The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The towns and countryside of New Castile, republican Estremadura, and La Mancha were, like the capital, dominated by the UGT and by the socialist-communist youth. Anarchists increased as the weeks went by and there were interesting projects of collectivization throughout New Castile. The old municipal authorities often continued alongside the Popular Front committees. Expropriation of industries and of small private businesses was exceptional. The shops and businesses of, for example, Talavera de la Reina, in the Tagus valley, might be covered with notices announcing ‘here one works collectively’. But the words indicated an agreement to distribute profits between owner and workers, not workers’ control. In the country, in La Mancha as in New Castile, large estates were confiscated, and were run by the local branch of the UGT. There were numerous collectives, established in accord with the anarchist resolutions at their May congress, but they were not established everywhere, nor at once, and, even in pueblos where collectives were set up, it was unusual for the collective to be the sole economic unit: private persons were allowed (chiefly due to the support of the UGT or the communists) to continue to farm, and to carry on business, and, theoretically at least, anyone who had joined a collective could withdraw from it if he desired, taking with him goods to the value of those which he had when he entered. Both UGT and CNT (here, as in most places of revolutionary Spain) were, however, agreed on the superiority of collectivization to the distribution of land, both on economic and on social grounds.1

  To the south, at Ciudad Real, the chief town of La Mancha, only one concern, an electricity plant, had been expropriated. Market, shops, and cafés carried on as before. The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau, visiting this area in August, noted that, at one collective farm, the cattle seemed in good health, and that the wheat was harvested on time, being stored in the chapel. Before collectivization, the labourers had lived in Ciudad Real, and had come out for harvesting. Now they were settled in the old farm house. Food, though not plentiful, was described as better than before. Before the war, these same labourers had wrecked machinery brought in by the landowner, since they supposed that he was trying to bring down wages. Now a threshing-machine from Bilbao was welcomed.2 The general rule for collectivization was that land should not be held beyond the amount which could be cultivated without hired labour. Distribution of food could be only through the local committee. Three free litres of wine might be distributed a week; in other places, it might be double that.3 In some places, collectivists and individualists could live peaceably side by side; in one pueblo there might be two cafés, one where the individual peasant-proprietors went, one for the workers of the collective.4 The church might become a warehouse, occasionally a place for tranquil reflection.5

  The revolution in Barcelona in July 1936 differed from that in the centre of Spain in being primarily anarchist. With a radio station, eight daily newspapers, innumerable weeklies and periodicals dealing with every aspect of society and continuous public meetings, the anarchist movement had really captured power. In that capital alone, there were now 350,000 anarchists. The main executive organ in Barcelona, and, therefore, of Catalonia, was the Anti-Fascist Militias Committee, which had been formed on 21 July and upon which, as has been seen, the FAI and CNT were the most influential forces. Several representatives of the Generalidad were usually present at the meetings of this body.1 They sought to re-establish public order, organize production and food supply and, at the same time, put together an army to defend Barcelona and ‘liberate’ Saragossa. The committee’s meetings were usually at night, since the members were busy doing other things during the day.

  Meanwhile, all the great industrial plant of Barcelona had passed to the CNT: the CAMPSA, the Ford Iberia Motor Company, the public works company known as El Fomento de Obras y Construcciones—all were anarchist directed. So too were the main services—water, gas and electricity. Barcelona thus became a proletarian town in a way that Madrid never did. Expropriation was the rule—hotels, stores, banks and factories were either requisitioned or closed. Those requisitioned were run by committees of technicians and workers.2 Food distribution, milk-pasteurization, even small handicrafts, were all collectivized. Account books were examined by the new managers with fascination. What waste, what profits, what corruption they seemed to show! And then (as a workers’ committee on the Barcelona metro put it), ‘we set out on the great adventure!’1 Since the large National Labour development building had been taken over by the FAI and CNT as headquarters, it seemed that nothing could go wrong.

