SPANISH GOLD

In autumn 1936, as civil war raged across Spain, the official Republican government took an unprecedented step: it transferred the lion's share of the country’s gold reserves to the friendly Soviet Union. Eighty years have passed since then, and all this time, the documents containing the facts about the Spanish gold reserve have been stowed away in the Soviet archives, marked ‘classified’, while rumours throughout Europe suggested that the Spanish gold placed in the secret vaults of the Kremlin was soon thereafter unscrupulously appropriated by Stalin’s ‘henchmen’. Such rumours discrediting the Soviets were beneficial to the dictator Franco, who ruled Spain for decades. Franco knew full well what had actually happened to the Spanish gold. After all, that is what paid for all the weapons and military equipment with which the Soviet Union supplied the Spanish opposition...