48. Whereas in Mas de las Matas and Alloza it was possible to talk to supporters and detractors of the collectives, I was unable (for extraneous reasons) to do the same for the Angüés collective. No contemporary descriptions exist in Leval, Souchy, Mintz or Peirats. A village of 1,500 inhabitants, Angüés was an important centre with thirty-six collectives within its district in February 1937, a number which grew to seventy within the next few months (Leval, op. cit., p. 70). The testimony of Fernando ARAGON and his wife – a view of the inherent undemocratic dangers contained within the collectivization experiment – must stand on its own.
49. Republican agricultural ministry figures, cited by Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 559. The figures showed a small drop in the Levant – at the time less collectivized relatively than Aragon with 340 collectives; and a 16 per cent increase in Castile where there were 230 collectives comprising about 100,000 members. (Leval, op. cit., pp. 150 and 182.) At the height of the movement in July 1937, some 400,000 agrarian collectivists worked in about 800 collectives in the Popular Front zone, by no means all of which were libertarian-organized. (Mintz, op. cit., p. 148). Aragon thus represented just over half the total collectives and just under half the total collectivists at that time.
50. See Bricall, Política económica de la Generalitat, p. 44. Other Catalan cereal crops showed either little improvement or actual drops; potatoes and vegetable production, on the other hand, increased.
51. Many libertarians outside Aragon felt that collectivization there had been pushed unnecessarily far. Antonio ROSADO, an Andalusian CNT militant who was appointed coordinator of all CNT collectives in unoccupied Andalusia, advocated a much more moderate approach. ‘People weren’t ready for such extreme measures. We expropriated no land, setting up collectives exclusively on estates that had been abandoned, and with any land that smallholders wished to bring in. Otherwise, the latter were left free to continue working their own land as before and to sell their produce freely.’ (By the end of the war, 300 collectives with 60,000 members existed in unoccupied Andalusia, according to ROSADO, many of them worked by labourers who had fled the nationalists.)
Collectivization did not necessarily guarantee control of production and consumption in every circumstance either. Jacinto BORRAS, editor of the CNT’s Catalan peasant paper Campo and a long-time advocate of rural collectivization, observed that the Catalan collectives looked very different in the last year of the war (by which time Aragon had fallen to the nationalists). ‘The privations awoke the peasantry’s egoism. The youth had gone to the front, leaving the collectives in the hands of older men whose mentality had not necessarily changed. In the dire circumstances, it was only natural that people thought first of themselves and their families … ’ Collectives, like individuals, could hoard food when shortages arose.
52. Or rather, it happened only embryonically. Militiamen helped the collectivists at harvest and ploughing time. ‘And I’ve had collectivists come up to the front line with shotguns and farm implements to help out when we were hard pressed on the Belchite front,’ recalled CAROD, the column leader. ‘It was a sign of the tremendous solidarity that existed.’
53. As we have seen (p. 326 above) the communist party originally proposed giving the expropriated land to the peasantry as its property, and consistently argued for the peasantry’s complete freedom in the production and sale of its crops.
54. Guerra y revolución en España, 1936–1939, vol. 2, p. 274.
55. Within little more than a year, under the Agrarian Reform decree, over four million hectares of land in the Popular Front zone – excluding Catalonia or the Basque country – were officially taken over. This represented the equivalent of one fifth of the total arable land of all Spain pre-war, suggesting that decisions on who had intervened directly or indirectly in the military uprising, which were initiated at local level, received a fairly wide definition. (For an instance of local power exercised in a contrary sense, see R. Fraser, In Hiding (London, New York, 1972), p. 147.) Evidence that the communist party was not opposed to collectives per se is demonstrated by the fact that the Institute of Agrarian Reform, under communist control, had given 50 million pesetas worth of credits, implements, seeds etc. to collective farms by June 1937. But to qualify, the collectives had to legalize their situation with the Institute; this, on principle, many libertarian collectives refused to do.
56. See pp. 144–5 for Domènech’s food organization. A Generalitat crisis in December 1936, which ousted the POUM, resulted in Domènech being shifted to the public services portfolio. ‘It was a manoeuvre by García Oliver, Durruti and other libertarians who decided that the CNT must control the war councillorship. They tried to keep their plan quiet, using the crisis to exchange the portfolio of supply for that of war’ (Joan DOMENECH). García Oliver, who had been acting as virtual Generalitat war minister, had shortly before been appointed a CNT minister in the central government; the Nosotros group was doubtless concerned that his absence might threaten libertarian control of the Aragon front.
57. Set up outside Domènech’s ministry, according to the latter.
58. A year after the PSUC took over supply, its trade union, the UGT, was complaining of the ‘disorganization in the supplies of food and its enormous expense’. Whereas inflation in the first six CNT months pushed the cost of living up by 47 per cent, the next six PSUC-dominant months saw it rise by 49 per cent.
59. See p. 211n.
60. Later to become Hungarian deputy premier, famous for his role in support of the Russians during the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
61. Central government ministers, as well as President Azaña, were reported to have had ‘incidents’ when talking on the phone. The latter was said to have been in the middle of a conversation with President Companys a couple of days before when he was cut off by a voice which told him he had been talking long enough.
