A small anarchist organization, the Friends of Durruti, came out openly against the CNT leaders, calling for a revolutionary junta, with the POUM’s participation because the party had come out on the workers’ side. Until then, its relations with the POUM had been notably cool. The call found little echo.64 What carried real weight in the CNT was the neighbourhood defence committees, the middle-level militants who had made the revolution by taking over factories and workplaces in the first days, and who felt that their revolution was being betrayed. Frustrated by the rise of an official communist party where none had seriously challenged them before, angered by its large intake of petty bourgeois whom they saw as their enemy, these militants were fighting not for political power but to crush the PSUC and its allies.
—It was they who had mobilized the people when the Telefónica was attacked, it was they who had arms, who were the first to man the barricades, stressed SOLANO. The Friends of Durruti have subsequently been portrayed as the perfect group of anarchists who had evolved to marxism. A seductive myth, but a myth nonetheless …
The POUM leadership had no confidence in them, SOLANO knew. In his neighbourhood, the CNT–POUM committee was about to give the order for its column, which included officer cadets from the training school, to march on the centre when the POUM youth leader was called to the phone.
—It was Nin. He told me not to give the order. As long as the CNT was opposed, we could take power militarily but not politically. Nin feared – and he was right – that the events would be totally misunderstood in the rest of Spain. There were such enormous disparities beween Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. A revolutionary government backed by an army and controlling the radio could have explained the situation to the combatants at the fronts; even then, even had the CNT unanimously agreed with us, it would have been a risky affair. Alone with the CNT neighbourhood defence committees – which carried little weight outside their own barrios – things were quite different …
The POUM lacked the political credibility, he thought, to swing over the mass of CNT workers from their own organization and leadership. To have broken with their organization at a moment like that (‘it wasn’t, after all, a trade union congress from which they could walk out, set up a new organization and later propose reunification’) was a big step to take. The difference between being in opposition within an organization and openly breaking with it was often forgotten, he thought. ‘I didn’t give the order, we didn’t move from the barricades.’
It was nearly over. Juan ANDRADE, of the POUM executive, managed to reach the seminary where the CNT regional committee had its headquarters. It was a question of terminating the fighting as advantageously as possible.
—‘It’s not a question of taking power, if that’s what worries you,’ I explained. Power could have been taken, I was convinced, but not held, for the central government would send forces. But if the Generalitat were taken in a rapid offensive, it could be used as a lever in negotiations to ensure immunity for all those who had risen.65 The CNT leaders refused, assuring me that nothing would happen. But we were already convinced that when the fighting ended the repression would be unleashed on us …
While he was there, Federica Montseny, the anarchist minister in the central government, broadcast yet another appeal to end the fighting.
—The CNT militants were so furious that they pulled out their pistols and shot the radio. It sounds incredible but it happened in front of my eyes. They were absolutely furious – and yet they obeyed. They might be anarchists, but when it came to their own organization they had tremendous discipline. As soon as they were told to, they started to dismantle the barricades, including ours. ‘Wait, you’re not taking these down yet,’ we said …
By Friday, the city was almost back to normal: 5,000 assault guards arrived from Valencia and took over ‘like a conquering army’. The five days of fighting, which had on the whole been defensive, took an inordinately high toll: 500 dead and 1,000 wounded. The assassinations, particularly of anarchist militants, after the fighting ended added to the toll.
*
There were two victors: the central government and the communist party. Using Largo Caballero’s refusal to suppress the POUM for having ‘organized the May putsch’, the communist party, in alliance with the right wing of the socialist party, succeeded in its earlier-conceived aim of ousting the left socialist prime minister; he had not proven himself the leader required by the times. Having conformed to the overall communist strategy of containing the revolution in order to prosecute the war with (hoped-for) British and French aid, he had not conformed to the communist demands on the actual conduct of the war. The fall of Málaga three months before had shaken the Popular Front. By containing the revolution he had lost the revolutionary base which was a potential alternative source of power; by refusing to repress that base he gained no new source of power. Symbolically, only the vanquished, the anarchist ministers, stood behind him in his last crisis.
