The Spanish Civil War Read online

The World War intensified all Spanish labour’s interest in Europe. The Russian Revolution raised this preoccupation to the highest excitement. German agents were active in Catalonia, bribing both gangsters and corrupt anarchists to attack pro-Allied businessmen, also securing the services of the chief of the political section of the Barcelona police. The interminable governmental crises of the monarchy suggested to anarchist leaders that their hour was near. Membership of the CNT reached 700,000 by 1918, while over 200 anarchist newspapers and periodicals flourished—Barcelona alone listing 29 publications between 1900 and 1923.2

  The power attained by the CNT over the Spanish working class in Barcelona and Andalusia by the end of the World War presented a problem of its own, since it bred dissension between the purists, who would accept nothing less than a complete social revolution, and the more moderate wing which, while retaining the same goals for the future, nevertheless believed that some short-term alleviation of conditions was a worthwhile goal, along with a modicum of strategy, a few allies and a little knowledge of the international scene. The moderates were led by the ‘Noi del Sucre’ (the sugar boy), the nickname of Salvador Seguí, a sugar worker of oratorical gifts, and an enemy of indiscriminate terrorism. The attempts of the government to crush the whole movement, and the anarchists’ determination to preserve the advantages which they had won from the industrialists during the World War, led (as has earlier been seen) to a five-year period of gang warfare in Barcelona, between CNT militants and pistoleros hired by the employers. The struggle was begun in 1919 by a strike in the Barcelona electricity plant, La Canadiense. The government accepted an eight-hour day. But a combative management locked out the workers. A general strike followed, peaceful in intent, converted or provoked into violence. Seguí did his best to refound the anarchist movement on realistic principles. He even preached patience. But before long, most of the leading Barcelona anarchists, including Seguí and his lawyer Layret, were murdered, either by pistoleros in the street or while ‘trying to escape’ from confinement, the so-called Ley de Fugas (Law of Escapes).1 The civil governor, General Martínez Anido, fought the anarchists with every weapon he could find, including not only the rival, government-favoured union, the Sindicato Libre, but a special constabulary, the Somaten (a revival of a similarly named force of Catalan irregulars who had fought Napoleon). Violence and murder became day-to-day occurrences, political crimes accompanied by gangsterism, deaths of police, ordinary workers, and passers-by. Altogether some 1,000 people died for ‘political’ reasons in Barcelona between 1917 and 1923.

  The Russian Revolution, meantime, presented at first a temptation to the anarchist movement. Enthusiasm was greatest in Andalusia, where the years 1918–21 were thought of as the ‘bolshevik triennium’.1 In 1920, the national congress of the CNT sent Seguí’s chief rival, Angel Pestaña, to Moscow to report on the Russian Revolution. Like the socialist delegation, he was unfavourably impressed, especially by the persecution of the Russian anarchists. Pestaña therefore spoke in Moscow against the Twenty-one Conditions named as necessary for joining the Third Communist International (Comintern). He could not, however, make his report when he got back to Spain, since he was arrested on arrival and spent the next months in prison. In 1921, another invitation to Moscow resulted in the loss for the movement of its new secretary-general Andrés Nin, and some other intellectuals, who joined the communists: but this had no effect on the mass of the movement.2 Pestaña was soon out of gaol and, with the only one of Nin’s group to remain an anarchist, Gaston Leval, pointed out how quickly Lenin had organized police and censorship. The anti-communist faction triumphed, and the anarchists, instead of affiliating with Moscow, joined the new, small anarchist International, the International Working Men’s Association, AIT, with its headquarters in Berlin.3

