I grew up in Hackney, in the East End of London, where increasingly there was a presence of Mosley and the Blackshirts - but, even before then, some of the history of that time was passing by my front door.

This was a period of mass unemployment, of out-of-work miners from South Wales singing in the streets and begging. We were quite near Victoria Park, which was like a miniature Hyde Park in that Hyde Park had its Speaker's Corner, and in Victoria Park every Sunday there were similar groups of political people standing up and speaking. As a kid, I would stand there by the bandstand and listen to them. I'd got a scholarship at that time - I hadn't passed my 11+, but in the end I'd got to a secondary School in the east of London, at a place called George Green's. This was in the heart of Poplar, and the parents of most of the kids there were working in the docks or in the shipyards or ship-repair yards in one way or another. It was called George Green's because it was one of the ship-repair companies in the building there. The teachers at the school were also very left-wing in their politics, although they weren't signed-up members of the Communist Party or even of the Labour Party.

During the General Strike in 1926, Victoria Park was closed down and taken over by the military. The army came in with light tanks that were sent down in order to defend the docks against the strikers - so they said. But it was totally unnecessary.

In about 1934 I won another scholarship from my secondary school in London and went to University College, London, in Gower Street. I was just eighteen, and, like many people of my age at that time, I wasn't too certain what I wanted to study, but I decided to go in generally for history; but I got rather fed up with that and switched to, of all things, Egyptology.

I'd only been abroad once, when I went to Paris a couple of years before, but I had a passport. I got in contact with the Communist Party and this chap who was organising it gave me f 10 to buy a ticket to Paris, and an address to go to when I got there. So I kitted myself out - didn't say a word to my parents about this, just to my younger brother who was sworn to secrecy - and off I went across the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe. In those days when you crossed the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe the train was rolled onto the ferry.

I went to Paris, met the contact there and hung around a bit. At that time in France there was a very strong movement in support of the Spanish Republic - the French, too, had formed their own 'Popular Front, and had an election in which the Popular Front won a majority with the Socialists and the Communists and part of the Radical Party, as it was called at the time.

I didn't have more than about three weeks' training near Albacete. That was in early November 1936, when we were told that we were going to Madrid. We were taken down in trucks to Albacete, put on trains there and went up to the front with the French Battalion. We didn't see really anything of Madrid right away, we arrived there during the night. We actually went into action on 6 or 7 November 1936. By the time we got out it was light and we marched through the streets. People gathered around and at first thought we were Russians, but they soon realized that we were not. There was a tremendous reception because the word went round. While we were getting out of the trains and forming up, the crowd gathered and cheered us. We didn't realize immediately how serious the military situation was and how close to Madrid the fascists had got. We were taken into University City, that was the first encounter.

They decided to gather all the British volunteers who were then at Albacete in various stages of their training and form a company - that's 120-130 men. We were under the command of an Irish comrade who was later killed - a wonderful chap. Of the volunteers that came from the British Isles, a considerable number were Irish. Some of them had got some military experience in the fighting against the British armed forces during 1922 and that period of very stormy relations between Great Britain and the newly formed Irish Republic, and many of them had been in the IRA. If you look through the casualty list of that first fight - the battle for Lopera on the Cordoba Front, you will see, one after another, the names of Irish comrades who fell there.

As we advanced we came under very heavy fire and had to keep our heads down. I did my best, but, not far from me, John Cornford and Ralph Fox were killed. There were heavy casualties and I was wounded. I didn't know at the time where I'd been wounded - in which part of my body - except that when I tried to get up l couldn't. I just fell down - there was something wrong with my legs. As the day progressed, our people had to retreat and I was lying there unable to move - and there was no possibility of a stretcher-bearer coming for me. We were badly equipped, even with the Russian weapons, but particularly in respect of the medical equipment, which was very, very sparse. By that time we had a few doctors and nurses who had come as volunteers to Spain, but the medical equipment was very scarce. Interestingly, a very important part of the mass movement of support for the Spanish Republic throughout Great Britain focused specially on medical aid, including fully fitted - out ambulances and other medical equipment. But at the battle for Cordoba it was very difficult, and while I was lying there I always remember hearing them calling out, in Spanish, for stretcher-bearers to come. I lay there that night in what had become no man's land, because our people had had to withdraw.

