Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book examines competing Marxist approaches to antifascism during the 1930s in the USSR and select European countries during the Spanish Civil War. It wrestles with the question that many works have addressed: Why did the Popular Front fail when the fascist threat was so clear? Unlike those works, it addresses that question through a series of micro-histories by examining incidents that spurred centrifugal forces that divided Marxist antifascists, fragmented the Popular Front, and contributed to the melding of antifascism and anti-Communism by the late 1930s. The literature on the USSR in the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War is vast, but rarely do those works intersect because many studies stay within tight national or political boundaries. The work is a synchronous transnational analysis that examines the struggles over antifascism between Marxist parties in the USSR, Germany, Austria, France, England, and Spain during its civil war. The range of sources from which it draws its evidence is unique. Especially notable are recently released archival materials related to the anti-Trotskyist campaign in the USSR and the 1936 Moscow trial, materials that challenge longstanding assumptions on which much of the literature has been based. The sources and method allow for integrating the political practices of various Marxist parties and the importance of friendship, love, and trust that held together the members of intensely competing political groups that were often wracked by pervasive suspicion, distrust, and the fear of betrayal. Throughout, it examines the role of women in those groups.</jats:p>