Juan Negrín, the new, moderate socialist premier, had none of Caballero’s hesitations. He would prosecute the war resolutely enough to satisfy the communists, clamp down on any revolutionary or autonomist stirrings, and at the same time prosecute his own, secret peace feelers to negotiate an end to the war. A distinguished physiologist of the haute bourgeoisie, his tremendous personal vitality fitted him for the task of leading a bourgeois democratic struggle while shrouding the ambiguities of his aims.
It was not only those on the wrong side of the barricades who suffered defeat. The Esquerra was deprived of control of its police forces and army by the central government66 and soon lost its raison d’être: Catalan autonomy.
The CNT withdrew from the central government, and was soon to be provoked into withdrawing from the Generalitat. But it was the POUM which took the full initial force of the communist attack.
On the Sunday after the fighting ended, José Díaz, PCE secretary-general, addressed a large audience in Valencia. ‘Who, if not the trotskyists, inspired the criminal putsch in Catalonia?’ he asked. The fascists went under many names; one of them was trotskyists. ‘That is the name many secret fascists use who talk of revolution in order to create confusion. Everyone knows it, the government knows it. What is the government doing in not treating them like fascists and exterminating them without consideration?’
The POUM was not trotskyist, as many PSUC militants who had been pre-war members of one of the POUM’s two constituents, the Bloc Obrer i Camperol (BOC), knew.67 It was anti-Stalinist.
—The revolution in Spain began just as Stalin’s crimes were beginning to be known. The show trials were taking place, recalled ANDRADE. There was a feeling of terror and indignation amongst the revolutionary left internationally. The POUM represented the new revolutionary current that could stem the Stalinist tide, it challenged the Comintern and the Soviet Union. This was why Stalin had to liquidate the party …
—There were party militants who said it would be better to drop our criticism of the Soviet Union. They were frightened. But we continued. It is one of the POUM’s historical merits to have condemned Stalin’s policies, the Moscow trials, affirmed SOLANO …
But the communist party would have got rid of the POUM under any circumstances, believed Ignacio IGLESIAS, La Batalla’s political editor, because it ‘could not permit another, independent communist movement to exist’.
—It had nothing to do with trotskyism. Even if we had been reformists to the right of the PCE they would have liquidated us. We thought the communist party was bourgeois and conservative; we were mistaken. It wasn’t ‘right’ or ‘left’, it simply followed the line laid down by the Soviet Union’s state interests at the time …
In other parts of the Popular Front zone there was incomprehension about what had happened.68 In Madrid, however, Eduardo de GUZMAN, CNT journalist, felt that a great opportunity had been lost in not making good the CNT’s initial error in July of failing to take power, an essential of revolution.
—They could
have smashed the communists and republicans in Barcelona, driven the revolution forward everywhere. The CNT might then have taken power in Valencia and Andalusia, if not in Madrid. The aim, of course, would have been to reach an agreement with the other parties that would have been much more favourable to us and to the revolutionary cause than handing power over to Negrín …
The ‘ifs’ of history are unending. It did not happen. Who would take responsibility for unleashing a full-scale civil war within the civil war while there was still hope of defeating Franco? GUZMAN’S opinion was not widely held;69 hostility and doubt were the more usual reactions. Nin was right. The long-standing and generalized suspiciousness of Catalonia in the rest of the Spanish state made it only too easy to misinterpret the revolt – which took place as the enemy was closing in on Bilbao in the north – as a stab in the back, possibly to separate Catalonia from the republic. ‘If the anarchists are trying to break up the republic, the sooner troops go up there and settle the matter the better,’ thought the socialist youth militant, Antonio PEREZ, on the central front. The correlation of forces had already moved against the proletarian revolution, against Catalonia.
