In 1978, Professor Radosh began conducting research into FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A former participant in campus radicalism during the 1960s, he recalls in his memoirs that many otherwise Left-Wing professors opposed any effort to politicize the universities, arguing in favor of keeping them neutral as places of learning and inquiry.Īlthough he has admitted to having had doubts about aspects of the movement for a long time, his decision to break with the left was sparked by his research into Rosenberg case. During the Khurshchev thaw, he broke with the Soviet-backed Party of his parents' generation and became a founding father of the New Left.
A self-described Red Diaper Baby, he attended the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin High School.ĭuring the 1950s, Radosh attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he engaged in jam sessions with a young Bob Dylan. His parents, Reuben and Ida Radosh, were Jewish immigrants from the former Russian Empire and lifelong members of the Communist Party USA. The documents also shed light on many other disputed episodes of the war: the timing of the Republican request for assistance from the Soviet Union the rise and fall of the International Brigades the internal workings of the Comintern and its influence on Spain and much more.Īuthoritative and startling in the new information it offers, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in Soviet foreign policy or the Spanish Civil War.Radosh was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1937.
Documents in the book reveal that the Soviet Union not only swindled the Spanish Republic out of millions of dollars through arms deals but also sought to take over and run the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession, thereby effectively destroying the foundations of authentic Spanish antifascism. Based on previously unavailable Moscow archives, it provides the first full documentation of that country’s duplicitous and self-serving activities. This book presents a very different view of the role of the Soviet Union in this war. Although the Republic was eventually defeated, some observers believed that the effort to defend it was a selfless undertaking of the international Communist movement and the Soviet Union-a noble crusade against Hitler, Mussolini, and their Spanish puppet Franco.
Thousands of brave young men from all over the Western world, most of them organized by their local Communist parties, rushed to Spain to support the democratic Republic against right-wing forces led by rebellious generals in the Spanish officer corps. The Spanish Civil War has long been the stuff of legend.
0 kommentar(er)
