I focus on the connections between the Soviet Union and Spain because the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), much like the Bolshevik Revolution itself, played a pivotal roles in (re)defining and galvanizing international communists. By the late 1930s, the selfless heroism of Spanish militiamen and women and international volunteers had become emblems, even in Soviet domestic propaganda, of communism’s most idealistic and humane aspirations.
The Spanish Civil War was also very much about the future of Spain and Spanish identity. Dolores Ibárruri, the best known representative of the Spanish communism both at home and abroad was also, as the Soviet writer Il’ia Ehrenburg described her in Izvestiia in 1937, a national symbol: “exacting eyes, silver hair, traditional earrings, in a long black dress -- this is Spain.” In the wake of the Republic’s defeat, the tensions between Spanish and communist identities became particularly acute among Spanish exiles in the Soviet Union. Drawing on the archives of the Spanish Communist Party and the Comintern as well as memoirs, the paper examines relations within the exile community as well as the Spaniards’ shifting understandings of Soviet socialism as both an ideology and a set of everyday interactions, expectations, and practices. The conflicts between “communist” and “Spanish” played out in part as a political and profoundly personal struggle between Ibárruri, who maintained her public persona as Spain in mourning, and Jesús Hernández, who vilified her as an insufficiently Spanish “priestess of Stalin’s temple.
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