READING THE RUNES New Perspectives on The Spanish Civil War ...

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on anarchists in fiction128throughout Spain and internationally. Balius was a child of themiddle class and was pursuing medical studies when he wasstruck by poliomyelitis. Balius, the radical anarchist figure, andhis friend the POUM military commander Josep Rovira, two ofthe most remarkable and best-remembered among theirpeople, if secondary and least-studied figures in the civil war,had begun their political lives in Estat Català, the mainnationalist cadre fighting for Catalan independence. Like manyearly 20 th century nationalist movements, Estat Català hasbecome firmly respectable in Catalan public memory. Baliusformulated the exceptional proposition that the proletariat andthe bourgeoisie formed separate nations in every country. Butthe movement drifted to the right during the 1930s, wasexcluded from the regional government of the Generalitat afterthe events of 1936, and was considered an equal enemy of theanarchists, POUM, and Communists. Its leaders, labeled asfascists, fled to France. Balius and Rovira evolved toward theWorkers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC), a predecessor of thePOUM led by Maurín, although Balius ended up firmlyaffiliated with the CNT-FAI.A final, new and important accession to the bibliography ofthe Spanish civil war is a collection of letters by an AmericanTrotskyist woman active in the POUM, Lois Cusick Orr (1917-80s), published with supplementary materials by her husbandCharles Orr and edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn, a historianemployed at Warwick University. 32 Lois Orr, as a strict Marxist,was hostile to Catalan nationalism; even offensively so, with aparticularly provincial American manner. She worked in theEnglish-language press and radio department of the POUM.On September 27-30, 1936, she wrote a letter to her family inthe U.S., in which she noted that while all mail leaving theSpanish Republic was supposed to be censored, POUMcorrespondence abroad avoided the censor because the partysent a twice-weekly automobile to France to use the postalservice there. In a sentence profoundly anticipatory of thetotalitarian future of Communism and its collapse, whiledeeply affecting in the sentiments it evokes, Lois Cusick Orrwrote, “POUM does not believe in censorship”. 33Notes1. 0See Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, andGrigory Sevostianov:Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War,<strong>New</strong> Haven 2001; España Traicionada, Madrid 2002.2. 0See George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, London 1938,
<strong>New</strong> <strong>Perspectives</strong> On The Spanish Civil Warreprinted and translated in many editions; Franz Borkenau:The Spanish Cockpit, London 1937; Gerald Brenan: TheSpanish Labyrinth, Cambridge, UK 1943.3. 0See, for example, Bertrand M. Patenaude: Stalin’s Nemesis,London 2009.4. 0Victor Serge: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, London 1963, p.216. Stepanov, bornStoyan Mineff (1891-1959) and also knownas Stefanov, was assigned the revolutionary alias “Moreno”(“dark”) while active as leading Comintern representative inSpain. See the not-always-reliable work of Branko Lazitchand Milorad M. Drachkovitch: Biographical Dictionary of theComintern, Stanford 1986 (second edition.)5. 0Víctor Alba and Stephen Schwartz: Spanish Marxism vs. SovietCommunism: A History of the P.O.U.M., <strong>New</strong> Brunswick, NJ,USA 1988.6. 0Víctor Alba, ed.:La Nueva Era (The <strong>New</strong> Era), Madrid 1977;La Revolución espanola en la practica) The SpanishRevolution in Practice), Madrid 1978.7. 0Anonymous: “Els papers de Salamanca són ja a Barcelona,segons el Ministeri de Cultura,” (“The Salamanca Papers arenow in Barcelona, according to the Culture Ministry,”Europa Press [agency], Madrid, January 31, 2006.8. 0Joaquím Maurín Juliá (1896-1973), a former CI official, was thecofounder of the POUM with Nin. See CEHI printedcatalogue: História del POUM, Documents per el seu estudi(History of the POUM, Documents for its study) Barcelona,19859. 0It should be noted that in both the main POUM trial andthe Rovira trial the Spanish Republican judiciary found thedefendants innocent of “high treason and espionage,” butguilty of involvement in the “May events,” resulting in minorpenalties. Notwithstanding the argument of certainhistorians that the Spanish Republic had been completelytaken over by the Russians, significant parts of the stateremained independent of their control. The trivial sentencesimposed on the POUM leaders illustrate this fact; in Russiaor a completely Russian-dominated state, they would havebeen executed.10. Víctor Alba, Marisa Ardevol, et al., eds.: El Proceso del POUM:Documentos Judiciales y Policiales (The POUM Trial:Judicial and Police Documents), Barcelona 1989, p. 75.11. Víctor Alba, Marisa Ardevol, et al., eds.: El Proceso del POUM,op. cit.129
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