Martyrdom Without Politics: How Remember Me to My Comrades Conceals the Betrayal of the Spanish Revolution

Michael Crowley’s "Remember Me to My Comrades: Letters and Diaries of the International Brigade" (Barnthorn, £16.99) honours the approximately 2,500 British volunteers who fought in Spain from 1936 to 1938. It offers valuable insights as a recovery project, gathering letters, diaries, and memoirs from workers whose voices are often overlooked in official histories. However, as an analysis of the political forces influencing their fate—and ultimately betraying the Spanish Revolution—it is somewhat evasive, bordering on distortion.

Crowley observes that both the volunteers and the Comintern organisation that recruited them consistently framed Spain as a conflict against fascism rather than a civil war. It is undisputed that young workers like Kenneth Bradbury—from Oldham, who was already leading a Young Communist League branch at seventeen and died at Teruel in January 1938—saw their fight as part of a broader struggle against fascism internationally. However, Crowley declines to examine how the Stalinist leadership actually manipulated this understanding and systematically distorted it.

The book notes, almost as an aside, that between half and two-thirds of the battalion were members of the Communist Party or the YCL. Crowley views this as a mere sociological fact rather than a basis for in-depth political analysis. In fact, this detail is crucial to understanding Spain's tragedy. These workers were mobilised not to advance the revolution, but to defend the Popular Front—an anti-revolutionary strategy enforced by Moscow that placed the working class under the control of the liberal bourgeoisie, even as workers had shown their potential to seize power.

In July 1936, workers in Barcelona and much of Catalonia successfully stopped the military uprising, took control of factories, collectivised land, and began building structures for workers’ self-management. Spain created exactly the situation Stalin feared most: an independent socialist revolution happening outside Soviet control. Stalin’s main aim in Spain was not to defeat Franco but to prevent a second October — a workers’ government revealing the conservative, nationalist nature of his own regime. His foreign policy relied on alliances with ‘democratic” bourgeois powers; a socialist revolution in Spain would have destroyed that approach.

Trotsky’s analysis here is crucial. Writing in the moment, he emphasised that Spain was more than just a civil war or a fight against fascism; it was a proletarian revolution. The workers demonstrated extraordinary heroism, yet heroism alone couldn't replace the need for revolutionary leadership. Trotsky contended that the Popular Front was the main barrier to victory because it compelled the working class to defend a bourgeois system incapable of overcoming fascism. He noted that Franco didn't defeat the Spanish proletariat, but by its own leadership.

The Popular Front was more than a tactical alliance; it was a strategic constraint aimed at dismantling the revolutionary momentum generated by the working class. Following directives from Moscow, the Communist Party targeted not only Franco but also the POUM and the anarchist militias, whose soldiers' bravery in July had been crucial. The NKVD set up secret prisons, infiltrated the Republican police, and was involved in the disappearance of Andrés Nin. The May Days of 1937, when Communist-controlled forces attacked the Barcelona workers, marked a turning point. Ultimately, the revolution was halted by the Popular Front government, operating under Stalinist influence, rather than Franco. Crowley does not develop this analysis in detail.

The strongest material in the book — the letters and diaries — exposes the reality Crowley’s narrative avoids. Peter Kerrigan’s account of the retreat toward Gandesa, men going days without water, their shoes cut to pieces on the rocks, “many… literally barefoot as well as being in rags,” and Walter Gregory’s description of finding George Stockdale dying on the Ebro, a machine‑gun bullet having “cut a dreadful groove in his skull leaving his brain exposed,” speak with a clarity no editorial framing can soften. These passages reveal the human cost of the Comintern’s strategy. They indict the leadership more effectively than Crowley ever attempts.

Crowley dedicates a chapter to Harry Pollitt, celebrating his recruitment efforts and visits that boosted morale, while overlooking a crucial fact: this leadership, following Moscow's directives, played a key role in suppressing the revolutionary alternative to Popular Frontism in Spain, most notably during the May Days of 1937. The chapter also covers George Orwell, whom the original review dismisses as undeserving of attention. This is actually the opposite of the truth. Despite Orwell’s later political changes, Homage to Catalonia is one of the few well-known accounts describing what truly happened to the POUM militias and Barcelona’s workers under the Stalinist-controlled security forces — a stark reality Crowley, like many others commemorating the event, deliberately avoids.

