Page View
Bunk, Brian D., 1968-; Pack, Sasha D.; Scott, Carl-Gustaf (ed.) / Nation and conflict in modern Spain: essays in honor of Stanley G. Payne
(2008)
Esenwein. George Richard
The Cold War and the Spanish Civil War: the impact of politics on historiography, pp. 175-189 ff.
Page 183
The Cold War and the Spanish Civil War This does not mean, however, that we should accept the harsh and one-sided verdict of his critics, who implore the naYve reader to avoid reading his "Cold War" version of Civil War eve nts. 1 Earlier we said that the revisionists have taken Bolloten to task for constructing an explanation of the war that relies on a selective and highly tendentious body of evidence.'2 Before assessing the validity of this claim, it is important to bear in mind the obstacles that Bolloten as well as other Civil War scholars have had to labor under for the past sixty years. Not least of the problems they faced was in gaining access to documentary sources. After the war, many of the personal and official records of Republican individuals and groups that were smuggled out of Spain became widely dispersed in private and public collections stretching from Europe to the Americas. It would take the better part of fifty years for many of these records to be returned to Spain. In the meantime, few of these archival collections were sufficiently organized to be of much use to a scholar. Nor were many of them easily locatable let alone accessible to researchers. Some, like the ones that ended up in the Soviet Union, have only recently been opened to researchers. Even more problematic for the his- torian both inside and outside of Spain was the fact that, for a period of nearly forty years, the Franco regime enforced a strict code of censorship over Civil War studies, effectively preventing any serious scholar from consulting the massive collections of Civil War materials housed in state-run archives, like the one in Salamanca. The result was that, anyone who wanted to undertake a comprehensive study of the Civil War during the dictatorship faced a Herculean task. As we have seen, Burnett Bolloten was one of the few individuals who rose to this chal- lenge.3 It should be added here that his quest to gather documents relating to the war did not end when he sold the bulk of his personal collection of documents and printed materials to the Hoover Institution. Over the next thirty-five years or so, he continued to enrich the original core of Civil War materials by obtaining microfilms, microfiche, and Xerox repro- ductions of archives from various institutions across the globe. He eventually deposited at Hoover all the materials he had obtained through his own personal efforts and at his own expense at various archives, including, the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, the British Museum, the Civil War archives in Salamanca, the Fundaci6n de Pablo Iglesias, and other organizations that housed special collections on the Civil War. Thus, Bolloten searched far and wide for documentary sources on the Civil War and it was his determination to build a comprehensive collection on the subject that made it possible for him and other scholars to conduct serious research on the Civil War long before it could be done inside of Spain itself. What this has to say about Bolloten's writings on the Civil War should be self-evident. Above all, it suggests that he was not interested in producing a history of the war and revolu- tion that was based on a select group of documents. A number of his critics, however, do not acknowledge the fact that his explanation of the war and revolution was grounded on such a 183
Copyright 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin