Barcelona. The anarchist movement firmly seizes power. The city is gripped by an iconoclastic fever and teems with the movement’s red and black flags. These initial successes of the anarchists, especially those of the Trotskyists, attract the attention of Stalin, who, initially uninterested in the Spanish Civil War, later decides to intervene. He then withdraws his military support in the late 1930s (thus allowing Franco’s forces to win), when his strategy leads him to side with Hitler, with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
