Moscow Gold - Historiography and Myth

Historiography and Myth

Pablo Martín Aceña, Francisco Olaya Morales and Ángel Viñas have been among the most distinguished researchers on the topic, the last one being the first to gain access to the documentation of the Bank of Spain. At an international level, Gerald Howson and Daniel Kowalsky have had direct access to the documents of the archives of the Soviet Union opened to researchers during the 1990s, focusing their investigations on the relations between the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic, and the deliveries of military material.

Even though the decision to use the gold reserves has not given rise to much debate or interest among historians, its final destination continues to be a motive for controversy. Authors like Viñas, Ricardo Miralles or Enrique Moradiellos defend Negrín, both as head of the Ministry of Finance and as Prime Minister (Viñas considers him "the great Republican statesman during the Civil War") and view that the sending of the gold to the USSR had a political, economic and operative rationale accepted by the Republican government. It was, according to the aforementioned, the only viable option faced with the Nationalist advance and the non-intervention of the Western democracies, making the survival of the Republic possible in an adverse international context. For these authors, without the selling of the reserves, there would not have been the slightest possibility of military resistance. On the other hand, Martín Aceña viewed the sending of the gold as a mistake that cost the Republic its financial capability: the USSR was a distant country, of opaque bureaucracy and financial functioning foreign to international norms and guarantees, in such respect that it would have been logical to send the gold to democratic countries such as France or the United States. With respect to Olaya Morales, exiled anarchist during the Francoist régime, in all of his works he described the administration of Negrín as criminal and denies the arguments and theories of Ángel Viñas, considering the "gold issue" a gigantic fraud and one of the most important factors in the Republican defeat.

Authors like Fernando García de Cortázar, Pío Moa or Alberto Reig Tapia have defined the Spanish episode of the Moscow Gold as mythical, used to justify the disastrous situation of post-war Spain.