The Spanish Civil War (17 page)

The second congress of the Comintern was duly held in Moscow. There were no socialist delegates, however, the only Spanish representative there being Angel Pestaña, director of the anarchist paper
Solidaridad Obrera,
who had been dispatched to Russia to make the same inquiry for the anarchists which de los Ríos and Anguiano were to make on behalf of the socialists. Pestaña was critical.
³
The socialists reached Russia shortly after Pestaña returned. They were accompanied by Julio Álvarez del Vayo, then a foreign correspondent accredited to Germany. As has been seen, de los Ríos was hostile, and proposed the annulment of the provisional entry into the Comintern; Anguiano supported entry, with conditions. An extraordinary conference of the socialist party was summoned for April to consider the question anew.
⁴
Several weeks of argument followed, in a highly-charged political atmosphere (Dato, the Premier, was shot by the anarchists on 8 March). Pablo Iglesias, now old,
conducted a vigorous campaign against the Comintern, and that tipped the balance; one old comrade from the eighties, García Quejido, took the other view. After long debates, the party finally voted by 8,808 to 6,025 against joining the Third International.
¹
The leaders of the
terceristas
(i.e., advocates of joining) broke away to form a second Spanish communist party, the Partido Comunista Obrero de España:
²
they included the young Dolores Ibarruri, ‘La Pasionaria’.

A further invitation to Moscow followed: this time to the first congress of the communist federation of trade unions, which became known as the ‘Profintern’—in effect, the trade-union section of the Comintern. The two small Spanish communist parties were asked to send a joint delegation, as was the CNT. The latter sent their new secretary-general, Andrés Nin, a young ex-socialist journalist; Joaquín Maurín, a schoolmaster from Lérida; Hilario Arlandis, a sculptor from Valencia; and Gaston Leval, a French anarchist.
³
Nin, a brilliant linguist, admired the Russian Revolution so much that he stayed in Moscow, while Maurín and Arlandis returned to Spain to try and persuade their anarchist friends to support Lenin. Leval alone remained an anarchist, being sceptical of what he saw. The two small Spanish communist parties of socialist ancestry, meantime, were merged with the help of various Comintern delegates—the first of many international communists who appeared in Spain between that date and 1939 to give guidance and, on occasion, punishment to the Spanish communist party.
⁴
These first delegates included Roy, the Indian, the famous revolutionary ‘Borodin’, Antonio Graziadei, an Italian intellectual, and Jules Humbert-Droz, one
of the founders of the Swiss communist party. Iglesias commiserated with Roy as a ‘victim of a new fanaticism’ when rejecting his arguments.
¹
Maurín and Arlandis associated themselves with the party, their base being in Barcelona. Nearly all the leaders were arrested after Primo de Rivera’s
pronunciamiento
in 1923. Others came forward: Oscar Pérez Solís, a mercurial ex-artillery officer, who had been a socialist;
²
José Bullejos, a post-office clerk in Bilbao, and his brother-in-law Gabriel León Trilla, a student son of a colonel: all shadowy semi-conspirators rather than political leaders, acting in the wings of the main Spanish labour movements. All of them usually left Spain when they left gaol.

Of these early communists, Julián Gorkin (born Julián Gómez), in both his origin and his later career, was characteristic.
³
Son of an illiterate carpenter who was a strong republican, Gorkin joined the socialist youth of Valencia but was bowled over by the news of the Russian Revolution. He became a communist in 1921, and founded the party in Valencia when still scarcely out of his teens. He went to France, was expelled by the French police and went ‘underground’, as a full-time employee of the Comintern, editing a Paris communist paper, and acting as the Comintern’s representative among Spanish exiles in those years. Gorkin abandoned the communist party partly because he discovered that he was being spied upon in Moscow by a girl from Tiflis in the pay of the Russian secret political police, the GPU; partly, because the Comintern, through its then chief representative in Paris, the Lithuanian August Guralsky, instructed him to plan the murder of General Primo de Rivera; and partly because he sided with Trotsky against Stalin in the late 1920s. He broke with the party in 1929 (and afterwards reappeared, along with many others of these early Spanish communists, as a leader of the new anti-Stalinist Marxist party, the POUM).
⁴

