Books in Brief

Heroic Victims: Stalin’s Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War, by Herbert Romerstein (Council for the Defense of Freedom, 127 pp., $7.95)

THE NAZI and Fascist intervention in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 is well documented but there was a gap on the Communist side. That gap has now been filled by Herbert Romerstein. One of the West’s leading specialists on Communism, Mr. Romerstein has been studying the archives of the Soviet-organized International Brigades. The outcome is a moving, at times harrowing, account of the young recruits: mostly idealistic, mostly members of the CPUSA, who thought they were enrolling for seven months but found later that they were in the war for the duration, on penalty of imprisonment or even execution. Untrained, ill-armed, and poorly led, 1,800 of the 3,000 young Americans who served in the Abraham Lincoln or the George Washington Battalion lost their lives. Their commitment turned to bewilderment with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Stalin had ordered them to turn their wrath on the democracies, not on the Nazis and Fascists—until Hitler’s legions invaded the USSR. It then became PC to support the Western war effort.

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Heroic Victims: Stalin’s Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War, by Herbert Romerstein (Council for the Defense of Freedom, 127 pp., $7.95)

THE NAZI and Fascist intervention in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 is well documented but there was a gap on the Communist side. That gap has now been filled by Herbert Romerstein. One of the West’s leading specialists on Communism, Mr. Romerstein has been studying the archives of the Soviet-organized International Brigades. The outcome is a moving, at times harrowing, account of the young recruits: mostly idealistic, mostly members of the CPUSA, who thought they were enrolling for seven months but found later that they were in the war for the duration, on penalty of imprisonment or even execution. Untrained, ill-armed, and poorly led, 1,800 of the 3,000 young Americans who served in the Abraham Lincoln or the George Washington Battalion lost their lives. Their commitment turned to bewilderment with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Stalin had ordered them to turn their wrath on the democracies, not on the Nazis and Fascists—until Hitler’s legions invaded the USSR. It then became PC to support the Western war effort.