MY UNCLE DIED IN VAIN FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300003-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: April 6, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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' Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03 :CIA-RDP90-009658000605300003-8
6 April 1986
My Uncle Died In Vain
Fighting the Good Fight
By Ronald Radosh
GREW UP with an heroic pic-
ture of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade. They were the brave
young men of the '30s, the legend
went, who went to Spain and fought
the "good fight" in the Spanish Civil
War, -defending democracy against
the burgeoning threat of fascism.
They were the flower of the Amer-
ican left, "premature anti-fascists,"
who alone sought to rouse the
world's conscience about the de-
struction of the Spanish republic.
Old legends die hard. But for me,
after sifting through the historical
record of what actually happened in
Spain 50 years ago, the old roman-
tic picture has been shattered. The
story of the Lincoln vets, rather
than being a tale of heroism and
virtue, is a story of how good people
were manipulated by the Soviet
Union for its own ends.
I began with a romantic view of
the Lincoln Brigade because my
own uncle, Irving Keith (nee
Kreichman, but like so many young
Jewish Communists he took a new
name to more "Americanize" him-
self) went. into battle near the end
of the Spanish republic's collapse.
"I'm really anxious to meet your
son," he wrote my father in one of
his letters home from Spain, "but
that will have to wait until the war
is won."
I was never to meet him. Ap-
pointed a "commissar" by the Bri-
gade, he was killed in battle during
the 1938 spring retreat. My family
honored his memory, and I grew up
filled with the lore of the Brigade.
Like the actor Richard Dreyfuss,
who spoke at one of the vets' recent
reunions, I, too, considered them
authentic American heroes.
Spain was the radical chic cause
of the 1930s. It was, as Murray
Kempton wrote, "the passion of that
small segment of my generation
which felt a personal commitment
to the revolution." The- eminent. so-
ciologist :Lewis Coser recently re-
flected in Dissent-that for his gen-
Runatd Radosh is professor of
History at the City University of
New York.and co-author of"The
Rosenberg File: A Search for the
Truth."
eration of the European left, 1936
was a 'Watershed;" a period in
which all seemed open and possible.
"The occupation of the factories by
millions of French workers in June
1936 and the outbreak of the Span-
ish Civil War ...seemed once and
for all to break the despair that had
settled on those of us who consid-
ered themselves Marxists."
Coser remembers looking on
with amazement at what he calls
"an almost instinctive reaction of
the working class," who disarmed
police and civil guards. Worker mili-
tiamen took over luxury restaurants
and opened them to the populace;
luxury hotels became headquarters
for revolutionary organizations. It
was, as George Orwell wrote in
Homage to Catalonia," "a sort of
microcosm of a classless society .. .
a crude forecast of what the open-
ing stages of socialism might be
like." It was, he confessed, a vision
that "deeply attracted me."
Rememl~ring
The Lincoln Brigade
That vision has been romanti-
cized and distorted in the years
since, particularly made to fit the
analysis and line of the Commu-
nists. It is a potent myth, that of a
generation of idealistically moti-
vated young people spontaneously
joining the fight against fascism. At
a time when the rest of the world
ignored the threat, these prema-
ture anti-fascists rose to the occa-
sion, committing .their bodies and
even their lives to the fight.
It was the one' pure cause of the
1930s: a legally elected democratic
government battling against reac-
tionary generals who wanted to in-
stall aSpanish version of fascism.
The democratic republic was alone
and embattled: the western democ-
racies stayed neutral and would not
sell it arms, while the fascist re-
gimes in Germany and Italy rushed
men .and weapons to aid General
Franco's rebellion. Defense of Spain
was the symbol for all that was good
and decent organizing against the
tides of reaction and Nazism.
For the Lincoln vets, this history
became a catechism. Only Soviet
Russia came toydemocratic Spain's
aid, the. Brigade fighters claimed,
and the Soviets proved by this ac-
tion that they were on the side of
the people. It was Russia, they con-
cluded, that gave light and hope to
the oppressed of the world. Be-
tween the Lincoln Brigade soldier
and his enemies stood his rifle, sup-
plied by Russia. The aircraft, tanks
and artillery protecting him all were
of Soviet origin. The admiration of
the volunteers for the Soviet Union
was boundless.
pain became the central met-
aphor for artists, intellectuals
and writers of the 1930s.
Hemingway immortalized the ~con-
flict in "For Whom The Bell Tolls,"
although the veterans were piqued
at his critical portrayal of French
Commissar Andre Marty. When
they issued an anthology of writings
from Spain in the 1960s, they still
could not see fit to include any ex-
cerpts from Hemingway. W.H. Au-
den immortalized the conflict in his
poem "Spain, 1937," the call to
arms being heard on the "sleepy
plains" and the "corrupt cities."
