The Spanish Civil War Read online

  Two days after a JONSista of Madrid, Matías Montero, had been killed while selling the Falange newspaper, FE, by a member of the FUE (the Federación Universitaria Escolar, the main students’ union, then controlled by left-wing students and founded in 1927),3 José Antonio and Ledesma Ramos negotiated the amalgamation of the Falange and the JONS. The latter had had some success in 1933: a student group was formed, the Sindicato Español Universitario (SEU), incorporating 400 students, and about a hundred other ‘militants’ had been organized to fight in the streets, in groups of four.4 The new united party (which came into being on 11 February 1934) adopted the JONS’s symbol of the yoke and arrows but, of the triumvirate in control, two—José Antonio and Ruiz de Alda—came from the Falange and only Ledesma from the JONS. The slogans of the party came from Ledesma: ‘¡Arriba!’; ‘¡España, Una, Grande, Libre!’; and ‘Por la Patria, el Pan y la Justicia’. But José Antonio overshadowed his companions, through his social prestige, his dignity as a deputy—he had been elected by conservative interests in Cádiz—and by his attractive personality. In the spring of 1934, he visited Germany—but he did not see Hitler, and returned to Spain critical of the Nazis. Six months before he had been more pleased by Mussolini,1 while he had himself made ‘a deep impression’ on Sir Oswald Mosley in England.2

  On 14 March 1934, the first national meeting of the Falange and JONS was held at Valladolid. A vigorous but still ‘poetic’ speech was made by José Antonio, a brawl occurred with some socialists outside, and the movement was off to a good start. Retired officers busied themselves with military training. The leaders continued to speak in bellicose language, though it was not till mid-1934 that José Antonio accepted the full implications of his own words. Even then, he was always a reluctant supporter of terrorism.3 The falangists now saw themselves as an heroic élite of young men, whose mission was to release Spain from the poison of Marxism, as from what they took to be the second-rate, dull, provincialism of orthodox liberal values.

  The majority of the members of the Falange were young. Ledesma thought that no one over forty-five should be allowed to be a member, and, indeed, the national syndical state set out to be that of the under-forties. A minority were dissatisfied sons of the rich, anxious for the climate, at least, of combat. There were a few dissatisfied ex-socialists and ex-communists. Others were survivors of the old dictator’s Patriotic Union. Many were frustrated members of the middle class, like Ledesma himself, anxious for a more heroic life than they could afford. Most came from the centre of Spain, though Seville was a source of recruits. In Madrid, there was a hard core of Falange taxi-drivers—perhaps because they had seen the middle class at its worst. Students probably composed the largest single group.4 Funds came from business and from the monarchists, always willing to have their finger in a new rightist movement, but the party was short of money. Some of the ‘ideology’ was Carlist in phraseology, and so it was scarcely accidental that one of the army officers who told young falangists elementary facts about handling weapons was the retired Colonel Ricardo Rada, who had the same task with the Carlists at a later date.

  At the other side of the political battle, the party of Cayetano Bolivar, the communist deputy for Málaga, probably numbered in 1933 about 25,000.1 Its origins were to be sought among the pro-bolshevik sections of both socialist and anarchist movements at the time of the Russian Revolution. In April 1920, a majority of the executive committee of the socialist youth movement had declared themselves in support of the Soviet Union and, after a while, formed themselves into the first Spanish communist party, the Partido Comunista Español. Though they were denounced by their own rank and file, in June of the same year a majority of the socialist party proper pronounced their support of entry into the Comintern, the vote being 8,270 to 5,016, 1,615 abstaining. The socialist trade union, meantime, the UGT, kept to its non-communist position, affiliating to the (Social Democrat) Labour and Socialist International.2

  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 1920
s. 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.<
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  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.