Unsurprisingly, one of the important, controversial, much speculated and least known aspects of the Spanish Civil War is the role of Soviet intelligence services. Every scholar who tries to tackle this problem will soon find out how notoriously hard it is to ensure accuracy, truth and objectivity in writing about secret intelligence and counterintelligence. There the whole purpose of governments is not to document but to hide the facts, and there, too, witnesses are unlikely to know the full truth underlying even the events in which they personally participated. As a result, the interpretation of these secret doings can quickly coagulate in false patterns. Writers deprived of access to fresh facts, original documents and ability to professionally assess the information tend to copy what other have written although that may be largely guesswork, misinformation and speculation. Any single surviving fragmentary detail gains value because no other is recorded, even though it may stem from ignorance or partisanship, and by repetition it gains credibility and becomes history. In recent times, there has been a growth of interest to this particular topic due, first of all, to the efforts of the imminent British intelligence historian Professor Christopher Andrew, and because more and more original documents became available to researchers. There are, nonetheless, still major gaps in our knowledge of wartime intelligence in what concerns Soviet operations on the Republican territory and outside it. Who were the people sent by the Soviet government? What was their mission brief and how they carried out orders? What was their influence, if any, on the outcome of the war? How did secret intelligence influence Stalin's decisions in relation to Spain at various periods of the conflict? This work cannot hope to cover the vast programme of research on intelligence and the war history or international relations albeit in a very short period of three years (1936-39), but it seeks to give scholars, researchers and students of intelligence better access to primary sources from many archives, oral histories, memoirs, books and articles in several languages otherwise little known, totally unknown or very hard to acquire. This previously unknown information may help the historian to make different conclusions from what seemed an established fact, was misinterpreted or misunderstood. Intelligence is a fascinating subject but only knowledge gives you power.

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The Spanish civil war was widely seen by contemporaries as part of the international struggle against fascism, but for the Italian anti-fascist volunteers fighting in defence of the Spanish republic the war also represented the first stage in the liberation of Italy. Approximately 5,000 Italian anti-fascists volunteered to fight for the Republic during the course of Spanish Civil War (1936-39). While the Comintern played a major role in organising the foreign volunteers in Spain, each national group brought its own concerns and aspirations to Spain. For the Italian volunteers, most of whom were exiles (juorusciti), the war was seen a means of re-establishing a link with the Italian masses by reinforcing their claim to represent an alternative national identity. They saw themselves as the representatives of an alternative, virtuous Italy which was inspired by the "Risorgimento popolare" and a re-working of the Risorgimento myth. The Italian anti-fascist press and radio broadcasts depicted the volunteers as the heirs to the volontarismo of the 19th century and used the popular heroes of the Risorgimento - especially Giuseppe Garibaldi - as symbols of the nationalist and internationalist struggle. The myth of the republican-democratic traditions of the Risorgimento served as a unifying force and Garibaldinismo was used to create an amorphous political shell which could contain mutually exclusive political forces. Very little space in the historiography has been dedicated to the Italian anti-fascists in Spain. This gap is significant as a study of the motives for the Italian anti-fascist participation in the Spanish conflict, and what the conflict represented to the main anti-fascist parties, deepens our understanding of the meaning of anti-fascism in the latter half of the 1930s, and the elements which drew the diverse anti-fascist parties together.

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This thesis analyses the opposition mounted by anarchists to the policy of state collaboration, which was adopted by the principal organisations of the Spanish libertarian movement at the outset of the civil war. Collaboration is understood in broad terms as the involvement of libertarian individuals and organisations in the reconstruction of the Republican state following its near collapse in July 1936, a process that implied not only participation in the organs of governance, but also in the ideological reconstitution of the Republic as a patriarchal and national entity. Using original sources, the thesis shows that the opposition to this process was both broader and more ideologically consistent than has hitherto been assumed, and that, in spite of its heterogeneity, it united around a common revolutionary programme. Focusing on the strategies adopted by oppositional anarchists over the course of 1937, from the radical interpretation of the CNT’s socialisation campaign to the insurrectionary mobilisation of May and finally to the defence of federalism within the libertarian organisations, the thesis also sheds light on the turbulent relationship between the responsible committees of the libertarian movement and its ‘mid-level’ union and affinity group delegates. The ‘conscience’ of the Spanish revolution, like its Russian precursor, both recognised and struggled against the role that the principal revolutionary organisation in the country had assumed in the reconstruction of the state. In the Spanish case, the resistance to state reconstruction was informed by the essential insight of anarchism: that the function and purpose of the modern state cannot be transformed from within. By situating the struggles of the radical anarchists within the contested process of state reconstruction, the thesis affirms the continued relevance of this insight to the study of the Spanish revolution.

The proclamation of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931 was met with an outpouring of popular jubilation. Municipal elections two days before had returned a majority of monarchist candidates nationally but even the most trenchant supporters of King Alfonso XlII recognised that success in the countryside, where voting could be easily manipulated by political bosses or caciques, was meaningless in the face of a sweeping urban victory for republicans and socialists. In all but seven of Spain's fifty-two provincial capitals, the monarchy had been defeated. Mass politics had definitively announced its arrival, delivering a devastating mandate against a king who was left with little support and little option but to go into exile. Spain had ended overnight a monarchist tradition that went back centuries, installing a genuinely democratic regime for the first time - and without a single shot being fired. Yet less than five years later, with extreme polarisation having taken hold and political coexistence having become ever more precarious, Spain was plunged into a bloody civil war. There were a number of interrelated reasons for so rapid and spectacular a collapse. Promising more than the simple substitution of a president for a king, the Second Republic was welcomed as an opportunity to reform an essentially backward country but it had inherited severe social, economic, religious and even regional cleavages. If political power had changed hands, socio-economic power had not yet done so and there was little patience from those sectors of society who demanded solutions to the crisis. The Republic had also come into existence at a time that was far from propitious.

