Spanish Identity and International Communism: Moscow’s Spanish Center, 1966–86—and Beyond

This paper will assess the political, cultural, and social import for international communism of the Spanish Center of Moscow (El Centro Español de Moscú), an important landmark of the Spanish-Soviet encounter missing from the historiography.  Created in 1966, the Spanish Center was a voluntary political and cultural “entity whose purpose was to bring together the Spaniards residing in the Soviet Union, and keep watch over their moral and political unity;” and to aid them in “supporting the Spanish people’s struggle for democracy and peace.”   The Center sought to reach all Spaniards in the USSR—not just the 3000 children evacuated from Spain during the Civil War, but also the political exiles, namely members of the Spanish Communist Party, who came to the USSR after the Civil War.  The Center closed in 1986.  But in 1995, it was reopened under a new statute.
The rich archival records of the Center allow us to revisit problematic assumptions in the historiography of the Spanish emigration to the USSR.  Among these assumptions is a tendency to view the refugees and exiles as tragic victims lacking agency, as a bounded group apart from Soviet society, and as individuals whose self-understanding is unproblematic.  Drawing upon archives, memoirs, and interviews, I seek to reconstruct a robust history of the Spanish Center.  The paper will explore how members of the Center shaped its programs and activities in ways that diverged from its official statute. It will examine the Center not as an institution of a bounded group, but as a nexus for Spanish-Soviet cultural interactions.  And it will assess the meaning of its activities for how Spanish exiles in the Soviet Union understood who they were.  Finally, the paper will examine the import of the Spanish Center’s activities for those who returned to Spain during the Franco years.