The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  There were few large estates in Catalonia, and even anarchists were uncertain as to what should be done about the lands taken over. The eventual solution—not reached in most of Catalonia until the autumn—arranged that half the expropriated land should be run by the municipality, while the other half was divided among the poorer peasants. The Popular Front committee of the pueblo would receive half the rents, while half would be remitted. Revolution was less than complete in Catalonia, since both the Esquerra and the UGT could support the smallholders. Still, there was even there a lack of foresight in the peasants’ treatment of bourgeois property. In Sariñena, between Lérida and Saragossa, where some members of the middle class (including the vet) had been spared, Franz Borkenau watched the destruction of all the documents relating to rural property. A bonfire was set ablaze in the main square, the flames rising higher than the roof of the church, young anarchists throwing on new material with triumphant gestures.1

  An amazing range of social and economic experiment was tested in the countryside in Catalonia and Aragon as in Castile. In many places, for example, money was no longer in distribution. A careful account of what occurred at Alcora (Castellón) was given by an acute German observer, Hans Erich Kaminski:

  Everyone can get what he needs. From whom? From the committee, of course. But it is impossible to provision 5,000 people from a single distribution point. Hence there are stores where, as before, one can satisfy one’s requirements, but these are mere distribution centres. They belong to the whole village, and their former owners no longer make a profit. Payment is made not with money, but with coupons. Even the barber shaves in exchange for coupons, which are issued by the committee. The principle whereby each inhabitant shall receive goods according to his needs is only imperfectly realized, for it is postulated that everyone has the same needs … Every family and every person living alone has received a card. This is punched daily at the place of work; hence no one can avoid working, for on the basis of these cards coupons are distributed. But the great flaw in the system is that, owing to the lack of any other measure of value, it has become necessary again to have recourse to money to put a value on labour performed. Everyone—the worker, the doctor, the businessman—receives coupons to the value of 5 pesetas for each working day. One part of the coupon bears the inscription ‘bread’, of which each coupon will purchase a kilo; another part represents a sum of money. But these coupons cannot be regarded as bank notes, since they can only be exchanged for goods and that only in a limited degree … All the money of Alcora, about 100,000 pesetas, is in [the hands] of the committee. The committee exchanges the products of the community for other goods that are lacking, but what it cannot secure by exchange, it purchases. Money, however, is retained only as a makeshift …

  Nevertheless, money could be had from the committee if a peasant needed it to visit, say, a girl in the next village or a specialist doctor.1 In all such places, an important role was played by the ‘justice committees’: in Lérida, a good example, this was composed by a third POUM, a third PSUC-UGT, a third CNT-FAI—the POUM doing so well because of their old strength in that town. The president and prosecutor were both chimney-sweeps: there were a great many executions.2

  Down the coast at Valencia, the Speaker of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio, who had fled there after failing to form a government in Madrid on 18–19 July, had organized a junta to control the five provinces of the Levante, which was more ineffective before the local committee than the Generalidad was before the Anti-Fascist Militias Committee. Martínez Barrio was even forced to live in the country, not in Valencia at all, after the surrender of the rebel officers in the barracks on 31 July. That success gave authority to the local CNTUGT committee presided over by a left-wing officer belonging to the old UMRA, Colonel Ernesto Arín. Real power reposed in the hands of a revolutionary lieutenant, José Benedito, a member of the Valencian autonomist Left party, and the chairman of the local defence committee. Yet, though the CNT was strong, dominating the port, and the transport and the building workers, Valencia was more bourgeois than Barcelona, with fewer expropriations. The anarchists of Valencia had mostly been treintistas, and the countryside had voted for the CEDA in February. The UGT was influential among white-collar workers. The republicans, with a following among the lower middle classes and the richer peasants of the Valencian huerta, were divided between those who saw, in present circumstances, a chance for a Valencian separatist movement and the supporters of Azaña and Giral. The minute communist party in Valencia alone gave any support to the government delegation, headed by Martínez Barrio. It later gained support among the rich Valencian peasants, through its championship of the distribution of expropriated land to individual peasants against the anarchist idea of collectivization. Elsewhere in the Levante, anarchists and socialists disputed power in different villages. Alcoy, an old bastion of libertarianism, was anarchist, along with Jativa, Elehe and Sagunto; while Alcira and Elda were socialist. At Castellón, Alicante, and Gandia, the two movements divided the authority.