This thesis deconstructs the bases of enduring Francoist myth that General Queipo de Llano heroically conquered Seville with a handful of soldiers. Having established the full ramifications of that conquest, it goes on to assess the political, social, economic and cultural implications of the Spanish Civil War in Seville, the largest urban centre to fall to the military rebels at the beginning of the conflict. Chapter I examines the nature and infrastructure of the military conspiracy against the democratic Republic developed in response to the Popular Front electoral victory of February 1936. Chapter II scrutinises the career of General Queipo, in particular his metamorphosis from a marginal figure in the conspiracy into a rebel secular saint. Chapter III dismantles the legend that Queipo directed a small group of soldiers that miraculously conquered Seville and examines how the myth was exploited to legitimise political repression. Chapter IV demonstrates how the bloody pacification of Seville by nearer to 6,000 men exemplified the conspirators’ determination to eliminate the Republic by extreme violence. It shows how the use of the most brutal methods of colonial war was employed against civilians all over rebel-controlled territory. Chapter V analyses the painful transition from insurrection to civil war from a novel perspective: fundraising campaigns. It quantifies the devastating consequences of Nationalist economic repression. Finally, Chapter VI demystifies the legend of a Catholic Church persecuted by a ‘Judeo-Masonic’ conspiracy. It concludes that anticlericalism was a popular form of protest that pre-dated the establishment of the II Republic by analysing/quantifying patterns of religiosity, revealing that only 1.44% of the local population regularly attended Church in 1930s Seville; and investigating the development of the Catholic Church into the main cultural institution in Nationalist Spain that sanctified the transformation of myth into History.

This thesis traces the important role played by Spanish medical personnel, particularly surgeons, in the development and organisation of their own medical services during the Spanish Civil War. This study, therefore, is not strictly a history of medicine during the conflict, nor does it seek to further explore international efforts in this regard; rather it analyses through an examination of the medical personnel involved on both sides, the causes, treatments and long term consequences of injury and trauma, including that of exile, on the wounded of the Spanish Civil War. This thesis, by picking over the bones of a wide body of literature and by engaging with a variety of different sources, forms an interlocking part of a new historiographical strand examining the origins and evolution of a traumatic conflict whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout Spain. Through its engagement with a diversity of sources, its analysis of the relationship between medicine and propaganda, and through an inclusive examination of the contribution made by Spanish medical professionals across Spain during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, this thesis provides its own unique historical perspective of a conflict whose living legacy of trauma and of wounds unhealed is still alive in Spain today.

This thesis consists of a close reading of the representation of the Spanish Civil War in selected novels of Juan Marse (1933-) and Claude Simon (1913-). It explores how this representation, ultimately, reveals the traces of their different intellectual contexts. The initial comparison questions whether Marse's representation of the Spanish revolution in Barcelona implies, like Simon's account, a negative representation of the concept of political engagement and a similar historical pessimism. It goes on to discuss how this negative view is shaped by the writers' respective historical contexts and aesthetics. Secondly, since, to varying degrees, the novels studied make the reader critically aware of processes of narrativisation and representation, and of issues of narrative reliability and authority, the thesis explores the extent to which their representations of the Civil War are 'anti-realist'. In order to do so, it initially locates the question of 'realism' or 'anti-realism' in the texts within a wider theoretical framework: that of the critique of realism within poststructuralist French theory after Barthes. The latter debate over referentiality in literary realism also underpins ongoing critical debates over the status of history as a text. This thesis, thirdly, considers whether both writers' representations of the Civil War and of historical processes suggest a particular attitude towards the writing of history, namely whether and to what extent Simon's and Marse's representations of the war problematize the relationship between their historical referent - the events of the war and/or its aftermath - and its narration and interpretation. In particular, it asks whether Marse's texts involve the kind of rejection of progressive historical 'meta-narratives' which is implicit and explicit in Simon's representation of the Civil War, but also whether Simon's texts do, in fact, not simply undermine this model of historical causality but posit an alternative, anti-progressive historical telos.

A vast body of knowledge has been produced in the field of war remembrance, particularly concerning the Spanish Civil War. However, the representation and interpretation of that conflictual past have been increasingly contested within the wider context of ‘recuperation of historical memory’ which is taking place both in Spain and elsewhere. An academic gap has been identified with regard to the part played by the Basque Children (Niños Vascos) who were evacuated to the UK in 1937 as a result of the war. This thesis investigates the impact that forced migration has had on these children’s identity construction, particularly those who settled permanently in the host country. The thesis is a comparative examination of the process of memory construction and memorialisation, across transnational spaces and time. It analyses the nature and development of commemorative practices both in the UK and in the Basque Country, addressing some of the most fundamental issues related to agency and categorisations. My analysis of the social actors goes beyond Jelin’s ‘memory entrepreneurs’ to include those memory profiteers who benefit from a return to the past in order to fulfil their own personal agendas. I introduce the new term ‘conmemoraccionistas’ to refer to them. The central question dealt with here is how identities are constructed and reconstructed in the social and political arenas in which remembrance takes place. By using ethnography and a multimodal approach, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the discourses of the main agents engaged in memory production, and their agendas. It also identifies reasons for disengagement. Finally, it examines the interrelated narratives of those social actors and how they build on interaction with each other in a complex and continually changing social reality, where I argue, identities can no longer be approached from an essentialist polarising and dichotomising perspective. On the contrary, new approaches are needed which see identitarian development as a dynamic and accumulative process in which different actors have an input and identities are displayed according to particular contexts, settings, and audiences.