Crowley cannot explain why the Communist Party ostracised Orwell because doing so would mean admitting the Party’s role in suppressing the revolution. The CPGB’s hatred for Orwell was rooted in politics, not literature or personal reasons. Orwell had seen the crime the Party needed to hide: the outlawing of POUM, arrests and disappearances of its members, and the attack on the Barcelona working class by forces claiming to oppose Franco. Homage to Catalonia challenged the Popular Front’s narrative—that Spain’s conflict was merely between democracy and fascism—and exposed the Communist Party as the tool Moscow used to crush revolutionary hopes that arose in July 1936. As a result, Orwell was slandered, censored, and labelled as “objectively fascist.” Crowley’s reluctance to address this hostility reflects the same sanitising tendency that pervades the entire book.

Another crucial omission is decisive: the International Brigades were not purely expressions of independent working-class internationalism. Instead, they served as tools of the Popular Front strategy, aimed at channelling genuine anti-fascist sentiment into defending the bourgeois republic and diverting from the revolutionary potential that emerged in July 1936. While the volunteers' anti-fascism was sincere, the Brigades' primary purpose was to prevent revolution. Trotsky understood this well: their heroism was misdirected by leaders who prioritised maintaining bourgeois order over defeating Franco. Crowley fails to acknowledge this contradiction because doing so would force him to confront the political role of Stalinism, which he chooses to avoid.

Crowley notes that men who faced death at the front were unlikely to be intimidated by a foreman upon returning. This highlights the revolutionary potential among these workers — a potential that was wasted in Spain and again during the Second World War, as the fight against fascism and the necessary programme to defeat it was fought globally. The courage shown here is genuine and worth remembering. However, a history that separates this bravery from the bureaucratic betrayal that led to the fall of the Spanish Revolution ultimately results in a moving story of martyrdom rather than an analysis of why the Spanish working class was defeated.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. First‑hand account of the POUM militias, the May Days, and Stalinist repression in Barcelona.
• Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973. Collection of Trotsky’s writings on Spain, including analyses of the Popular Front, the POUM, and Stalin’s foreign policy.
• Andrés Nin, Selected Writings. Various editions. Documents the POUM’s political positions before his disappearance at the hands of the NKVD.
• International Brigades Letters and Diaries (various collections). Including materials reproduced in Crowley’s Remember Me to My Comrades.
• Peter Kerrigan, The International Brigade: Spain 1936–1939. Memoir of a CPGB cadre and Brigade commissar.
• Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Eyewitness testimony from a British volunteer.

Soviet and Comintern Documents

• Comintern Archives, RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History). Includes directives to the Spanish Communist Party, reports on the POUM, and NKVD operations.
• NKVD Reports on Spain (1936–1938), published in various scholarly editions. Documentation of arrests, interrogations, and the disappearance of Andrés Nin.

Trotskyist Analyses

• Pierre Broué, The Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006. The most comprehensive Trotskyist history of the revolution and its suppression.
• Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in Spain. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974. A contemporary Trotskyist analysis written during the war.
• Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. A monumental study documenting Stalinist repression and the destruction of the revolution.

Marxist and Critical Histories

• Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Standard academic account; useful for chronology, though politically limited.
• Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Important for institutional and social history of the Republic.
• Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. Conventional narrative history; valuable for military detail.
• Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. Early eyewitness account sympathetic to the revolution.

Anarchist and POUM Sources

• Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Oakland: AK Press, 2007. Biography of the anarchist leader; essential for understanding CNT‑FAI rank‑and‑file militancy.
• Julián Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain. London: Routledge, 2010. Scholarly treatment of anarchist politics and social base.
• Wilebaldo Solano, The Spanish Revolution: The POUM and the Struggle for Power. POUM perspective on the revolution and its suppression.

Studies of Stalinism and the Popular Front

• E.H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1984. Detailed study of Soviet policy and Comintern strategy.
• Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck & Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press, 2001. Uses Soviet archival material to document NKVD operations and Stalinist intervention.
• Stanley Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic. Yale University Press, 2006. Conservative but useful for institutional analysis of the Popular Front.

Biographies and Memoirs Relevant to Stalinist Policy

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Oxford University Press, 1963. Trotsky’s biography; includes analysis of Trotsky’s writings on Spain.
• Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Memoir of the NKVD officer in Spain; controversial but revealing.

For Contextualising Orwell and the CPGB

• John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics. London: Macmillan, 1999. Explores Orwell’s anti‑Stalinism and the CPGB’s hostility toward him.
• Christopher Hill, The CPGB and the Popular Front. Essays on the British Communist Party’s alignment with Moscow’s line.

Archival Collections

• Marxists Internet Archive (MIA): Trotsky’s writings on Spain, POUM documents, CNT manifestos, and contemporary analyses.
• Tamiment Library (NYU) International Brigades papers, CPUSA materials, and Comintern correspondence.
• Modern Records Centre (Warwick University)