"Madrid is the heart," Auden put
it-of a world, a civilization and an
ideal. British poet Stephen Spender
edited an anthology of veterans'
writings, and Hemingway narrated
the fund-raising film by Joris Ivens,
"To Die in Madrid." Two genera-
tions later, in the 1960s, this film
enjoyed a robust run in art movie
theaters around the country.
The hagiography continues. A
documentary film, "The Good
Fight," received wide distribution
two years ago, and a new oral his-
tory of the vets, "The Premature
Anti-Fascists," further romanticizes
their story. And this week a gala
event is taking place at Lincoln
Center in New York. The veterans
of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are
celebrating their 50th Anniversary
with a script by Ring Lardner Jr,,
and a concert by The Weavers, who
will again sing the stirring songs
once heard on the battlefields of
republican Spain.
I, too, once shared that thorough-
lyromantic image. In fact, the myth
of Spain persisted for me even after
I wrote a book debunking another of
the celebrated causes of the Old
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Left, the Rosenberg case. My book
"The Rosenberg File" documented
that Julius Rosenberg had engaged
in espionage for the Soviet Union.
This conclusion enraged the Old
Left; no amount of interpretation of
factual data could convince them to
shed the version of history to which
they were wedded. But even after
this experience with Leftist mythol-
ogy, Isomehow thought the Span-
ish Civil War was a different case-
an exception to the rule.
I was again proven wrong. What I
found when I investigated wasn't
the story of a heroic generation
fighting against fascism, but a les-
son in how the idealism of a gener-
ation was used, manipulated and
ultimately betrayed in the interests
of those who had at heart a cynical
realpolitik.
The story of the Lincoln vets can-
not be taken out of the context of
communism. The blind spots re-
vealed by the Lincolns were those
of their comrades in the communist
movement. Oblivious to Stalin's
purge trials, which were contem-
poraneous with the war in Spain,
the brigade members saw Stalin
only as the world's hero-the man
whose arms were helping them de-
fend the fledgling Spanish democ-
racy.
The reality of Spanish events did
not conform to the image person-
ified in the Comintern's interpre-
tations. The soldiers went to fight
for democracy-but only a few re-
alized that their battalions were put
together for a greater purpose in
which they served only as pawns: to
fashion Spain in the manner desired
by Joseph Stalin, who needed to
create a situation in Europe that
would serve his foreign policy ends.
began by reading through my
uncle's letters, where one can
find all the themes and beliefs
that lead so many men to battle. His
letters are a mixture of moving as-
surances to his sisters and his
mother that there was no need to
worry-he would be home safely
when the war against Franco was
won. Others were long political di-
alogues-attempts to convince his
family that the communist "Popular
Front" policy was correct.
"The main political problem," he
wrote, "is that of strengthening the
unity of the working class." By that
he meant the need. to get the anar-
chists and socialist "irresponsibles"
to join with the communists in sup-
port of the moderate goal of defend-
ing the bourgeois republic. Worse
were those in the "rearguard" who
opposed communist policy and
sought to "create divisions in the
Popular Front." Clearly, he was al-
luding to those hated "Trotyskites"
who thought the fight was about
consolidating a revolution.
Ever optimistic, my uncle de-
scribed the bitter defeat suffered by
the loss of Teruel in 1937 as a vic-
tory, since the Loyalists took the
city in only six days, but lost it to
Franco after two months of bitter
fighting. "One is deeply impressed,'
he wrote, "by the heroism, deter-
mination and spirit of the people in
the face of all their difficulties and
sacrifice:' Through the years the
same has been said of these men of
the Lincoln battalion.
No one can doubt, the heroism
and bravery of men like -my uncle,
but so many decades later, one can-
not avoid noticing their total naive-
te-all good was on one side, all
evil on the other. But was Spain and
the Civil War a simple good fight on
behalf of democracy against fascist
tyranny? If Murray Kempton was
correct in his much-quoted obser-
vation that it "was a canon of the
myth of the '30s that these were all
heroes who died with their faces to
the enemy;' new evidence and anal-
ysis shows that Kempton's icono-
clasm was misplaced in debunking
"the myth of the '50s that most of
them fought for a cause be-
trayed by the Soviets." That, in
fact, is precisely what did happen.
he truth is that Stalin got
involved late in the war, via a
policy of cautious military
intervention. Soviet tanks, planes
and artillery did not reach Spain
until October and November of
1936, and they were of a limited
caliber-no match for the heavy
equipment supplied by the Germans
and Italians. Even so, the Soviets
received payment in advance, by
taking the valued gold reserves of
Spain to Russia. Fearing involve-
ment in a war with Germany and
Italy, Russia limited its aid to bol-
stering the resistance of the anti-
Franco forces until such time as
Britain and France might be in-
duced to abandon their policy of
non-intervention.
Stalin's cyncical goal was to steer
internal events in Spain to coincide
with his foreign policy objectives.