It was a long time later that I was told that people started looking for me, and Jock Cunningham, who'd been with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and had become a great friend of mine during the Battle of Madrid, said he was going out and looking for me.

Apparently they said, "It's no use, Jock, he's a dead 'un, a goner, and if you go out you'll be a goner too."

lock, to his credit, said he was going anyway. He looked around and found me - then literally dragged me in, because he couldn't find a stretcher. I had got a bullet in my left leg, and also in in my back - because I had an early encounter with what in the Second World War came to be called "friendly fire".

It was at that time we met up with the rest of the British volunteers who had arrived there by one means or another - there were just over thirty of us. We immediately ran into the problem - a core problem for the International Brigades - which was, quite simply, the language. Here you had people from different countries, different nationalities speaking their own languages, and as we British were one of the smallest groups, we were put into a French battalion and training began.

Among this first group were a number of students, paticularly from Cambridge: John Cornford (who was later killed on the Cordoba Front, where I was wounded) and Bernard Knox, who later became a professor of ancient Creek history in the USA. There were a number of people who had been in the British Army, too. This was not a conscript army - there was no conscription or military service in Britain at the time - instead, these were mostly from Scottish regiments, such as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. One of these was a man called Jock Cunningham, who became a very good friend of mine - in fact, he saved my life during the battle for Cordoba after I was wounded - and there were a couple of others from the Black Watch, who certainly knew the way the British army worked.

We underwent more training at Andujar, then went on trucks to the front. There was a very bitter battle at a town called Lopera and, personally, I was not in very good shape although I had survived Madrid, but we advanced there, as ordered.

They decided to gather all the British volunteers who were then at Albacete in various stages of their training and form a company - that's 120-130 men. We were under the command of an Irish comrade who was later killed - a wonderful chap. Of the volunteers that came from the British Isles, a considerable number were Irish. Some of them had got some military experience in the fighting against the British armed forces during 1922 and that period of very stormy relations between Great Britain and the newly formed Irish Republic, and many of them had been in the IRA. If you look through the casualty list of that first fight - the battle for Lopera on the Cordoba Front, you will see, one after another, the names of Irish comrades who fell there.

As we advanced we came under very heavy fire and had to keep- our heads down. I did my best, but, not far from me, John Cornford and Ralph Fox were killed. There were heavy casualties and I was wounded. I didn't know at the time where I'd been wounded - in which part of my body - except that when I tried to get up I couldn't. I just fell down - there was something wrong with my legs. As the day progressed, our people had to retreat and I was lying there unable to move - and there was no possibility of a stretcher-bearer coming for me. We were badly equipped, even with the Russian weapons, but particularly in respect of the medical equipment, which was very, very sparse. By that time we had a few doctors and nurses who had come as volunteers to Spain, but the medical equipment was very scarce. Interestingly, a very important part of the mass movement of support for the Spanish Republic throughout Great Britain focused specially on medical aid, including fully fitted-out ambulances and other medical equipment. But at the battle for Cordoba it was very difficult, and while I was lying there I always remember hearing them calling out, in Spanish, for stretcher-bearers to come. I lay there that night in what had become no man's land, because our people had had to withdraw.

It was a long time later that I was told that people started looking for me, and lock Cunningham, who'd been with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and had become a great friend of mine during the Battle of Madrid, said he was going out and looking for me.

Apparently they said, "ft's no use, lock, he's a dead 'un, a goner, and if you go out you'll be a goner too."

Jock, to his credit, said he was going anyway. He looked around and found me - then literally dragged me in, because he couldn't find a stretcher. I had got a bullet in my left leg, and also in my back - because I had an early encounter with what in the Second World War came to be called 'friendly fire'. Our French comrades, who were on our right flank to support our advance, were sending over crossfire. We had apparently advanced too quickly and when they saw us they opened fire.

I was dragged by lock and finally dropped on a stretcher and taken clear of where the fighting was still going on. Then we discovered another aspect of the shortages we'd been labouring under. First, there was the difficulty of finding a stretcher and then an ambulance or some way of getting the wounded clear of the fighting. I was put into an agricultural cart and, by God, it stank to high heaven - you could tell what it had been used for before. I finally got clear of the lines and we wounded were put into trucks - not ambulances - there was no such thing as an ambulance there. The walking wounded were sitting as best they could in the truck, stretchers were put where they could be fitted in and we were driven to a place, part of which is now a large town called Linares.

