‘Off to Moscow with No Passports and No Money’: The 1921 Spanish Syndicalist Delegation to Russia

Abstract

This article will follow the steps of the 1921 Spanish syndicalist delegation to revolutionary Russia. It will use the delegation as a window into the revolutionary subculture of post-war Europe and into the experience of foreign representatives in early Soviet Russia. Particular attention will be paid to the complex ways in which syndicalist militants that were strongly influenced by anarchism grappled with the realities of Soviet Russia, to argue that the thought process foreign visitors traversed was often contradictory, being simultaneously attracted and repelled by the Bolshevik regime.