38. In other areas of the Popular Front zone, the induction of allcomers by the CNT caused similar deprecatory comment by socialists and communists. The socialist and republican parties alone did not open their doors to wholesale induction of new members.
39. See below, pp. 239–41.
40. Workers’ and soldiers’ committees, organized by the CNT and UGT, functioned for a few months in the barracks, exercising surveillance over military commands, ensuring discipline and cooperation between the two unions; but neither proposed developing these into Soviets or new proletarian organs of power.
41. To be formed of five members of the CNT, five of the UGT and four republicans. See C. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas espanoles y el poder, pp. 97–102 and 179–90 for details of these decisions.
42. ‘If the committee did not approve the government’s wishes, the latter remained wishes,’ recalled Fulgencio DIEZ PASTOR, the committee’s Unión Republicana secretary-general. ‘Prime Minister Giral could never be sure that the Popular Front parties would obey the government’s decisions, particularly the socialist wing led by Largo Caballero, who refused to join the government, because he was saving himself for the only task he saw fit: to take over the premiership and become the Saviour of Spain.’
43. See also p. 258. The lessons of nineteenth-century Spanish revolutions were illuminating in this respect, as Raymond Carr has shown: ‘First came the primitive provincial revolution which spread “like a contagious disease” from town to town. In the second stage local Progressive politicians and notables captured the popular revolution, “restoring social peace” by setting up a Junta of respectable citizens … This may be called the committee stage of revolution … during which the central government abdicated control of the country to a network of local committees. The final stage, therefore, was the re-imposition, by a ministry that “represented” the revolution, of central government control.’ (Spain 1808–1939, pp. 164–5.)
44. The significance of this option will be examined later (pp. 323–34); its content can be seen in Points of Rupture, E.
Autumn 1936
THE BASQUE COUNTRY
On 3 September 1936, a force of insurgent military and requetés from Navarre captured the frontier town of Irún, sealing the border between the Basque country and France. Henceforth, the only communication with the rest of the Popular Front zone outside the north was by sea or air. Before abandoning Irún, some of its defenders set fire to parts of the town. Ten days later, the Basque nationalists surrendered San Sebastián without a shot. A force of gudaris (Basque nationalist soldiers) remained behind to ensure that the city was not burned like Irún by the retreating forces; earlier, they had disarmed the anarchist militia which wanted to resist. The heavy street fighting which had put down the military insurrection in the city, the long siege of the Loyola barracks, which had not surrendered until 28 July 1936, had served to keep Guipúzcoa in the Popular Front zone for less than two months.
Despite the PNV’s declaration of support for the republic on 19 July, and its participation in the defence junta set up in San Sebastián, it took nearly three weeks for the first of the Basque nationalist militia – Euzko Gudarostea – to be formed in Guipúzcoa.1 Luis MICHELENA, then an office clerk in Rentería, near San Sebastián, and a PNV militant from the age of fifteen, immediately enlisted in the new militia, seeing action for the first time two days after Irún fell. He felt that his party’s loyalty to the republican cause was absolutely natural, but that the PNV suffered from an excessively pacifist mentality.
—We kept thinking that we didn’t really want to have anything to do with war, that war was a barbarous invention which should be abolished. It was the marxists and anarchists who were the first to organize, the first to understand what was really happening. They had had experience in the October revolution of 1934; they knew that this was for real …
While socialists, anarchists, communists and left republicans attempted to hold off the enemy at the front, the PNV, which had not been able to procure arms in any quantity, remained in the rear. Telesforo Monzón, a leading PNV member, had been sent to Barcelona for arms; the Generalitat and central government were able to provide no more than 1,000 rifles and six field pieces.2 When Miguel GONZALEZ INESTAL, the CNT fishermen’s union leader and delegate on the Guipúzcoa defence junta, heard what had happened, he told the PNV members that their party lacked credibility amongst his companions in Barcelona. ‘A socialist, even a communist, would have been better.’ The junta delegated him to go to Barcelona where he saw García Oliver, Abad de Santillán and Companys.
