But what were the processes by which specific historical figures transmitted what Nolte calls a “totalitarian germ” of the Russian Revolution across space and time? Moving beyond the murky claims about the causal effect across national borders of ideas about violence, in my work I focus on the human beings who carried the violent practices of the Russian Revolution-especially the Russian Civil War-across the European continent.Īs for connections between the Russian Revolution and Spanish Civil War, it is well known that Soviet military advisors and other personnel were on the ground in Spain. To be sure, ideas about violence are important to consider. Particularly questionable are their claims that its influence consisted of ideas about violence and the role of the modern state in it.
But I am troubled by the way contemporary actors and scholars of the period have pointed to the Russian Revolution as a cause of subsequent violence. It is certainly useful to think of the Russian Revolution and Spanish Civil Wars as interlocking events within a general European Civil War. Guerrilla tactics traveled from the Russian Civil War, via Soviet advisors, to the Spanish Civil War - and then back to the Soviet Union as military tactics against the Nazi Wehrmacht. An interesting case in point is the transnational odyssey of guerrilla tactics from the Russian Civil War, via Soviet advisors, to the Spanish Civil War - and then back to the Soviet Union as military tactics against the Nazi Wehrmacht, with the same advisors and Spanish Republican officers exiled in the USSR. Yet they all oblige us to investigate how the civil wars and expressions of violence of this period became interlocked. Its champions don’t agree on the chronological endpoints and causal mechanisms that generated violence across the European continent during this period. Since then it has been adopted and refashioned by scholars and historical actors across the political spectrum, among them the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the controversial German historian Ernst Nolte, and the left-leaning scholar Enzo Traverso. The concept of a European Civil War was first advanced by contemporaries who lived through it.
Was the Spanish Civil War a nexus through which violence moved across borders?-an epoch of military violence and ideological, cultural, political, social and economic conflict that began either in 1914, with the outbreak of the “Great War,” or with the Russian Revolutions of 1917, especially the Bolshevik Revolution, and ended in 1945, when fascism’s defeat brought a resolution of the conflicts that had wracked the European continent since 1914? Mexican edition of journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales’ Secrets of the Defense of Madrid
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