Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  Culture was not forgotten; a small library was set up and schooling for collectivists’ children organized with school teachers evacuated from places close to the front. Unforced, untroubled by conflicts with government or unwilling peasants, the collective lived on in its own world until the end of the war.

  *

  The spirit, if not the practice, which moved the socialist peasantry to collectivize was little different to that of the libertarians. But the practical differences between the Aragonese collectives we have observed and this socialist experience are obvious enough: the latter was entirely voluntary, did not attempt to include other village occupations (although some socialist collectives might include shoemakers or barbers), and was not part of a regional economic system, operating an exchange system, with its own regulatory body or government, like the Council of Aragon.

  With some important modifications, it was this type of socialist collective which communist party militants were prepared to support and promote.

  In Toledo province, for example, the communist party’s provincial secretary, Trinidad GARCIA, told the local peasantry that they had the right to work the land as they wished, but encouraged the day-labourers to form collectives. State credits, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, seeds would all be easier to obtain that way, he stressed.

  —‘The agricultural ministry can’t provide each of you with a loan, or a tractor, compañero; whereas it can provide the collective with these. You’ll see that the day-labourer in a collective lives better than someone working their own plot, earns more. If you stay out, your whole family will have to slave to earn as much – and in the end you’ll want to join the collective. Alone you’re not going to be able to sell your produce in the village. Think about it, compañero’ …

  Collectives, GARCIA was convinced, were a higher form of social organization than cooperatives. In the latter, the means of production remained the personal property of each member; each peasant continued to work his own land. But it was evident to him that, in the present stage, this was the only solution for the small peasant who was reluctant to hand over his plot and his livestock. ‘Why should we have to put in everything we own when the day-labourers put in nothing,’ was their attitude. It even took a great deal of work, in his experience, to persuade labourers, who wanted their own plots, to change their minds in favour of forming collectives. There he did what he could; but for the smallholding peasantry he favoured cooperatives for the time being – ‘cooperatives which, in the long run, would be replaced by collectives; that was the direction the agricultural ministry, supported by the communist party, was heading’.

  Meanwhile, in any village without a collective there was, in his experience, nothing but trouble.

  —The people said: ‘Yesterday, it was don José and today it’s don committee.’ They understood very well what was going on. Where the committee simply controlled things and worked the land in place of the former landowner, people knew they were no better – indeed, sometimes worse – off. This happened in Corral de Almaguer, one of the richest villages in Toledo. The cacique mentality continued to operate. We had to go there and tell the committee members, who included socialists and communists, that the government’s agrarian reform decree had got to be applied. As we got no concrete reply, we summoned a village assembly. As soon as we explained the situation, the villagers solved the problem immediately – they went out and took over the land themselves …

  The village committee complained to the Popular Front provincial committee that GARCIA had stirred up the villagers against it. He and fellow party members were called to task. ‘I told them we had done what they should have been doing.’ The villagers didn’t want a committee whose members ate meat they had ‘expropriated’ while the rest had none; didn’t want to work and get whatever wage the committee happened to decide to pay; didn’t want a committee that rendered no accounts. ‘The people have got to be told the truth. We are at war. If there is only bread – then by bread alone; but they have got to know the truth …’

  The communists did not support ‘total’ collectivization; they favoured only the collectivization of production, not consumption. Similarly, they did not support the abolition of money or an egalitarian wage. GARCIA found it necessary to explain to the collectivists that they needed foremen and specialists, as in the past, and that these would have to receive a higher wage.

  —The difference with the past was that these foremen and specialists must be elected by the collectivists and that they would have to work longer hours than the rest. Because of that, and their extra responsibility, it was only right that they should receive 25 céntimos a day more for their work. The collectivists understood this when it was explained …

  These, and all the other political differences between communists and anarchists, led to bitter clashes over collectivization in GARCIA’S province. He maintained that the CNT’s rapid growth was in large measure due to its admitting right-wingers. On the other hand, CNT militants were killed by troops attempting to break up collectives, as Eduardo de GUZMAN, editor of the CNT paper Castilla Libre, recalled. More than once, GARCIA was attacked by the paper for his work in the province. But he continued, firm in his belief that the agrarian reform decree was a gigantic leap forward towards socialism.