*
The denial six months earlier by the Soviet consul general in Barcelona (the old Bolshevik Antonov-Ovsëenko, who led the storming of the Winter Palace, and was soon to be recalled and shot by Stalin) that the Russians intervened in the republic’s affairs, as the POUM had alleged, was now to be shown in its true light. On 16 June, after a semi-clandestine meeting of the POUM’s executive committee (the party’s paper, La Batalla, had been suppressed a fortnight earlier) Andreu Nin walked across the Ramblas to the POUM offices above the Café Moka. One of the bodyguards, Miquel COLL, formerly of the armed workers’ patrols, was about to accompany him.
—‘No, no,’ Nin said, ‘I’m only just going across the street.’ I insisted. Since the May events, our orders were that no executive member was to leave the Virreina Palace on the Ramblas where they lived and met without being accompanied by one of us guards. ‘No, coño, it’s not worth it,’ he repeated. He didn’t want to put me to any trouble. He went out. That was the last we ever saw of him …
The police had come from Madrid. Six days after his arrest on trumped-up espionage charges, Nin was assassinated in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, where – alone of all the POUM leaders – he had been taken. Officially, not even the new prime minister, Juan Negrín, could find out where Nin was. Luis PORTELA, founder member of the PCE and now on the Valencia POUM provincial committee, went to see the new socialist interior minister.
—‘If you know where Nin is,’ the minister said, ‘I’ll put a police force and cars at your disposal and you can free him.’ It would have been comic if it weren’t so tragic. It was he – the minister in charge of police and security forces, not we – who should have known where Nin was … 70
Jaume MIRAVITLLES, the Esquerra politician and former secretary of the Catalan Anti-Fascist Militia committee, travelled to Valencia on Companys’s behalf with a verbal message that the president of the Generalitat was ‘enormously surprised’ that Nin had been arrested on charges of spying for Franco. He wanted it known that any trial must be conducted with absolute impartiality and all evidence thoroughly proven. MIRAVITLLES saw Manuel Irujo, the newly appointed Basque minister of justice who was ‘very concerned and plainly knew nothing about the case’. Then he went to see Col. Ortega, a Negrín appointee as director general of the security forces (DGS) and a wartime communist party member.
—‘A document bearing the initials A.N. and revealing a great number of war secrets has been found on the body of a known spy,’ he said to me. ‘The initials are those of Andreu Nin. In due course, the government will be informed of all the details. But at the moment, as it is a very serious espionage case –’ ‘This is the first time in the history of spying that a spy signs – if only with his initials – a compromising document,’ I replied. ‘Supposing A.N. were Amadeo Núñez or Andrés Nova – what then?’ Ortega got up bad-temperedly, saying that he considered my remarks insulting and would take it as expressing my personal opinion and not that of President Companys. ‘That’s right,’ I said …
The communist outrage, the direct work of the GPU (the Soviet secret police), demonstrated the Soviet Union’s clear determination to use Spain at any cost for its purposes, even if it meant reducing the republican government to powerlessness in its own territory. Until Trotsky’s assassination four years later, it was Stalin’s most heinous foreign crime, and did considerable damage to the moderate image of the new Negrín government which communist policy had so long called for.71
The POUM was outlawed, its 29th division on the Aragon front forcibly disbanded by the communists and its commander, Rovira, arrested – contrary to military law which forbade the arrest of divisional commanders without the defence minister’s express authority. The communists took the law into their own hands – the law they had made so much of defending in the first months of the war against the ‘uncontrollables’, whose assassinations they now repeated. POUM militants, officers of the division, fled. Many of the communists who disbanded the division were known to the POUM officers as old, pre-war militants.
—‘We’re anti-fascists, you know that, we’ve been in the struggle together a long time,’ Ramón FERNANDEZ, a POUM carpenter pre-war and now a captain, remembered telling them. But it made no difference. I had to flee to Barcelona where I was able to enlist in a mainly Basque brigade as a sergeant …
Adolfo BUESO, veteran militant printworker, was sheltered by some friends in a village near the French frontier. ‘When the enemy hunts me down, I can understand it; but when those who claim they are on the side of the working class do so – no!’
