While, here and there, people strive today to relativize the epic that gathered, around the defense of the Spanish republic, volunteers come from more than fifty countries (from France, from Poland, from Palestine, from Cuba, from the United States, and… from elsewhere), reducing it exclusively to an enterprise of pre-Sovietization remote-controlled from Moscow, it is worth recalling that the impulse that carried these men (and women) toward Spain was characterized first of all by an antifascism of conviction — and not the kind that, after the war, would serve as a screen for “the building of socialism.” Then by courage, for nothing obliged them to leave wives, children, home. There was also, without any doubt, for some, a measure of revolutionary adventure — the Russian revolution was not so far off. This participation in the Spanish Civil War remained for them — all their testimonies show it — an exhilarating, unique experience that no reexamination on their part would truly manage to tarnish. Even their later disillusionments, recantations, abandonments would not manage to fold “Spain” into the Great Communist Lie. For if they were indeed almost all communists — though some, such as G.E. Sichon, the author of one of the articles that follow, came out of the socialist movement — their destinies, their dawning awareness, would gradually distance them from the great initial dream. That of Frantisek Kriegel, presented in this dossier, is exceptional, for he knew at every moment, often at the cost of his own freedom, how to fight for a socialist future that was free as well. For Kriegel, there was a logical continuity between his commitments on behalf of republican Spain and on behalf of the democratic opposition in Czechoslovakia (he was one of the signatories of Charter 77). Forty years apart, it was the same struggle.
J.-C.S