Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  leaders had revolutionary histories behind them. Some of them had been mixed up in the 1934 revolt, and most of them had been imprisoned for Socialist activities under the Lerroux Government or the monarchy. In 1936 its then leader, Joaquín Maurín, was one of the deputies who gave warning in the Cortes of Franco’s impending revolt. Some time after the outbreak of war he was taken prisoner by the Fascists while trying to organise resistance in Franco’s rear. When the revolt broke out the POUM played a conspicuous part in resisting it, and in Madrid, in particular, many of its members were killed in the street-fighting. It was one of the first bodies to form columns of militia in Catalonia and Madrid. It seems almost impossible to explain these as the actions of a party in Fascist pay. A party in Fascist pay would simply have joined in on the other side.

  Nor was there any sign of pro-Fascist activities during the war. It was arguable – though finally I do not agree – that by pressing for a more revolutionary policy the POUM divided the Government forces and thus aided the Fascists; I think any Government of reformist type would be justified in regarding a party like the POUM as a nuisance. But this is a very different matter from direct treachery. There is no way of explaining why, if the POUM was really a Fascist body, its militia remained loyal. Here were eight or ten thousand men holding important parts of the line during the intolerable conditions of the winter of 1936–37. Many of them were in the trenches four or five months at a stretch. It is difficult to see why they did not simply walk out of the line or go over to the enemy. It was always in their power to do so, and at times the effect might have been decisive. Yet they continued to fight, and it was shortly after the POUM was suppressed as a political party, when the event was fresh in everyone’s mind, that the militia – not yet redistributed among the Popular Army – took part in the murderous attack to the east of Huesca when several thousand men were killed in one or two days. At the very least one would have expected fraternisation with the enemy and a constant trickle of deserters. But, as I have pointed out earlier, the number of desertions was exceptionally small. Again, one would have expected pro-Fascist propaganda, ‘defeatism’ and so forth. Yet there was no sign of any such thing. Obviously there must have been Fascist spies and agents provocateurs in the POUM; they exist in all Left-wing parties; but there is no evidence that there were more of them there than elsewhere.

  It is true that some of the attacks in the Communist Press said, rather grudgingly, that only the POUM leaders were in Fascist pay, and not the rank and file. But this was merely an attempt to detach the rank and file from their leaders. The nature of the accusation implied that ordinary members, militiamen, and so forth, were all in the plot together; for it was obvious that if Nin, Gorkin, and the others were really in Fascist pay, it was more likely to be known to their followers, who were in contact with them, than to journalists in London, Paris, and New York. And in any case, when the POUM was suppressed the Communist-controlled secret police acted on the assumption that all were guilty alike and arrested everyone connected with the POUM whom they could lay hands on, including even wounded men, hospital nurses, wives of POUM members and, in some cases, even children.

  Finally, on 15–16 June, the POUM was suppressed and declared an illegal organisation. This was one of the first acts of the Negrín Government which came into office in May. When the Executive Committee of the POUM had been thrown into jail, the Communist Press produced what purported to be the discovery of an enormous Fascist plot. For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarising various Spanish Communist papers):

  SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO

  Following the arrest of a large number of leading Trotskyists in Barcelona and elsewhere… there became known, over the week-end, details of one of the most ghastly pieces of espionage ever known in wartime, and the ugliest revelation of Trotskyist treachery to date… Documents in the possession of the police, together with the full confession of no less than 200 persons under arrest, prove, etc. etc.

  What these revelations ‘proved’ was that the POUM leaders were transmitting military secrets to General Franco by radio, were in touch with Berlin and were acting in collaboration with the secret Fascist organisation in Madrid. In addition there were sensational details about secret messages in invisible ink, a mysterious document signed with the letter N (standing for Nin), and so on and so forth.

  But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most of the POUM leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to trial, and the charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never even been formulated. Had they really been guilty of espionage they would have been tried and shot in a week, as so many Fascist spies had been previously. But not a scrap of evidence was ever produced except the unsupported statements in the Communist press. As for the two hundred ‘full confessions’, which, if they had existed, would have been enough to convict anybody, they have never been heard of again. They were, in fact, two hundred efforts of somebody’s imagination.