New difficulties arose over the question of the policy to be followed towards the Pact of San Sebastián and the municipal elections of 1931. Once again a programme of isolation from all other parties was decided upon, the ‘social fascists’ (that is, the socialists) and the ‘sterile’ anarchists being regarded as, if anything, more pernicious than the more obviously bourgeois groups. The only occasion, in fact, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera when there was collaboration between the communists and the other political opposition movements in Spain occurred when, in 1925, the Catalan nationalists and the anarchists tried unsuccessfully to make common cause with the communists over a possible Catalan rising. Colonel Maciá went to Moscow with the then communist secretary-general, José Bullejos, but the absence of urgency on the Russian side maddened ‘el avi’, while the Russians could not believe that a man as old as Maciá could achieve anything. Nothing came of the negotiations.
¹

The republic in 1931 thus found the communist party in poor morale after ten years of controversy. The party did not exist in Barcelona, and there were only fourteen members in Bilbao. The highest estimate for membership at that time is 3,000, the lowest (by the Comintern itself) 120.
²
Andrés Nin returned from Russia after nearly ten years, but he too had broken with communism over Stalin’s persecution of Trotsky. He founded a small new group of his own, Izquierda Comunista. His old ex-anarchist comrade Maurín (who had never seen eye-to-eye with the central leadership) was also ready to break with the communists. He formed a Marxist, anti-Stalinist splinter group, the Workers’ and Peasants’ party, BOC (Bloque Obrero y Campesino). Both Nin and Maurín were regarded as Trotskyist but that they never were: they were Marxists who disliked Stalin. But Trotsky criticized them from his exile in Norway. Their following remained small, but for the time being they prevented the communist party from finding members in Catalonia.
³

The party began its life in the open in outright opposition to the republic, in accordance with instructions received through a new Comintern delegation headed by Jules Humbert-Droz (a Swiss who had been for some years chief of the ‘Latin’ secretariat in the Comintern secretariat), and including ‘Pierre’, a Caucasian, another Swiss, Edgar Woog, and a Frenchman, Octave Rabaté. Jacques Duclos was also there. In May 1931, Bullejos went to Moscow to receive confirmation that the instructions were to ‘Prolong the crisis by all possible means, to try and prevent the firm establishment of the republican régime, to frustrate the possibilities of effective social revolution, and, where possible, create soviets’. Humbert-Droz wrote from Madrid to his wife that he and Woog wrote most of the articles in the communist press and that they all had very little to do: Woog did a lot of sight-seeing, while Rabaté rose at noon, read the newspapers on the terrace of a café, had an aperitif, lunched well, returned to the café for coffee, and passed the rest of the day in a cinema or in bars. ‘Our party’, he added, ‘sleeps with the deep and innocent dreams of childhood.’
¹
That seemed also to be the case when another committee of investigation arrived from Moscow, headed by Walter Stoecker, a German.

The succeeding months were ones of dispute but no success, and the secretary-general, José Bullejos, later wrote that, throughout, there was enmity between the party leaders and the Comintern delegates, who arrogated to themselves all decisions. The party polled 190,000 votes in the elections for the constituent Cortes in June 1931, but no deputy. Sanjurjo’s rising inspired a manifesto by those members of the secretariat who happened to be in Madrid—Bullejos, Astigarrabía (from the Basque provinces), and Etelvino Vega—which launched the slogan ‘Defence of the republic’. Subsequently, the Comintern representatives, on instructions from Moscow, repeated that the principal enemy was the ‘butcher government’ of Largo Caballero and Azaña, not the monarchists and their allies. Bullejos and the other Spanish leaders disagreed.
²
They left to discuss this matter in Moscow. All these leaders were expelled from the party and only returned to Spain after five months’ enforced stay in Russia.
³
The new directorate of the party were all young (La Pasionaria, the oldest, was thirty-seven in 1933), and all owed their
position to their uncritical support of the Moscow delegations in Spain. The new secretary-general, José Díaz, an ex-baker from Seville, and an ex-anarchist, was an honest and hard-working man of limited imagination. He was to be the director-general of the Spanish revolution, a man who always (however reluctantly) followed instructions from Moscow.
¹
Vicente Uribe, a metal worker, half-Castilian, half-Basque, who had been to Moscow, was the party theoretician and editor of
Mundo Obrero.
Antonio Mije, talkative, something of a demagogue, alive and feminine in appearance, the ‘union secretary’, came from Andalusia and was also an ex-anarchist. Jesús Hernández, the party’s propagandist, was an agitator
par excellence,
a fluent speaker who had been tirelessly active in street-fighting since his early teens when he had been known for an unsuccessful attempt on Prieto’s life.

