sco Franco, into rebellion (Riker-Coleman n.d., 1).
While Franco was essentially a traditionalist authoritarian, his Falangist movement had overtones of European fascism, and he gained military assistance from Fascist Italy and then from Nazi Germany. In turn the Soviet Union gave assistance to the struggling Republicans. While volunteers from the Western democracies went to Spain on their own to fight for both sides, including Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the Republican side, the Western powers did not intervene directly.
Deep internal divisions within the Republican faction left it no match for Franco's Nationalists, even with Soviet support (Riker-Coleman n.d., 2). The Soviets abandoned their efforts and the Republicans collapsed in 1939, leaving Franco and the Nationalists triumphant. While World War II did not grow directly out of the Spanish Civil War, it has been regarded as a "dress rehersal" in which both Germany and the Soviet Union tested out their weapons and tactics.
Karl Marx would never have picked Russia as the first country to experience a Communist revolution. In Marx's formulation, economic and political development took place in successive stages; socialism, or Communism, could only come about in a country that had already fully matured in the capitalist stage. This was far from the case in Russia in 1917, or in Spain in 1936. Both countries were at that time still largely agrarian. While they had industrial sectors, and thus industrial working classes (proletariats), most of the population lived as peasants on the land, in conditions that Marx would have characterized as feudal. In Spain, for example, 67 percent of the land was owned by 2 percent of landowners (Conlon 1994, 2).
The Russian Civil War, as noted above, was in many respects several conflicts in one. Outlying parts of the empire sought to break away, having no wish to be
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