—‘The PNV has always shown great hostility to the CNT; but now that they have committed themselves to the struggle, things are different,’ I told García Oliver. ‘We must ensure that they continue to cooperate with us.’ Everyone agreed, arms were collected, a train organized. It reached Hendaye, across the border from Irún in France, where it was held up by the French, who had sealed the border in anticipation of Non-Intervention. Irún meanwhile fell …
The PNV, with its base in the strongly Catholic, staunchly nationalist petty bourgeoisie, was incensed by the repression taking place in San Sebastián, and the subsequent burning of Irún. After a particularly brutal mass assassination of right-wing prisoners, Monzón, the PNV member in charge of interior affairs on the Guipúzcoa defence junta, resigned. The killings, in the PNV view, brought the republic into serious disrepute. Relations with the CNT were bad. The latter’s view mirrored the former’s; the PNV, in GONZALEZ INESTAL’S opinion, was always reactionary.
—Irremediably hostile to anything that threatened a change in the political or social situation. Not that there was the time or opportunity to collectivize anything; we had the enemy on top of us from the start. But the Basque nationalists were much more concerned with protecting right-wingers and churches and fighting us than they were in defending the interests of the republic …
The surrender of San Sebastián pushed the front almost overnight some 60 km west to the borders of Vizcaya, the only Basque province still remaining in the Popular Front zone. Had the insurgents not been concentrating their attention totally on the advance on Madrid, they might have pursued their advantage to the gates of Bilbao. The seriousness of the situation seemed to some to be lost on the majority of the middle-class citizenry of that great industrial centre.
—A friend of mine who went there shortly before San Sebastián fell, came back astonished that people were still walking along the Gran Vía with their hats on as though nothing in the world had happened, while the atmosphere in San Sebastián was, to put it mildly, chaotic, recalled MICHELENA. But even in the most difficult times, towards the end, there was always a certain normality in Bilbao; the churches were open, priests walked the streets in their cassocks, and people continued to maintain their reputation of looking well-dressed in English-style clothes …
The failure to defend San Sebastián aroused some quite violent confrontations within the PNV, not to speak of the other parties, as MICHELENA remembered. The Biskai-Buru-Batzar (PNV of Vizcaya) believed that if it went to the defence of Guipúzcoa, where there were plenty of men but few weapons, the province would fall anyway and Vizcaya’s defence would be prejudiced.
In Vizcaya itself, the PNV (unlike the other parties) sent no militia to the front until the last ten days of September when the enemy was almost on its borders. It was not till then that it was able to receive a consignment of arms. Despite its clear-cut declaration of adherence to the republic – which made the PNV the only non-Popular-Front political party to play a leading role in the republican zone during the war (ensuring thereby that the war would be fought not only between Spaniards but also between Basques) – there were members who, to say the least, were dubious. Juan Manuel EPALZA, an industrial engineer, believed that the PNV’s adherence to the republican cause also meant above all that the party intended to maintain law and order in the rear and to prevent the left from considering it an enemy.
—Unt
il the evening before, our real enemy had been the left. This was not because they were left-wing but because they were Spanish. And as Spanish, intransigent. We vacillated for two weeks or more, hesitating to ally ourselves with our former enemies. Had it been possible, we would have remained neutral …
The war, he thought, didn’t really concern the Basques; it was a Spanish problem to be settled among Spaniards. But then, as the military invaded Guipúzcoa to the cry of ‘Death to Euzkadi!’ and assassinated Basque nationalists, there had been no alternative but to take up arms in self-defence.
Vice-president of the Bilbao Mendigoixales, the PNV’s youth movement, EPALZA had earlier set out under Ramón Azkue, later head of the Basque nationalist militia, to form an embryonic militia force to control the rearguard.