  —I always said that we wanted the revolution and, while it might not be the moment for the inauguration of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that under Popular Front pluralism we were inevitably heading towards socialism …

  Wounded in the retreat to Madrid in November 1936, Timoteo RUIZ, the youth who started the war with a lance, spent some time convalescing in Los Navalmorales de Pusa, his native village in Toledo. There he found that the land belonging to the half-dozen large owners had been taken over and a collective, of which his father, a smallholder, was one of the founding members, was flourishing.

  —‘Never have I seen the country women looking so pretty,’ my father said to me, and I knew what he meant: never before had the country women eaten so well, nor been better off …

  The proposal to form a collective of all the village lands had run into the opposition of many of the village’s 500 smallholders; they wanted to retain their plots. The organizers of the collective respected their wishes and agreed, moreover, that the collective would help them with tools, seeds, fertilizers, etc.

  —And not only that: each was given extra land from the expropriated estates so that his plot was large enough to keep him in work all year round, but never larger than he could till with help only from his family. He could not hire labour …

  RUIZ, who was a JSU member and would soon join the communist party, attended a collective assembly. Socialists still outnumbered communists in the village, but it appeared to him that the communists had the clearest ideas. A section of the assembly, a group of some twenty CNT members, argued that smallholders should be forced to join, accusing them of egoism.

  —The local communist secretary argued that this was wrong, they had to be convinced by example. It would be the collective’s own development and progress which would make these smallholders join. ‘If we force them, we shall make enemies of them – and not only that, they may well try to sabotage the collective,’ I remember him saying. He succeeded in persuading the assembly of his point of view …

  On entering the collective, RUIZ’s father had put in his smallholding, ‘one of those to set an example’. By the end of the war, he told his son later, only 5 per cent of the smallholders who had started out working their own plots remained outside the collective.

  —The reason was simple: they saw it worked well, was able to buy machinery, new tools, fertilizers which had never previously been known. They saw that people worked more enthusiastically but with less worries than before. A ploughman, for example, did not have to stable and feed the mules after work. That was taken care of by others and he could go straight home. A smallholder had all those additional tasks to do at the end of the day …

  The
CNT had not existed in the village pre-war. Having failed in their effort to oblige the smallholders to join, the twenty or so members decided to form their own collective, accusing the village collective of reformism ‘since to wait for the smallholders to make up their minds was to delay the revolution’, in RUIZ’s words.

  —The CNT made a tremendous mistake in opening its doors to anyone who wanted to join. The most reactionary falangist elements in my village became members, as I know from personal experience, because it was they who persecuted the workers with the greatest hatred after the war.

  Nor, I know, was the communist party exempt from this error. Obviously, the party wanted to attract as many new members as possible, draw in the best elements. But not all those who were allowed to join were good elements by any means. People in my village who lacked the faintest communist feelings – and who, by their condition, could never hope to aspire to them – were admitted to party membership …

  1. Albert PEREZ-BARO, secretary of the decree’s application commission, was never able to get to the bottom of why this happened. ‘But I believe that the PSUC representation on the Economics Council, which was drafting the decree, managed to persuade the CNT members that compensation should, in certain circumstances, be paid; and that in the Generalitat, Nin, the POUM leader, persuaded the CNT ministers to reject the compensation clause. If my interpretation is correct, it shows again that the CNT lacked consistency, allowing itself in this case to be led in opposite directions by two people who didn’t belong to its organization.’

  2. Shortly before the CNT withdrew from the central government following the May events in Barcelona, Joan Peiró, the CNT industry minister, issued an order for the state take-over of the mines which in turn were to be handed over to the miners for the purposes of interior sales, while a state organism would handle exports. The order, in effect, remained a dead letter. See Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, vol. 2, pp. 205–6.

  3. Report to the Plenum of the Amplified Central Committee of the PCE, Valencia, cited in Bricall, Política econòmica de la Generalitat, p. 317. Comorera said that on the day Málaga fell (7 February 1937) the Generalitat, the political parties, the unions and the press had been concerned with only one problem: the collectivization of dairies.

  4. See p. 211 n.

  5. See Pérez-Baró, Trenta mesos de col·lectivisme a Catalunya, especially chapters 4 and 5; also Bricall, op. cit., pp. 314–22.

