Broue.Stalin and the Revolution The Case of Spain 1936-39 [English-French Bilingual]

Description

“How did a handful of mediocre apparatchiki selected in Moscow for their docility, even their servility, manage to capture the most radicalized political current of the pre-revolutionary era and turn the Socialist Youth into Stalin's infantry? “How the leader of the Soviet Union, moreover perfectly indifferent to the fate and the very existence of Spain, manipulated this issue of world politics for the benefit of his policy in general and his prestige especially as far as its policy of repression? “This complex and difficult period, teeming with contradictions, is also shimmering with a thousand colors. It resounds with all the fanfares of hope and death knell sometimes confused. For the counter-revolution there adorned itself with the colors of the revolution, and it was Lenin's successor who made himself the executioner of the soviets, the friend of the powers which he called “democratic” at the time of his ally with Hitler and German fascism. “Nothing is true of his legend and his halo of anti-fascism, and yet the memory of men still retains this image deeply engraved in it, perpetuated and crystallized by the Second World War from 1941. “I try, through this particular chapter of the history of the 20th century, to determine Stalin's Spanish policy in its motivations and its consequences, its long and its short duration, the image that it wanted to give to itself and the deep traces it has left. “P.B. Born in 1926, Doctor of Letters, Pierre Broué was a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Grenoble. A specialist in Trotsky and the Fourth International, he is notably the author of a monumental biography of the irreducible opponent whom Stalin had assassinated in 1940 (Fayard, 1988).