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When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, symbolically ending the Cold War, few imagined that the resulting shockwaves that toppled the Soviet Union would also reach a perpetually dark and quiet microfilm reading room on the third floor of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. But this is what occurred. The disintegration of the Communist order in Russia loosened rigid Soviet control of state archives and made available to Western researchers material which had been inaccessible for the length of the Cold War. This included tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War—foreign volunteers, including roughly 1,600 Canadians, who had been recruited and sent to Spain by the Communist International to fight a fascist rebellion lead by General Francisco Franco. ...In 1993 and 1994, George Bolotenko, an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, visited the Centre for the Preservation and Study of Records of Contemporary History in Moscow, also known as the Comintern Archives, to purchase microfilmed copies of some 10,000 pages of documents on Canadians in the International Brigades. Although the impact of this material on historical scholarship has thus far been light, it has the potential to irrevocably change scholarship on Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. --Author's introduction