The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  37

  The political crisis in Franco’s Spain caused the death of two people only, even if it resulted in the imprisonment of many. It did not affect the war. The concurrent crisis in republican Spain, of greater complexity, more important for Spain and the European socialist movement, killed several hundred, damaged morale, and prevented the republic from launching any offensive which would have taken advantage of their enemies’ preoccupation with the north.

  The republic’s crisis was the consequence of the emergence, since July 1936, of a new force in Spanish politics: namely, communism, a movement sustained by Russia’s diplomatic and military help, guided by a group of experienced international agents, and supported by many members of the middle class. For this was no ordinary communist party. If its propaganda harked back to the Russian revolution, its practice suited, and reflected the desires of, the small shopkeepers, farmers, taxi drivers, minor officials and junior officers who joined it between July and December 1936, without reading much Marx or knowing much of Russia, in the hope of finding protection against anarchism and lawlessness. The communists stood for a disciplined, left-of-Centre, bourgeois régime, capable of winning the war, with private industry limited by some nationalization, but not by collectivization, or workers’ control. Prieto, hostile to revolution, with the right-wing socialists, was still a supporter of collaboration with the communists. Companys, despite his knowledge that communism spelled centralism, preferred to use the Catalan communists of the PSUC, well organized by the ex-socialist Juan Comorera, against the anarchists who had helped Catalan separatism in the past and whom he, Companys, had so often defended. It has previously been shown how many army and air force officers, for technical reasons, preferred the communists to the other parties and how, while some joined the party explicitly, many others looked on it with sympathy. The astonishing triumphs since July 1936 of the self-confident communists seemed a sure token that they possessed an elixir for continuous success.

  Against the new party was ranged—though that suggests a nonexistent formality—a heterogeneous gathering. There were the left-wing socialists, headed by Largo Caballero, still the Prime Minister, resentful of communist infiltration into the organs of the state and of communist arrogance. There were some officers and officials, such as General Asensio, who had kept their heads, failed to surrender to the emotions of the mass and were shocked by the communists’ cynicism. There were the revolutionary communists of the POUM, whose emotions were to be chronicled so well by George Orwell (then serving with the POUM militia in Aragon); and there was the anarchist movement, though that was divided—it was a long way, intellectually, from the nationally influential anarchists, such as the CNT’s secretary-general, Mariano Vázquez, and the anarchist ministers who had been convinced of the need for authority of some sort while the war lasted, to those who still, and independently, controlled the forces of public order in Catalonia. There were also the anarchists who ran half Aragon as ‘the Spanish Ukraine’; and there were those in the factories of Barcelona, who resented the stealthy way in which the state had mastered the revolution, through the manipulation of credit, raw materials and the insistence on the priority of war production.

  In the unfolding drama, ordinary people, non-political workers or secret sympathizers with the nationalists, were in a weak position, since the censorship was in communist hands, and often prevented the truth being known. Under the excuse of the needs of war, less and less accurate knowledge of what was happening was available to good republicans, while their picture of the outside world became almost as narrow as that in the zone of Franco. Meanwhile, the economic position was worsening: in May 1937, food prices in Barcelona were almost double those of July 1936.1 Most factories were running down. Only the metallurgical industries, in which war production was concentrated, showed an increase over July 1936.2 The industrial use of electric power in April 1937 was down 27 per cent on what it had been in the same month of 1936.3 Wages meantime had risen only 15 per cent over July 19364—a stability in one part of the economy due to the fact that strikes, at which both UGT and CNT had been such expert practitioners, were unthinkable.

  The political crisis in the republic came to a head in May 1937, but its roots need to be sought in the events of the previous winter. Thus, at their annual conference on 21 February, the FAI threatened that their ministers would be withdrawn from the government unless the Aragon front, still manned mainly by anarchists, were supplied with arms.5 Some time during the spring, the FAI seized a shipload of arms in Barcelona harbour. Largo Caballero brought up the matter in the cabinet and asked the anarchist ministers to surrender the material. García Oliver said that he would give up the arms if the government gave the anarchists some aeroplanes. Largo accepted this without protest.