  In Andalusia, the revolution was anarchist in inspiration, without the focus which Barcelona provided for the revolution of Catalonia.1 In most pueblos, old municipal councils merged with new committees. Control of roads and public services was shared by officials and militiamen appointed by the committee. Each town acted on its own responsibility. There was also hostility between the anarchist leaders, of cities such as Málaga and those of small pueblos. The former desired to intervene in the pueblos, and were resisted by the local leaders, who regarded that as an attack on their own rights.2 The socialist agricultural union, the FNTT, despite their numbers, were pushed aside by the extremists: ‘We in the socialist party were overwhelmed. What could we do? The people who took over thought only of violence. We were the strongest party here and yet we were helpless. We hardly ever met, to tell the truth. Those who took power had so little political consciousness that they robbed smallholders of the little they had.’3 In many places, private property was abolished, along with the payment of debts to shopkeepers. In Castro del Río, near Córdoba (for years one of the centres of anarchism),4 a régime was set up comparable to that of the anabaptists of Münster of 1530, all private exchange of goods being banned, the village bar closed, the inhabitants realizing the long-desired abolition of coffee. ‘They did not want to get the good living of those whom they had expropriated,’ noted Borkenau, ‘but to get rid of their luxuries.’5 In many places in this region, the anarchists had taken the initiative against the authorities and instead, afterwards, of speaking of their resistance to the rebellion, would name this time that ‘when the people rose against the señoritos’.1 The great estates in this region continued often to be worked by their former labourers, who received no pay at all but were fed from the village store, according to their needs. (Some later complained that the new village committees behaved just as those in authority always did: ‘they ate the ham’.)2 Between the pueblos, an uncertain condition prevailed. The land was dotted with places where the rebel civil guard had abandoned their garrisons and, retreating to hilltops, monasteries, and other easily defensible points, held out indefinitely, living as highwaymen by robbing from the neighbourhood. The longest surviving encampment of this kind was established by Captain Cortés of the civil guard in the monastery of Santa María de la Cabeza in the mountains of Córdoba. There were similar encampments of anarchist ‘outlaws’ inside rebel Andalusia, preying on the land and reverting to the banditry of which anarchism had been once in part a politicization.

  The generally anarchist pattern of revolution in Andalusia was varied in Jaén, which had had a strong UGT following for several years, and at Almería, where the dock workers were chiefly communists. In Jaén, there was little social change. The civil guard was sent away, but the local committees organized their own militia, who patrolled the countryside in pairs, as the civil guard had done too. The committee usually took over from the landlord, and continued to receive the landlord’s half share from
sharecroppers as discontented as before. In the straggling, stagnant town of Andújar, for example, though five of the middle class were killed, their land was left unexpropriated. The UGT left the administration of the nearby large estates to the municipality, with the result that the labourers worked the same hours as before, for the same starvation wage. Committees running these villages were sometimes elected by popular assembly, sometimes named by the Popular Front parties.

  The revolution in Málaga, controlled by the CNT and FAI, was characterized by its arbitrary inefficiency. Almost cut off from the rest of republican Spain (because of the nationalist hold on Granada, to the north-east), living under daily threat of aerial attack, with constant rumours that land assaults were about to be made upon it, Málaga was tense: ‘They are going to destroy you, Málaga. Your vices have condemned you,’ said an anarchist, watching the burning churches from a village outside.1 Antonio Fernández Vega, the civil governor, ‘a mere signing machine’ before the victorious workers, seemed ‘a pale Girondin, trembling before Jacobins in comparison with whom ours [it was the French journalist Louis Delaprée who spoke] were mere children’.2 Eventually, the committee of public safety was recognized officially from Madrid and its president, the socialist schoolmaster Francisco Rodríguez, was named civil governor. This committee did not impose its authority on the province: Motril, Vélez Málaga and Ronda ran their own affairs under anarchist direction, the old municipal councils being brushed aside. But, when the anarchist militia occupied Puente Genil in Córdoba province, it was announced that, after the war, it would be annexed to Málaga. So provincial loyalty must have existed. In Ronda ‘one did not collectivize, one did not share out, one socialized everything’.3 In Málaga itself, meantime, a military command was set up by a group of sergeants, who proclaimed themselves colonels; and then a real colonel, Romero Bassart, of the Regulares, who had escaped from Morocco, became their chairman.4

  The republican territory along the north coast of Spain was cut off from Madrid and Barcelona by the columns operating under General Mola. Here three societies came into being, one centring on Bilbao and San Sebastián; one on Santander; and one on Gijón. In the former towns, and throughout the provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the Basque nationalists ensured the continuance of a middle-class social order. Both Bilbao and San Sebastián, and the territory around them, were controlled by committees of defence, but, on these, the Basque nationalists had a majority. Only the anarchists (with strength among the fishermen and builders) were inclined to make a stand against the Basques, who regarded the working-class parties with distrust. Hence, in the new Basque motorized police corps, no members of the left-wing revolutionary parties were permitted, though there were persons who might have preferred being on the side of the rebels. About five hundred persons were apparently murdered in the Basque provinces, apart from Colonel Carrasco and some officers and falangists who took part in the rising. The anarchists were mainly responsible. The Basque leader Irujo pointed out that, for several days, he and his colleagues were almost prisoners of the CNT, who, in fact, had taken the lead in resisting the rising.1 But, after the start of August, there was little persecution of the upper or middle class.2 Priests went free and church services continued. Only two churches had been burned in San Sebastián. Expropriation of capitalists’ goods occurred only when they had taken part in the rebellion. The goods of such persons were handed over to a state board on which employees were represented, but which they did not control.