  Most industries were back at work ten days after the rising. Public services were maintained by the anarchist unions, the electricity workers assuring the continuity of supply by guarding the dams and hydro-electric plants of the Lower Pyrenees, which provided Barcelona’s power. Barcelona’s sixty tram lines were soon running much as they were before the rising. Even so, an extraordinary variety of solutions was reached. In some places, the old wages, with numerous differentials, were maintained, in others a new uniform wage was established. The tramworkers of Barcelona sought a compromise, reducing the number of different wages to four. Differentials continued, however, for technicians and specialized workers and while, in prosperous factories, workers were probably better paid than before, in poor ones, they were often as badly paid as before. If a factory had plenty of cash on hand at the time of the revolution, it would pay its way; if not, it soon declined. It seemed more difficult than people had assumed to organize a factory on anarchist lines if it required raw materials from sources outside anarchist control. If the raw materials came from abroad (and the cotton used in Barcelona factories was imported mainly from Egypt), the factories had to negotiate with the socialist dock workers and even with businessmen. Thus compromise, even centralization, began even in the first days of the revolution. Low stocks of raw materials and low funds also opened the way to state intervention. The Catalan government tried to regularize matters by, first, recognizing a workers’ control committee for each large factory and then nominating an official delegate to sit on each such body; the delegate was, however, to begin with, usually himself a worker who did little. Anarchist theory had envisaged gaining power in some factories, but not in all. The dictates of war also played a part: on 19 July, García Oliver instructed one of his anarchist comrades, Eugenio Vallejo, to create an armament industry in a city where no previous factories had made arms. The plan evidently required, from the start, collaboration between anarchists and other political movements, even though the chemical and metallurgical factories which were to make the arms were in anarchist hands. Here, too, the Catalan government intervened. (By October 1936, the Generalidad controlled fifty such plants in Barcelona and some 75 outside it.) Innumerable questions had also to be resolved with technical advice: could a lipstick factory be reorganized to make shell cases? In addition, the anarchists had to collaborate with the banks, which were controlled by the UGT1—in practice that meant the communists. Thus, from the start of the war, the supporters of the concept of government—from the Catalan Esquerra to republicans, socialists and communists—had control of credit, even in the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona. Because of all these difficulties, the textile industry in Barcelona soon only worked three days a week. In order to overcome this crisis, a national effort, organized by a vigorous government, was desirable. Thus, faced with an unprecedented situation, the anarchists of Catalonia improvised in the industries, of which they had become suddenly the masters, several different temporary solutions; though some worked adequately, the failure of those that did not pointed to unforeseen weaknesses in the anarchist ‘Idea’.

  A characteristic example of what happened was the collectivization of the Barcelona cinemas: all the auditoria were grouped in a single enterprise, directed by a committee of seventeen men, of whom two were elected by a general assembly of workers, the others by workers of the different professional groups within the industry. Members of the committee received their normal salary but dropped their normal work, devoting th
emselves to administration. A three-quarters majority of the general assembly of workers was necessary to secure a dismissal. A month and a half of annual holidays were proclaimed, including two weeks in winter. During illness, a worker would get full pay, and permanent invalids, 75 per cent of their old salary. Profits would be devoted to building a school and a clinic.2

  The revolution in Barcelona had other shapes too. As in Madrid, no one was to be seen in middle-class clothes. To wear a tie was to risk detention. Solidaridad Obrera even denounced the Russian foreign minister Litvinov as a bourgeois because he wore a hat. (The anarchist Hatters Union registered a protest.) Almost all the fifty-eight churches of Barcelona save the cathedral (preserved by order of the Generalidad) were burned. Some were ruined, others, such as the lovely Santa María del Mar, merely damaged. Much valuable petrol was wasted in an attempt to burn Gaudí’s unfinished ‘Sagrada Familia’, which was, alas, made of cement. By early August, whatever excitement there had been earlier at such scenes had died, and the destruction was carefully limited by the fire brigades. Church schools were shut: ‘The revolutionary will of the people has suppressed schools of confessional tendency. Now is the turn of the new school, based on rationalist principles of work and human fraternity.’1