He wanted to prolong the existence
of the Spanish republic until the
western democracies joined him in
supporting the republicans. It was a
stalemate strategy; Stalin never
gave the Spaniards enough arms to
win. The ill-equipped Brigade
troops were sitting ducks-led off,
as one American commissar put it,
ac "ehwane to Yha ela~iohtar "
Alongside Stalin's militar ad-
visors came is mte ~gence and
litica operatives, w o manage to
omma e e repu is y e
quad pro quo for Soviet aid was the
push to purge and liquidate those on
the left who did not accept Stalin's
views. Spanish communists in par-
ticular executed Kremlin directives
without hesitation, although, as
Burnett Bolloten, author of ?The
Spanish Revolution," puts it, "those
directives meant antagonizing other
parties of the left and eventually
undermining the war effort and the
will to fight:'
he reign of terror inflicted on
republican Spain by Stalin's
agents was described by Gen.
Walter Krivitsky, one of the first
Soviet defectors to the United
States. Krivitsky had been head of
both Soviet military intelligence in
western Europe and the the Soviet
secret police in Spain. His revela-
tions to congressional committees
and the press after his defection led
to an international Communist cam-
paign to smear Krivitsky as an un-
trustworthy witness in league with
the Nazis.
Krivitsky explained the details of
how Stalin's agents operated in the
Spanish republic. What they brought
to Spain .was an unmitigated repres-
sion and terror-the civil war
against the Spanish left, a war within
the civil war. The regular police
corps was reorganized., Communists
secured the pivotal positions in the
newly-rebuilt police, which became a
formal part of the Soviet apparatus in
Spain. The Soviet intelligence ser-
vice, the N torts y wrote,
"had its own soec~a pnsons is um s
carried out assassinations and kid- _
nappings, filled hidden dungeons and
maTe---dying rai s. t unctione
...indepen ent y o t e oy ist
overnment.. a oviet mon
seeme to ave a grip on Lo iat _
Spain, as if it were already a Soviet
possession."
Members of the Lincoln Brigade
had to know about some of the ter-
ror. They had undoubtedly heard
about the murders carried out by the
French communist brigade leader
Andre Marty. By his own account,
Marty had some 500 of his own men
shot for desertion, or for the political
heresy of "Trotskyism." In other
words, one-tenth of all the volun-
teers killed in the civil war were shot
by Marty, and his own figure is seen
as modest by many who worked with
him. Many of the volunteers came to
call Marty "the butcher of Albacete,"
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after the training camp over which
he presided. So much had Franco
and the communists acted the same,
that one leading anarchist aptly com-
mented, "whether [Premier] Negrin
won with his communist cohorts, or
Franco won with his Italians and
Germans, the results would be the
same for us."
The Lincoln vets are right about
one thing: The western democracies
disguised their inactivity and toler-
ance of fascist aid to Franco as "non-
intervention;" leaving the Spanish
republic defenseless and making, it
easier for the Soviets to achieve
their aims. Spain became a pawn in a
chess game of the world's big pow-
ers.
he veterans should listen to
one of their own, John Gates.
Gates was the revered 23-
year-old commissar of the XV Bri-
gade 50 years ago, and he was pro-
moted to chief American commissar
after 1937. Later an editor of the
Daily Worker, Gates quit the Amer-
ican.Communist Party in 1958. Now,
years later, Gates stays aloof from
the official Lincoln veterans organ-
ization, which he considers to be too
close to the communist view of
events. The Lincoln volunteers, he
says; "fought with the best of inten-
tions, they held noble ideals, but they
fought in a system controlled and run
by the Russian Communist leader-
ship, then under the control of
Stalin:' The result of their effort,
Gates puts it, was to "insist on ad-
herence to the policy advocated by
the Spanish communists, which at ,
first helped but later hurt the ability
to wage an effective war, hindering
what support we could get in Spain."
It is an ambiguous judgment of the
role they played. Most of the Lincoln
Vets prefer to only celebrate. But
history is more attuned to shades of
grey than to black and white.
My uncle's last note was written
"as I ride in a very jerky; bouncing
box-car which seems to have square
wheels," on the way to the front af-
ter five months in a training camp.
"I'm happier," that young man wrote,
"than I've ever been:'
I have no doubt that he was and
that he died believing he was fighting
the good fight. But looking at the
weight of the historical evidence to-
day, Ican .only conclude that -his
death was. in vain. By the time he
went into battle, the Comintern had
already decided that Spain was ex-
pendable. Unity with Britain and
France was more important, and the
theatre of operations was turning to
Europe. Men were sent into a battle
that could not be won for the reason
of propaganda alone. Stalin was even
beginning to explore mending fences
with Hitler, and was soon to order
the recal]ing of the Brigades. If my
uncle had stayed on base, he would
have still been alive. He went to his
death defending a democracy that
had already been defeated, by the
inaction of the West and the cruel
realpolitik of the Soviets.
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