  The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera saw the eclipse of militant anarchist activity, most of the leaders being either dead, in exile, or in gaol: anarchist newspapers were banned, though not all their periodicals. Some rationalist schools were allowed to stay open. The more turbulent anarchist leaders, including a famous gang named Los Solidarios, gathered in France and directed forays across the border. Among these men a number of legendary anarchist warriors appeared: notably two inseparable men of violence, Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso. Durruti was a railway worker from León, Ascaso, a baker and a waiter. Their most notorious crimes were the murder of the archbishop of Saragossa in 1923, the attempt on King Alfonso (in Paris) in 1924, and a celebrated assault on the Bank of Spain at Gijón. They fled from Spain, wandered through South America, and set up an anarchist bookshop in Paris. Four countries, Ilya Ehrenburg later approvingly remarked, had condemned Durruti to death.1 These men and their companions were not, of course, common criminals. They were dreamers with a mission, characters whom Dostoyevsky would have been proud to have created. For some, Durruti was a ‘thug’, ‘killer’, or ‘hooligan’; for others he was the ‘indomitable hero’, with a fine ‘imperious head eclipsing all others, who laughed like a child and wept before the human tragedy’.2 Most of the solidarios believed that some alliance was necessary with other enemies of the dictatorship, and several of them, in exile, prepared to contemplate a long time of preparation before a real general strike. They also made plans for a revolutionary anarchist army in the style of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian, whom they knew.

  In July 1927, at a secret meeting at Valencia, the leading militant anarchists left in Spain meantime formed a new society, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), designed to resist revisionism. This became, in the next few years, a revolutionary élite dedicated to lead the masses towards realization of the right revolutionary moment. The FAI was not a centralized organization but instead a number of separate groups acting without cohesion: hence its weakness in crisis.

  At the end of the dictatorship, and with the coming of the republic, this powerful, secret group—its organization and numbers were unknown3—came more and more into dispute with the reformists, now led by Pestaña, who desired to establish a syndicalist political party which would have had much the same relation to the CNT as the socialist party did to the UGT. Another moderate leader was Juan Peiró, a glass-maker, who defined anarchism as ‘tolerance, nobility and anti-dogmatism, as well as the exemplary value of forming cooperatives of production and consumption’. The republic brought the movement face-to-face with a dilemma: one single document admitted that the republic’s constituent Cortes4 was ‘the consequence of a revolutionary act, in which, directly or indirectly, we have intervened’, but also proclaimed that ‘we face the constituent Cortes in the same fashion as we face all power which oppresses us. We are in open war against the state.’1

  The solidarios, on their return from exile, naturally attached themselves to the FAI. They were younger than old CNT leaders, such as Pestaña, and profited from the mood of impatience among the youth of Spain to press forward towards the uncompromising.

  The anarchist movement had a clever tactical leader in the 1930s in Juan García Oliver. To Cyril Connolly, the English critic, he once described his aim as ‘to eliminate the beast in man’.2 But he had himself spent years in prison for murder.

  The CNT was in 1931 divided on grounds of doctrine, geography and age. The workers of the cities, above all of Barcelona, could be regarded as syndicalists, and were still groping for that ‘vertical’ order of society suggested by French trade unionists in the late nineteenth century. Their plan continued to be that the workers in one factory should delegate members to a ‘syndicate’, which would negotiate with other syndicates all questions of lodging, food, and entertainment. The rural anarchists, notably in Andalusia, still represented an idealization of their own pueblo, whose inhabitants would cooperate to form a self-sufficient government. (The significance of the latter ideal is suggested by the second meaning of the word pueblo, which can be translated as ‘people’, as opposed to the upper or middle classes. The inference was that the latter were foreigners in their own town.) The p
ractical consequence was that there was, in any given town, still at least one anarchist who maintained the CNT connection, who kept a black and red anarchist flag ready in an emergency to fix on the headquarters of the civil guard, living as the conscience of the place, and who could, given the opportunity for action, count on the support of many others—a fact which makes estimates of number illusory. Probably over a million and a half Spanish workers were anarchist in outlook in the thirties; but the ‘militants’ numbered no more than 200,000.3