62. ‘Later, Comorera had me appointed secretary to General Pozas, a supposed PSUC member, who took over as commander of the Catalan army. He made it clear enough that I was to act as a party informer’ (Pere RIBA).
63. In March 1937 José Díaz, PCE secretary-general, called for the elimination of those ‘agents of fascism – trotskyists disguised as POUMists’ – a reflection of the accusations being made at the Moscow show trials.
64. The group was formed of anarchist militants from the Durruti column who had refused militarization and abandoned the front to return to Barcelona ‘with their arms and equipment’, according to Jaime Baliús, one of the group’s prime movers. The proposed revolutionary junta was to be composed of combatants from the barricades. ‘We did not support the formation of Soviets; there were no grounds in Spain for calling for such. We stood for “all power to the trade unions”. In no way were we politically oriented. The junta was simply a way out, a revolutionary formula to save the revolutionary conquests of July 1936. We were unable to exercise great influence because the Stalinists, helped by the CNT and FAI reformists, undertook their counter-revolutionary aggression so rapidly. Ours was solely an attempt to save the revolution; at the historical level it can be compared to Kronstadt because if there the sailors and workers called for “all power to the Soviets”, we were calling for all power to the unions.’ (Jaime Baliús, letter to the author, April 1976.)
65. Throughout the fighting, President Azaña had been besieged in the Catalan parliament building where he lived. Jaume MIRAVITLLES, the Esquerra politician, managed to get out of the Generalitat to visit him. ‘What would have happened if someone had captured him and used him as a hostage to negotiate conditions? Happily, no one thought of it except Azaña himself who was tormented day and night by the possibility.’
66. Shortly Catalan police and even firemen were being transferred out of Catalonia, more Catalan war industries were taken over, the central government moved to Barcelona to impose tighter control and, finally, the entire war industry came under government control.
67. And as the POUM had officially declared in Decem
ber 1936 when it rejected the Second (socialist), the Third (communist) and the Fourth (trotskyist) internationals as incapable of being the ‘instrument of the world revolution’. It condemned the last of these for its ‘sectarian character’ and for ‘lacking roots in the masses’. Izquierda Comunista, the other POUM component, whose leaders included Nin and Andrade, had belonged to the Fourth International until 1934.
68. Even the POUM was split. The Madrid section, which had been refused representation on the defence junta by the Soviet ambassador’s intervention, and subsequently had its radio and press closed, published a statement disassociating itself from the POUM’s position in Barcelona. (The small Madrid section, which had undergone considerable trotskyist influence in the preceding months, was ‘the victim of a public opinion hostile to Catalonia’, according to ANDRADE.) The Valencia section published a note ‘regretting’ the events, although not specifically condemning them (Luis PORTELA).
69. Significantly, Cipriano Mera, the outstanding CNT military commander on the Madrid front, makes only a passing reference to the May events in a footnote in his memoirs. ‘When I asked him the reason, he said they received the news late on the front and didn’t understand its significance’ (Ignacio IGLESIAS).
70. It was not an isolated case, as PORTELA later discovered. On his fifth visit concerning two POUM militants the minister had ordered released from prison and who were still being held, PORTELA confronted him with his powerlessness: ‘Comrade Zugazagoitia, I think you should leave your desk, take that guard’s rifle and his place on duty outside the door, and let the guard sit at your desk. Because your orders are evidently totally ineffectual –’
71. As a cover-up, Mundo Obrero, the Madrid PCE organ, published a sensationalist story that Nin had been sprung from prison by Falange agents and was in Burgos.
72. The Soviet secret police organization.
73. During the fighting, the diminutive Bolshevik-Leninist section of the Fourth International put out a call for the disarming of the police forces, a general strike in all but war-related industries ‘until the resignation of the reactionary government’, the complete arming of the working class and for committees of revolutionary defence in shops, factories etc. ‘Only proletarian power can assure military victory.’ (See F. Morrow, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain, New York, 1974, p. 144.)
74. Imprisoned in Barcelona, they were moved the day before the city fell in 1939 to a village near the French frontier. Hoping to use their safe release in France for his own protection, the prison director had got the justice minister’s permission for the move. By chance, the communist army commander, Enrique Lister, set up his H Q in the same village, ANDRADE: ‘“If they find us here they’ll liquidate us tonight,” we said to one another. It was only because the GPU agents were so frightened at Barcelona’s collapse that they had forgotten about us. Many militants were executed during the flight into France. We insisted that the prison director move us immediately; he managed to find Catalan guides to lead us across the mountains into France that very night.’
75. For RUIZ’s and another communist’s favourable experience of rural collectivization – and the differences between communist and anarchist modes of collectivization – see Appendix, B.
76. Compared to mid-1937, the number of agrarian collectives increased by 25 per cent throughout the Popular Front zone to the end of 1938, while the number of collectivists dropped by nearly half (see F. Mintz, L’Autogestion dans L’Espagne révolutionnaire, p. 148). The relative increase of rural collectives was actually larger, for by early 1938 Aragon had fallen to the nationalists and was not included in these figures. A somewhat similar sweep had been made by Lister through certain areas of the Levant prior to Aragon; there, too, peasants were given the option of leaving collectives.