  The communist party held a conference from 5 to 8 March at Valencia.6 The speeches were moderate in tone, save on the subject of the POUM. Díaz praised the republicans of Azaña’s persuasion for participating in the ‘anti-fascist movement hand-in-hand with the proletariat’. He denied that the republic stood for a battle against religion. He left open the question of whether confiscated estates should be collectively, or individually, run. But he, and all speakers, urged speed in unifying the army, and organizing industry for war. Otherwise, he added, ‘the government will cease to be the government’.7 Lister, increasingly depicted in propaganda as the most popular commander, and his commissar, Santiago Alvarez, became members of the central committee.1 As for the POUM, their leaders were vilified. With Trotsky, they had recently spoken of ‘Stalinite Thermidorians’ who had established in Russia ‘the bureaucratic régime of a poisoned dictator’. They also insisted that they were fighting for socialism against capitalism, and that ‘bourgeois democracy in this country’ had had its day—dangerous attacks on the communists’ defence of ‘the democratic republic’.2 The POUM had even suggested that Trotsky be invited to make his home in Catalonia. Díaz denounced the party as ‘agents of fascism, who hide themselves behind the pretended slogans of revolutionaries to carry out their major mission as agents of our enemies in our own country’. The few POUM newspapers and radio stations outside Catalonia were seized, as harmful to the war effort. During the spring, the POUM leaders became more and more apprehensive. They were mostly ex-communists who had known Moscow well in the 1920s. Nin had known the Russian consul-general in Barcelona, Antonov Ovsëenko, when he had been a follower of Trotsky. Undoubtedly, from Stalin’s point of view, he knew too much. The minister responsible for press and propaganda, Carlos Esplá, explained to the Valencian POUMista Gorkin: ‘At this time we cannot have polemics with the Russians.’ His deputy warned the POUM that he thought the communists were preparing their physical suppression.3

  A committee of liaison between communists and socialists had meantime been created. This dangerous step, as Largo Caballero thought it, was counterbalanced by his own reassignment of a number of communist officers—‘communistoids’ (as their enemies called them)—to remote fronts. This plan included the dispatch of the chief of personnel, Major Díaz Tendero, to the north.4 He had attacked Largo Caballero anonymously in a military journal as senile and so incapable of directing the war. During March—when the Russian military advisers and senior communist officials were at their most influential, following the victory of Guadalajara—the Comintern’s directors of the Spanish communist party evidently resolved to destroy Largo Caballero once and for all.

  The communists had by then also probably got wind, through Alvarez del Vayo, of a scheme of Largo Caballero’s whereby a settlement of the war would be internationally sought and guaranteed, giving bases to Italy, mines to Germany, in return for the total exclusion of Russia’s influence: this idea was apparently put to the French by Araquistain, the ambassador in Paris, who fully shared Largo Caballero’s views on the subject of communist influence. Nothing came of the scheme, just as nothing had come of the plan to stir up trouble for the nationalists in Morocco, by sponsoring an independence movement
there. At all events, Largo Caballero seemed busy on the international scene,1 in a way which might be to Russia’s disadvantage, and he had obliquely attacked the communists by publicly saying that his feet were surrounded by ‘serpents of treason, disloyalty and espionage’.

