Abstract
On 17 June 1937, Lois and Charles Orr were rounded up and arrested along with many other Catalan, Spanish and foreign revolutionaries residing in Spain. It was part of a crackdown operation nominally undertaken by Republican authorities, but instigated, inspired and supervised by Stalinist operatives then congregating in Spain. As the hot spot of revolutionary activity anywhere in Europe at the time, Barcelona had become the temporary home of anti- Stalinist revolutionary Marxists from around the world. The Soviet leadership, then engaged in a series of show trials in the USSR, designed to snuff out any potential for the revival of a revolutionary anti-authoritarian tradition at home, intended to extend their field of operation to other parts of the world, in order to crush opposition currents which operated to the left of the Comintern.
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Notes
An interesting recent exchange regarding the circumstances of Bob Smillie’s death in a Valencia prison took place in the pages of the British The Historical Journal (THJ); see Tom Buchanan, ‘The Death of Bob Smillie, the Spanish Civil War, and the Eclipse of the Independent Labour Party’, THJ, 40 (1997), 435–461;
John Newsinger, ‘The Death of Bob Smillie’, THJ, 41 (1998), 575–578; and
Tom Buchanan, ‘The Death of Bob Smillie: A Reply’, THJ, 43 (2000), 1109–1111.
Elsa Hentschke was released in late November 1937 only to be kidnapped and rearrested again one week later. She was finally released and expelled to France in late January 1938. On Elsa Henschke’s fate in Spain, see Hans Schafranek, Das kurze Leben des Kurt Landau: Ein österreichischer Kommunist als Opfer der stalinistischen Geheimpolizei (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1988), pp. 494–495, 510–511.
This Swiss couple, Clara and Paul Thalmann, survived their period in jail and were released on 30 August 1937. The episode of their capture is narrated, from the perspective of the two Swiss, by Paul Thalmann in his autobiography, Wo die Freiheit stirbt (Olten: Walter, 1974), pp. 205–206.
A handwritten notation explains that this was the pseudonym for Leon Sedov, ‘Trotsky’s son’. Leon Sedov (1906–1938) was a key activist within the Trotskyist movement throughout the 1930s. He had accompanied his father, Leon Trotsky, into exile in 1928. He subsequently had his home base in Berlin and then Paris, where he died in February 1938. His death while undergoing an emergency hospitalization remains shrouded in mystery. A well-planned murder by Stalinist agents remains a widespread explanatory theory, but a careful reconstruction of the medical evidence surrounding Leon Sedov’s emergency hospitalization by two French Trotskyist medical experts suggests an ill-attended appendicitis. See Jean-Michel Krivine and Marcel-Francis Kahn, ‘La mort de Leon Sedov’, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, 13 (March 1983), 44–54.
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© 2009 Gerd-Rainer Horn
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Horn, GR. (2009). In Stalin’s Secret Barcelona Jail. In: Horn, GR. (eds) Letters from Barcelona. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234499_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234499_8
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