Russian language textbooks under the scrutiny of Franco's censors

Abstract

For years, the Franco regime justified the Spanish Civil War as a crusade against international communism, hence the special attention which the censorship paid to publications relating to Russian and the Soviet culture. When, at the end of the 1940s, Spain began to emerge from autarky and became part of the capitalist bloc, Russian was considered a strategic language, and its study was authorized. As a result, Russian language manuals began to be published. The regime’s censors reviewed these texts and only authorized them if they did not detect Soviet propaganda. These censorship files, which are preserved in the General Administration Archive, are the subject of this article. A summary review of the history of the teaching of Russian before the civil war and during Franco’s regime, as well as of the textbooks used, is presented here. It analyzes in detail the files of two of the most problematic textbooks for the censors from the 1950s onwards, A New Russian Grammar by Anna Semeonoff and Nina Potápova’s Manual breve de lengua rusa, concluding that it was historical circumstances that forced the censors to authorize them.