  Most anarchists believed that the CNT was not only a revolutionary organization, but the outline for a future ideal society as well. It was supposed that, after the revolution, the different pueblos would be linked together, for exchange of goods, to their neighbours in a regional federation, while it would collaborate with other federations exchanging statistics and surplus produce. Similar federations would be formed in towns, linking factories together with suppliers or importers of raw materials. Anarchist intellectuals would explain their views by saying that there was no hope of justice in any society unless it was first achieved among small groups of men. Many anarchists hated even the idea of property. Thus the anarchist youth, the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL), declared themselves against property since it was:

  an inhuman injustice that a man should keep for himself wealth produced by others or even a part of the earth … which is as sacred to humanity as life is for the individual; because it has its origin in a violent and criminal exploitation of the stronger against the weaker, creating the odious existence of parasites … living on the work of others; because it creates capitalism and the law of salaries which condemns man to a permanent economic slavery and to economic disequilibrium; because it is the cause of prostitution, the most infamous and degrading outrage that society inflicts on the human conscience, condemning woman to make the object of commerce an act which is both the purest and the most spiritual known to humans. We are … against the state because it restrains the free unfolding and normal development of ethical, philosophical, and scientific activities of people and because it is the foundation of the principles of authority and property through the armed forces, police and judiciary …1

  Despite all these views, however, there was no suggestion that children should be brought up in common, and free love was despised.

  It was natural that the anarchists should be suspicious of Largo Caballero’s labour exchanges and arbitration committees which, under Primo de Rivera as under the republic, they believed threatened their raison d’être. That lack of interest in a promising programme of social legislation shows how the movement, though its members were often imaginative, was too easily able to forget that there were others in Spain, including both socialists and capitalists, who had points of view worthy of being heard. Anarchists often had indeed only ‘the Idea’ of libertarian revolution to sustain them. They ignored that the men of ‘the Idea’ were never a majority of the working class.

  Some unions did exist in Spain which were neither socialist nor anarchist, whose members were both Catholics and hostile to militant atheism and revolutionary talk. The National Catholic Agrarian Confederation even claimed a following of 600,000 peasant families in 1919. That body, however, confined its activities to Castile and Navarre and concentrated less on ideology than on such practical matters as marketing manure and the purchase of seed. Some attempts in the past had also been made at comprehensive social legislation. There was, for example, a Workers’ Compensation Act of 1909, an eight-hour day was introduced in 1918, and social insurance had been brought in during the 1920s. The difficulty was not only anarchist reluctance to cooperate but the state’s incapacity to ensure that laws were enforced. Similarly, the cooperatives which were introduced in some Catalan or Castilian fishing and agricultural communities were eccentric exceptions to the growing disharmony in social affairs.1

  6

  The events of May 1931 gave to the new republican government a warning of the threats which seemed likely to beset it from both Left and Right. But the ministers knew nothing of the details of the monarchists’ plans: rumours, of course, there were, and verbal menaces. Nor did they take the anarchists as seriously as they should have done. They attributed the church burnings to the provocation of the monarchists. On 28 June, an election was held which suggested that the majority of the people were behind the régime. This, for a constituent Cortes, was held on the understanding that one member would represent about 50,000 male votes. They were the fairest elections that had been held in Spain. As a result, there were elected 117 socialists (a true reflection of the growth in socialist numbers during the weeks since April); 59 radical socialists, and 27 members of Azaña’s Republican Action party; 89 radicals, following Lerroux; and 27 right republicans, following Alcalá Zamora. In addition, there were elected 33 members of the Catalan Esquerra and 16 Galician nationalists. All these could be expected to vote generally with the government.1 Against these, the non-republican Right could muster only 57 members, despite evidence that the old caciques were still often strong enough to exercise an improper influence. The monarchist party seemed ‘nothing but an incitement to riots’.1 Many agricultural workers who might have been expected to have been indifferent to the republic had been won to it by the new land legislation.2 The Catholics’ National Action won only six seats. The Right had been taken by surprise by the fall of the monarchy, the old leaders could not agree with each other as to what policy to follow, and such new right-wing leaders as were already in the wings of Spanish politics had as yet no following. Had it not been for the government’s minor anti-clerical decrees during the early summer, opposition might not have got under way for some years. But these included such things as a ban on showing images of saints in schoolrooms, on the ludicrous ground that the kissing of such objects was insanitary; and the minister of education was allowed to confiscate artistic objects from churches if there were danger of their deterioration. These pinpricks wounded, but did not injure. Meantime, the new constituent Assembly was in many ways a gathering of individuals, more than of parties. Only the socialists were an organized movement. The other republican groups were gatherings of friends. There were numerous independent members such as Ortega, Unamuno and Dr Marañón, the ‘founders’ of the republic.