The communists were regarded with more alarm than their numbers would have suggested as necessary. This was partly because of the quantity of communist propaganda and partly because of the party’s intimate relations with the Soviet Union. But it was also partly because most members of the Spanish upper class did not distinguish between one or other of the proletarian parties. The anarchists, after all, said that they were trying to achieve ‘libertarian communism’, and colonels in Burgos, like sherry exporters in the south, had no sensitivity for the nuances of revolutionary ideology.

The Comintern representative in Spain in the middle and late 1930s was an Argentinian of Italian origin, Vittorio Codovilla (known in Spain as ‘Medina’). He had spent his life hitherto organizing communist parties in South America. He was a fat man, bourgeois in manner and tastes. Jacques Doriot, when still the bright hope of the French communist party in the early twenties, remarked
à propos
of Codovilla’s enormous appetite: ‘Louis XIII liked having around him men who ate a lot. Codovilla will do well under Stalin.’
²
Later, a Bulgarian, ‘Stepanov’, came to assist Codovilla.
³
Given the youth and inexperience of the
Spanish communists, the importance of these two foreigners in the party’s deliberations was critical. It was Codovilla, for instance, who assured José Antonio Balbontín, a deputy who joined the party in the winter of 1933–4, that the communists would never make common cause with the socialists and republicans against ‘monarcho-clerical reaction’.
¹
That was in March 1934. Yet, from the summer of 1934 onwards, the policy of the Comintern was to establish a ‘Popular Front’ of all democratic parties, working-class and ‘bourgeois’ alike, to resist ‘fascism’. From then onwards, therefore, all communist parties, including the Spanish one, spoke of the need to preserve ‘parliamentary bourgeois democracy’, until it could be replaced by ‘proletarian democracy’.

At this time, with the shadows of war and fascism alike growing, the Soviet Union had a good reputation in Spain as elsewhere among Left and progressive people. The great Russian experiment did not yet seem to have betrayed its ideals. Thanks to an extraordinary programme of propaganda and unprecedented secrecy, the facts of agricultural collectivization were not known, and the persecution of Trotsky not understood. The communist party were to claim that they were responsible for the pact of the Popular Front which fought the Spanish general elections of February 1936. But it required little prompting for the socialists to adopt the salute with the clenched fist and bent arm (originated by the German communists), the red flag, the revolutionary phraseology, the calls to unite in the face of international fascism demanded throughout the world by communist parties. ‘Anti-fascism’ and ‘the Popular Front’ were becoming powerful myths, almost irresistible to those who both loved peace and liberty and were impatient with old parties.
²
Equally important on the Right were the myths of empire and national regeneration. The appearance in the Cortes elected in 1933 of a fascist and a communist was a portent and a warning.

The history of Spain during the two and a half years after the general elections of November 1933 was marked by disintegration. From time to time, one individual or another would attempt vainly to halt the terrible and, as it transpired, irreversible process. They lacked the energy, luck, self-confidence and perhaps the magnanimity necessary for success.

