you want to live.’

See also: ‘The Young Jewish Women Who Fought the Nazis – and Why You’ve Never Heard of Them’

‘Why the Stories of Jewish Women Who Fought the Nazis Remained Hidden for So Long’

‘Jewish Women in the Partisans’

Rly shit takes from Engels here [Engels - The Magyar Struggle] Apparently there's worse yet to come in "Democratic Pan-Slavism"

Its also a total reversal from his position in septemberish 1848, when he was castigating germans for their chauvanism being the cause of slavs opposing revolution

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7863910

In 1964, American companies made 94 percent of every color television sold in the United States. By 1992, that number had collapsed to zero. This is the story of how RCA, Zenith, Motorola and the rest of America's television giants were overtaken by Sony, Panasonic and the rising force of Japanese manufacturing. What went wrong, who was responsible, and why nobody stopped it until it was too late.

The Principality of Outer Baldonia is a defunct micronation that claimed sovereignty over approximately 4 acres (16,000 m2) of Outer Bald Tusket Island, the southernmost of the Tusket Islands off the southern tip of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.[1][2]

Founded in 1949 by American businessman Russell Arundel,[3] the principality had a charter, a flag, currency,[4] passports, and an organized military. Its membership consisted of 69 fishermen.[5] All citizens of the principality who caught a Bluefin tuna and paid a $50 fee were accorded the rank of prince.[citation needed] Its government officials included Prince of Princes Russell Arundel, Chancellor Elson Boudreau, and Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Ron Wallace.[6]: 68  The text of the Charter of Outer Baldonia is preserved in the Yarmouth County Museum.[1][7]

After the Soviet state publication Literaturnaya Gazeta published a critique of the charter of Outer Baldonia, Outer Baldonia declared war on the Soviet Union on March 9, 1953.[6] The Soviets issued a series of condemnations through their various press outlets, and press coverage exposed the principality as a humorous half-truth.[2]

In 1973, Outer Bald Tusket Island was sold by Russell Arundel for the price of one Canadian dollar to the Nova Scotia Bird Society. The island was designated the Earle E. Arundel Breeding Bird Sanctuary.[2][7] In 2015, the Nova Scotia Bird Society partnered with the Nova Scotia Nature Trust to donate the Bald Islands as conservation lands.[8]

Reading this like "nope, sorry bud all ur hopes and dreams are gonna be crushed next year" Poor marx

(This takes 2.75 minutes to read.)

“Mnemonic warriors,” i.e. populist‐nationalist politicians and parties instrumentalize Holocaust memory through the configuration of memory politics, as described by Andrea Pető: first, they nationalize the universal Holocaust narrative by constructing an overarching national narrative that downplays other interpretations. Then, they legitimize competitive victimhood by canonizing the “double occupation” narrative — and at the same time, they push all responsibility on the Germans and the Soviets, and depict communism and fascism as alien ideas to the nation (Pető 2021, 161; Subotić 2019, 6).

Consecutively, when nationalist politicians seek legitimacy in the interwar and wartime period, they tend to obscure the exclusionary nature and the collaboration of these régimes with the [Third Reich] (Subotić 2018, 303).

[…]

Unfortunately, historical accuracy is sacrificed for conciseness and easy understanding: for instance, while the description deals with antisemitism in Hungary from the 1920s, it fails to mention the 1944 [Wehrmacht] occupation and everything that happened afterward.

Addressing the responsibility of the Slovak state and the local population is also controversial: while in one of the panels, the text clearly states that it was the government that deported the Jews, it fails to explain what the Jewish Code¹⁴ was, and at other places mentions the blurry phrase “fascists in Slovakia.”

In the second barrack, the exhibition explores the history of labor camps in Slovakia. Here, broader descriptions are included, which explain that members of the Hlinka Guard were responsible for the inmates’ fate. When discussing the post‐uprising reprisals, again, the narrative addresses the complicity of collaborators. While the third barrack, processing life in the Sereď camp, would be the place to explore the complexity of rôles and behavioral patterns (Nešťáková 2023), this is probably the most problematic part of the exhibition.

Most of the photos do not have captions, and the reconstructions of camp workshops, school, and barrack convey the message that prisoners actually had a comfortable life — which is far from the truth (see Nešťáková 2020, 132–140). My guide stated that visitors refer to this section as a “Holocaust skanzen,” which in itself reflects the authenticity of the exhibit.

Instead of exploring the complex relations among the occupying forces, Hungarians, Slovaks and Jews, the narrative is again simplistic. The final barrack describes a general Holocaust history, focusing first and foremost on [Axis] camps where Slovak Jews were deported; the victims (both symbolically and individually), and the Slovak Righteous among the Nations (Figure 11).

A general major issue with the exhibit is that only a few of the artefacts or photos have explanatory texts and thus the visitor does not get to know whether they are replicas or originals, their origin or what they depict, etc. (Vrzgulová 2019) The length of texts is disproportionate, and they are descriptive instead of analytical.

Thus, the exhibition of the Sereď Holocaust Museum lacks an analysis of the rôle of collaborators, bystanders, and the underlying reasons behind the fact that in 1942, “the Slovak Republic was the only state not directly occupied by Germany in which Jews were deported by the state’s own administrative and security forces” (Kamenec 2011, 189–190). In fact, what the non‐Jewish population gained through the deportation of the Jews, is not even mentioned in the exhibition, neither are the main perpetrators and collaborators introduced.

The gravity of complicity is also reduced by the idyllic depiction of camp life. This way the institution’s achievement in processing the past is unbalanced; compared to the HDKE, it seems superficial in the sense that it does not delve into the depths of collaboration — the visitor has to consciously seek for hints about it in order to gain at least an incomplete picture.

This is the result of reluctance to face the past — contrary to the previously discussed HDKE, the influence of a nationalist narrative and an endeavor to blur responsibility for the Holocaust is more noticeable at the Sereď Museum’s exhibition.

(Emphasis added.)

While the author does not delve directly into the area of public schooling, seeing as how the government funded two of these national memorial musea it is reasonable to suspect that Shoah education in compulsory learning is not much better.