International Communism and the Spanish Civil War Solidarity and Suspicion [Paperback]

This book provides an intimate picture of international communism during the Spanish Civil War.This book provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Focusing on Americans and Spaniards who worked or studied in Moscow and later participated in the Spanish civil war, it uncovers the personal and political ties that linked communists to one another and the Soviet Union.This book provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Focusing on Americans and Spaniards who worked or studied in Moscow and later participated in the Spanish civil war, it uncovers the personal and political ties that linked communists to one another and the Soviet Union.International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces  from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain  the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish civil war, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism  the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions  and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.Introduction: being communist; Part I. International Communists and the Soviet Union, 19306: 1. Learning to be Bolshevik; 2. Imagining, seeing, feeling the revolution; Part II. Being Bolshevik, Making History in Spain, 19369: 3. 'All advanced and progressive humanity'; 4. True Bolsheviks and Trotskyite basl•