Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War by Christopher Othen

Author:Christopher Othen [Othen, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2015-04-11T21:00:00+00:00

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ROVS members and other rightist émigrés supported Franco’s Nationalist rising. Chasovoi (Sentinel) magazine applauded Francoist victories and reprinted the Generalissimo’s speeches. Fund raising events and lectures in Paris, Berlin, and Belgrade were well attended. When journal Novi Grad (New City) published an article criticising Francoist repression it met a storm of protest and the theologian author had to fight Orthodox Church authorities to keep his job.298

Republican sympathisers existed but kept their views quiet, mindful of the diaspora’s murderous past. In 1922 the novelist Vladimir Nabakov’s father, known for his liberal politics, had been shot dead at a meeting in Berlin by a pair of embittered Russian monarchists.

Nikolai Skoblin, General Miller’s advisor and next in line to head the organisation, saw the Spanish conflict as an opportunity to reinvigorate the White Russian movement. The smooth forty-four-year-old cavalry officer, husband of famous gypsy folk-singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, convinced his boss the ROVS could use Spain as a military academy to sharpen veterans’ skills and blood a younger generation.

Other ROVS members were suspicious of Skoblin’s motives. His dark-eyed wife, her wavy hair held back by a headscarf, had been a Bolshevik until she met Skoblin during the civil war. Some suspected she never abandoned those sympathies. Skoblin himself had dubious friends. He could be seen drinking in the cafés near Gare Saint-Lazare with Captain Zavadski-Krasnopolski, the amoral proprietor of a private intelligence agency which sold information to the highest bidders, including the Soviets.299 Some of the Captain’s employees boasted that they would inform on their own families for the right price.

But Skoblin was not alone in urging help for Franco. Military-minded White Russians were aware the ROVS’s armed might was thin as tissue paper. One unit was a group of Cossacks reduced to marching in parade formation through the Paris streets every morning to their jobs as porters at the Gard du Nord railway station. A good war could reinvigorate both the ROVS and exile community. The road to Moscow could first divert through Madrid.

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