ABSTRACT
The simple issue of democracy versus fascism which, in the 1930s, the Spanish struggle seemed to display, has long since faded and died. The questions which are now asked about the Civil War increasingly turn on the extent of communist influence within the Spanish Republic. The sense that this was the Last Great Cause – so vividly expressed by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger – has been replaced by a probing of the changes, political and social, which transformed Republican Spain during the war. Anarchist writers have expressed their urgent conviction that the revolution was betrayed, without ever asking what the alternatives were for the Republican government; liberal historians have deplored the growth of Soviet power in Spain, without linking this to the failure of the liberal democracies to provide arms for the Republic. The shift of interest in the studies of the Civil War helps to obscure two central issues – that the Republican government was a liberal government elected in a constitutional way and challenged by a military rising; and that the regime that took over Spain was based upon repression and continued in repression for many years to come. No reassessment of the Civil War should overlook either the nature of the pre-war government or the squalid brutality of the post-war regime [48].
