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"International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces--from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain--the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism--the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions--and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror"--

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration

The article examines connections between Spanish communists and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Focusing on the period beginning with the founding of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, it analyzes how 'revolutionary' Spain not only borrowed from the Soviet experience but also became an emotional core of the international communist project. To examine these exchanges, the article investigates two topics that are often treated separately: the revolutionary 'brotherhood' of Soviet and Spanish writers (focusing on Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León) and the lessons learned by ordinary communists at the Comintern's International Lenin School. It argues that these varied interactions were part of a single, multifaceted phenomenon: the creation of complex revolutionary networks in the years before the Spanish civil war. From this perspective, 'world revolution' can be understood not only as a 'faith' that came from Russia but also as a lived reality shaped by multidirectional – if also Soviet-dominated – institutional and personal exchanges.