—We were determined to prevent outrages, to ensure that the left-wingers didn’t kill, steal, burn churches. We were between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was absurd, tragic – we had more in common with the Carlists who were attacking us than with the people we suddenly found ourselves in alliance with …
Pedro BASABILOTRA, who became secretary to the head of the PNV militia, also believed the Basques should have remained neutral. For if one side was bad, the other was worse. Only the news of the assassinations of Basque nationalists in Navarre and Guipúzcoa changed the situation.
—The right, for the moment, was even worse than the left. Assassinations committed by so-called religious believers, by people with so-called education, were even more unpardonable than those committed by the under-privileged and poor on the left …
If the PNV had not taken control of the rearguard from the start there would, he was convinced, have been the same assassinations as in the other parts of the Popular Front zone. Because of them, the republic would lose the war. Capitalism was cunning, it knew it had nothing to gain by intervening on the republican side; and even more so, when the Soviet Union intervened.
—But all the same, the left remained as dangerous to us as the fascists. We knew that if the war were won there’d be a second round to fight …
Juan Manuel EPALZA was already preparing for that ‘second round’; the left would certainly turn on the Basque nationalists if they were victorious. He and others set up a second, parallel military staff with the aim of preparing to fight the left. Once the Basque country was granted its own government they were able to dispense with this, for then there was only one authority, and it was controlled by the PNV.
Without arms, the PNV found it impossible to train a militia.3 After a meeting in early August of PNV youth, BASABILOTRA went round the villages calling for volunteers. Finally, on 20 September 1936, a consignment of arms the PNV had purchased in Czechoslovakia, and which travelled in part through Nazi Germany, reached Bilbao; some of the rifles were single-loaders.
The PNV militia reached the front just in time to help hold the line after the surrender of San Sebastián.
Two sectors of Basque nationalism did not share the doubts and hesitations of some of their PNV counterparts. The Basque nationalist trade union, STV (Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos), came out ‘immediately on the side of the people’, according to its president Manuel ROBLES. ‘The working class had none of the hesitations which certain PNV elements betrayed.’ As for Acción Nacional Vasca, which (unlike the PNV) had formed part of the Popular Front electoral alliance, it had – in the figure of one of its founders, Gonzalo NARDIZ – joined the Popular Front defence junta in Bilbao immediately, and ANV militants went straight to the front.
At the beginning of September, Manuel Irujo, PNV deputy to the Cortes, proposed, on behalf of the Guipúzcoa defence junta, the formation of a Basque government without waiting for Madrid’s approval of the autonomy statute which was pending. The central government, about to be taken over by Largo Caballero, was not unaware of the party’s intentions. It offered Irujo a seat in the cabinet in exchange for the statute. On 1 October 1936, the Cortes approved the statute, and on 7 October, at Guernica, José Antonio Aguirre, aged thirty-two, was elected leader of the new Basque government. The PNV held the key posts in the cabinet. The CNT, shortly to join the central government, was excluded from the Basque government on the pretext that the latter was composed of political parties, not unions. (Safe in the knowledge that it would refuse, Aguirre said he would accept the FAI in his government.)
Now that, after all these years, they had been granted the statute,4 what did they need it for? That was what Juan Manuel EPALZA felt. ‘We had guns in our hands now, we didn’t need anyone granting us our autonomy. That was what I thought then, though today I can see I was wrong.’
Trifon ETARTE, of Jagi-Jagi (Arise Arise), the youth movement which had broken from the parent PNV before the war and come out clearly for an independent Basque state, had been to see Aguirre to suggest that Jagi-Jagi should seize the first arms consignment before it could be unloaded to ensure nationalist superiority and the cause of Basque independence.
—Aguirre was horrified. ‘That would be to betray the Popular Front.’ I, who was only twenty-five, replied: ‘The only betrayal I know is the betrayal of my country.’ But Aguirre was much too honourable to take advantage of such an opportunity. We had always believed that the statute was a trap – a trap very similar to that in which Ireland had fallen after the First World War …
But in general there was cautious joy at the statute’s approval. Jon MAURURI, a medical student and PNV member, summed up the feeling: people were happy but a bit suspicious. Would the republic have granted the statute if it had not been for the war?
