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The research for this article has been done with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy (project HAR2015-64155-P, FEDER). I want to thank Victoria Ramos, at the Archive of the PCE, for their advice. My student, José Luis López Aguilar, also provided me with very useful information on Solzhenitsin and Spain.
The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes: PCE: Communist Party of Spain; PSUC: Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia; SED: German Socialist Unified Party; CPSU: Communist Party of the Soviet Union; NB: Nuestra Bandera (Theoretical Journal of the PCE); MO: Mundo Obrero (Official newspaper of the PCE); Historical Archive of the Spanish Communist Party (AHPCE); Foundation Archives of Parties and Mass Organisations of the GDR in the Federal Archives (SAPMOB-Archiv); Hoover Institution Archives, Collection Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii - RGANI); Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU). For this article, I rely on internal Party sources (PCE and others), Party press, publications by Party functionaries and intellectuals on ideological issues, memoirs and autobiographical accounts.
On 24 August 1977 Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE), went to the Madrid premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the classic Soviet film of the 1920s.1He was not alone. The ambassadors of eight Eastern European communist countries arrived with him.2The episode received wide coverage in the Spanish media because of its novelty. The PCE had been legalised in Spain only four months previously and most of the ambassadors were quite new: the Kingdom of Spain had established diplomatic relations with most of the 'people's republics' of Eastern Europe only that year.3The presence of the leader of the most important opposition party to the dictatorship, and of the communist world's diplomats, was remarkable: Spain was still formally a dictatorship, although since Francisco Franco's death in November 1975 some legal changes and a democratic election had taken place.
Santiago Carrillo (1915-2012) was at that time a prominent figure in the world communist movement.4Born in northern Spain but raised in Madrid, he was the son of Wenceslao Carrillo, an influential member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido...