Best Podcasts on the Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 was the defining conflict of the interwar period — a brutal proving ground for fascism, a graveyard for the international left, and a rehearsal for the wider catastrophe of the Second World War. The Explaining History podcast has covered the war from every angle: the pre-war social crisis, Franco’s coup, the International BrigadesInternational Brigades Full Description:Military units composed of approximately 35,000 foreign volunteers from over 50 countries who fought for the Spanish Republic. Recruited, organized, and controlled by the Comintern (Communist International), they were idealized as symbols of anti-fascist solidarity. Brigades included the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the British Battalion, and the French Commune de Paris Battalion. They suffered catastrophic casualties, particularly at the battles of Jarama, Brunete, and the Ebro. Critical Perspective:The International Brigades are both the war’s most romanticized and most manipulated institution. The volunteers’ courage was genuine—many were unemployed workers, intellectuals, and veterans of previous struggles. But the Brigades were also a Soviet instrument, used to enforce Communist Party discipline within the Republican camp and to marginalize anarchist and non-Stalinist leftists. Their dissolution in 1938, ordered by the Republic to appease the Non-Intervention Committee, was a betrayal of the very idealism they embodied. , Soviet intervention, the battle for Madrid, and the war’s bitter end. These are the essential episodes.
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The Road to War: Spain 1931–1936
Social Conflict in Spain, 1933
After two short years of social reform under the socialist PSOE, a new right-wing government came to power. In the following years, poverty, hunger and violence dismantled the modest gains made by Spain’s workers and peasants — setting the stage for civil war.
Spain’s State of Emergency and the FalangeFalange Full Description:The Spanish fascist party, founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera (son of a former dictator). The Falange combined Italian-style fascist aesthetics with Spanish Catholic traditionalism and a rhetoric of national regeneration. After Primo de Rivera’s execution by the Republicans in 1936, Franco absorbed the Falange into his broader Nationalist coalition, making it the sole legal political party under his dictatorship. Critical Perspective:The Falange was a minor party before the war—it won only 0.7% of the vote in 1936. Franco did not need fascism to win; he needed its symbols, its paramilitary style, and its international connections. By absorbing the Falange, Franco created a “movement” that masked his real power base: the army, the Church, and conservative landowners. Spanish fascism was thus a Frankenstein’s monster—engineered by a general who had little personal commitment to fascist ideology but understood its usefulness as a legitimizing myth. Party, 1934
The new interior minister declared a state of emergency, and the fascist Falange party — founded on the belief in the “bullet and the fist” — began its violent campaign against the left. A pivotal episode in understanding how Spain slid toward war.
The British Communist Party, Popular Fronts and Spain 1932–36
How the rise of fascism reshaped European left politics, and why the Popular FrontPopular Front Full Description A political strategy adopted by communist parties in 1935, on Comintern instruction, to form alliances with socialist and liberal parties against fascism. In France and Spain, Popular Fronts won elections in 1936. The Spanish Popular Front government was the legitimate authority the Republic defended during the Civil War. The strategy represented a significant shift from the communist parties’ earlier “class against class” line, which had labelled social democrats as “social fascists.” Critical Perspective The Popular Front strategy has been debated ever since. Communist parties argued it was necessary to unite against fascism; critics on the left argued it subordinated working-class interests to bourgeois democratic alliances. In Spain, Communist Party insistence on prioritising military order over social revolution — and the NKVD’s suppression of revolutionary forces — ensured that even if the Republic had won the war, the social revolution many of its supporters sought would have been crushed. strategy — uniting socialists and communists against fascism — shaped both Spanish politics and the international response to the civil war.
War: 1936–1938
Franco’s March on Madrid
After the election of a Popular Front government, the generals’ counter-revolution began with decisive help from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Franco’s Army of Africa crossed from Morocco to the mainland — and the war began in earnest.
Revolutionary Violence in Madrid in 1936
After the generals’ coup failed in Madrid, the city was dominated by anarchist militias, political violence, and the settling of scores. A vivid account of how war transformed the Spanish capital into a city of revolutionary chaos.
American and British Volunteers at the Battle of Jarama, 1937
Poorly equipped and barely trained, the International Brigades — American, British, French, German, Polish — sustained catastrophic casualties holding the road to Madrid open at Jarama. A story of extraordinary sacrifice for an increasingly compromised cause.
Spain, StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More and European Communist Parties in the 1930s
Soviet intervention in Spain was never straightforward solidarity — it came with strings, control, and the NKVDNKVD Full Description The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) was the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 1946, responsible for political repression, the administration of the Gulag, and the terror purges of 1936–1938. Under Nikolai Yezhov during the Great Terror, the NKVD executed approximately 750,000 people and arrested over 1.5 million. It also conducted mass deportations of ethnic minorities and operated a network of foreign intelligence and assassination operations. Critical Perspective The NKVD institutionalised the principle that the state’s survival required pre-emptive destruction of potential enemies. Interrogation protocols routinely used torture to extract confessions — not to discover truth but to perform it. The show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, in which loyal communists confessed to absurd crimes, demonstrated that no loyalty to the party could protect an individual once designated an enemy.. This episode explores how Stalin used the Spanish war for his own strategic purposes, and what that meant for the Republican cause.
Journalists and the Spanish Civil War
Hemingway, Orwell, Koestler, Gellhorn — Spain attracted the greatest writers of the age. Many were openly partisan for the Republic, and saw Spain as the world’s last chance to stop fascism. This episode examines the war’s extraordinary literary and journalistic record.
Defeat: The Battle of the Ebro and After
The Battle of the Ebro: Part One
In 1938, with the Republic running out of options, Juan Negrín ordered one last offensive — crossing the Ebro river to strike into Nationalist territory, hoping a bold victory would force Britain and France to intervene. The opening moves of the war’s decisive final campaign.
The Battle of the Ebro: Part Two
The Munich agreement shattered the Republic’s last hope that Britain and France would act. Reading from Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts, this episode captures the overwhelming odds faced by the International Brigades as the Ebro offensive collapsed and the war entered its final phase.
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Part of the Explaining History Podcast Collections. Also explore: Fascism & the Far Right | Stalin & Soviet Terror | The Iranian Revolution | Neoliberalism & Thatcherism
Further Reading
These articles from the Explaining History archive go deeper on the history behind these episodes:
- The Italian Civil War — How the anti-fascist struggle continued into Italy’s liberation, 1943–45.
- The Nazi Camps and the ‘Workshy’ — The terror apparatus that awaited those who lost the fight against fascism.
- Britain, France and the Mandate System — The same powers whose non-intervention abandoned Republican Spain had reshaped the world after 1918.
- The Spanish Civil War: Prelude to a Global Struggle — A longform article on the origins and international dimensions of the Spanish Civil War.