  The government’s confidence was reduced by a series of strikes organized by the anarchists in July and August. In Barcelona, strikers, besieged in a house in the Calle de Mercaders, said they would not give in except to regular soldiers. A unit arrived and the men surrendered; they were shortly machine-gunned by the forces of order.3 Three deaths also occurred during a general strike in San Sebastián. The government even called on the artillery to crush a general strike in Seville, arising from a telephone strike. No less than thirty anarchists, including some gunmen, were killed and two hundred wounded. If they had reacted too slowly to the burning of the conventos, the government had now reacted too strongly.

  Animosity between the anarchists and socialists was, however, stilled that summer by the former’s own dissensions. The opponents of the FAI’s aspirations to élite leadership published in August a manifesto, signed by thirty leading anarchists (thereafter known as the treintistas). The FAI were guilty, they said,

  of developing an over-simplified concept of revolution … which would hand us over to republican fascism … The revolution does not trust exclusively in the audacity of a more or less courageous minority, but instead it seeks to be a movement of the whole working class marching towards its final liberation, which alone will decide the character and precise moment for the revolution.1

  The FAI were strong enough to resist this criticism and even succeeded in expelling the treintistas from the CNT. This victory was one of youth against middle-age: most FAIistas were in their twenties or thirties, most treintistas older. Some of the treintistas never rejoined the movement; Angel Pestaña, for example, formed a small splinter party which never gathered any momentum. Others, such as Roldán Cortada in Ba
rcelona, became communists.

  By the autumn of 1931, a committee of the Cortes had, meantime, prepared a draft constitution. Here the government (or, rather, the drafters) blundered. They identified the new régime with their own political views. Thus the draft constitution began by announcing, ‘Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all classes, organized in a régime of liberty and justice’. Government ‘emanated from the people’ and all citizens were equal. The country would renounce war as an instrument of policy. No titles of nobility would be recognized. Both sexes would vote at twenty-three. There would be only one chamber of parliament. Property would be ‘the object of expropriation for social utility’. Some of these clauses might be invoked to justify socialism; others could be regarded as giving safeguards against it. Then, since the men of the republic feared a meddlesome Head of State, such as King Alfonso had been, the powers of the President were limited by a six-year term, and ineligibility for immediate re-election. The President would, however, nominate the Prime Minister. The acts of the President would be valid if signed by a cabinet minister, but the President could veto laws which he did not like. He could be removed nevertheless if he were to dissolve the Cortes twice.

  The religious clauses brought dismay. Article 26 separated church and state. The payments by the state to priests were to stop in two years, though these salaries had been compensation for the confiscation of church lands in 1837. All religious orders had to register with the ministry of justice. If they were judged a danger to the state, they would be dissolved.1 All would have to pay ordinary taxes. Orders which required a vow beyond the three normal canonical vows would anyway be dissolved. This was merely another way of dissolving the Jesuits, from whom a special oath of loyalty to the Pope is customarily exacted. No order was to be permitted to hold more property than it required for its own subsistence, nor was any to indulge in commerce. All orders were to submit annual accounts to the state. All education, meanwhile, was to be inspired ‘by ideals of human solidarity’. Religious education, that is, was to end. Every ‘public manifestation of religion’—including the Holy Week, Epiphany and even carnival processions—would have to be officially approved; while divorce was to be granted as a result of mutual disagreement between the parties, or on the petition of either party, if just cause could be shown. Civil marriages were to be the only legal ones.