Stanley G. Payne

Who is Stanley G. Payne?

Stanley George Payne is a historian of modern Spain and European Fascism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He retired from full-time teaching in 2004 and is currently Professor Emeritus at its Department of History. Payne is one of the most famous modern theorists of fascism. He is a specialist in Spanish fascism and he has also produced comparative analyses of Western European fascism. Payne is known for his typological description of fascism. He asserts that there were some specific ways in which National Socialism paralleled Russian communism to a much greater degree than Fascism was capable of doing. Payne does not propound a theory of "red fascism" or the notion that communism and nazism have been essentially the same thing. He states that Hitlerian National Socialism more nearly paralleled Russian communism than has any other noncommunist system.

In the 1960s, his books were published in Spanish by Éditions Ruedo ibérico, a publishing company set up by Spanish exiles in Paris, France, to publish works forbidden in Spain by the Spanish government at the time. His position regarding the Spanish Civil War has been that of shedding light on the conflict's origin and addressing its related myths. One of his more famous books is Spanish Civil War, The Soviet Union and Communism, which analyzes Joseph Stalin and the Soviet government's intervention in Spain. He also wrote The Franco Regime, The Spanish Civil War and A History of Fascism 1914-1945.