77. Comisión de incorporación industrial y mercantil, No. 3, ‘Estudio sobre la riqueza del Levante Español’ (Valencia, 1940). I am indebted to Regina Taya for bringing this document to my attention.
Summer to Autumn 1937
EUZKADI
While the issues of war and revolution were being fought out in the republican rearguard, the Basque country and Santander were falling to the Franco forces.
Having failed to take Madrid, the nationalists turned their attention totally on Vizcaya, beginning their campaign at the end of March. It was immediately marked by air raids on open towns behind the front, which was no more than 40 km from Bilbao at its farthest. Mola’s boast was no idle threat. In Durango, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, 250 were killed in two air raids on the first day of the offensive. A volunteer army chaplain, Father José Maria BASABILOTRA, rushed to the town where some troops of his unit had been caught on their return from leave. Bombs had fallen on two churches as communion services were being held, and several nuns had been killed in a near-by convent. Father BASABILOTRA saw the planes of the Nazi Condor Legion – ‘grey, rather beautiful and sinister’ – on their second raid. He went to the cemetery. People started to emerge from the coffin niches in the walls where they had taken refuge. Rows of corpses were laid out, men, women and children. He was stunned. ‘They’ve done this to demoralize us at the front.’ It was to become an important element of enemy strategy, he later saw.
The Basque government, in which the PNV was the dominant force, had organized its own army. Here, the issue of war and revolution did not arise: there was no revolution. More than any other republican region, Euzkadi exemplified a nationalist bourgeois approach to the conflict. For most Basque nationalists, the war was being waged in Euzkadi’s defence against an external aggressor – ‘the Spanish, white or red’ – to retain their country’s autonomy, not to make revolutionary changes in the Spanish state and society.1 When the central government decreed the formation of an army of the north (Asturias, Santander and Euzkadi), the Basque government maintained it had been ‘wrongfully’ created and refused to accept it.2
—Of course, militarily, there should have been a single command. But there was no understanding between us and the others – the Asturians and the people from Santander. We found it very hard to feel Spanish. Whether one likes it or not, that’s the truth, asserted Juan Manuel EPALZA, a leading PNV militant …
There was a different concept of liberty and democracy; the religious question aggravated everything, he thought. How could one mix units where some gloried in their Catholicism, like the Basque nationalists, and others in their anticlericalism? Moreover, he and others feared that when the central government appointed Capt. Ciutat, a communist party member, as chief-of-staff of the army of the north, it heralded ‘a complete infiltration by the communists’.
The government’s non-revolutionary conduct of the war was criticized shortly before the enemy offensive began by the Popular Front parties (which included the small Basque nationalist party AN V (Acción Nacionalista Vasca), but not the dominant PNV) in Euzkadi. They called for the fusion of the existing militias into a popular army under the single command of the army of the north (the AN V alone opposed this, maintaining that the command should be ‘conditional’); the appointment of political commissars; the ‘energetic elimination’ of the enemy in the rear; the nationalization of all industry needed for the war effort, and the banking system; and workers’ control and participation in the direction and administration of all enterprises. Although the socialist party was the major working-class force in Euzkadi, the programme corresponded fairly closely to making good the criticisms the Spanish communist party had been levelling against the Basques – and in particular against the Basque communist party leadership – for allowing the PNV to dictate the terms of the war.3 But the Popular Front parties continued to participate in the government. Gonzalo NARDIZ, the ANV agriculture minister, remembered no great political differences until the defence of Bilbao.4
Basque nationalist battalions, manned in the main by the peasantry, formed the largest single element of the army. Even its junior officers were aware that the chief-of-staff, Col. Montaud,
a career officer, who enjoyed the confidence of President Aguirre, was a defeatist. Lt Luis MICHELENA, ex-bookkeeper from Rentería in Guipúzcoa and PNV militant, believed he should have been shot. It wasn’t a question of disloyalty as much as the way the colonel conceived the war effort.
—He always had the idea that any operation he planned would turn out badly. But then few of the professional officers in the Basque army were much good. The majority had a civil servant mentality, lacking initiative and understanding of the popular forces they were commanding. In short – they were suspicious of the people …
With the exception of one offensive the previous November at Villareal, which had failed in its attempt to draw forces from the Franco offensive on Madrid, the Basque army had launched no major attacks since its creation.5 In Basque nationalist eyes, and not without reason, too much effort in the north had been concentrated on Oviedo.
On 20 April, after a fortnight’s lull due to bad weather, the Franco offensive resumed. At the same time, the nationalists hoped to starve Bilbao into submission by imposing a blockade which the British Admiralty readily accepted as effective until disproved by a British merchant ship, the Seven Seas Spray, which sailed in with 3,500 tons of food. By 24 April, the enemy had made an important breakthrough in the hills of Inxorta; and in the ensuing panic it seemed as though little would stop the Franco forces advancing to Bilbao. Two days later Guernica was blitzed by the Condor Legion.
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