Spanish sailors in the USSR

April 1954: three young Galician men walk through the halls of the Barcelona Military Hospital holding an old photograph in their hands—so old that its color has long since faded to sepia. They are looking for their parents, whom they have not seen for just over seventeen years and who have just been repatriated from the USSR aboard the ship Semíramis, which has just arrived in Barcelona. (The ship also carried 248 Francoist soldiers and 12 pilots from the Republican Air Force. 

As they walk down the corridors, carefully observing the patients dressed in khaki shirts and trousers, they realize they have only a faint memory of their parents. One of them, a sailor, who had been overjoyed to hear his father’s name announced on the list broadcast by the radio, finally finds him at the end of the hallway, calm and downcast. The old sailor, now nearly sixty, knows he is standing before one of the four children he left behind in Galicia more than seventeen years earlier. He knows it cannot be his eldest son—sadly deceased—but he has no idea which of his three remaining sons, who were born within just four years of each other, now stands before him.

Thus ended the odyssey of a handful of Spanish sailors, many of them from Galicia, who had been illegally confined in the USSR between 1937 and 1939, when their ships, which were carrying weapons for the Republican army, were seized by the Soviet authorities without any justification, and their crews disembarked and detained in Black Sea ports. The sailors belonged to that large group that has been called geographical combatants, a term used to describe the role of chance in placing them in a war situation—a kind of accident in the course of history: finding oneself in the worst place at the worst possible time.

For long periods of time, their relatives know nothing about their whereabouts. Between 1937, the year they were detained, and 1941, they are able to communicate regularly. But when the German army invades the USSR and they are truly treated as prisoners—and therefore sent to the Gulag—their trail is completely lost. No one, except for a few leaders of the PCE, knows where they are: whether they are working as civilians or have been deported to one of the remote Soviet republics.

At the end of the war, prisoners liberated from concentration camps and a handful of Jewish women of Austrian origin who had maintained relationships with some of them in Karaganda, spread the news that a small group of Spanish prisoners—of antifascist political affiliation and, for the most part, members of the UGT and CNT unions—were being held against their will in the USSR, subjected to all kinds of hardships and privations.

The postcard shown here is one of a number issued by the Paris-based Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Prisoners (FEDIP) demanding the release of the crew of the Cabo San Agustín, Republican sailors who had been held in the Soviet Union.

JCSI