  More than this, most of the members of the Spanish Government have disclaimed all belief in the charges against the POUM. Recently the cabinet decided by five to two in favour of releasing anti-Fascist political prisoners; the two dissentients being the Communist ministers. In August an international delegation headed by James Maxton, MP, went to Spain to inquire into the charges against the POUM and the disappearance of Andrés Nin. Prieto, the Minister of National Defence, Irujo, the Minister of Justice, Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior, Ortega y Gasset, the Procureur-General, Prat García, and others all repudiated any belief in the POUM leaders being guilty of espionage. Irujo added that he had been through the dossier of the case, that none of the so-called pieces of evidence would bear examination, and that the document supposed to have been signed by Nin was ‘valueless’ – i.e. a forgery. Prieto considered the POUM leaders to be responsible for the May fighting in Barcelona, but dismissed the idea of their being Fascist spies. ‘What is most grave,’ he added, ‘is that the arrest of the POUM leaders was not decided upon by the Government, and the police carried out these arrests on their own authority. Those responsible are not the heads of the police, but their entourage, which has been infiltrated by the Communists according to their usual custom.’ He cited other cases of illegal arrests by the police. Irujo likewise declared that the police had become ‘quasi-independent’ and were in reality under the control of foreign Communist elements. Prieto hinted fairly broadly to the delegation that the Government could not afford to offend the Communist Party while the Russians were supplying arms. When another delegation, headed by John McGovern, MP, went to Spain in December, they got much the same answers as before, and Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior, repeated Prieto’s hint in even plainer terms. ‘We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like.’ As an illustration of the autonomy of the police, it is interesting to learn that even with a signed order from the Director of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, McGovern and the others could not obtain admission to one of the ‘secret prisons’ maintained by the Communist Party in Barcelona.1

  I think this should be enough to make the matter clear. The accusation of espionage against the POUM rested solely upon articles in the Communist press and the activities of the Communist-controlled secret police. The POUM leaders, and hundreds or thousands of their followers, are still in prison, and for six months past the Communist press has continued to clamour for the execution of the ‘traitors’. But Negrín and the others have kept their heads and refused to stage a wholesale massacre of ‘Trotskyists’. Considering the pressure that has been put upon them, it is greatly to their credit that they have done so. Meanwhile, in the face of what I have quoted above, it becomes very difficult to believe that the POUM was really a Fascist spying organisation, unless one also believes that Maxton, McGovern, Prieto, Irujo, Zugazagoitia, and the rest are all in Fascist p
ay together.

  Finally, as to the charge that the POUM was ‘Trotskyist’. This word is now flung about with greater and greater freedom, and it is used in a way that is extremely misleading and is often intended to mislead. It is worth stopping to define it. The word Trotskyist is used to mean three distinct things:

  (i) One who, like Trotsky, advocates ‘world revolution’ as against ‘Socialism in a single country.’ More loosely, a revolutionary extremist.

  (ii) A member of the actual organisation of which Trotsky is head.

  (iii) A disguised Fascist posing as a revolutionary who acts especially by sabotage in the USSR, but, in general, by splitting and undermining the Left-wing forces.

  In sense (i) the POUM could probably be described as Trotskyist. So can the English ILP, the German SAP, the Left Socialists in France, and so on. But the POUM had no connection with Trotsky or the Trotskyist (‘Bolshevik-Leninist’) organisation. When the war broke out the foreign Trotskyists who came to Spain (fifteen or twenty in number) worked at first for the POUM, as the party nearest to their own viewpoint, but without becoming party-members; later Trotsky ordered his followers to attack the POUM policy, and the Trotskyists were purged from the party offices, though a few remained in the militia. Nin, the POUM leader after Maurín’s capture by the Fascists, was at one time Trotsky’s secretary, but had left him some years earlier and formed the POUM by the amalgamation of various Opposition Communists with an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Nin’s one-time association with Trotsky had been used in the Communist press to show that the POUM was really Trotskyist. By the same line of argument it could be shown that the English Communist Party is really a Fascist organisation, because of Mr John Strachey’s one-time association with Sir Oswald Mosley.

  In sense (ii), the only exactly defined sense of the word, the POUM was certainly not Trotskyist. It is important to make this distinction, because it is taken for granted by the majority of Communists that a Trotskyist in sense (ii) is invariably a Trotskyist in sense (iii) – i.e. that the whole Trotskyist organisation is simply a Fascist spying-machine. ‘Trotskyism’ only came into public notice at the time of the Russian sabotage trials, and to call a man a Trotskyist is practically equivalent to calling him a murderer, agent provocateur, etc. But at the same time anyone who criticises Communist policy from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trotskyist. Is it then asserted that everyone professing revolutionary extremism is in Fascist pay?

  In practice it is or is not, according to local convenience. When Maxton went to Spain with the delegation I have mentioned above, Verdad, Frente Rojo, and other Spanish Communist papers instantly denounced him as a ‘Trotsky-Fascist’, spy of the Gestapo and so forth. Yet the English Communists were careful not to repeat this accusation. In the English Communist press Maxton becomes merely a ‘reactionary enemy of the working class’, which is conveniently vague. The reason, of course, is simply that several sharp lessons have given the English Communist press a wholesome dread of the law of libel. The fact that the accusation was not repeated in a country where it might have to be proved is sufficient confession that it is a lie.

