Battling Bolshevik Bogeymen: Spain’s Cordon Sanitaire against Revolution from a European Perspective, 1917–1923

By placing the anti-Bolshevik reaction in Spain in 1917-1923 in a transnational context, this article adds nuance to a Europe-wide analysis of the era’s counter-revolutionary movements by including a prominent First World War neutral. It also questions the prominent “brutalization” thesis that links postwar violence to trench warfare and military defeat. This cannot explain the widespread and violent social unrest that gripped Spain after 1917. But, rather than reject the war and brutalization thesis entirely, this article contends that the Russian Revolution should be seen as part of a “Greater War” that affected all countries, whether they were formally belligerents or not.