A newly arrived T-26 from the Soviet Union.

Agreed by Stalin in mid-September, the war materiel arrived on the Madrid front just in time to be deployed in the November fighting. Up until this moment the Soviet Union had remained aloof. Moscow ignored an initial plea for aid made by the Republican government back in July – once Madrid realized that France was about to renege. Even so, the plea was made more in desperation than with any real anticipation of success. There were no proper diplomatic channels through which the request for aid could have been pursued. Although the Republic had formally recognized the Soviet Union in June 1933, the first Spanish government ever to do so, there had still been no exchange of diplomatic representatives when the military rose in July 1936.

When the coup happened, the Soviet Union had rapidly backed the British- and French-inspired policy of Non-Intervention. Given the enormous economic, social, and political upheaval occurring inside the Soviet Union, Stalin was as concerned as policy-makers in Britain to keep the international scene in equilibrium. Moreover, since his greatest fear was of an expansionist Nazi Germany, nor had he any desire to alienate Britain by supporting the Spanish Republic. Quite the contrary, by 1936 the Soviet leadership was actively seeking a mutual defence alliance with both Britain and France, a policy Stalin termed ‘collective security’. He was convinced that the imperial powers would soon have to understand that the greatest and most urgent threat to their interests lay not in Russian communism but in the territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany. For a time too the Soviet leadership also thought that Non-Intervention, if it could be made to work, would offer the Republic its best chance. Stalin knew that, if the war in Spain escalated, then, in the long term, it would be very difficult for the Republic to compete, even if it could procure foreign armaments, since it was facing rebel forces backed by direct state aid from both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the most sophisticated military-industrial complex of its day.

However, it rapidly became clear that Non-Intervention was not working, and Stalin realized that unless something was done, the Republic was going to collapse under the onslaught. If this happened, then Nazi firepower would be freed up for aggression eastwards – against vulnerable Soviet frontiers. In order to avoid this, Stalin decided to risk British displeasure by dispatching some military assistance. But in an attempt to protect the cherished goal of a defensive alliance with Britain and France, Soviet military assistance to the Republic, unlike its humanitarian equivalent, was never openly acknowledged. The silence of the Soviet press on this matter contrasted with those of Germany and Italy; the Italian press in particular was full of news of ‘virile’ fascist action in Spain.

Soviet aid saved the Spanish Republic from almost certain military defeat in November 1936. Its tanks and drivers rendered valuable service, as did the small cohort of military and technical advisors, but most important were the Soviet Union’s planes and trained pilots, who gave the Republic superiority in the air during the battle for Madrid which thundered on throughout the winter of 1936.

Stalin was neither willing nor able to send precious material from Soviet factories in a quantity that could have allowed the Spanish Republic to compete on equal terms on the battlefield once Italy and German stepped up their support for Franco at the end of 1936. In 1937 Soviet industrial production was still in a turmoil of reorganization, made worse by the purges, and throughout the war in Spain real Soviet production levels remained anything up to 50% below the published ones. Given this situation, it is surprising that Stalin sent even as much domestically produced materiel to the Republic as he did. This was high quality – most crucially the planes and tanks – and, as we have seen, it was vital to Republican survival, especially at the start. But much of the ‘Soviet aid’ that kept the Republic ticking over did not originate in Soviet factories at all, rather it was obtained from elsewhere by the Soviet Union acting as a broker.

Apart from the materiel that came direct from the Soviet Union, most of the armaments procured by the Republic through intermediaries came from Eastern Europe and, in practice, mainly from Poland. At first sight this is surprising, since not only was the military dictatorship there a signatory to the Non-Intervention agreement, it was also politically sympathetic to Franco. But selling to the Republic was too lucrative an opportunity to forgo – all the more especially as this allowed Poland to offload obsolete and defective stock, thereby raising revenue for its own crisis-ridden treasury and re-armament programme.

By mid-1938, the Republic’s gold reserves were perilously close to being exhausted. Negrín had always been clear that the war would be over the day its last gold-peseta was spent. Certainly, he was right that the Republic could not access major sources of credit as Franco could. But the Republic was able to eke out its defence beyond the summer of 1938 courtesy of $60 million credit provided by the Soviet Union. Since the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in early July, Spain had in fact been displaced in Soviet foreign policy considerations. Soviet technical advisors were recalled during the summer. [1] Stalin also agreed to the withdrawal of the International Brigades. Mainly staffed by Spaniards anyway by 1938, the presence of foreign volunteers in Republican Spain was now of little more than symbolic importance. Stalin no longer believed the Republic could win in the face of Francoist blockade and British obduracy – something that had also rendered impossible his own preference for an agreement of collective security with Britain and France against an expansionist Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the longer the Republic went on resisting, the longer it absorbed German energies, and the better that was for Soviet defences. So, although whatever the Republic used of the credit would almost certainly be irrecuperable, it was still considered money well spent.

 [1] Assistance from Soviet technical advisors, these were a scarce resource – between 600 and 800 people at any one time across the whole of the Republican zone (some 3,000 Soviet personnel serving in Spain during the whole war). The valuable qualitative assistance of these military engineers, technicians, strategists, and experts in irregular warfare.

[2]The most recent study of how the Republic managed to arm itself is Gerald Howson’s Arms for Spain (London: John Murray, 1998). Scholarly disagreements are still too numerous for us to speak of a consensus on why the Republic lost the Civil War. But given the empirical evidence, few specialists would seek to argue that the Republic was on an equal footing with the Francoist camp in terms of quantity or quality of military aid received. For the most up-to-date calculations of Soviet aid, see G. Howson, Arms for Spain, Appendix 3, pp. 278–303, and especially the summary of material on pp. 302–3.