B. N. Kovalev, Dobrovol’tsy na chuzhoi voine: Ocherki istorii Goluboi divizii (Veliky Novgorod: Yaroslav-the-Wise Novgorod State University, 2014).

The book of Boris Kovalev (Novgorod State University) deals with the Blue Division, a Spanish volunteer division that took part in the operations on the Eastern Front of World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. Its Russian historiography is still rather poor, although 45,482 Spanish soldiers were fighting on the Soviet land altogether, among them 4,954 were killed and more than 10 thousand wounded. The author tried to fill this gap. According to him, the book was initially intended as a history of the Blue Division, but finally took the form of a collection of essays describing the most important parts of its ‘biography’.

The research is mostly a descriptive one and is based on the documents of several central Russian archives (RGASPI—the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGVA—the Russian State Military Archive, TsAMO—the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense), of local archives in Novgorod and Saint-Petersburg and of the German Federal Military Archive (Bundesarhiv-Militärarhiv), and also on memoirs of the participants of the events. At the local Communist Party archives one can get, among others, documents of partisan units, at the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB)—trophy documents of the occupation authorities and of collaborationist forces, including newspapers. The author also had an opportunity to interview several residents of Novgorod Oblast who had experienced the Spanish occupation in their childhood.

Officially the division was called the 250^th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht, but since the very time of its creation, the phrase Blue Division emerged both in Spanish and German documents, because of the blue shirts of members of the Spanish Falange. The division was formed in June–July 1941 and was moved to Bavaria in July where it received German armament and underwent training during a month under command of German instructors. It had 19 thousand soldiers and officers. In late August—early October the division was moved to the Eastern Front.

In his essays, the author traces the operations in which the volunteers of the Blue Division took part, their relations with Germans and with the local population of the occupied Soviet territory, the experience of Russian émigrés and collaborators who served at the division, as well as that of the Spanish émigrés who served at the Red Army and thus continued their civil war in the forests of North-Western Russia. The final essay deals with the experience of Spanish prisoners of war.

Initially the Blue Division was to be included into the Army Group Center, but then, during its moving to the Soviet territory, it was directed to the Army Group North. In October 1941 the Spaniards took part in the German offensive to Tikhvin, but had to retreat behind the Volkhov River in early December. In the first half of 1942 the division was holding positions under Novgorod, some of its subunits took part in capturing the encircled troops of the Soviet 2^nd Shock Army. In August the division was moved under Leningrad, its new positions were under Krasnogvardeisk (Gatchina), Pushkin and Slutsk (Pavlovsk). In October 1943 Franco declared the change of Spain’s status from a non-belligerent state to neutrality and withdrew the Blue Division from the Eastern Front. 2,500 of its soldiers decided to go on fighting against Bolshevism, they formed the ‘Legion of Spanish volunteers’ (or the ‘Blue Legion’) that stayed near Lyuban where it was completely destroyed during the Soviet offensive in late January 1944. Those Spaniards who survived in that battle took part in hostilities on the Soviet–German front until spring 1945, some of them became citizens of the Third Reich. The Soviet troops captured about 400 Spanish volunteers altogether, a hundred of them died. Others could only come back to Spain in 1954.