We were unloaded from these trucks at what we were told was a hospital. During the night large numbers of the town's population kept coming in, and, as we were being unloaded from the trucks, they were clapping and cheering us. But that was nothing compared to what happened the following morning. When it got light, the hospital was absolutely stormed by people coming up from the town. These people had brought everything they could think of - ordinary things like soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste and packets of pastries and bottles of wine. Everybody wanted to shake our hands and say thank you.

We could have won if the democracies, particularly the British government, had allowed the legally elected government of Spain to purchase arms internationally, as was the right of any government to do so, but they were prevented. The French tried to send arms but the British government bullied them. Through Chamberlain and Anthony Eden they made it clear that if the French became involved in any war as a result of supplying arms to Spain, the British government would not come to their assistance.

Spain has remained always in our minds and in our hearts. If the Republican government had been given its rights by international law to buy arms on the market we wouldn't have lost the war. The experience in Spain didn't change me politically. The change came for me when I was in the Soviet Union, with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) and Hungary (1956).

International Brigade veteran Sam Lesser made a huge contribution to the Daily Worker and Morning Star over nearly half a century writing under the name of Sam Russell.

One of the last surviving British fighters in the war against fascism in Spain, he became chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust.

He made an emotional anti-fascist speech at the Spanish embassy in London in 2009 at a ceremony granting the eight last surviving British and Irish volunteers Spanish citizenship and passport. Some members of the embassy staff were reduced to tears as Lesser, speaking in fluent Spanish, delivered a searing attack on racism and fascism linking past struggles to the fight against the rise of the BNP today.

Along with a whole generation of Jewish anti-fascists, Lesser started his life in the Communist Party in 1935 as an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin.

In the 1970s he became increasingly critical of the Soviet model of socialism and by the 1990s he had turned into a fervent admirer of Tony Blair seeing him as a great leader of a supposed new leap forward for social democracy.

He also supported the destructive leadership faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain which was hell-bent on attacking the Morning Star in the mid-1980s. He backed the short-lived Democratic Left project which quickly morphed into a feeble think tank....

Lesser struck up a friendship with Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who had defected to Moscow from their top Establishment jobs. He attended jolly social evenings at Burgess's flat where he was entertained by the spy's gay Russian lover playing the balalaika. The gay lifestyle was fully supported by the KGB even though homosexuality was illegal in the Soviet Union. Lesser displeased the Soviet authorities by writing a piece for the Daily Worker revealing that Melinda Maclean had always known about her husband's spying activities.

During the tragic events in Hungary in 1956 Lesser was sent from Moscow to report on the situation following the Soviet military intervention and the bloody street fighting. He entered Budapest in a Soviet armoured car after fellow Daily Worker reporter Peter Fryer had rebelled against the paper's line and hailed a Hungarian "people's revolution" before taking refuge in the British embassy.

His mother thought he was heading to Egypt for an archaeological dig, but instead Sam Russell was on his way to Spain as one of the earliest British volunteers to fight fascism. Russell first saw action at the Madrid university campus in November 1936, when only a few of his unit survived. Despite a shrapnel head wound, he joined a new unit of the International Brigades, which was rushed south to the Córdoba front, where he was wounded again and was unable to resume fighting. His war did not end, however. Russell became a radio reporter for the Republicans and then the correspondent in Spain for the British communist paper the Daily Worker. Thus began his career as a prominent communist journalist...

In 1943, he had married Nell Jones, 20 years his senior and a Daily Worker switchboard operator. Nevertheless, he soon renewed his acquaintance with Margaret Powell, whom he had first met in Barcelona as a volunteer nurse working at the front. He divorced Nell in 1950 and married Margaret the same year.

As the paper's diplomatic correspondent, Russell covered "show" trials in central and eastern Europe, which he accepted as genuine. He began to have doubts later, and they hardened after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he, like the British party, opposed. He was Moscow correspondent from 1955 to 1959, and those years – during which he became a close friend of Donald Maclean, the spy who left Britain in 1951 and who was also a communist critical of the Soviet system – only added to his disenchantment. Russell found his attempts to report the experience of everyday life an irritant both to the Soviet authorities and his editor in London. The Soviet Communist party even asked for Russell to be withdrawn, but the British Communist party refused.