Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Winner & Loser. Spain was only partly a "rehearsal" (as the familiar phrase has it) for World War II in which Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin experimented with military and political techniques. Actually, the only important military lesson-that mass civilian bombing does not break, but stiffens the morale of the surviving victims-had to be learned all over again in World War II. The political lessons, reaching well beyond World War II, were far more significant...
...Stalin, the apparent international loser, showed the greatest enterprise; his agents were able to develop the techniques, so useful later in eastern Europe, by which a Communist minority can influence and finally take over a popular wartime regime. Also, he trained in the NKVD or the Spanish SIM, a corps of future Red quislings-Togliatti. Ulbricht, Malinovsky, Tito. Without endorsing Franco, many readers will draw the hard conclusion from Historian Thomas' documents that if the Madrid-Barcelona republic had beaten Franco, it would have been as a Communist or "people's" republic...
...depressing record of human illusion and disillusion. On the level of national policy, the story is equally dismal -the impotence of the League of Nations, the nonintervention policy of Britain and France and the arms Embargo Act in the U.S. leaving the door open for intervention by Stalin and the Axis. Historian Thomas' sober judgment is that German-Italian intervention may have just barely tipped the scales in Franco's favor; Stalin could have won it for the Republicans, had he wanted to, but his policy was to prolong the conflict rather than win it at the price...
With similar cynicism, and almost simultaneously, Stalin and Hitler decided to cut their losses and count their gains. Author Thomas' reckoning is fascinating. On the face of it, the Axis won, but gained little for its investment (500 million reichsmarks and 16,000 Germans; the equivalent of ?80 million sterling and 50,000 men from Italy). Later, Hitler could never induce Franco to give him houseroom in World War II. And on the face of it, Stalin was the loser on his investment of ?88 million sterling. But Stalin got a great hunk of Spain's gold reserve...
Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, by George Kennan. There is grace and reflective melancholy in this highly informative chronicling of U.S.-Russian relations...