Ind the Legend

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Thered by Stalinist murder squad in Barcelona 1937 Pravda, Stalin's personal organ, declared: "As for Trotskyists and the Anarcho Syndicalists has lith the same energy with which it was conducter moved too slowly. They were supplemented equipped with private prisons and torture cham.

The worthies recruited for this work beggar he Fascist CEDA, Cuban gangsters, brotheladists. Spawned by the petty-bourgeois comparty, nurtured by its counter-revolutionary jands of the Spanish GPU exhibited towards the r's bloodhounds, for like them, they were tion."

only in the war but by Stalinist purges which owed the installation of lalecio Prieto as Prime nister in 1937 - someng which will presumy be the subject of one he next two episodes. The film archive and the erviews are the two basic ual resources of this les. They are supplented by well chosen still itos and -graphics, inly of the geographical gress of the war: The er I personally found a le disappointing and not ¿lear as might be hoped. dore disappointing, if very central, was the ious lapse in the first rode when the assassinn of the rightist leader Calvo Sotelo was fictionally reconstructed in film. Such an unnecessary technique was oddly out of character with the style of the rest of the series.

In documentary the aural is as important as the visual. In this series the aural resources are first, the interviews which start in the original language and are then superimposed by good translations well spoken by appropriate voices la good second best to sub-titles); second, the rather pointless, and to me annoying soundtrack of explosions with which the war films are "enhanced"'; third, the music which seems to me totally appropriate and helpful to appreciating the film (it is written by Patrick Gowers and played by the Gabrieli String Quartet and the guitarist John Williams).

Finally, and most important, the commentary -pleasantly spoken by Frank Finlay and written by Neal Acherson, author of the widely read book, The Polish August.

There is no way in which such a commentary could provide a full account, let alone analysis of such complex events as the civil war in Spain.

The first episode, for instance, tried to condense five of the fullest political years in any country in modern times into less than one hour.

One can only reasonably demand that a commentary with these constraints tells no lies and does not, through inevitable oversimplitication, distort • LOO much.

Clearly

On these criteria, I personally found it hard to criticise the commentary in the first two episodes. The main political figures and events were clearly located and the events were treated not as the clash of personalities but of class forces and ideologies.

This success only to the skills of Neal Acherson but to the quality of the three historical advisors.

These are Hugh Thomas, a Thatcherite British historian, whose mammoth and detailed book on the Spanish Civil War is the best factual account of the war available in English, and whose analytical judgements are much closer to those of Marxists than you might expect; Javier Tussel, a Spanish historian who has written the standard work on the elections of February 1936 in which the Popular Front came to power, and who was a leading intellectual of the Centre Democratic Union - the right wing party which lost power in the recent Spanish election; and the socialist writer Ronald • Fraser whose book 'The Blood of Spain' is the powerful and moving literary model of the interviews of the TV series.

Credit

All in all, so far the director of the 'Spanish Civil War' , John Blake, deserves credit for a series of films which seems unlikely to achieve the near impossible task in his medium of definitively analysing the politics of Spain in the 1930s but in proving thas events, so imporars i the "Isolated engagements before paving stone barricades led to a general engagement in the afternoon, And here political weapons more than made up for the superior armament of the fascists.

Heroic workers stepped forward from the lines to call upon the soldiers to learn why they were shooting down their fellow toilers. They fell under rifle and machinegun fire, but others took their place. Here and there a soldier began shooting widé. Soon bolder ones turned on their officers. Some nameless military genius - perhaps he died then -seized the moment and the mass of workers abandoned their prone position and surged forward. The first barracks were taken.(...) With arms from the arsenals, the workers cleaned up Barcelona. Within a few days, all Catalonia was in their hands.

The Asturian miners, fighters of the Commune of October 1934, outfitted a column of 5,000 dynamiters for a march on Madrid. It arrived there on the 20th, just after the barracks had been taken, and took up guard duty in the streets."

struggle for socialism, yet so often devalued into mere symbols, really did happen.

Perhaps some SO readers will have the time to combine the watching of this splendid series with reading some of the more significant historical books on the subject available in English such as Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, "The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain', ', George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia'; Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain; Hugh Thomas, "The Spanish Civil War': Leon Trotsky. "The Spanish Revolution Ronald Fraser. The Blood of Spat:

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Organiser no: 116, 20 January 1982, page 1Q • QUESTION Trade Undoh! "SOLIDARIA South Affik