100 Books Like International Communism and the Spanish Civil War

For a long time, studies of the Comintern focused on the political organization itself. Brigitte Studer’s work focuses on developing a cultural history of the organization, focusing on what she calls the “Cominternians,” the various communists who worked in the apparatus. Here, she uses a variety of lenses, from Moscow as a transnational hub, to the role of gender, to the impact of the Stalinist terror on these members. By also focusing on a wide array of experiences, she showcases the hope many Cominternians had, but also the betrayal they experienced as Stalinism changed the movement in the 1930s. Partially responsible for the transnational turn in Comintern studies, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to know more about the organization. 

For over three decades, John Riddell has gradually made available the records of the key meetings of the early years of the Comintern. Focusing on the period when Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin was still alive, Riddell’s edited collections have set the standard. Of his multiple volumes, those on the Second Congress, which took place July-August 1920, are the most important. Here, the Comintern developed its conditions for communist party membership and outlined key platforms on politics, anti-imperialism, trade unionism, and centralization. As the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War by this point, leftists, radicals, and colonial leaders alike believed the Bolsheviks genuinely offered an alternate way forward from the existing world order. The hope in the movement, regardless of its future, was on display and this collection highlights these possibilities.

C.L.R. James wrote the first histories of the Comintern in English, first published in 1937. He wrote it also during a particularly chaotic period of the interwar period. Italy invaded Abyssinia, Republicans (supported by communists) fought the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler continued to consolidate his power, and the Soviet Union was in the midst of the Great Terror. Taking a critical tone, informed by his support for Trotskyism, and his belief that Stalinism had led to a series of missed opportunities for the revolutionary moment, James’s book remains an important book on the Comintern. On one hand, it is a valuable primary source, giving a glimpse of the revolutionary socialist, and critical, response to the Comintern in a particularly chaotic moment. On the other hand, it offers a unique perspective on the history of the Comintern that still resonates on the left today. Hogsbjerg’s edition, which includes… show more.

Why did some Black Americans turn to the communist movement during the interwar period? This is one of the key questions Makalani seeks to answer in his book. He understands the limits of the movement, particularly its doctrinaire approach and the left’s limited engagement with race heading into the 1920s. He focuses on how Black Americans played a role in turning communism’s attention to racial issues while reconsidering certain theories of communism within their own radical networks. Makalani also emphasizes how many Black sojourners accepted communist tactics while maintaining their hesitancy towards the broader movement. Makalani provides a critical look at the Comintern and its efforts, while stressing the development of a unique Black radical movement. 

In 1936 an attempt by a coalition of reactionary army officers to overthrow the Spanish government outraged left-wingers around the world. By the start of the next year the International Brigades had been formed under the watchful eye of the Soviet Union to help the beleaguered Republic. At least 35,000 men from countries as diverse as Britain, China, Sweden, and Cuba fought and died on Spanish battlefields for a lost cause. Giles Tremlett’s expansive narrative history brings them vividly to life, with both their heroism and flaws, and shows why their struggle is still remembered today.

It is a memoir about a father and a father-daughter relationship written by a daughter. But it is also a story about how history written with capital H can affect family relationships, about surprising ways children interpret their parents while searching for space for themselves in their parent’s lives. Jane Lazarre seems to live in the shadow of her extraordinary father, who left Eastern Europe in 1902 for the USA and dedicated his life to fighting for economic equality and racial justice.

He believed in a more just world, but he also struggled with depression and cracking cohesion of the communist movement that he was a member of. The book is as much about him as about his daughter’s attempts to live up to some of his dreams: it’s about love, search for answers, and reconciliation.

The Time of the Doves is one of my favorite books of all time for its intimacy, immediacy, and unusual descriptive power. Natalia, a young woman living in Barcelona around the time of the Spanish Civil war, paints for the reader a vivid and seamless picture of her life from the inside out—her loves and losses, survival, the confusion of a world broken by chaos and violence and put back together again by perseverance and tenderness. A short but unforgettable read that I return to again and again.

Both Hemingway and Orwell show up in this compelling, well-written, and sweeping account of the war. Hochschild is a brilliant writer who was aspired to take up this topic by Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Like he did in King Leopold’s Gold, Hochschild focuses his attention on a limited number of people making it easier to follow the story. The co-founder of Mother Jones, he brings to the book a lively magazine-style of narration. If Thomas’s work is too much, this is the one history worth reading. 

If the First World War was the brooding background to 1930s Britain, the Spanish Civil War was the tragic conflict at its centre. Thousands of British volunteers went to Spain to fight, overwhelmingly on the Republican side. Meanwhile, the British government’s dogged adherence to a non-intervention agreement was slowly starving the Republicans of military aid.

I rate Preston’s account of the war because he shows how the brutal civil conflict became a proxy battleground for international forces of right and left while Britain clung to non-intervention. London was in a genuine bind over Spain but ended up adopting a position that paved the way for the appeasement of Hitler, a policy many Britons saw as profoundly dishonest.

As the Guardian correspondent in Madrid, Giles Tremlett’s book is a no-holds-barred deep investigation into the Spanish psyche and recent history and its uncomfortable relationship to the trauma of the Spanish Civil War. It is brave, provocative, deeply-researched but above all immensely readable.