  Bibliography

  The following list of books and articles, comprising only a small portion of the literature on the republic and civil war, includes those works which I have referred to in footnotes or have found of use in writing this book. Where a work has been republished I have tended to give the later publication date.

  ABAD DE SANTILLAN, DIEGO, Por qué perdimos la guerra (Madrid, 1975).

  ABELLA, RAFAEL, La vida cotidiana durante la guerra civil, La España nacional (Barcelona, 1973); La vida cotidiana durante la guerra civil, La España republicana (Barcelona, 1975).

  AGUIRRE, JOSE ANTONIO DE, Report on the Civil War (first 95 PP., Bolloten collection, typescript, no date).

  ALBA, VICTOR, Historia del POUM (Barcelona, 1974).

  ALPERT, MICHAEL, El ejército de la república en la guerra civil (Barcelona, 1978).

  ALVAREZ, RAMON, Eleuterio Quintanilla (Mexico, 1973).

  ALVAREZ DEL VAYO, JULIO, Freedom’s Battle (New York, 1940).

  ARANA, SABINO, ‘Minuta: Errores Catalanistas’, Obras completas (Bayonne, 1965).

  AUB, MAX, Campo cerrado (Mexico, 1943); Campo del Moro (Mexico, 1963); Campo de los almendros (Mexico, 1968).

  AZAÑA, MANUEL, Obras completas, 4 vols (Mexico, 1966–8).

  Balances para la historia (mimeograph, Barcelona, no date).

  BALCELLS, ALBERTO, Cataluña contemporánea II (1900–1936) (Madrid, 1974).

  BALEZTENA, DOLORES, Veinticinco años al volante, Memorias de una chofer (unpublished).

  BAREA, ARTURO, The Forging of a Rebel (London, 1972).

  BIZCARRONDO, MARTA, Araquistaín y la crisis socialista en la II república. Leviatán (1934–1936) (Madrid, 1975).

  BLINKHORN, MARTIN, ‘Carlism and the Spanish Crisis of the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 7 (July–October, 1972).

  BOLLOTEN, BURNETT, The Grand Camouflage (London, 1968).

  BORKENAU, FRANZ, The Spanish Cockpit (Ann Arbor, 1963).

  BRADEMAS, JOHN, Anarcosindicalismo y revolución en España (1930–1937) (Barcelona, 1974).

  BRENAN, GERALD, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, 1943).

  BRICALL, JOSEP MARIA, Política econòmica de la Generalitat (1936–1939) (Barcelona, 1970).

  BROUE, PIERRE, La Révolution espagnole (Paris, 1973); (and TEMIME, EMILE), La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1961).

  BURGO, JAIME DEL, Conspiración y guerra civil (Madrid, 1970); Requetés en Navarra antes del alzamiento (San Sebastián, 1939).

  CABEZAS, JUAN ANTONIO, Asturias: catorce meses de guerra civil (Madrid, 1975).

  CARR, RAYMOND, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford, 1966); (ed.), The Republic and the Civil War in Spain (London, 1971).

  CASARES, FRANCISCO, La CEDA va a gobernar (Madrid, 1934).

  CASTILLO, ALBERTO DEL, La Maquinista Terrestre Marítima, personaje histórico (Barcelona, 1955).

  CATTELL, DAVID, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley, 1955).

  CLAUDIN, FERNANDO, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth, 1975).

  COLODNY, ROBERT, The Struggle for Madrid (New York, 1958).

  COMIN COLOMER, EDUARDO, Historia del partido comunista de España, 3 vols (Madrid, 1973).

  Contestacions al questionaria que ens ha estat adrecat per la Generalitat relacionat amb la requisa dels nostres talleres … (mimeograph, Barcelona, May 1938).

  CORDON, ANTONIO, Trayectoria (Paris, 1971).

  CORES FERNANDEZ DE CANETE, A., El sitio de Oviedo (Madrid, 1975).

  CRUELLS, MANUEL, Mayo sangriento: Barcelona 1937 (Barcelona, 1970).

  De Companys a Prieto, documentos sobre las industrias de guerra de Cataluña (Buenos Aires, 1939).

