Thanks for taking the time to read through the thread.
I'll join the choir of people complaining that the post-war Republican tree is super boring and short. Even though they historically lost and we can't know for sure what a democratic republican Spain would have done after the war, you could probably fairly extrapolate from the pre-war left-Republican government to see what kinds of programs they'd try to carry out (that they had to put on hold for the war or that CEDA tanked and never got back on track) if it was just a question of lack of ideas. I'd also love for the wartime Spanish Prime Ministers to get representation as, as stated earlier, Azana was sort of a non-entity figurehead.
Also since someone brought up the POUM path, I'll again question their portrayal in the tree and its events as militantly anti-Trotskyist. Especially the last focus they get "Against Trotskyism and Stalinism" which in a conversation about the effects of focuses being lacking or wrong is fair game imo. I know this is just a fun fantasy focus as a reward for winning but even still, it is very weird to me.
POUM never held Trotsky as a figure in any way analogous to Stalin. Nobody in POUM called for the destruction or opposition to Trotskyism as a tendency - Nin himself was still a believer in Permanent Revolution and the classification of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state down to the day he 'disappeared'. POUM even publicly invited Trotsky to come to Barcelona in '36 (now there's a crazy alt-history if you want it); incidentally Trotsky was interested but neither the Catalan government or anarchists had the power to give him a Visa and both pledged to block this from happening in any event. They mainly just disagreed on the tactics you could/should adopt to fight stalinism, whether it was okay to join the Popular Front government, and whether or not Trotsky was being too dogmatic and rigid in how he attempted to apply lessons from the USSR to Spain.
Just my two cents.
Well said. I brought up these exact concerns myself in the developer diary on Spain back when it was revealed in September.
To be exact, POUM was formed as a merger of Spanish Trotskyists and 'Bukharinites', members of the former International Communist Opposition(Bukharin indeed had his own pseudo 4th International equivalent). For most of his period in opposition to the Soviet government, Stalin was actually not Trotsky's arch-enemy. Rather, he saw Bukharin as the most dangerous and counter-revolutionary figure in the Soviet government. He only retroactively revised this assessment after the Great Purge(which is after the game start, it should be mentioned).
The reason is that Bukharin(leader of the former Right Opposition) opposed forced collectivization and crash industrialization. History has ended up vindicating Bukharin's position that this would be disastrous, as indeed it was; but in Trotsky's eyes this was basically tantamount to liquidating the revolution and paving the way to the restoration of capitalism. Outside of this issue of Soviet domestic policy, most Trotskyists and Bukharinists held broadly similar political views internationally, so the regroupment of Spanish Trotskyists and Bukharinists should not be seen as particularly surprising. To them, the question of forced collectivization in the Soviet Union(which was already a fait accompli) was simply not worth splitting over if they broadly agreed in terms of political program.
They also disagreed with Trotsky on the Popular Front, which is pretty essential to the way things unfolded historically. Trotsky's position was that in joining the Popular Front, communists would be surrendering their political program to the "bourgeois" forces dominating the Popular Front, and would essentially be held hostage to it. As the May events were to prove, Trotsky was largely correct in predicting that the Popular Front would be disastrous to the independent communists.
It's also super puzzling to me as to why Andres Nin wasn't chosen as the leader of POUM in-game. I had never heard of Julian Gorkin until I saw his name in this game. Nin was the founder of POUM, a former secretary to Trotsky, and significant enough to have been selected as a minister for the regional Catalan government after the Civil War began.
I have a degree in history, and studying the minutiae of Soviet and Soviet related history is my particular hobby horse. I relish in talking about esoteric historical subjects like this.
Unfortunately, at this juncture it's far too late for any substantive changes like a revision of the POUM path or for the addition of Caballero, Negrin, and Prieto as leader options for Republican Spain. I wish that wasn't the case, but at this point the most we can realistically hope for is some more substantive changes to the balance in civil war recovery, factory bonuses, consumer goods bonuses, etc. This is the main barrier to actually fun gameplay; the rest, as fascinating as it is, is really just kind of fluff as far as the game is concerned.
