"The ruthlessness of Soviet Stalinism and its inability to work with other parties of the Left was shown most clearly in the Spanish Civil War, the main Soviet foreign intervention between the 1920–21 war against Poland and the Hitler–Stalin Pact. The Spanish events are highly important in order to understand later Soviet interventions in the Third World: not only was it the first long-distance intervention directed by Moscow, but it also provided the personal experience that many leaders of the Cold War period fell back on to plan or execute involvements abroad. While most Spanish Republicans saw their state as having been defeated by Franco’s armies in part because of Communist sectarianism and Soviet perfidy, Moscow’s lessons were quite different. Stalin and his colleagues saw the failure in Spain as resulting from the ‘‘carelessness’’ and ‘‘undue haste’’ of the Spanish Republicans themselves, including many members of the Communist Party. If an ‘‘isolated’’ struggle like the one in Spain was to succeed in the future, it would have to be directed by Soviet officers, even if the aim was defensive rather than offensive. Only if the Soviet experience was brought directly to bear on the local situation, Stalin decreed, could such struggles have any chance of succeeding."