BNRU's Hispanic Scholars Attend Moscow Conference

The conference was sponsored by the Association of Russian Diplomats, the Council of Veterans of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Spanish Association of Republican Pilots (ADAR), and the Cervantes Institute. It is considered the most comprehensive academic event on recently unearthed history of Soviet-Spanish relations.

The conference was attended by luminaries including José Ignacio Carbajal Gárate, the Spanish Ambassador to Russia, Dr Alexander Chubaryan, Scientific Director at IWHRAS, Dr Abel Antolín Murcia Soriano, Director of the Cervantes Institute in Moscow, Dr Anatoly Torkunov, Rector of MSIIR, and Igor Halevinsky, Chairman of the Association of Russian Diplomats. Our own Dr Svetlana Krupskaya, Dr Marina Orekhova, Dr Alexander Pchelinov-Obrazumov, and Dr Olga Timoshkova were also delegates.

The conference was informed about the current status of archives with information about Spain in the period in question. 'The Civil War in Spain in the Russian Archives' was moderated by BNRU Professor Vera Malay. Her paper on 'The USSR in the Civil War: New Finds in the Foreign Affairs Archive of the Russian Federation', aroused a great deal of interest, as did Dr Nikolai Fomichev's paper 'How the British Press Reported Aid to the Republicans from 1936-1939'. These papers will be published in the Russian Academy of Science Conference Journal.
As well as academic presentations, visitors were able to meet descendants of the participants of the war and visit exhibitions of archive documents pertaining to the period. This forum is significant of the potential for academic cooperation to eliminate the dark corners of our shared history, and promote future healthy relations between Russia and Spain.