ABSTRACT
In his analysis of the rise of the Communist Party in Spain and of the growth of Soviet influence, Burnett Bolloten sees Negrín as the tool of the Communists and the Soviet Union [50], a view which neglects Negrín’s own character and his fundamental concern to maintain the Republic and to defend Spanish interests. There are, it is true, areas in which Negrín’s policy seemed to have a Russian flavour. His emphasis on ‘concentration’, on forced unity, and in particular his attack upon the POUM seemed to echo treatment of Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. But any comparison between Negrín’s Spain and Stalin’s Russia reveals only a similarity of aims, not of tactics; nowhere did Spain show the degree of paranoia which marked Russian communism, with its continuing judicial murder of leading Bolsheviks and others. In Spain there were relatively few examples of this attitude. Andrés Nin, the POUM leader, disappeared into an NKVD prison in Spain, and his colleagues were brought to a show trial, charged with slandering a friendly country (the Soviet Union) and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. To deal with political dissidents, Negrín established the Servicio de Investigatión Militar (SIM),* a political police force, which grew to 6,000 agents, and established its own prisons and camps. Yet there was no indiscriminate persecution. Largo Caballero, for instance, lived on, albeit neglected, as did Prieto, after his resignation, and although there were occasional press campaigns against them, their lives were not in danger – as they most certainly would have been if Spain had simply been an Iberian version of the Soviet Union.