The government after the elections was a coalition of the Centre, led by radicals. Lerroux became, to his satisfaction, Prime Minister at last. Gil Robles and the CEDA undertook to support him in the Cortes, but did not join the administration itself. This Catholic party stood—ominously, as it seemed—in the wings, waiting for the moment when Gil Robles should give the word to take power. The transformation, meanwhile, of Lerroux, the anti-clerical, into an ally of the Catholic party was too much for his lieutenant, Martínez Barrio, who, after a short period as minister of the interior, passed into opposition at the head of his own group, renamed the Republican Union party.
¹
Actually, Lerroux had voted for the previous government’s anti-clerical legislation with reluctance. He was already a man of the Right, more than of the Centre. His minister of public works was Rafael Guerra del Río, an intemperate leader of ‘Young Barbarians’ in 1909; he now seemed a mere
machine politician. One added source of confusion was the distrust felt for both Lerroux and Gil Robles by President Alcalá Zamora, who intrigued against the former, and tried to avoid calling the latter to form a government. Alcalá distrusted Lerroux for his corruption, and Gil Robles as a secret monarchist. In the circumstances, he preferred Lerroux and, in fact, never called on Gil Robles: a weakening of the democratic process, since the Catholic leader was as prepared to work in a constitutional democracy as much as the socialists were.

Lerroux’s first difficulties derived from yet another series of anarchist challenges. They attacked isolated civil guard posts and derailed the Barcelona-Seville express, killing nineteen people. In Madrid, there was a long telephone strike. In both Valencia and Saragossa there were general strikes lasting for weeks. That at Saragossa, designed, to begin with, to free prisoners taken by the government the previous year, lasted indeed for fifty-seven days. The CNT never issued strike pay, but the workers’ resilience astonished the country. The anarchist leaders, as usual, for a time believed that they were in the anteroom of the millennium; and their
pistolero
friends heightened the drama by sporadic shooting. The strikers decided at one point to send their wives and children away to Barcelona by rail. The civil guard fired on the train, and prevented it from reaching its destination. The evacuees later went by caravan. This unrest was partly the consequence of a new and ‘suicidal egoism’ of employers who celebrated, throughout Spain, the Right’s victory at the polls by attempting to lower wages, raise rents, and enforce evictions.
¹
On 8 December, a revolutionary committee, led by Buenaventura Durruti, was installed at Saragossa. This fought for several days against the civil police, reinforced by the army, backed by tanks. Durruti became a national legend. In numerous places in Aragon and Catalonia, ‘libertarian communism’ was briefly established. Fighting occurred in many places, causing 87 dead, many wounded, and 700 imprisoned.
²
It was hard to accept that the country was at peace. Not surprisingly, militancy spread more and more
through the UGT, especially its largest, but least well led, section, the agrarian FNTT. Their members were hit by falling wages, themselves the consequence of right-wing chairmen having been appointed by the radical minister of labour, José Estadella, to Largo’s arbitration boards. The recovery of the agrarian upper class was everywhere complemented by a more radical attitude on the part of the workers, supported by a more embittered Largo Caballero. Prieto, a moderate socialist if ever there was one, did not discourage this, to his everlasting regret. Besteiro did: he criticized the ‘anti-governmentalism’ in 1934 of his colleagues as much as he had done their ‘pro-governmentalism’ in 1931, to no avail.

In the new year of 1934, the government introduced a series of measures designed to halt the reforms of their predecessors. The substitution of lay for religious schools was indefinitely postponed. The Jesuits were shortly to be found teaching again.
¹
By a clever debating speech, Gil Robles secured that priests would be treated as if they were civil servants on pensions and they began to be paid two-thirds of their salary of 1931. Though the Agrarian Law remained on the statute book, its application was in many places tacitly abandoned. An amnesty was eventually also granted to political prisoners—including General Sanjurjo and all those imprisoned at the time of the rising in 1932. This clemency merely stimulated the old plotters to new schemes.

