10. Soviet Hardware Supplied to the Republic I
Stalin and the Spanish Civil War: Chapter 10 2/23/04 1:48 PM Email this citation Introduction 10. Soviet Hardware Supplied to the Republic I. Diplomacy 1 1. Pre-July 1936 Ascertaining the day of arrival of the first Soviet weapons in Spain has proved, for most 2. Civil War 3. To Moscow historians of the civil war, a slippery task. The problem is due to two separate factors. On II. Soviet Aid the one hand, pro-Franco propagandists, in part to justify the rebellion itself, long held that 4. Solidarity Russian weapons were present in Spain, in large amounts, from a very early date— 5. Children according to some accounts, before July 18. 1 By the late 1950s, most of these claims had III. Cultural Policy been largely dismissed by Western researchers, 2 though until quite recently, historians 6. Pre-War would still occasionally refer to Soviet military aid to the Republic as dating from July 1936. 7. Agit-prop 8. Home Front 3 It is significant that, in his memoir of the war, the American ambassador to Madrid sought IV. Military Aid to refute both the erroneous Franquista propaganda claims of pre-war Soviet shipments as 9. Operation X well as the gross exaggerations of the quantity of Russian hardware deployed in Spain: 10. Hardware 11. Spanish Gold Up until that time [October 1936] I invariably asked war correspondents from the V. Soviet Advisors 12. Command front about foreign war material, and, without exception, they all said they had 13. Activities seen many Italian and German planes, tanks, guns, and soldiers, but they had 14.
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