  The only measures of social change in the Basque provinces were a decree forbidding anyone to be a director of more than one company (a blow at the Basque millionaires, though less at the bourgeoisie), the cut in rents by 50 per cent which obtained elsewhere in republican Spain, and the institution of a new public assistance board for those in need. The Vizcaya arms industry—the Eibar gun plants, the small-arms factories at Guernica and Durango, the Bilbao grenade and mortar factories—were naturally taken over by the Bilbao defence committee. The Basque nationalists also gained control of the financial structure of their provinces. New boards were formed to control the banks.

  Despite this moderation, the Basques came into conflict with the church.3 The bishops of Vitoria and Pamplona, in a pastoral letter broadcast on 6 August, condemned the adhesion of the Basque nationalists to the republican side.4 The Basque priests, under the vicargeneral of Bilbao, consulted together, and advised the political leaders to continue that support. The reasons for this advice were that there was no proof that the pastoral letter was authentic, since no copies of it had arrived; that the letter had not been promulgated with due formality, being broadcast; that there were suggestions that the bishop of Vitoria did not have freedom of action; that the bishops could not know the truth of what was going on in the provinces of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya; finally, that a change of attitude by the Basque nationalists would bring untold miseries upon many people and upon the church. Thereafter, the Basque priests continued in their defiance, remaining with their flocks, whose spiritual needs they continued to serve. They also intervened on behalf of persons in danger from left-wing violence. Basque Catholic political leaders continued to support the republic and afterwards shared in its government. Their relations with Madrid were never good, distance confusing the problems of ideology. They justified their attitude by arguing that the four conditions named by St Thomas Aquinas as sanctioning a rebellion against the state did not exist, and that recent papal encyclicals had suggested that rebellion was never legal.1

  Along the coast in Asturias, the situation was complicated by the resistance of the civil guard in the Simancas barracks in Gijón under Colonel Pinilla and by Aranda’s defence of Oviedo. During the sieges, however, relations between the UGT, CNT, and communist party in Gijón became closer even than those achieved in 1934. At the beginning, power was divided between rival authorities: the war committee of Gijón, presided over by Segundo Blanco of the CNT, and the Popular Front committee of Sama, led first by González Peña, the old socialist leader of 1934, and, afterwards, by another socialist, Amador Fernández. These bodies eventually united. Belarmino Tomás, a socialist deputy, became governor of the province of Asturias, with administrative powers delegated to him, as they had been, less effectively, to Martínez Barrio in Valencia. The important coal mines of Asturias were controlled by a council composed of a director, representing the state, a few technicians, a deputy director and secretary chosen by the Asturian mines councillor, and three workers. This director could not act without the workers’ agreement.1

  The siege operations against Aranda in Oviedo were still directed by the political leaders. Gijón was constantly shelled by a nationalist cruiser, the Almirante Cervera. Its people were poor and puritan, but confident of the future. A huge poster on the hoardings displayed a red Spain and, in the centre, a lighthouse giving a beam stretching over Europe. The legend ran: ‘Spain will be a light to the world. Viva the Popular Front of Asturias!’ At night, loudspeakers would bellow to empty streets false good news from faraway battlefields. Gijón, perched on the edge of the unfriendly Atlantic, gave the impression of being a lonely soviet all of its own.2 As for Santander, that city was a far-flung outpost of the UGT, as its ancient position as Castile’s only port might have suggested. Its defence committee, presided over by a certain Juan Ruiz, also acted almost independently from the central government in Madrid.

  From the start of the civil war, the military tactics of these northern regions remaining faithful to the republic were hampered by separate political direction. The only thing they had in common was, after a few weeks of war, a lack of food. There was beer, cigarettes, cheese, and some fish, but little else to eat. The symbolic figure of north Spain in late 1936 was the native of Gijón known as ‘the man the cats are afraid of’. He could pounce on a cat from a distance of twenty yards. That night, there would be chicken on the menu for dinner.3

  As for the old borders of republican Spain, the flight or murder of many carabineers caused the man
agement of frontiers to fall into the hands of local committees. Some custom houses were run by the old officials under control of new committees. Thus, despite the formal demands of the Catalan government, the three main control points of the Catalan border with France were in the hands of the CNT—in particular the anarchist mayor of Puigcerdá, ‘the lame man of Málaga’, Antonio Martín, who ran his local stretch of frontier as if it were private land, until his murder at communist hands, in April 1937.1

  President Azaña, who appealed publicly on Radio Nacional on 23 July to Spaniards to rally behind the republic, not the revolution, later made a bitter condemnation of the ‘rrrevolutionaries’, as he spoke of them, through ‘Garcés’, one of the characters in his famous imaginary dialogue, La velada en Benicarló: ‘Where was national solidarity? I saw it nowhere. The house began to burn in the roof; and the neighbours, instead of helping to put out the fire, gave themselves up to sacking the building, stealing whatever they could. One of the most miserable aspects of these events was the general dislocation, the assault on the state.’2 The trouble was, though, that the house was collapsing, and Azaña, with Casares Quiroga, had been over-optimistic guardians of it in the weeks before. For the rest of the war, Azaña behaved as a passive man of letters, even if still President, cultivating, often over-obtrusively, the serenity of Montaigne in his château, while the countryside was aflame: a very different man from the haughty, sceptical, assertive orator of 1931.3