Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin is a largely offstage but consequential political presence: the Soviet leader on whom the Spanish Republic depends for weapons, the figure whose victory over Hitler is later pushed to the margins of the Western account of the war, and the commander whose forces deliver the devastating final air assault on Berlin. Across these episodes, Stalin’s significance lies not only in military power but in the way that power is remembered, bargained over, and feared.

Soviet Aid and the Spanish Republic

In 1937, Prime Minister Juan Negrín explains to Manuel Arroyo Benítez why he cannot simply remove Soviet advisers from the Republican side. Negrín distrusts their influence and resents how much they control, but expelling them would mean giving up the Soviet Union’s military support—the Republic’s only source of aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons. Mexican rifles and the affection of the International Brigades could not replace that material aid. To break with Stalin, Negrín argues, would be tantamount to handing Spain to Francisco Franco; he says he would rather shoot himself than accept that outcome.

The exchange makes Stalin’s influence tangible without placing him in the room. It operates through an unequal dependency: Negrín regards Soviet involvement with deep suspicion, yet the Republic’s survival makes that involvement difficult to refuse. The political disorder Negrín describes—factional struggles within the Republican camp and uncontrolled detention centers—further sharpens the dilemma. Soviet power is neither presented as uncomplicated solidarity nor as something the government can readily cast off.

Stalin and the Changing Memory of Victory

After the Second World War, Arroyo warns that the political meaning of the Allied victory is being rewritten. The Soviet Union, once an ally, is no longer publicly credited as it was before; schoolchildren may soon be taught, he fears, that Americans took Berlin. His point is not simply that the history of the war is changing, but that the new account serves a present political purpose. Franco can present himself as a champion of anti-communism just as Western powers turn toward that same priority.

Arroyo sets the public spectacle of the Nuremberg trials against rumors that some Allied commanders are recruiting Nazis for anti-Soviet work in Germany and Eastern Europe. In this emerging Cold War logic, Stalin’s role in defeating Hitler becomes inconvenient to a political order that is willing to use former Nazis against the Soviet Union. The contrast deepens the earlier Spanish dilemma: Soviet assistance had been indispensable to the Republic, but the postwar Western powers increasingly treat anti-communism as more important than either that history or opposition to Franco.

The Bombing of Berlin

The narrative also links Stalin to the final battle for Berlin. On 10 April 1945, more than 1,200 Soviet aircraft launch a massive assault on the city, already devastated and nearing its end as the last stronghold of the Third Reich. The defenders had assumed that the advancing Soviet infantry, vastly outnumbering them, made another major air attack unnecessary. The narrator instead attributes the bombing to Stalin’s refusal to forgive, turning the air raid into an expression of vengeance as well as overwhelming force.

For Adrián Gallardo Ortega and the soldiers around him, the destruction is not an abstract strategic decision. They are confined in ruined quarters, short of food, and waiting through a defeat that seems certain but never quite arrives. The Soviet attack makes visible the danger they had tried not to imagine: even a city already reduced to rubble can be devastated further. Later, on 24 April, Soviet troops finally stand before the city’s last defensive ring; beyond it lies Berlin, and within Berlin, the remaining defenders.

Narrative Significance

Stalin’s appearances are mediated by characters facing the consequences of decisions made at a distance. Negrín weighs dependence on Soviet weapons against his distrust of Soviet interference; Arroyo observes the postwar suppression of Soviet credit as Western anti-communism takes precedence; the Berlin passages place Stalin’s power in the sky above soldiers awaiting the Soviet advance. The book thus connects wartime alliance, postwar historical revision, and battlefield destruction without reducing them to a single judgment of Stalin.

The recurring contrast is between what political actors say about history and what their choices require in practice. In Spain, Soviet aid is necessary even when Soviet influence is resented. After the war, the Soviet contribution is minimized even as the Western powers reportedly make use of former Nazis against the Soviet Union. At Berlin, Stalin’s power is registered not in negotiation or recollection but in the assault that reaches the defenders before the ground forces do. These distinct contexts make him a figure through whom the narrative examines military dependence, the politics of memory, and the human cost of power.