The Spanish civil war has been defined in quite diverse ways, most of them derived from ideological predilections or international power struggles. Only occasionally has the war been analyzed in terms of its most accurate definition, as a revolutionary/counterrevolutionary struggle, typical of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, though also singular because of its geographic location, timing, and special features. The reasons for this reluctance to treat the civil war as a revolutionary conflict have been discussed in Chapter 6. The Soviet definition, however, was not reluctant to do so, for decades labeling it the “Spanish national-revolutionary war” and, unlike some Western commentaries, giving major importance to the revolutionary struggle.

As emphasized earlier, the most unique features of the Spanish civil war had to do with 1) its timing, long after the revolutionary wave of 1917–23 yet prior to World War II, at first moving strongly counter to European political tendencies of the 1930s; 2) its location, the only full-scale civil war in Western Europe during the entire era; and 3) its origins – of all the violent domestic conflicts between 1917 and 1949, it was the only one not provoked, or at least influenced in a major way, by foreign war. There were other differentiating factors, some completely unique and others only partially distinct.