By this time, many small
pueblos
seemed to have been utterly divided by politics. In places which still had socialist or left-wing councils, efforts were being made to impose a new cultural order, the exact reverse of its predecessor in that religious ideas had given way to atheism, not just agnosticism; old festivals were giving way to celebrations of the revolutionary tradition—The First of May, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution or the death of Galán and García Hernández. Women, whom old Spain had traditionally kept at home behind high windows, came out into the streets wearing party colours, ‘forming groups like men, singing, shouting and dancing in great gangs to celebrate the name of Liberty’.
²
Battles took place now over working conditions as well as over the church. For example, in one village in
Aragon, a café had been made into a labour exchange. Everyone had to seek work through the officials in the café. Nobody liked that and those of the Right disobeyed, as did all workers who had any old arrangement to work for a particular farmer. The Left called a general strike: the men of the Right went on working, and were picketed. Fighting began and a death occurred. Threats, taunts, and demonstrations then became part and parcel of the life in the village. Everyone began to join one group or another. The uncommitted sought ideologies, while leaders on both sides schemed to make politics out of all entertainments.

People on the Right assumed automatically that Azaña’s, and the socialists’, defeat meant a victory for old Spain. Certainly, whether the government liked it or not, all over Spain the old masters of the economy used what they believed to be their opportunity to restore their position; and, as certainly, the socialist party responded by despairing of, even denouncing, the republic. In a speech in his constituency of Granada, even Fernando de los Ríos said as much. From that time on,
El Socialista
regularly argued that the republic was as bad as the monarchy had been and that, in this ‘bourgeois republic’, there was no place for the proletariat. Azaña tried to point out to the socialists the danger of this attitude. If the socialists really tried to bring ‘the revolution’, he said, they would fail. De los Ríos, to whom he spoke, said that ‘the masses dominated the leaders’. Azaña replied, ‘the feelings of the masses can be changed’. He pointed out that, to prepare an insurrection, as the socialists seemed to be doing, was to invite the army to reenter politics: ‘The army would be delighted to launch a repression against the workers’. De los Ríos passed on Azaña’s remarks to Largo who, however, brushed them aside and, three weeks later, the extremist ‘Caballerista’ view triumphed in the national committee of the Spanish socialist party resulting in the resignation of moderates such as Besteiro, Saborit and Trifón Gómez. A ‘pre-revolutionary’ commission was then formed, and, on 31 January, Largo told the Madrid socialist party that he desired to reaffirm his belief in the necessity of preparing a proletarian rising.
¹
It was a fatal error of judgement.

From that time onwards, the socialists began to arrange military training for their youth, and thus joined the insurrectionary Right, as well as the minuscule groups on the edges of Spanish politics such as the Falange and the communists, in the character of their challenge to the republic. They became intoxicated by the prospect of revolution.

The Carlists had been active in this way for months. In Navarre, their red berets (
boinas rojas
) were weekly seen in the market-places. A dashing colonel, Enrique Varela, who had twice won Spain’s highest medal for gallantry in Morocco, was procured to train these new
requetés
—as the levies had been named in the Carlist Wars, from a line of the marching song of their most ferocious battalion. Varela (whom the Carlist leaders Fal Conde and Rodezno had met in gaol after the 1932 rising) travelled about the Pyrenean villages dressed as a priest, known as ‘
Tío Pepe
’ (Uncle Pepe), acting as a missionary of war. When officially promoted a general, he was replaced by Colonel Rada.
¹
The Carlist communion claimed no less than 700,000 members, in 540 sections, in early 1934 and, though that surely was an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the movement was growing fast, as a result of the quickening political awareness of the Catholic petty bourgeoisie in western Andalusia, Navarre, Valencia and parts of Catalonia.
²

On 31 March 1934, Antonio Goicoechea, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, together with two Carlists (Rafael Olazábal and Antonio Lizarza) and General Barrera (the unsuccessful coordinator of the plot of 1932), visited Mussolini. The Spaniards gave an impression of disaccord as to their aims. Mussolini, however, brushed this aside by saying that all that was necessary was that the movement should be ‘monarchist and of a corporative and representative’ character. He promised 1½ million pesetas, 20,000 rifles, 200 machine-guns, and 20,000 grenades to the Spanish rebels, and agreed to send more when
the rising started. The money was paid the next day.
¹
Thereafter, the
requetés
developed fast, committees being formed to deal with, for example, recruitment of officers, propaganda, arms purchase, and strategy.
²
There had been several previous tentative expeditions by monarchist or other plotters to Italy; and now, with the arrival there of ex-King Alfonso, Rome became a new focus of conspiracy against the republic. On the other hand, with the appointment of the energetic Fal Conde as ‘royal secretary-general’ of the Carlists in May 1934, that movement differentiated itself sharply from the orthodox monarchists, of whom they spoke as the ‘riff-raff of the Alfonsine monarchy which has adopted the name of Renovación Española, as if we did not know that the “renovation” with which they entice us is the return of a régime of iniquity’. Rodezno, Fal Conde’s predecessor, the movement’s leader in the Cortes, continued to believe in a broader movement.
³

