No Barrier Can Contain It

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Mae Lambe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Cuban Government ◽  
The Face ◽  
General Strike ◽  
At Home

Vividly recasting Cuba’s politics in the 1930s as transnational, Ariel Mae Lambe has produced an unprecendented reimagining of Cuban activism during an era previously regarded as a lengthy, defeated lull. In this period, many Cuban activists began to look at their fight against strongman rule and neocolonial control at home as part of the international antifascism movement that exploded with the Spanish Civil War. Frustrated by multiple domestic setbacks, including Colonel Fulgencio Batista’s violent crushing of a massive general strike, activists found strength in the face of repression by refusing to view their political goals as confined to the island. As individuals and in groups, Cubans from diverse backgrounds and political stances self-identified as antifascists and moved, both physically and symbolically, across borders and oceans, cultivating networks and building solidarity for a New Spain and a New Cuba. They believed that it was through these ostensibly foreign fights that they would achieve economic and social progress for their nation. Indeed, Cuban antifascism was such a strong movement, Lambe argues, that it helps to explain the surprisingly progressive turn that Batista and the Cuban government took at the end of the decade, including the establishment of a new constitution and presidential elections.

scholarly journals Unknown Siberian Poems by Vasily Yan

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-227
Author(s):  
I. V. Prosvetov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Face ◽  
Poetic Style ◽  
At Home

The first publication of poems by the Soviet writer-historian, 1st degree Stalin Prize laureate Vasily Yan (Yanchevetsky), composed in 1920–1923, when he lived and worked in Siberia. Source – handwritten miscellany “Poems of Wanderings”, recently discovered in the Yanchevetskys’ family archive. The publication is accompanied by detailed biographical comments. In the civil war, V. Yanchevetsky took part on the side of the whites as one of the main propagandists of the Kolchak army – the head of the Informative Department of the Special Chancellery of the Supreme Commander’s Staff, editor of the front newspaper “Vperyod”. After the collapse of the white movement, V. Yanchevetsky had to hide his past, changing occupations and places of residence (Achinsk, Uyuk, Minusinsk). The Siberian po- etic cycle, created at this time, makes it possible to understand not only the mood of the author in the last years of the turning point in Russian history, but also literary searches, and the atmosphere of the time in general. The main themes are homeland, revolution, freedom, atheism, building a new life, preserving the personality in the face of political upheavals. Obviously, the influence on the poetic style of the author of such trends as symbolism and futurism, which he was interested in. In Omsk V. Yanchevetsky closely communicated with the writer, poet and avant-garde artist Anton Sorokin, attended his literary evenings at home. Probably, as a result, some of the Siberian poems were written in free verse, to which V. Yanchevetsky had never used before.

scholarly journals Studies on Anticlericalism in Contemporary Spain

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Pérez Ledesma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Spain

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

scholarly journals Prison Letters: Spain Confronts Its Past

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB80-LWFB87
Author(s):  
Martyn Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Face

In post-Franco Spain, the families of the regime’s victims, as well as other republican supporters, have not only struggled to recover the bodies of victims of the repression, but also have tried to recover a lost historical memory after years of imposed silence. Véronica Sierra Blas’s new study of Franco’s prisoners (there were approximately 280,000 of them) aims to give recognition and some human dignity to their obscure fate. This article offers a critical discussion of her study of a corpus of about 1500 letters written by prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist repression. They include petitions to the authorities, messages secretly smuggled out of jail, and the ‘chapel letters’ written by condemned prisoners on the eve of their execution. Many of the latter were designed to be made public for propaganda purposes. This article suggests that as those condemned to execution reviewed their lives, their final farewells constituted a form of life writing in the face of certain death.

From Civil Conflict to Crusade: Mobilisation and National Identity in the Spanish Civil War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
International Context ◽  
Post War ◽  
At Home

Abstract For decades after its conclusion, the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was officially described by the newly imposed dictatorship as a Crusade. However, the appropriation of a mythologised medieval past was not just the product of post-war legitimisation. This article explores how, using “crusade” as a placeholder for Reconquista, the rebel army and its supporters responded to three distinct developments: a reaction to Republican anticlericalism; the imposition of a national identity in which Catholicism was understood as an essential element of Spanishness and the basis for its greatness; and a very practical need for popular mobilisation both at home and abroad. However, as this study demonstrates, the adoption of a crusading rhetoric and medieval mythology was a transnational development, in which distinct anti-Bolshevik campaigns, with origins in Rome and Spain, fed off each other and intersected, sometimes in intricate and hidden ways, within the increasingly polarised international context of the 1930s.

Scots and the Spanish Civil War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Raeburn
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
The Many ◽  
Scottish Politics ◽  
At Home

Few causes before or since have inspired such passion, determination and sacrifice than the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). This book explores the many ways in which Scots responded to the war in Spain, covering the activists and humanitarians who raised funds and awareness at home, as well as the hundreds of Scots who journeyed to Spain to fight as part of the International Brigades that fought for the Republican cause. Their stories reflect much larger narratives of the rise of European fascism, the networks and cultures of international communism and the wider modern phenomenon of transnational foreign war volunteering. Scots and the Spanish Civil War is a groundbreaking study of Scottish involvement in one of the 20th century’s most famous and divisive conflicts, drawing on newly-declassified government documents and international archives in Spain and beyond. As well as shedding new light on Scottish politics in the 1930s, it is argued that this case study – part of the largest wave of foreign war volunteers in the 20th century – can help us understand other such mobilisations, past and present.

Factionalism, Solidarity, Unity

2019 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
Ariel Mae Lambe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
At Home

Chapter 6 considers the antifascist perspectives and goals of a number of leftist individuals and groups on the island. Tension and overlap and conflict and collaboration between groups characterized the antifascism of the Cuban Left. The factionalism of the era is readily apparent, but so, too, is significant unity and solidarity building. Unity and solidarity—even if limited and imperfect—are notable not only I the various leftist internationalist groups well known to have fought among themselves but also between those ideological cohorts and Cuban domestic political actors and groups not affiliated with internationalist ideologies. Ultimately, to demonstrate that there was a continuity in the fight for a New Cuba in Cuban antifascism, chapter 6 illustrates the ways in which the defense of the Spanish Republic on the island involved the same people, groups, relationships, networks, ideas, goals, rhetoric, and tactics as did the Cuban struggle. The Spanish Civil War caused each group to reckon with its own existence, role, values, and aims. The conflict reenergized these groups and provided the impetus for unity, which was vital for the continuation of the struggle at home and abroad.

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