The intellectual struggle against the Soviet Union during what has been called the cultural cold war featured three European figures whose experiences of the Spanish Civil War were crucial in their political evolution toward antitotalitarianism: Franz Borkenau, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler.
Borkenau was an Austrian sociologist who arrived in Spain in August 1936 to study the development of the revolution in the besieged Republic. He was a former communist, but not yet an anti-communist, who had been a member of a Marxist institution, the Frankfurt School, and had to flee Nazism to England in 1934 as an academic refugee.
Having worked as a political analyst for the Comintern, Borkenau had a deep knowledge of the fragmentation of the left and had no difficulty identifying the political reality of republican Spain. He understood that, particularly in Barcelona, the anarchists were the largest political force: they had the most powerful union, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), and majority control of the streets and factories.
Orwell arrived in Barcelona as a volunteer soldier of the Republic in December 1936. Although anarchist power was much weakened, he considered the revolutionary atmosphere “a situation worth fighting for,” as he later recounted in Homage to Catalonia.
At the time, Orwell championed the city's revolutionary temperament, which rejected bourgeois manners and had forced factory owners and priests to flee. He believed that the fight for social revolution was indistinguishable from the fight against fascism. In this sense, Borkenau, who had abandoned communism in 1929, in opposition to the Comintern's renewed emphasis on class struggle, was less enthusiastic than Orwell.
In El reñidero español, the book he published about his experience in the Civil War, the Austrian described witnessing a burning of religious objects ordered by the revolutionaries, which the locals involved in the action reluctantly welcomed. In that book he also expressed how the violent actions of the Durruti column disturbed him deeply.
However, as a student of revolutions, he recognized that violent terror was a fairly common characteristic of them, and that nationalists were also perpetrating extreme violence: “Perhaps the massacre of all enemies is not so much an anarchist custom as , rather, Spanish,” he wrote.
Upon returning to London after his first trip to Spain, he published an article recalling how General Narváez, when asked on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, responded: “I have no enemies, I have killed them all.” Despite the violence, Borkenau pointed out that, at least in the Republic, critical journalists and academics like him were free to form and make public their opinions.
When Borkenau returned to Spain in January 1937, the situation had changed drastically. As a result of Soviet involvement, the anarchists had lost their power and the communists had become an increasingly influential force. During his investigation, Borkenau dealt “with many republicans, socialists, anarchists and Trotskyists, finding them all equally free of any heretic-hunting attitude.”
The same could not be said of the communists. Suddenly, Trotskyism had become a serious crime, of which one could be suspected simply for conversing with Trotskyists. Borkenau was arrested for this reason and imprisoned in a communist prison that had been improvised in Valencia.
A few months later, Orwell, who fought in the Trotskyist ranks of the POUM, managed to flee Spain; with better fortune than Andreu Nin, the leader of the party, who was assassinated. Unlike Orwell, Borkenau had no real connection to Trotskyism. In fact, he disparaged the Spanish Trotskyists as “a small and innately sectarian group.”
That the communists arrested him as a Trotskyist was absurd. However, at the time of the Moscow trials (1936-1938), it was an absurdity born of a terrible logic, which the communists were completely incapable of understanding: "The communists have contracted the habit of denouncing as Trotskyist anyone who disagree with them about anything; since within the communist mentality, any disagreement on political issues is a major crime and every political criminal is a Trotskyist […]. And in this aspect the Spanish communists are no different from the German Nazis. The Nazis call anyone who disagrees with his political regime a 'communist' and end up truly believing that all of his opponents are communists."
While Orwell and Borkenau were forced to flee Spain by the communists, the Hungarian writer Koestler was captured and sentenced to death by the rebels. Koestler was a communist when he arrived in Spain in 1936 with a commission from Willi Münzenberg, the propaganda chief of the Communist International, to write a book about Franco's atrocities.
