Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  Vicente Uribe, agricultural minister, PCE (Madrid, 7 October 1936)

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  The Council of Aragon will respect the peasants’ right to work the land individually or collectively, in order to avoid any discontent which the rapid social transformations of the first moments may have caused. Although the Council will defend smallholders, it will – as agreed between the UGT and CNT – strive to prevent the return of the despicable system which existed prior to 19 July …

  Joaquín Ascaso, president (CNT) of the Council of Aragon

  (Radio broadcast, 19 July 1937)

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  As far as the collectives are concerned, there is not a single Aragonese peasant who was not forced to join. Any who resisted suffered terroristic attacks on their persons and property. Their land was taken from them, they were forced to work from sunrise to sunset on sweated day labour, receiving a wage of 95 centimos. Any who refused were deprived of bread, soap and their most basic needs. All privately held stocks of food were taken over. Well-known fascists were put in positions of authority in municipal councils …

  Frente Rojo, PCE organ (Valencia, 14 August 1937)

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  2. It is now known that from early 1934, Primo de Rivera was financed to the tune of 50,000 lire (the equivalent of $2,600 or £530) a month by Mussolini. See M. Gallo, Spain under Franco (London, 1973), pp. 48–9; Angel Viñas, La Alemania nazi y el 18 de julio, pp. 168, 500–501.

  3. For his description of the provincial petty bourgeoisie, see Points of Rupture, B.

  4.‘We didn’t believe that Spain could in fact expand territorially since the colonial carve-up had already been made, and what Spain might now get was hardly likely to be economically profitable. Spain had lost money for long enough in Morocco. In consequence, the demands for territorial expansion – in North Africa and the return of Gibraltar – were largely rhetorical, although great emotional rallying cries. In this, the Falange differentiated itself from Italian fascism with its clearly defined policy of territorial expansion; it differentiated itself from Nazism by having no racist policies which would, in a country as racially mixed and as Catholic as Spain, have been nonsense.’ (Dionisio RIDRUEJO.)

  5. ‘To begin with we believed the news of José Antonio’s execution; then a conflicting report saying that he was alive and being held hostage gained unconditional credence. It made political sense, after all. Even Franco believed it. Serrano Suñer [Franco’s brother-in-law who was about to become the dominant political personality in the nationalist zone] told me on one occasion that Franco was convinced José Antonio had not been executed. Franco was jealous of him; he could see that the Falange masses had no other ideology, no other myth than that of José Antonio. Franco felt this as an insult. He maintained to Serrano Suñer that José Antonio had been handed over to Russia and that the Soviets had castrated him. Franco patently believed what he wanted to believe. José Antonio could no longer overshadow him as a man or a myth. The former had been destroyed by his castration, the latter by his being alive, not a dead martyr … ’ (Dionisio RIDRUEJO.)

  6. A Carlist politician, Count Rodezno, said later that Franco had told him before the event that unification was necessary to prevent the resurgence of right- and left-wing dissension and the class struggle. The left, he said, was joining the Falange; the right the Carlists. Unification would permit the more extremist falangist elements to be counter-balanced by the Carlists (see J. del Burgo, Conspiración y guerra civil, pp. 777–8). Potential civilian contenders for power were being removed without difficulty. Fal Conde, the Carlist secretary-general, had been exiled by Franco the previous December for attempting to set up Carlist military academies without his approval; don Juan, Alfonsine heir to the throne, had been escorted from the country earlier (see p. 202); Gil Robles was in exile in Portugal; don Xavier, the Carlist pretender, would be asked to leave Spain six months later.

  7. Hedilla was kept in solitary confinement for four years. ‘I heard Franco say more than once later, when some problem arose, that he regretted not having Hedilla shot. Hedilla had struggled within the limits of his possibilities to contain the repression, without going so far as to condemn it. He protested about falangist participation in it; and also about the “orgiastic” aspects of the war – the proliferation of bodyguards, arms, cars. But he was a man who lacked any talent for leadership; discreet, prudent and, in the last analysis, weak, he made it easier for Franco to take over.’ (Dionisio RIDRUEJO.)

