The Grand Camouflage

Book excerpt: The product of many years’ research and material gathering, Burnett Bolloten’s The Grand Camouflage is a very richly documented study of the reasons for the Communists’ success in taking over the anti-Franco forces in the course of the Spanish Civil War. “ALTHOUGH the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936, was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp—more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages—millions of discerning people outside Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range, but even of its existence, by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history. “Foremost in practising this deception upon the world, and in misrepresenting in Spain itself the character of the revolution, were the Communists, who, although but an exiguous minority when the Civil War began, used so effectually the manifold opportunities which that very upheaval presented that before the close of the conflict in 1939 they became, behind a democratic frontispiece, the ruling force in the left camp. “The overthrow in May, 1937, of the government of Francisco Largo Caballero, who was the most influential and popular of the left-wing leaders at the outbreak of the Civil War, marked the Communists’ greatest triumph in their rise to power. What was the secret of their success? And why did they attempt to screen from the outside world and to misrepresent in Spain itself the revolution that had swept the country? The answer lies within these pages.”—Burnett Bolloten