  After the murder of Desiderio Trillas, president of the UGT dockers—presumably killed by anarchists—the FAI and CNT joined with other parties in denouncing the crime. Together, they threatened death to any who carried out indiscriminate shootings or looting: ‘the Barcelona underworld is disgracing the revolution’. The FAI ordered its members to be vigilant so as to ‘Smash the riff-raff! If we do not, the crooks will smash the revolution by dishonouring it.’2 Several prominent anarchists were even shot, such as José Cárdenas, of the construction workers of Barcelona, and Fernández, president of the food syndicate, for having failed to ‘overcome a moment of confusion and weakness’ and killed a man and a woman who years before had denounced them to the police.3 But at night, on the road out of Barcelona towards the Tibidabo mountain, shots continued to be heard. ‘Fascists’ continued to be arrested. A well-known Left independent deputy, Angel Samblancat, had, in the first days of the revolution, swept into the Palace of Justice at the head of the CNT-FAI militia, thrown out of the window legal documents, contracts, leases, crucifixes, and killed many lawyers and judges. Soon afterwards, however, Samblancat installed a revolutionary committee of justice, whose first act was to recall the old officials and secretaries of the court.

  The anarchists’ domination in Catalonia placed them in an uneasy alliance with the Catalan government in what Azaña was to describe as ‘a plot to annul the Spanish state’. The advance of Barcelona’s militias, anarchists at their head, into Aragon, might be represented as a responsible defence of the central government. But there was no discussion about such offensives with the ministry of war in Madrid. There were other changes: given the weakness of the government in Madrid, the Generalidad was able to take over, without protest, the customs and the frontier guards, the railways and the docks, security at hydro-electric plants, the fortress of Montjuich and the Bank of Spain—even the right to issue money and pardons. All these powers, under the Catalan statute, belonged to Spain. Now, under the pretext that they were in danger of being usurped by the FAI, the Generalidad took them over. The University of Barcelona was rechristened the University of Catalonia. The Generalidad, in Azaña’s words, ‘took advantage of the military rebellion to finish with the state’s power in Catalonia and then sought to explain everything by saying that the state did not exist’.1 One Esquerra politician, José Tarradellas, thought that, since Catalonia had successfully defended herself against the military rising, she could wash her hands of Spain.2

  On 9 August, an anarchist meeting was held at the Olympia Theatre in Barcelona to protest against the conscription by the Madrid government of the 1933 and 1934 classes of reserves to serve under regular officers: ‘We cannot be uniformed soldiers. We want to be militiamen of liberty. To the front, certainly. But to the barracks as soldiers not subject to the popular forces, certainly not!’3 But the Generalidad, fearing the consequences of legalized political armies, caught up in a maze of conflicting arguments, supported the idea of keeping the regular army, with officers named from above, and their political faith obscured. Companys was supported, on this, by the new united socialist party of Catalonia (PSUC). Though a socialist, Juan Comorera, became secretary-general of this party, the communists, by their superior efficiency, ruthlessness, and skill, dominated it. The PSUC even affiliated itself to the Comintern. Comorera, a blacksmith’s son who had emigrated to Argentina in the twenties and returned in the thirties, had been Councillor for agriculture in the Generalidad in 1934 and had helped move the rabassaires to the Left in that year. He soon became a communist and even, within months, a member of the central committee of the Spanish communist party, along with another ex-socialist PSUC leader, Rafael Vidiella.1 The Barcelona UGT, also under communist influence, increased its membership from 12,000 on 19 July to 35,000 at the end of the month, partly because of the help afforded by a party, or union, card to gain food, partly because of the urge towards association in revolutionary circumstances.

  The PSUC favoured an ‘army system’ rather than a militia, since they had organized followers, and since their chief hope of influence was by infiltration into the officially recognized government. Formally, however, communist policy in Barcelona, as in Madrid, was that nothing should be done to jeopardize the winning of the war, while ‘political adjustments between comrades’ should await victory. The PSUC thus gave full support to the Generalidad over several reforms—the 15 per cent rise in wages, the return by the pawnshops of all articles pledged for less than 200 pesetas, and a forty-hour week. (Malraux in his novel L’Espoir has a vivid account of the noise in Barcelona caused by the return, and sudden use, of the many sewing-machines previously in pawnshops.) The PSUC also made economic claims on behalf of the widows of dead fighters. All their attitudes were reformist, and conciliatory, in the sense that they were intended to improve conditions within the society that existed; the new world could wait.