—And was the republic going to regret it and abandon us? – as indeed it did. Would it think that it could leave us to be defeated and still win the war so as to use the victory to crush us once again? Who could know, who could say more than that everyone was our enemy then … ?
Concha ARRAZOLA, daughter of one of the first Basque nationalist town councillors in Bilbao and herself a leader of the nationalist women’s organization, Emakume Abertzale Batza, had little doubt. The main enemy?
—The Spanish, of course. ‘Red’ or ‘white’ – they were brothers. We were ‘cousins’ – and by cousins we mean the person who pays the consequences. But we had such complete confidence in our leaders – such gentlemen they were – that our apprehension at finding ourselves allied with these left-wing Spaniards didn’t last long …
Indeed, there was little enough cause for apprehension; Vizcaya was the least revolutionary area in the Popular Front zone. Industry remained in private ownership even if production was ‘militarized’ for the war effort; churches remained open.
—The working class made no demands. There were no wage claims. The working class was only too well aware of what was at stake in the struggle, believed Ramón RUBIAL, lathe operator and executive committee member of the UGT metalworkers’ union. If they had to work overtime, they worked it at their ordinary hourly rate. Factory committees were set up to control and stimulate production, often taking the fastest worker as the norm and creating Stakhanovites …
After the PNV, the socialists were the strongest force in Vizcaya, recruiting mainly among the migrant mining labour force. But it was here, too, that the communist party had one of its major concentrations of strength, as the national leadership of the party attested: three of the major party figures (Uribe, Hernández and Dolores Ibarruri – La Pasionaria) came from Vizcaya. Despite the communist party position that it was necessary to do everything to keep the anti-fascist petty bourgeoisie in the struggle – even to leave its leaders at the helm of the struggle – there were criticisms by party members (and later by the Spanish party itself) of the way the struggle was being waged in Euzkadi. A young communist miner. Saturnino CALVO, who had got a job for the first time now that his elders were at war, felt that pre-war conditions were being allowed to continue to the point where, in the initial months, it appeared almost as though there were no war. In the mines everything continued the same, the same bosses, the same foreme
n, the same hours; only the day wage was increased to equal the militiaman’s ten pesetas. There was a lack of combative spirit, in his view.
—The Basque government didn’t know how to make full use of the human and industrial potential available to it. And that was because the PNV wasn’t a revolutionary party; it feared that if the war were won it would mean an advance for socialism – which it was hostile to. And yet a civil war is won or lost as much in the rearguard as at the front. Perhaps more …
Ricardo VALGAÑON, a communist foundryman, who had been in a column which set out from Bilbao on 19 July to help put down the uprising in San Sebastián, and was now manning the front at Orduña, felt that the revolution had been forgotten.
—Our only desire was to win the war; everything else was left for the future. The working class, the communist party of Euzkadi, made no claims on the Basque government. Even when our party paper, Euzkadi Roja (Red Euzkadi), attempted to point out that we were fighting not only for national freedom but to change the social structure, the PNV managed to get it censored …
The communist party, he thought, kept too silent. National liberation, of course, was the major social conquest for the people of Euzkadi at that moment; if the fascists won the Basques would lose their freedom and democracy. None the less, the failure to make any social conquests was inevitably to ‘play into the hands of the Basque bourgeoisie’.
Only in those businesses where the management had sided with the insurgents or disappeared were new boards of directors and managers appointed. A government decree forbade anyone to hold more than one directorship; rents were reduced by 50 per cent as elsewhere in the Popular Front zone. For a factory owner like Juan MALZAGA, whose metal-window company had had a large contract before the war in the Madrid University city which was then under construction, work continued much the same as pre-war. Instead of metal windows he now made metal hospital beds. There was no attempt by the trade unions to take over or control the factory. About 60 per cent of his work force belonged to the STV, 30 per cent to the UGT and 10 per cent – ‘a very aggressive 10 per cent’ – to the CNT. But there was no trouble.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 27