history

From my experience, most historical scholarship on 19th and 20th century topics is unabashedly lib (or anti-communist) in its orientation and it requires a critical eye and cross-referencing between books (and often digging up primary source stuff) to arrive at a fairly comprehensive picture of the subject.

It sucks but it is what it is. Unfortunately there isn't a Patriots, Traitors and Empires for a lot of 19th and 20th century historical events and it sucks. It makes the work so much harder because it requires that you become an amateur expert in the subject.

For an example here, Orw*ll squarely blames Stalin for not providing enough military aid to the Spanish Republic and in his article "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War" he states:

As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a n*ggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid

I'm not sure how much this narrative prevails but you need to understand that the Spanish Civil War was seen as the prelude to WWII.

It was well known that tensions were boiling over in western Europe and it's my contention that the USSR was very cautious about how they supported the Spanish Republic because their primary concern was that the Spanish Civil War would erupt into a regional conflict across western Europe, or worse.

We know that even towards the beginning of WWII the USSR was barely industrialised and that it had only just begun to reach something near military parity with the big players in Europe at that time, so the reluctance on behalf of the Soviets is understandable.

Another reason is that Stalin had, imo, rightly ascertained that the great powers in Europe (at that time Britain and France) were quite ambivalent towards fascism as evidenced by their refusal to engage in the Spanish Civil War.

Stalin had sought to get Britain and France to enforce the terms of the non-intervention pact for the civil war that they and Italy and Germany were signatories to and, despite the USSR providing evidence of the fascists violating the terms of the pact and, at one point, a charge d'affaires for Italy directly admitting to having Italian troops stationed in Spain and refusing to remove them, Britain and France failed to act.

Without their support, the USSR risked overexposing themselves and to attempt to unilaterally enforce the non-intervention pact terms which would have likely been disastrous for them.

As for the Soviets pushing for a popular front against the fascist forces and, in doing so, "defending private property and handing power to the middle class as against the working class", it's quite obvious that the revolutionary forces of the Spanish Republic were entirely unable to fight off the fascist forces successfully by themselves and this vindicates the position of needing the middle class as at the least temporary allies in the fight. If that meant compromising with the middle class in order to prevent Spain from being plunged into decades of fascist rule and having to do the messy work of conducting a revolution after the civil war was concluded then so be it.

Instead, the Spanish Republic had struggled with its production and especially in industry and I'd argue that the economic policy of the Spanish Republic was honestly disastrous; they shifted textile production from piece work to salary work with generous benefits temporarily however this seriously backfired and their textile production was plagued by poor labour discipline and a lack of productivity. Likewise, collectivisation of agriculture seems to have not worked particularly well in the Spanis Republic. Unemployment ran high, at somewhere between 10-15% when they should have been at full mobilisation to win the war. There was also a problem of massive, runaway inflation. Overall, neat the end of the war production in the republic dropped to 1/3rd if what it was at the start of the war.

I believe that their "revolutionary" acts, which alienated the middle class, lost them the support of those with the much-needed technical skills and knowledge to organise production properly.

I believe that the left-deviationist line, pushing for a socialist revolution in held territories before they'd even beaten back the fascists was partially to blame for their defeat and, even with increased military aid from the USSR and intervention from Britain and France, their position would have been eroded by their failure to shore up their productive base.

Stalin's policy wasn't opportunistic and stupid.

It was opportunistic and stupid, imo, to play at revolution while crippling industry, failing to enforce labour and military discipline (there are plenty of stories of people fighting on the frontlines just wandering off, getting drunk, refusing orders, etc.), and attempting to implement economic policy which was premature given the state of war. At the time, the Spanish Republic held the most industrially productive areas. All they needed to do was to leave shit more or less intact, fight the war effectively and then, with the successes of a proletarian triumph over the fascists, you could ride that wave of popular support to then push for a socialist revolution.

But to arrive at this conclusion you have to understand the conditions of the non-intervention pact, the state of Europe in the interwar period, you have to look at the data available on industrial production in the Spanish Republic, and you have to do a lot of connecting of the dots.

There isn't a single decent book which lays all of this out from a Marxist perspective afaik. And this is just one example of a period in history.