  8. Given the portmanteau title of: Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, usually abbreviated to FET. Its political secretariat was made up of second-rank figures under Serrano Suñer, who became secretary-general.

  9. Basic to organic democracy (as opposed to ‘inorganic’ bourgeois democracy) is the concept that the class struggle can be overcome by the harmonious cooperation of different social groups within a single corporation. Class trade unions, political parties and universal suffrage are abolished. ‘Our regime will make radically impossible the class struggle because all those who cooperate in production will constitute an organic totality,’ in the words of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. An individual’s three ‘functions’ – as worker, as member of a community, as member of a family – are represented within an organization of corresponding interests. In the fascist/falangist variant, the state is all important and the corporations form an integral part of it; in the Catholic version, these corporations exist prior to the state and thus the latter occupies a lesser, subordinate role. This was the Carlist position (explaining their hostility to the Falange’s totalitarianism) as well as the long-term perspective of the CEDA pre-war. Where the latter two differed was on the means to achieve the desired goal. The monarchists also favoured a ‘strong, corporative state’ as a means of ending the ‘ruinous era of the class war’, in Calvo Sotelo’s words. Organic democracy was the common political denominator which Franco espoused, converting it into one of the means of dominating civil society for forty years.

  10. The volunteer temporary second lieutenants who were trained, partly by German military instructors, in rapid courses to officer the nationalist combat units. Their death rate was so high that a temporary lieutenant became known as a permanent corpse.

  11. Not usually credited with this formulation, Franco used the word ‘crusade’ in the first week of the war while still in Morocco when he called on the army to have ‘faith in the outcome of the crusade’, according to El Defensor de Córdoba (25 July 1936).

  12. Points of Rupture, E.

  13. J. Díaz, Tres años de lucha (Toulouse, 1947), pp. 295–7.

  14. In the same way as the creation of the Popular Front had corresponded to the ‘Complementary, not contradictory’ needs of the Soviet Union and the Spanish democratic revolution. See Points of Rupture, E.

  15. Not including the shopkeepers and artisans included by the party amongst the industrial workers. Guy Hermet (Les Communistes en Espagne, Paris, 1971) estimates that the industrial proletariat comprised no more than 25 per cent of the PCE’s membership between 1937 and 1939. This would mean that shopkeepers and artisans formed 10 per cent of the party, raising the petty bourgeoisie’s share to 50 per cent of the membership.

  16. Any who did not follow the line, like Juan Astigarrabía, secretary of the Basque communist party, were in difficulty. See p. 397, n. 1.

  17. See Guerra y revolución en España, 1936–1939 – the official party history of the war – (Moscow, 1967), vol. 2, p. 31. In August 1937, the communist agricultural minister, Vicente Uribe, published a decree regularizing agricultural cooperatives.

  18. This was blocked by the socialist ministers who sought nationalization of expropriated estates which the communist minister was forced to accept. However, the PCE’s criterion that only those owners who had intervened directly or indirectly in the uprising should be subject to expropriation was upheld. For further consideration of the land question see pp. 372–3.

  19. Stalin’s letter to Largo Caball
ero (21 December 1936).

  20. As, in effect, was done in Asturias where the initiative was taken by the UGT and the CNT and the outcome was applauded by the communist and republican parties. See UGT-CNT pact, p. 244.

  21. There can be no historical guarantee that a people’s war would have triumphed. International isolation, absence of bases outside the national borders, continuing lack of working-class unity might have proved too heavy a burden. But many factors favoured it: among them, the terrain, the great length of sparsely manned fronts, the vulnerability of the enemy rearguard (which, in fact, never felt its victory morale seriously threatened), Franco’s traditional military thinking, the lack of anti-insurgent weaponry, and, above all, historic memories and recent experience: the guerrilla warfare of the Napoleonic era, the victories of 18–20 July and of Madrid in November through the fusion of armed forces and civilians. In his letter to Caballero, Stalin advised him not to overlook the creation of peasant partisans in the enemy’s rear. The Popular Army included a guerrilla corps which raided but did not form a maquis; the latter existed, in isolation, in some parts of Andalusia and later Asturias. (For the experience of a guerrilla in Asturias, see pp. 426–30.) Guerrillas, partisans, etc. would, of course, have formed but part of a protracted people’s war strategy.