  An astonishing meeting of the Spanish communist party executive was shortly held, attended by Marty, Codovilla, Stepanov, Gerö, Gaikins (the Russian chargé) and apparently even Orlov, of the NKVD. One of these—it is obscure who2—announced that Largo Caballero should be removed from the premiership. Díaz and Hernández protested. Díaz added that Spanish communists should not always have to follow the lead of Moscow. Fear or ambition kept the other Spaniards from speaking. Stepanov said that it was not Moscow but ‘history’ which condemned the Prime Minister, for his defeatism and for his defeats. Marty agreed. Díaz called Marty a bureaucrat, and Marty growled that he was a revolutionary. ‘So are we all’, said Díaz. ‘That remains to be seen’, answered Marty. Díaz told Marty that he was a guest at meetings of the Spanish communist party. ‘If our proceedings do not please you,’ said Díaz deliberately, ‘there is the door.’ Uproar followed. Everyone stood up. La Pasionaria shrieked, ‘Comrades! Comrades!’ Gerö sat open-mouthed in surprise. Only Orlov seemed imperturbable. Codovilla tried to calm Marty. Such scenes were unheard of at such meetings. Eventually, Díaz was brought to accept the proposal if the majority voted for it. Díaz and Hernández were alone in voting against. One Comintern representative next said that the campaign to destroy Largo Caballero should begin at a meeting in Valencia, and blandly suggested that Hernández should make the keynote speech. As for the next Premier, Juan Negrín, the finance minister, would be the best choice. He was less obviously pro-communist than Alvarez del Vayo, who was anyway foolish, and less potentially anti-communist than Prieto. Hernández soon made his speech, in the Cinema Tyris, Valencia. Largo Caballero asked for his resignation. Hernández said that he was in the government as a communist representative and, if he left, the communists would all withdraw. Largo Caballero vacillated, asked the communists for another man in place of Hernández, but, in the end, did nothing.

  The tension in the streets in Barcelona between the anarchists and the POUM, on the one hand, and the government and PSUC, on the other, was becoming acute. Companys’s lieutenant, Tarradellas, wanted to fuse all the Catalan police into one body, thereby dissolving the control patrols which were still directed by the CNT. In this matter, as in so many others, the aims of the communists, and those republicans or Catalans who placed the efficient conduct of the war above all else, again coincided. Problems had been continuous since January. There had been many murders in both Barcelona and Madrid, with anarchists killing communists and vice versa, squabbles over control on committees and, in industries, sudden attempts by communists at intimidation. In March, a communist group stole twelve roughly made tanks from an anarchist depot, by forging an order from an anarchist commissar.1 When, on 26 March, Tarradellas forbade police to have political affiliations, and ordered all political parties to hand over their arms, the anarchists resigned from the Generalidad. The succeeding governmental crisis lasted so long that the Plaza de la República became nicknamed the Plaza ‘of the permanent crisis’.2 The anarchist youth, meanwhile, inspired by the implacable cripple Escorza, explained that they could not, and would not, die for that ‘pretty April democracy [of 1931] that used to deport us … the tragic alternative is, as it was in the days of the First International: either state or revolution’.1 The fact was, however, that José Asens, the anarchist chief of the control patrols, had arrested and killed innumerable people without cause and still terrified Barcelona. Other anarchist patrols inspired private ‘expropriations’, which were no better than thefts.2

  Eventually, on 16 April, the agile Companys formed a new government of much the same complexion as before. The main difference was that the important communist minister of supply, Comorera, moved to the portfolio of justice.3 The parties kept their arms, the control patrols survived, and nervousness in Barcelona continued. The anarchist ministers in the government at Valencia had done their best to restrain their Barcelona comrades, but only lost influence with their own followers, over whom they had anyway slight authority.

  On 25 April, the anarchist paper, Solidaridad Obrera, published a determined attack on José Cazorla, the communist commissar for public order in Madrid. He had closed the anarchist newspaper there simply because it had printed a denunciation by Melchor Rodríguez, the anarchist prison director, of the communists for retaining a private prison and interrogation chamber. The ensuing scandal resulted in a communist setback: Largo Caballero dissolved the entire Madrid defence junta, which, as has been seen, was dominated by the communists. He handed back the administration of the capital to a town council representing all the parties. Also on 25 April, a prominent communist in Barcelona, Roldán Cortada, was found dead, presumably shot by anarchists. The same day in Puigcerdá, the east Pyrenean frontier town, a clash occurred between the carabineers and the anarchists of the local collective. Negrín, the finance minister, had decided to end the anomaly whereby that crossing-point was controlled by the CNT. The Puigcerdá collective had become a centre for spying, false passports and secret escapes, and the lame mayor, Antonio Martín, was believed to keep his own cattle while insisting on collectivization for others. He was as much an eccentric as a smuggler, more a man of action than an anarchist. Nevertheless, after a violent clash, apparently provoked by the carabineers, he and several of his followers were killed.1 Negrín had less difficulty in resuming governmental control over the other customs posts.

