By the time he died in 2012 at the age of 97, Santiago Carrillo had long since become a pillar of his country's political establishment and something of a national treasure. This unexpected coda to an implausibly long life, spent mainly as a Stalinist apparatchik, was wholly due to his statesmanship during the brief but vital period between 1976 and 1981 when Spain emerged from the 36-year dictatorship of General Franco and became a modern European democracy.
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