Disguised as a journalist from a right-wing Hungarian newspaper, he had the lucky break of meeting Franco's brother in Lisbon, Nicolás, who provided him with safe conduct to enter the territory of the insurgents. However, while he was passing through Seville, he was recognized by a Nazi journalist with whom he had worked in Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic.
After this event, he managed to escape to Gibraltar, but was later captured by Franco's troops during the fall of Malaga. Koestler spent three months waiting to be executed, an experience that inspired his Dialogue with Death.
Koestler was saved from the firing squad thanks to a campaign launched by his communist comrades in England, who passed him off as a “liberal” journalist (understood as progressive) and turned him into a symbol of press freedom, under assault by fascism.
But his experience caused him an epiphany: he was close to dying in the service of a cause whose defenders did exactly the same as the Francoists, but with three differences that made the situation even more grotesque. First, the Soviet Union was carrying out “liquidations” on a much larger scale; Secondly, the victims were his own followers.
Münzenberg, perhaps the greatest communist propagandist who ever lived, whose The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire convinced a generation of liberals that the Comintern was an ally in the “defense of the democracy,” was eventually murdered by communists in a forest in France. And he was lucky: he avoided the tortures of the Lubyanka.
Münzenberg's silent death illustrates the third and most shameful difference. Koestler was not the first victim of fascism whose cause was adopted by the liberal intelligentsia of democratic countries. But where was the voice of protest from the liberal world for the victims of Stalin's terror?
In his memoirs, Koestler wrote: “Liberals around the world signed appeals demanding the release of Thaelmann, the communist leader imprisoned by Hitler; Not one in a hundred felt the same impulse regarding the communist leaders imprisoned and shot by Stalin. However, this was the time when the great purge was ravaging Russia […], beginning with the execution of the leaders of the Revolution, ending with the execution of the executioners […]. The men of good will of that era fought with clairvoyance and devotion against one type of totalitarian threat to civilization, and were blind or indifferent to the other. When I learned of the fuss that had been made about me and compared it to the anonymous end of my friends in Russia [...], I became increasingly aware of an overwhelming debt that must somehow be repaid.”
Koestler began to repay this debt by writing Darkness at Noon (here titled Zero and Infinity), one of the great novels of the 20th century, in which he used his own prison experiences to capture the feelings of Rubashov, an “old Bolshevik” who He awaited death in the name of the revolution for which he had fought. After World War II, Koestler wanted to do something more concrete.
He and Orwell attempted to establish a League for the Rights of Man, an organization that would defend victims of political persecution, regardless of the political expediency of doing so. As expected, they failed to win the support of the British intelligentsia, who branded the project “anti-Soviet.”
In the final months of a life cut short by tuberculosis, Orwell struggled to finish 1984. After its publication, dissident Polish writer Czesław Miłosz recounted the reception the work had in the Soviet Union, where copies of clandestine translations circulated illegally.
According to Milosz, no one could believe that Orwell, who had never visited, much less lived, in the Soviet Union, could have captured its atmosphere so vividly. What would explain this fact is that Orwell had been in Barcelona during the Moscow trials and there he had learned what the Soviet Union was like.
This is how he described republican Spain in 1937: “For some time now a reign of terror has been established: the forcible suppression of political parties, a suffocating censorship of the press, incessant espionage and mass imprisonment without trial […]. But the issue to highlight is that the people who are in jail now are not fascists, but revolutionaries [...]. And those responsible for putting them there are […] the communists.”
Like Orwell, Borkenau learned about totalitarianism in Spain: “I remained silent for seven years after my expulsion [from the party in 1929]. The Spanish Civil War gave me the reason to undertake the open struggle [against communism]. There, for the first time in my life, I saw the Soviet police in action. And the horror of this will never fade from my consciousness.”
In 1950, Koestler and Borkenau were instrumental in the formation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was probably the first congress of European intellectuals in twenty years that the Comintern did not secretly organize. Finally, a meeting of intellectuals defended Stalin's victims.