  Open fighting in Barcelona began to be feared between anarchists and POUM on the one hand and the government and the communists on the other.2 The communists were said to have devised a new slogan: ‘Before we capture Saragossa, we have to take Barcelona.’ Arms began to be gathered and buildings secretly fortified, both sides fearing the other would strike first. The Voroshilov (previously Atarazanas) and Pedrera barracks were the communist citadels. The Marx barracks were the stronghold of the POUM. The CNT held out at the Chamber of Commerce. A week passed. People began to say that the murder of Roldán Cortada had been a communist provocation to justify police action in anarchist quarters of Barcelona: the rumours survive to this day, for the dead man, once a friend of Largo Caballero, was known to be against the growing spirit of ‘pogrom’ in the PSUC.3 The first of May, traditionally a day of rejoicing, was quiet, since the UGT and CNT agreed that processions would be sure to lead to trouble. On 2 May, Prieto telephoned the Generalidad from Valencia. The anarchist operator answered that there was no such thing as a government in Barcelona, only ‘a defence committee’. The government and the communists had believed for some time that the CNT tapped their calls, which they were in a position to do. Perhaps they just listened. Communists have never liked being eavesdropped on. On 2 May, a call from Azaña to Companys was interrupted by the telephonist, who said that lines should be used for more important purposes than a talk between the two presidents.1 So, on the afternoon of 3 May, the chief of the police in Barcelona, Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, went to the Telefónica, and visited the censor’s department on the first floor, intent on taking over the building. That seemed a provocation, since the anarchist committee’s control of the Telefónica was ‘legal’, according to the Generalidad’s own decree on collectivization. The anarchist workers opened fire from the second floor down the stairs to the censor’s department. Rodríguez Salas telephoned for aid. The civil guard appeared, as did two FAI police leaders, Dionisio Eroles (now head of the anarchist commissariat) and José Asens (chief of the control patrols). Eroles persuaded the CNT workers not to shoot again. They gave up their arms, but fired their spare ammunition through the windows. A crowd had by now gathered below in the Plaza de Cataluña. It was at first assumed that the anarchists had captured the police chief. The POUM, the Friends of Durruti, the Bolshevik-Leninists (a small group of real Trotskyists headed by a gifted journalist,
Grandizo Munis), the anarchist youth, took up positions. Within a few hours, all the political organizations had brought out their arms and had begun to build barricades. Shop owners hastily shuttered their windows.2

  Until this moment, the communists in Barcelona had gained their ends chiefly by a mixture of intimidation and common sense. Their political tactics had the support of both the Generalidad and the republican government at Valencia. Ayguadé, the Catalan councillor for public order (in effect, minister of the interior), admired Comorera and was thus close to the communists. They probably thought that the Telefónica would have been easily captured. An open clash with the CNT in Barcelona was one contest which the communists could not have been sure of winning. The communist party had embarked on the destruction of Largo Caballero, with all his prestige among the working class in Spain. That task required their undivided attention. Largo Caballero was having some success in his drive against the communists. A decree of 17 April, restricting the commissars’ powers and requiring the appointment of all commissars to be personally approved by himself, had angered them as much as the dissolution of the Madrid junta of defence had. The communists would have taken more trouble, and taken men from the front, if they had planned a coup in Barcelona. But once the shooting had begun, they might be expected to reap the fullest advantage from what was happening—in particular, to discredit the POUM, whom they certainly proposed to destroy one day. The POUM, especially the POUM youth (Juventud Comunista Ibérica—JCI), and the ‘Bolshevist-Leninists’ had meantime issued many appeals during April in favour of continuing the revolution, of the immediate dissolution of the Cortes, and of the establishment of a constituent assembly, based on collectivist committees. The anarchist youth and an extreme anarchist ‘groupuscule’ which called themselves ‘The Friends of Durruti’ found these ideas acceptable.1