The inland seas: towards an ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea

Abstract

War was “remarkably consistent” appears to rest on a downplaying of the very real fears that Churchill expressed in 1937/8 about the dangers of a Nationalist victory for Britain’s imperial interests. Britain also looms large in the background of Pedro Aires Oliveira’s chapter on Portugal, in which he notes that – for all his instinctive support for Franco and hostility to the Second Republic – Salazar was essentially a defender of the status quo, and saw the alliance with Britain as crucial to maintaining Portugal’s independence. By contrast, Spanish Falangists were far less judicious in their relationship with Nazism. Xosé M. Núñez Seixas’ chapter charts the rise of Germanophilia on the Spanish right throughout the 1930s, an admiration that reached its peak with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Even those who were not outright Fascists saw the Third Reich in 1940/41 as the key to not only defeating Communism but also to breaking the power of the old imperialist enemy – the United Kingdom. The book concentrates on the Civil War’s political and international ramifications and gives little coverage to its impact on intellectuals. However, a fascinating chapter by Silvina Schammah Gesser and Alexandra Chevela Dergacheva on the poet Rafael Alberti goes some way to making up for this omission. Alberti, working closely with his partner Maria Teresa León, emerged during the Civil War as a key defender of the Republic in intellectual circles, and was a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, which by that time was, of course, the Republic’s only substantial source of weapons. The chapter focuses on Alberti and León’s visit to Moscow in March 1937 and their two-hour meeting with Stalin who, according to León, looked “thin and sad”. No record of the meeting survives beyond an official communiqué in which Alberti gushed about Stalin’s kindness and deep interest in Spanish affairs. However, it seems likely that Alberti conducted some secret diplomacy during his visit, presumably encouraging the Soviets to send a delegation to the forthcoming International Congress of Antifascist Writers in Valencia. The authors point out that in later life Alberti (who lived until 1999) was rather successful at presenting himself as merely a naive “engagé”, infatuated with the Soviet Union, and reticent to confront the true extent of his “Soviet past and connections” in public. In this case, at least, it seems that history really had stopped in 1936.