  22. As it did others, such as declaring Spanish Morocco’s independence to undermine the enemy’s rearguard and disrupt one of Franco’s major sources of recruitment, the legalization of revolutionary conquests on the mainland, etc.

  23. Jesús Hernández, communist minister and later head of the political commissariat, said after leaving the party that hundreds of communist and JSU ‘organizers’ invaded military units. ‘Our officers were given categoric instructions to promote the maximum number of communists to higher ranks, thus reducing the proportion of promotions open to members of other organizations. But it is my duty to state that while this reckless policy was being carried out, the communists did not cease fighting the enemy and their resolution and discipline at the fronts showed them to be better than the best, a fact that facilitated the proselytizing work we had undertaken.’ (Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage, p. 231.)

  24. The fact that the Soviet Union was the only large supplier of arms and that the government had sent the bulk of Spain’s gold reserves to Moscow meant that the influence was more than equal to the aid.

  25. By supporting the formation of a workers’ government based on a UGT-CNT alliance to the exclusion of the republicans. Such a government, or junta, was mooted at the end of August 1936. Participation, on the basis of making the revolution necessary to win the war, would not have excluded fighting to keep the petty bourgeoisie in the struggle. The new Soviet ambassador is said to have opposed the move and suggested the eventual outcome: a Popular Front government under Caballero. See F. Claudín, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (London, 1975), pp. 703–4; also, Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 180.

  26. As personal experience had convinced other CNT militia leaders, like Saturnino CAROD on the Aragon front (see pp. 132–4).

  27. The Valencia section of the POUM, to the right of the party in Barcelona (as the CNT there was to the right of the Catalan CNT), supported the creation of the Popular Army and believed that ‘we could win the war without making the revolution, but we couldn’t make the revolution without winning the war. In Barcelona they were certainly fixated on the revolution’ (Luis PORTELA, POUM).

  28. See p. 142.

  29. The general attitude in the printworkers’ union, one of the three main FOUS unions, was summed up by Adolfo BUESO, POUM printworker who had joined the CNT as long ago as the First World War, and was opposed to joining the UGT now. ‘If we return to the CNT we won’t be allowed to play any role, the FAI will continue to manipulate everything as before.’ Affiliation to the UGT was as individual members, not as a union. ‘Once the FOUS was in the UGT the communists, with their usual techniques, managed rapidly to gain control.’

  30. Joaquím Maurín, POUM secretary-general, who was caught by the uprising in the insurgent zone and held prisoner, had called it a ‘colossus with feet of clay’.

  31. A further description of this, and the relationship with the POUM, will be found on pp. 374–83, concerning the May events in Barcelona.

  32. ‘Jordi Arquer, the POUM leader, once asked me why his party wasn’t admitted to the CNT’s Council of Aragon. I answered that this was a revolutionary experiment of our own which had nothing in common with his or any other party – the POUM did nothing to foster rural collectives.’ (Juan ZAFON, CNT propaganda delegate on the Council of Aragon.)

  33. I. Iglesias, El proletariado y las clases medias (Barcelona, 1937), cited in V. Alba, Historia del POUM (Barcelona, 1974), pp. 146–7.

  ARAGON

  It was over the land question that the sharpest differences arose and Aragon became the centre of the storm.

