“I Remember You Fondly”: International Communist Correspondence Networks

The paper focuses on the diffuse, informal, personal (or quasi-personal) correspondence networks that linked international communists. Often originating in transnational contacts forged during the Spanish civil war, these networks persisted into the cold war. Dolores Ibárruri, the leader of the Spanish communist party in exile in Moscow, stood at the heart of one such network. From the time she arrived in the Soviet Union following the fall of the Republic in mid-1939, Ibárruri maintained a far-flung circle of correspondents that included Spanish communists in Eastern Europe and Mexico and foreign veterans of the Spanish war. American veterans of the war exchanged letters with one another and veterans from all over the world.

These communist correspondents often wrote what might be termed sentimental political letters, letters that made little distinction between political goals and personal needs. Ibárruri's correspondents among the Spanish exiles wrote requesting everything from housing to marital advice, taking seriously her public image as the proletarian mother of Spain. Her Russian, American, and East European correspondents often addressed her in emotional terms as a "beloved" leader who embodied " “all the pain, all the suffering of the Spanish people," and she responded in emotional, if also formulaic, language.

Such letters provided a powerful means of maintaining networks that conflated and solidified personal and party relationships. These networks in turn commemorated and enacted the international solidarity that had underpinned communist intervention in Spain, even as, in the late 1940s, transnational ties came under attack on both sides of the iron curtain. Maintaining local and international networks, the letter writers perpetuated the story of the good fight in Spain as both a means of reasserting their political identity as internationalists and of protecting precious, self-defining memories.