  On 31 July, Companys elevated himself from being formally president of the Generalidad—that is, the Catalan government—to become ‘president of Catalonia’. That was one more step towards Catalan sovereignty, one more again upon which he did not consult the government in Madrid. Three members of the PSUC (Comorera, Vidiella, Ruiz) were asked to join the reconstituted Generalidad under Juan Casanovas, previously the president of the Catalan parliament. The anarchists threatened to leave the Anti-Fascist Militias Committee if the PSUC were to enter the government. The PSUC men withdrew and the Generalidad for the time being remained composed of nine Esquerra members, and one each from the rabassaires and the more rightwing Catalan Action. ‘I hand over the government to you,’ Companys said grandly to Casanovas, who replied, ‘You hand over nothing, since there is nothing.’1 The government tried to disarm anarchist militiamen in the ‘patrol controls’: an action which was furiously resisted by the CNT. ‘Comrades,’ the FAI, meantime, generously appealed on 5 August to the PSUC, ‘together we have beaten the bloody beasts of fascist militarism. Let us be worthy of our victory by maintaining our unity of action until the final triumph. Long live the Revolutionary and Anti-Fascist Alliance.’ Powerless in itself, the Catalan government, during the next weeks, by its endorsement of the Anti-Fascist Militias Committee, continued to encroach substantially on the authority of the government in Madrid. When, some weeks later, Prieto (by then a minister) visited Barcelona, Colonel Díaz Sandino, Catalan counsellor of defence, greeted him as if he were a statesman of a foreign power.2

  Standing apart in Catalonia from anarchists, Esquerra and PSUC were the POUM, the anti-Stalinist revolutionaries led by Catalan ex-communists. Their numbers also grew greatly. Some joined this party believing that it represented a mean between the indiscipline of the anarchists and the strictness of the PSUC. Foreigners in Barcelona joined th
e POUM in the supposition that it embodied a magnificent Utopian aspiration. Franz Borkenau noted the enthusiasm among these émigrés, who enjoyed the adventure of war and had faith in ‘absolute success’. The POUM, with new headquarters in the Hotel Falcón in the Rambla, concentrated on pushing its comparatively unfamiliar name before the public, painting its initials in large letters on motor-cars and buses, and agitating for ‘a government of workers only’. Though one of the founders, Maurín, was presumed (falsely) dead in nationalist Spain, the other leaders, who were ex-communists from the twenties—Nin, Gorkin, Andrade, Gironella—spoke frequently. The POUM youth movement, the JCI (Juventud Comunista Ibérica), seemed the most radical of all the Left’s private armies and called continually for the ‘formation of soviets’, while ruthlessly killing ‘enemies of the people’.

  Catalonia as a whole and republican Aragon reflected the events in Barcelona. A political committee was formed in all pueblos. Power, as elsewhere, lay in the hands of the strongest party, regardless of formal representation. Thus the POUM predominated in the province of Lérida; the CNT elsewhere.1 Usually, a red flag, decorated with a hammer and sickle, would be hung outside the town hall, indicating the magnetic attraction of Russia to all the proletarian parties, not only to the communists. The railways and public services were run by committees of the UGT and CNT. In most places, all professional people and craftsmen had to take orders from the committee. Most churches were burned. In some places, particularly where the burning did not occur till August, and especially in the middle-class resorts along the Costa Brava, regret was marked. Borkenau observed sad women carrying to the pyres prayer-books, images, statues, and other talismans, which had been less an object of religious value than a part of familiar daily life. Only children seemed pleased, as they cut off the noses of statues before throwing them to the flames. The houses and land of the murdered or escaped bourgeoisie would be appropriated by the municipality. As elsewhere, the ruthlessness of the revolutionaries was tempered by streaks of generosity. For example, the French poet of the air, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, then a correspondent for L’Intransigeant, succeeded in persuading a village revolutionary committee to spare the life of a monk who had been hunted in the woods. This secured, the anarchists shook hands excitedly with each other, and also with the monk, congratulating him on his escape.2