  In the first days of the war, the militia columns – CNT-led in the main – sweeping towards Saragossa and Huesca had taken about three quarters of Aragon’s land mass. It included some fertile zones but, overall, it was the poorer agricultural areas that had been captured.34 In such relatively difficult conditions, rural libertarian collectivization began to take root and spread: 275 collectives totalling 80,000 members by February 1937; 450 collectives with 180,000 members three months later … 35

  Was collectivization being forced on an unwilling peasantry, as the communists maintained, or was it spontaneous, as the libertarians often argued? Was it undermining the war effort, turning small and medium peasants against the Popular Front, or consistent with revolutionary aspirations and the needs of the war? These were the questions that had to be answered. With two thirds of the country’s wheat lands in enemy hands, adequate food production was essential to meet the needs of the growing Popular Army and the nation’s three largest cities.

  Aragon was a region of small and medium-sized peasant holdings. Large estates of 100 hectares or more covered about one fifth of the total land,36 less than the overall Spanish average. The proportion of smallholdings was above average.

  Although the CNT had considerable strength in Saragossa city, it was much weaker in many of the rural areas, as Saturnino CAROD, former propaganda secretary of the CNT regional committee, knew from his work in the villages. In some there was a flourishing CNT, in others the UGT was strongest, and in only too many there was no unionization at all.

  The son of a poor landworker from a small Aragonese village, CAROD was well-placed to understand the peasant’s situation, and he had no hesitation, as a column leader, in arguing that it was not the moment to introduce total collectivization which, he felt, could harm the war effort. It was essential to keep the peasantry’s allegiance in the struggle.

  —I knew only too well how the peasant clings to his plot of land. He should not be forced to join a collective if he wanted to keep his own land. Only the lands of those who had fled and communal village lands should be collectivized, I maintained, and the collectives be given legal recognition …

  The advice was not heeded. Very rapidly collectives, in which not only the means of production but also of consumption were socialized, began to spring up. It did not happen on instructions from the CNT leadership – no more than had the collectives in Barcelona. Here, as there, the initiative came from CNT militants; here, as there, the ‘climate’ for social revolution in the rearguard was created by CNT armed strength: the anarcho-syndicalists’ domination of the streets of Barcelona was re-enacted in Aragon as the CNT militia columns, manned mainly by Catalan anarcho-syndicalist workers, poured in. Where a nucleus of anarcho-syndicalists existed in a village, it seized the moment to carry out the long-awaited revolution and collectivized spontaneously. Where there was none, villagers could find themselves under considerable pressure from the militias to collectivize – even if for different reasons. There was no need to dragoon them at pistol point: the coercive climate, in which ‘fascists�
� were being shot, was sufficient. ‘Spontaneous’ and ‘forced’ collectives co-existed, as did willing and unwilling collectivists within them.

  Forced collectivization ran counter to libertarian ideals. Anything that was forced could not be libertarian. Obligatory collectivization was justified, in some libertarians’ eyes, by a reasoning closer to war communism than to libertarian communism: the need to feed the columns at the front. Macario ROYO, an Aragonese CNT leader, believed that collectives were the most appropriate organization for controlling production and consumption, and ensuring that a surplus was made available for the front.

  —Everything was disorganized. The columns depended on the villages, they had no other source of supply. If there had been no collectives, if each peasant had kept what he produced and disposed of it as he wished, it would have made the matter of supplies much more difficult …

  By abolishing a free market and in effect rationing consumer goods, mainly food, the collectives controlled the local economy. Feeding the columns without payment became a source of pride or resentment, depending on the villager’s ideological commitment. But for ROYO, as for most Aragonese libertarians, the matter did not end there. The fundamental purpose of founding the collectives was social equality.

  —That each should produce according to his ability, each consume according to his need. Equality in production, equality in consumption. To supply everyone equally in the collective as well as the columns at the front – this was the principle and usefulness of the collectives …

  Nevertheless, even where the initiative had arisen spontaneously, collectivization did not lack its coercive moment. Inevitably, in ROYO’S view, for this was revolution. And revolution always meant imposing the will of an armed minority – ‘in this case, an anarcho-syndicalist minority made up essentially of the younger, idealistic militants, the ones who get things done’.37