RT Journal Article
T1 ‘Defeat, Victory, Repeat’: Russian Émigrés between the Spanish Civil War and Operation Barbarossa, 1936–1944
A1 Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel
A1 Beyda, Oleg
K1 Spanish Civil War
K1 European civil war
K1 Operation Barbarossa
K1 Russia
K1 Russian émigrés
AB Tens of thousands of White Russians were forced to leave their country after 1920. Many of them were career officers and soldiers imbued with anti-communism, who were then hired by diverse armies. They acted as transnational soldiers of the counter-revolution during the interwar period. This article analyses the trajectory of some dozens of them, who volunteered for the Francoist army in 1936–8 during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards, many of them joined the ranks of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’ as interpreters to take part in the invasion of their home country by the Germans. Their experience as occupiers was highly ambiguous and oscillated between disappointment and nostalgia once they perceived that the objective of the invasion was not to liberate Russia from communism, but to enslave the country and its inhabitants. However, once they returned to Spain, they cultivated a hero myth of their past experience and regarded themselves as winners
PB Cambridge University Press
SN 0960-7773
YR 2023
FD 2023
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30957
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30957
LA eng
NO Núñez Seixas, X., & Beyda, O. (2023). ‘Defeat, Victory, Repeat’: Russian Émigrés between the Spanish Civil War and Operation Barbarossa, 1936–1944. Contemporary European History, 1-16. doi:10.1017/S0960777323000085
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026