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Elsewhere he has insisted: With regard to the 1930s, he has written that Gina Herrmann, in her 2010 study of Spanish communists ' memoirs, claimed that " of the many myths that Western Communists lived by, perhaps the most abiding is that of Communist anti-Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s — one that was consolidated in Spain's Civil War of 1936 – 1939.
" However, the profound fascist / anti-fascist schism of the period described by Hobsbawm was real enough, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes: Nevertheless, Snyder also claimed that " The Spanish Civil War revealed that Stalin was determined, despite the Popular Front rhetoric of pluralism, to eliminate opposition to his version of socialism ", and that his determination was knowable and known even contemporaneously ( Snyder cites George Orwell's analysis of, and dismay at, communist actions in Spain ).
On the communist role in Spain, Hobsbawm writes simply that " its pros and cons continue to be discussed in the political and historical literature ", and refers to Orwell, not by his literary name, but as " an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair ".
He also claimed that the demise of the USSR was " traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere ", a statement that led journalist Francis Wheen to retort: " Speak for yourself, comrade.
I, like many other socialists, greeted the fall of the Soviet model with unqualified rejoicing ; and I don't doubt that Karl Marx would have been celebrating.
His favourite motto, de omnibus disputandum (' everything should be questioned '), was not one that had any currency in the realm of ' actually existing socialism '— a hideous hybrid of mendacity, thuggery and incompetence.

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