Four days after the meeting in Rome, Lerroux resigned in protest against the vacillation of the President, Alcalá Zamora, in giving his signature to the law pardoning Sanjurjo and the plotters of 1932. The new Prime Minister, an indolent Valencian lawyer, Ricardo Samper, was also a radical. He owed his promotion to the fact that he was a friend of President Alcalá Zamora, who preferred a weak Prime Minister, perhaps in order to justify his own interference. Samper did little save try and maintain his majority, though, to be fair, settlements continued under the agrarian law until October 1934. His minister of the interior, however, Salazar Alonso, smelled revolution everywhere and removed, as was within his legal power, many town councils on the excuse that they did ‘not inspire confidence in matters of public order’. In fact, he sought, by changing such councils, if they were socialist, to get rid of many FNTT members’ last political friends in their villages.

Combined with evictions, the use of migrant labour and dismissals
on political grounds, this policy made the countryside most tense in early 1934, when wages were falling and hunger on the increase. Gil Robles’s speeches fanned the flames as young men of the Right began to see that the pendulum of politics was now swinging against ideas of compromise: ‘leaders are always right! (
¡los jefes no se equivocan!
)’, cried the young
CEDAistas
at a great rally at the Escorial in April.
¹
There followed, at the beginning of June, a well-organized peasant strike in the south, during the harvest, by the socialist FNTT. This was fired by the repeal of the Municipal Boundaries Act which had given local
casas del pueblo
the control of labour. The FNTT had gained acceptance of their demands on wage rates and of their proposal for guarantees that all available labour be employed. But they struck over their sensational demand that harvest wages should be paid for the rest of the year. The anarchist leaders agreed to support this, but many socialist moderates did not. Salazar Alonso, the minister of the interior, believing that he had a revolutionary general strike on his hands, sent in the civil guard, imposed press censorship in the south and made many, though short-term, arrests, of socialist leaders, including mayors and even deputies. The strike collapsed, the harvest was brought in with police protection, while the UGT and the moderate leaders were accused of letting down the FNTT by inaction.
²
Next, also in June, a serious situation arose in Catalonia.

The Catalan government, the
Generalidad
(which had made little impact since the passage of the Catalan statute), had passed a law, the
Ley de Cultivos,
which enabled tenant farmers with vines (the
rabassaires
) in the region to secure a freehold of their farms if they had had them for fifteen years.
³
The proprietors complained to the supreme legal body of the republic, the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, which, by a small majority, rejected the
Ley de Cultivos
on the grounds that the
Generalidad
could not pronounce on such a matter. But Luis Companys, who, on Colonel Maciá’s death, in December 1933, had become president of the
Generalidad,
ratified the law of his own accord.
In taking this step, which constituted a challenge to the government in Madrid, Companys was encouraged by his new right-wing counsellor for the interior, José Dencás. Dencás, a doctor, was a leader of an extreme separatist group, Estat Catalá, founded by Maciá in 1922, now the main faction of militant Catalan youth. They wanted outright independence. They had a green-shirted militia, the
escamots,
headed by a reckless terrorist, Miguel Badía, who had spent most of his youth in gaol for an attempt on the life of Alfonso XIII. For a short time in 1934, Companys nevertheless had Badía as police chief. Even without this complication, the predicament of a left-of-centre Catalan government with a right-of-centre one in Madrid was certain to cause difficulties before long. Azaña had spoken in words of caution to Companys as he had earlier done to de los Ríos. Companys had seemed to appreciate the dangers at first but afterwards had been carried away by what he thought the ‘masses’ desired.