Red Terror (Spain) on 25 July, feast day of St James, patron saint of Spain. August saw a further 2,077 clerical victims. After just two months of civil war, 3400 priests, monks and nuns had been murdered. According to recent research, some of the Republican death squads were heavily staffed by members of the Soviet Union's secret police, the NKVD. According to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain
The Patron Saint of Butterflies a Golden Sower Award Nominee and a Grand Canyon Reader Award Nominee. In 2011, "The Patron Saint of Butterflies" was banned from a school in Minnesota. The effect of which was to increase the popularity and visibility of the novel. The story is a fictionalized account of the little-known religious commune run by Herbert T.(Thomas) Schwartz (1903-1980) at Mount Hope in New York in the mid-20th century. (Unlike the Mount Blessing community, the Mount Hope religious commune was quite mobile. Schwartz started the community by gathering laypeople around himself in Greenwich Village. The community was housed in Ridgewood, Queens, New