book reviews 85
Vjeran Pavlaković The Battle for Spain is ours: Croatia and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Zagreb, Kroatien: Srednja Europa, 2014) isbn 978-953-7963-18-7.
V. Pavlaković (b. 1974, Zagreb), after defending his PhD Naši Španci: Croatian Communists, Fascists and the Spanish Civil War in 2005 at the University of Washington (Seattle), moved back to Croatia and shifted his research focus to memory politics about the Second World War in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. He is now Head of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka. Still fascinated by the Spanish Civil War, he came across many new sources and works of young scholars, which encouraged him to go deeper into his first topic of research. Using an impressive amount of sources unpublished in Eng- lish (especially Yugoslav newspapers, police reports, personal files and mem- oirs of volunteers on the Spanish Republican side), he contributes successfully to the de-mystification of certain episodes of Croatian and Yugoslav history before, during and after the sww, discussing communist interpretation pre- vailing between 1945 and the 1980s, without minimizing the heroism of those who believed in the struggle against fascism or engaging in the kind of anti- communist revisionism prevalent in Croatian historiography since the 1990s. The central issue of this work is how the Spanish Civil War was portrayed in Croatia, how it was perceived by political parties, cultural and religious institu- tions, intellectuals on both the right and the left, and how it contributed to the polarization of the Croatian national movement, with the ideological legitima- tion of the extreme right tied to Rome and Berlin and the extreme left close to Moscow. This book is therefore within the field of the studies about the impact of the Spanish Civil War in Great Britain (K.W. Watkins 1963), France (D.W. Pike 1968), United States (F. Jay Taylor 1971), Ireland (F. McGarry 1999), Poland (J. Marek Chodakiewicz 2003) and Palestine (R. Raanan 2008). The main contribution of this book is the exhaustive analysis of the percep- tions of the Spanish Civil War by the political and cultural organizations in Croatia between 1936 and 1939. On one hand, those who wanted to preserve the political system feigned to ignore the Spanish conflict. The ruling party in Belgrade (Yugoslav Radical Union, jrz) headed by Prime Minister Milan Stojadinović, being more and more in line with Germany both politically and economically, adopted a strict policy of “neutrality”, ruthlessly repressing any support to the Spanish Republic (chapter 1). The most important party in Croatia (Croatian Peasant Party, hss) headed by Vladko Maček, proponent of a democratic solution to the Croatian national question, refused any alli- ance with the communists and finally opted for a political compromise with
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18763332-04101009
Belgrade; the Independent Democratic Party (sds), even if this Party support- ed the Popular front in Spain, remained loyal to his coalition partner Maček (chapter 2). On the other hand, the forces who wished to radically change the politi- cal order in Yugoslavia used the Spanish Civil War to legitimize their ideol- ogy and political agenda. The Croatian right wing, very willing to create an independent Croatian state, supported Franco verbally more than physically; the most radical movement, Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša (insurgent), albeit remain- ing marginal until 1941, influenced more and more the clerical part of the Catholic church (including the Archbishop of Zagreb Alojzije Stepinac) et cultural organizations such as Matica Hrvatska, with an antidemocratic, an- ticommunist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (chapter 3). The Croatian left wing, recommending the democratization of the regime, supported the Spanish republic; the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (kpj) headed by Milan Gorkić and then Josip Broz Tito, launched a big campaign for recruiting volunteers to fight in Spain, but the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia (spj) didn’t call to join the International Brigades and refused a Popular front with communists in Croatia (chapter 4). Finally, two marginal political forces, skillfully mobilizing historical myths (right wing drawing a parallel between Siget the fortress besieged by the Ot- toman army in 1566 and the Alcazar of Toledo by the Republicans in 1936; the kpj naming one company of the Dimitrov battalion after Matija Gubec, a Croatian insurgent against the feudal lords in 1573, chapter 5), successfully used the Spanish Civil War to become more influent in Croatia before the be- ginning of the sww in 1941, to the detriment of the other parties, especially the hss (chapters 6 and 7). When the Axis forces attacked and broke up Yu- goslavia in April 1941, the Ustaše took power in Zagreb and built up an au- thoritarian, anticommunist and racist regime, while the kpj led the People’s Liberation Struggle (nob), in which the Spanish veterans played a crucial role (Chapter 8). In addition to some mistakes (confusion between the first battle of Teruel in December 1936 in which some Croatian volunteers actually died and the sec- ond one the year after pp. 13–15) and many repetitions (especially in chapter 3), the main weakness of this work is the use of obsolete statistics about Yugoslav volunteers in Republican Spain. V. Pavlaković uses the figures of the sympo- sium organized in Zagreb in 1986, based on the list made by the Association of Yugoslav veterans in 1971. But anyway, this book, with maps, unpublished illustrations, extensive bib- liography and rather comprehensive index, will be very useful for everyone
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