  It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the POUM at greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I believe that libels and press-campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause.

  Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of dealing with political opponents by means of trumped-up accusations is nothing new. Today the key-word is ‘Trotsky-Fascist’; yesterday it was ‘Social-Fascist’. It is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials ‘proved’ that the leaders of the Second International, including, for instance, Léon Blum and prominent members of the British Labour Party, were hatching a huge plot for the military invasion of the USSR. Yet today the French Communists are glad enough to accept Blum as a leader, and the English Communists are raising heaven and earth to get inside the Labour Party. I doubt whether this kind of thing pays, even from a sectarian point of view. And meanwhile there is no possible doubt about the hatred and dissension that the ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ accusation is causing. Rank-and-file Communists everywhere are led away on a senseless witch-hunt after ‘Trotskyists’, and parties of the type of the POUM are driven back into the terribly sterile position of being mere anti-Communist parties. There is already the beginning of a dangerous split in the world working-class movement. A few more libels against life-long Socialists, a few more frame-ups like the charges against the POUM, and the split may become irreconcilable. The only hope is to keep political controversy on a plane where exhaustive discussion is possible. Between the Communists and those who stand or claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so long as no argument is produced except a scream of ‘Trotsky-Fascist!’ the discussion cannot even begin. It would be impossible for me, for instance, to debate the rights and wrongs of the Barcelona fighting with a Communist Party member, because no Communist – that is to say, no ‘good’ Communist – could admit that I have given a truthful account of the facts. If he followed his party ‘line’ dutifully he would have to declare that I am lying or, at best, that I am hopelessly misled and that anyone who glanced at the Daily Worker headlines a thousand miles from the scene of events knows more of what was happening in Barcelona than I do. In such circumstances there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached. What purpose is served by saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay? Only the purpose of making serious discussion impossible. It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing.

  1 The purchasing value of the peseta was about fourpence [about 1.7p in decimal currency].

  1 See the reports of the Maxton delegation [in Appendix II].

  1 Quiroga, Barrio, and Giral. The first two refused to distribute arms to the trade unions.

  1 Comiteé Central de Milicias Antifascistas. Delegates were chosen in proportion to the membership of their organisations. Nine delegates represented the trade unions, three the Catalan Liberal parties, and two the various Marxist parties (POUM, Communists, and others).

  1 This was why there were so few Russian arms on the Aragón front, where the troops were predominantly Anarchist. Until April 1937 the only Russian weapon I saw – with the exception of some aeroplanes which may or may not have been Russian – was a solitary sub-machine-gun.

  1 In the Chamber of Deputies, March 1935.

  2 For the best account of the interplay between the parties on the Government side, see Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit. This is by a long way the ablest book that has yet appeared on the Spanish war.

  1 The figures for the POUM membership are given as: July 1936, 10,000; December 1936, 70,000; June 1937, 40,000. But these are from POUM sources; a hostile estimate would probably divide them by four. The only thing one can say with any certainty about the membership of the Spanish political parties is that every party overestimates its own numbers.

  1 I should like to make an exception of the Manchester Guardian. In connection with this book I have had to go through the files of a good many English papers. Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty.

  1 A recent number of Inprecor states the exact opposite – that La Batalla or
dered the POUM troops to leave the front! The point can easily be settled by referring to La Batalla of the date named.

  1 New Statesman, 14 May.

  1 At the outbreak of war the Civil Guards had everywhere sided with the stronger party. On several occasions later in the war, e.g. at Santander, the local Civil Guards went over to the Fascists in a body.

  [Orwell originally mistook the Assault Guards in Barcelona for Civil Guards and thought only the troops brought from Valencia were Assault Guards. In his list of Errata he asked that ‘Civil’ be replaced by ‘Assault’ in the original chapters X and XI (now XI and Appendix II). But he also wished it made plain that the Civil Guards were hated. Fulfilling his wishes presents some textual problems. Details of how these have been resolved are given in A Note on the Text. Suffice here to note that on this occasion ‘Civil’ is retained; elsewhere, if there could be confusion, what he first called Civil Guards are referred to as ‘local’ Assault Guards and those brought into Barcelona are referred to as ‘Valencian’ Assault Guards. Ed.]

  1 For reports on the two delegations see Le Populaire, 7 September, La Flèche, 18 September, Report on the Maxton delegation published by Independent News (219 Rue Saint-Denis, Paris), and McGovern’s pamphlet, Terror in Spain.

  [378]

  ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’

  New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937

  I

  The Spanish War has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914–18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of Daily Mail reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker,1 with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.