* * *
Militancies 12
JUAN ANDRADE
POUM leader
The police who arrested Nin rounded up forty more ranking POUM militants. He escaped because, on Nin’s insistence, he had gone to the doctor’s.
—‘A revolutionary’s health is vital,’ Nin insisted, reproaching me for not taking it seriously. We were on our way back to the executive committee offices from our clandestine meeting place whose existence everyone knew. I went to the doctor. The police arrived asking for Nin and me. The communists hated us equally; we had both been in the communist party and had become trotskyists. I might well have followed the same road to death as he …
As soon as she heard of Nin’s arrest, Andrade’s wife ran out to warn him. Only a couple of hours earlier, in the Moka café, two republican officers of the International Brigades, he later was told, had apparently warned a POUM militiaman that Nin was about to be arrested. The militiaman had informed Nin but he took no notice. ‘None of us believed the situation was serious enough to risk our arrest.’
On his arrival at his new hiding place, Andrade found the police waiting. A Swiss woman POUM member who lived there was a GPU72 agent – ‘one of only two agents to infiltrate the party’. He and others were taken to the main Barcelona police station, and at midnight, he, Gorkin and Bonet, fellow executive committee members, were bundled into separate cars. Three convoys set out.
—In mine there was a car in front full of foreigners only – Poles, I think – and another behind also with foreigners. In my car there were four Madrid policemen – former socialist youth members. Whenever we stopped on the road, it was the car in front that gave the signal. The Madrid policemen would take us into a bar to have coffee while the foreigners remained outside …
When they reached Valencia they were kept in solitary confinement in police cells. The socialist and CNT warders gave them news when their communist chiefs weren’t about.
—‘Do you know what’s happened? Nin has disappeared. We of the CNT have begun a great campaign about it –’ That impressed me, but I must admit that even then we didn’t really think we were in danger of our lives …
An international campaign started, especially in England and France. The Independent Lab
our party sent a delegation to Valencia to investigate; the CNT continued its campaign. Finally, Manuel Irujo, the justice minister, was able to order their release. They came out of gaol, officially free, to be met at the gates by police who bundled them into a car and took them to Madrid, first to a communist checa in the basement of a hotel, later to one in a church in the Paseo de Atocha. There he was interrogated by three former socialist youth students now turned communist agents.
—What did I think of Trotsky? Of Stalin? Questions like that. An idiotic interrogation, but quite obviously their intentions weren’t of the best. I gave them as good as I got. There were tremendous shouts. My comrades feared I was being beaten up. ‘No, no,’ I assured them on my return, ‘they were such fools, those interrogators, I let them have it’ …
He remained convinced, however, that the POUM’s repression had taken place without the agreement of the PCE leadership.
—The GPU carried it out on its own. Once it had happened, the communist party had to agree to it; but they hadn’t given their prior consent. In fact, La Pasionaria is said to have exclaimed: ‘No, it is still too early –’ a phrase that can readily be explained. The Spanish communist leadership knew the situation in Spain and feared the CNT and socialist reaction; they were wrong as it turned out – there was none …
A founder-member of the Spanish communist party, a Treasury official and journalist, he had become one of the leaders of Left Communism, the Spanish section of the (trotskyist) International Communist League until 1934, and continued to think of himself as a trotskyist; but he did not carry on fractional work inside the POUM, which had his complete loyalty. He was not, however, in agreement with the trotskyists in Barcelona, nor with much that Trotsky wrote about the events there. In particular, the accusation that the POUM had capitulated during the May events and that it would have been easy for the working class to take power. Such power as might have been taken would have been rapidly isolated and overcome by the central government, in his view. During the fighting, when he had gone out from the virtually permanent sessions of the party’s executive, trotskyists had come up to him and said: ‘It can’t go on like this, there’s no rhyme or reason to it –’
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 58