Antony Beevor covers the Iberian tragedy in The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
(C) 2006 Penguin Books In 1976, only a few months after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a young ex-British Army officer named Antony Beevor began working on a book titled The Spanish Civil War , the very conflict which had ended with Franco's Nationalist faction as the victors after nearly three years of vicious fighting with the vanquished "reds" of the Spanish Republic. Beevor's book was published in 1982, but because it was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many important aspects of the Soviets' "internationalist" support of the Spanish Republic were not covered in depth, making The Spanish Civil War 's first edition worthy of the term "a work in progress" even if the author didn't realize it at the time. By the turn of the 21st Century, however, the Russians began granting access to the vast archives to scholars, researchers and authors from the once-feared West, and Beevor is one of