Pedro Fernández Barbadillo (Bilbao, 1965) holds a PhD in Public Law from the Universidad San Pablo CEU and a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the newspaper El País. He works as a journalist for several Spanish media such as libertaddigital.com and gaceta.es. He was director of the news services of 7NN channel (2022-2023). He has written two humorous books about Basque nationalism and the socialist Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero, another about Spain under Franco’s regime (Eternamente Franco), a selection of characters and episodes of the Spanish Golden Age (Eso no estaba en mi libro de historia del Imperio español) and a history of the United States through its presidents, its Constitution and its electoral system (Los césares del imperio americano). He coordinated the book edited in 2020 by the ECR group of the European Parliament entitled Historical Memory: threat to peace in Europe.

Sofía Casanova was born in 1861 in La Coruña. Her father, Vicente Pérez Eguía, died in a shipwreck in 1865, and in 1876 her widowed mother, Rosa Casanova, moved to Madrid with her parents and their three children.
In the capital, Sofia attended the conservatory, learned languages, read widely and began to write poetry and short stories. In 1886, she met Wicenty Lutoslawsky. They married in 1887 and settled on the family estate in Russian Poland.
Her relationship with her husband was bad, though not with his family. Sophia had four daughters (one of whom died young) and performed the feat of learning Polish. Her first novel, Doctor Wolski, was published in Spain in 1894. In 1899 they moved to Krakow, because Wicenty was hired as a university professor.
In 1905, she returned to Spain alone and began publishing in the Madrid and Galician press. In 1908, was published a translation by her of Quo vadis?. She used to travel once a year to Poland to join her three daughters. There he was surprised by the outbreak of the Great War.
In December 1914 he published a long letter about the war in Poland addressed to the Spaniards. Then, Torcuato Luca de Tena proposed him to be a correspondent for ABC. His collaboration with this newspaper lasted until June 1944, when his last article was published.
In August 1915, she was evacuated. First to Moscow and then to Petrograd, Casanova wrote articles in which she recounted the decadence of the tsarist regime and the popular unrest; she even tried to interview the monk Rasputin.
In her chronicles she recounts his walks through revolutionary Petrograd: the shootings, the lynchings, the breakdown of public order, the hunger and the cold… She expected the triumph of the Reds because of their willpower: “The bolsewiks have taken to the streets confident of their strength and determined to win or die”. He interviewed Leon Trotsky, Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Finally, he was able to return to Warsaw and from there to Spain.
She found a positive point in the war: the irruption of women in society. Sofía called those opposed to the rise of women “staunch masculinists” and “devotees of Mohammed”.
In 1920, she returned to Poland, where the Poles were fighting for their independence against the Bolsheviks. Until 1930, she lived his most glorious years: she traveled six times to Spain, published hundreds of articles in Spanish, Argentine and Cuban newspapers, wrote more books, etc.
Casanova’s books, such as The Bolshevist Revolution. Diary of an eyewitness (1920) and At the Court of the Czars: the beginning and the end of an empire (1924) refute the excuse of the progressives that the Western intellectuals who supported the communists were unaware of the atrocities they were committing in Russia.
In 1938, during the civil war, Sofía made her last visit to Spain. She went to La Coruña, where her brother lived, and on her return trip General Franco received her in Burgos.
The following year, the fourth war of her life broke out: the Great War, the Polish War of Independence, the Spanish War and the Second World War. With part of her family, she took refuge in the countryside. Casanova had no access to the Spanish press, but he wrote letters that were published in 1945 in a book entitled El martirio de Polonia (The Martyrdom of Poland).
Casanova told the soldiers of the Blue Division who visited her about the persecution of Poles and Jews by the Germans. She was offered a transfer to Spain, but refused to leave her family. Her last years, under the communist regime, were spent at her daughter Halita’s home in Poznan. She died in January 1958 and her remains are still in Poland.
Her greatest merit: to have warned the Spaniards of the danger that the Bolsheviks constituted for civilization.