Comrades Book

1999 marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, yet the international appeal of a singularly Spanish tragedy still holds strong. Where the conventional view beheld a classically romantic struggle between the forces of the Left and Right, the real story was of a knot of conflicts involving the Church, the military, the separatists and the working poor. Paul Preston seeks to establish a Third Spain, one populated by passionate people stranded by their neutrality who inevitably were despised by both "sides" who saw courage only in extremity. To this end he has produced a kaleidoscopic series of Plutarchian lives covering nine major protagonists, arrayed, broadly speaking, from Right to Left, with the writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga in the centre. To the far Right stands the terrifyingly ridiculous Jose Millan Astray y Terreros, who did more than anyone to pave the way for Franco. At the other end is Dolores Ibarruri, "La Pasionaria", a courageous and attractive orator for the Communist cause undone partially by her steely dedication to Stalinism. They act as bookends for Franco, a portrait which is essentially a distillation of Preston's own acclaimed 1993 biography Franco: A Biography, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, his sister Pilar, Julian Besteiro, Manuel Azana and Indalecio Prieto. Unfortunately the fascination Preston displays with Millan Astray and Ibarruri inadvertently illustrates the problem at hand: it is always the flamboyant who catch the attention while the undemonstrative splash in their wake. He does his best, though, to redress the balance, and his redemptive essay on Prieto is arguably the pick of the bunch, going a long way to rehabilitating the reputation of a humane and misunderstood man. Comrades!, already a bestseller in Spain, emerges as more than its sum parts. It adds a necessary dimension to the crudely simplistic vision of victors and vanquished which was the conflict's legacy and it is imbued with a love for Spain that all those chronicled would have recognised, and which tragically informed their differences. --David VincentRead More