  DIAZ, JOSE, Tres años de lucha (Paris, 1970).

  DIAZ DEL MORAL, JUAN, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas-Córdoba (Madrid, 1967).

  DURAN DE VELILLA, MARCELINO (and GARCIA PRIETO, MANUEL), l8 de julio – episodios del glorioso movimiento nacional en Córdoba (Córdoba, 1938).

  ELORZA, ANTONIO, La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república española (Madrid, 1973).

  ESCOBAR, JOSE IGNACIO, Asi empezó … (Madrid, 1974).

  ESCOFET, FREDERIC, Al servei de Catalunya i de la república (Paris, 1973).

  FERNANDEZ, ALBERTO, Procès à Madrid (Paris, 1973).

  FERNANDEZ CLEMENTE, ELOY, Aragón contemporáneo (1833–1936) (Madrid, 1975).

  FRANCO SALGADO-ARAUJO, FRANCISCO, Mis conversaciones privadas con Franco (Barcelona, 1976).

  FRASER, RONALD, In Hiding, The Life of Manuel Cortes (London, New York, 1972).

  GALLO, MAX, Spain under Franco (London, 1973).

  GARATE, RAFAEL DE, Diario de un condenado a muerte (Bayonne, 1974).

  GARCIA-NIETO, MARIA CARMEN (and DONEZAR, JAVIER M.), ‘La dictadura’ (Bases documentales de la España contemporánea, vol. 7) (Madrid, 1973); ‘La segunda república I’ (Bases …, vol. 8) (Madrid, 1974); ‘La segunda república II’ (Bases…, vol. 9) (Madrid, 1974); ‘La guerra de España, 1936–1939’ (Bases …, vol. 10) (Madrid, 1975).

  GARCIA VENERO, MAXIMINIANO, Falange en la guerra de España: la unificación y Hedilla (Paris, 1967); Madrid, julio 1936 (Madrid, 1973).

  GIBSON, IAN, The Death of Lorca (London, 1973).

  GIRON, JOSE, ‘Un estudio de sociología electoral: la ciudad de Oviedo y su contorno en las elecciones generales de 1933’, Sociedad, política y cultura … (Madrid, 1973).

  GOÑI, MARIA VICTORIA, El abstencionismo electoral durante la segunda república en San Feliú de Guixols, memoria a la Fundación Ju
an March (unpublished).

  GROSSI, MANUEL, L’ Insurrection des Asturies (Paris, 1972).

  GUARNER, VICENTE, Cataluña en la guerra de España (Madrid, 1975).

  GUZMAN, EDUARDO DE, El año de la victoria (Madrid, 1974); La muerte de la esperanza (Madrid, 1973); Nosotros, los asesinos (Madrid, 1976).

  HERMET, GUY, Les Communistes en Espagne (Paris, 1971).

  HILLS, GEORGE, Franco: the Man and his Nation (London, 1967).

  IBARRURI, DOLORES, et al., Guerra y revolución en España 1936–1939, 3 vols (Moscow, 1967–71); They Shall Not Pass: the autobiography of La Pasionaria (trans. of El único camino, London, 1967).

  IRUJO, MANUEL DE, La guerra civil en Euzkadi antes del estatuto (typescript), (Bayonne, 1938).

  ITURRALDE, JUAN DE, El catolicismo y la cruzada de Franco, 3 vols (Bayonne, 1955, and Toulouse, 1965).

  JACKSON, GABRIEL, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931–1936 (Princeton, 1965); A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1974).

  JELLINEK, FRANK, The Civil War in Spain (London, 1938).

  KAMINSKI, HANS, Ceux de Barcelone (Paris, 1937).

  KAPLAN, TEMMA, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903 (Princeton, 1977); ‘Spanish Anarchism and Women’s Liberation’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 6 (1971).

  KOLTSOV, MIKHAIL, Diario de la guerra de España (Paris, 1963).

  LEAL, JOSE LUIS, et al., La agricultura en el desarrollo capitalista español (1940–1970) (Madrid, 1975).

  LEVAL, GASTON, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London, 1975).

  LIZARZA, ANTONIO, Memorias de la conspiración (Pamplona, 1953).

  LORENZO, CESAR, Los anarquistas españoles y el poder (Paris, 1972).