This led the Spanish Communist Party to adopt a more pragmatic, gradualist policy than many in the Popular Front, including, at times, Caballero himself. But by the end of 1936, it seemed that the Communist strategy had been triumphantly vindicated. The Communists acquired a large, cross-class membership;31 and their centralized, militarized approach to politics seemed to be more effective than the more democratic, divided and chaotic Socialist and radical forces. The Comintern also organized over 30,000 volunteers from over fifty nationalities, to fight for the Republic – the International Brigades. Many of these volunteers were Communists and workers. In November 1936, as Franco’s Nationalists advanced on Madrid, Caballero despaired of victory and abandoned the capital. But General Miaja remained, and he, together with the International Brigades and the Communist Party, were vital in helping the population to defend the city. Soviet arms (however small in number) and Communist organization and discipline, it seemed, had saved democracy against fascism.
IV
Nineteen thirty-six was perhaps the high point of Communist prestige in the West. The Communists, unlike the French socialists and the British Labour Party, seemed to be the only force willing to act decisively against the forces of extreme reaction. Moreover, since the mid-1930s Western intellectuals had fallen in love with the Plan. Communists now had a disciplined and rational image, the heirs of the Enlightenment. They were no longer the revolutionaries of the post-World War I period, or the militant sectarians of the 1920s. Their Marxism was much more Modernist and rationalistic.
Eric Hobsbawm, the Austrian émigré historian and one of the most incisive Communist memoirists of the period, captured this atmosphere of seriousness. He had taken part in the German Communist Party’s militant street marches in Berlin in 1932–3 as a youth, but the Communism of the British party, which he joined in 1936 when he went to study at Cambridge, was very different:
Communist Parties were not for romantics. On the contrary, they were for organization and routine… The secret of the Leninist Party lay neither in dreaming about standing on barricades, or even Marxist theory. It can be summed up in two phrases: ‘decisions must be verified’ and ‘Party discipline’. The appeal of the Party was that it got things done when others did not. Life in the Party was almost viscerally anti-rhetorical, which may have helped to produce that culture of endless and almost aggressively boring… sensationally unreadable ‘reports’ which foreign parties took over from Soviet practice… The Leninist ‘vanguard party’ was a combination of discipline, business efficiency, utter emotional identification and a sense of total dedication.32
Many non-Communists were also attracted by this ethos of disciplined and clear-headed statism that could counter fascist irrationalism and pull the world out of Depression. Leftist intellectuals flocked to the USSR to see the ‘Great Experiment’. In 1932 Kingsley Martin, the editor of the British leftist magazine the New Statesman, declared that ‘The entire British intelligentsia has been to Moscow this summer.’33 Soviet eagerness to welcome and impress visitors with well-crafted propaganda trips only fuelled the enthusiasm. Hundreds of travel books appeared; over 200 French intellectuals visited in 1935, and the Communist philosopher Paul Nizan gave a lecture tour of France, describing the marvels he had witnessed.34
The ‘Soviet Union’ the visitors saw was a blend of their own utopian preconceptions and the Potemkin-village socialism presented by their guides. They admired the welfare state, the mass education, and the rational organization of leisure. They envied the high status that intellectuals (at least the obedient ones) enjoyed in the USSR. But most of all they loved the Plan. The Soviet regime was, in their eyes, a Saint-Simonian paradise, where hard science and efficiency informed a moral vision of social transformation.
The British socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb are the most notorious examples of this type of enthusiast. Technocrats and elitists, they were champions of a rational, modernizing socialism, but enemies of revolutions, which they saw as violent, anarchic and irrational. In the 1920s they had been opponents of the USSR, but Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan delighted them, and in 1932, in their seventies, they went on a tour of the Soviet Union. The result of their researches was a massive, detailed work of over a thousand pages, The Soviet Union – A New Civilization?, published in 1935.
By the time of the second edition in 1937 the publishers had removed the question-mark. The Webbs’ ‘new civilization’ was a land of committees, conferences and consultations. They could have been writing about the London County Council, to which Sidney had devoted so much of his career. They read reams of official documents, including the Stalinist Constitution of 1936, and assured their readers that full provision was made for elections, democracy and accountability; it would be entirely wrong to call the Soviet Union a ‘dictatorship’, they declared.35
Writers like the Webbs were eager to accept the reassurances of the Soviet authorities for political reasons. Others succumbed to cruder manipulation. The minor French landscape-painter Albert Marquet proved a much more awkward case for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), the body that hosted foreign visitors. He was not interested in politics, and was certainly not a Communist; his guides reported that he was irritable and unimpressed. But things changed when he visited the Museum of Contemporary Western Art in Leningrad. He was gratified, and surprised, to see that his own paintings were prominently displayed as part of the permanent exhibition, alongside works by Matisse and Cézanne. What he was not told was that VOKS had arranged for them to be taken out of storage especially for his visit. Marquet went on to attend various stage-managed meetings with young artists who claimed to value him as a mentor, and he was favoured with wide press-coverage. On returning to France, his attitude had been transformed: ‘I did like it in the USSR… Just imagine, a large state where money does not determine people’s lives’, he gushed. In a terse report, VOKS congratulated itself on the success of its elaborate efforts: ‘The Soviet artistic community was widely involved with this work [the Marquet visit]. The work went according to plan.’36
But for some visiting fellow travellers it was not manipulation or credulity that led them to overlook political repression and violence. They simply saw it as necessary and inevitable. The African-American singer Paul Robeson declared in 1937: ‘From what I have seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot.’ Similarly, the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who notoriously denied the existence of famine in 1932–3, believed that violence was inevitable in a backward country like the USSR, though he was also interested in ingratiating himself with his hosts to further his career.37 Others deliberately hid the negative sides of the Soviet experience because they did not want to undermine the anti-fascist cause. The French writer André Malraux was a revolutionary romantic, and had little sympathy with the disciplinarian Communist culture of the Comintern. In private he was scathingly critical of the USSR, but he remained a firm supporter in public.38 The English historian Richard Cobb, who lived in Paris at the time, explained the political choices as they then appeared to the liberal left:
My first sight of France was [a fascist] Action Française strong-arm team in full spate, beating up a Jewish student. And this was a daily occurrence. It is difficult to convey the degree of hate that any decent person would feel for the pimply, cowardly ligeurs … France was living through a moral and mental civil war… one had to choose between fascism and fellow-travelling.39
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda used a similar language of unavoidable, difficult choices, although he, unlike Cobb, became more committed to the Communist cause. In his memoirs he recalled how his time in Spain convinced him to support the Communists:
The Communists were the only organised group and had put together an army to confront Italians, Germans, Moors and [Spanish fascist] Falangists. They were also the moral force that kept the resistance and the anti-Fascist struggle going.
It boiled down to this: you had to pick the road you would take. That is what I did, and I have never had reason to regret the choice I made between darkness and hope in that tragic time.40
Neruda was not alone, and the Spanish Civil War was central to the revival of Communism’s popularity in Latin America. There were, of course, close cultural links with Spain, and many went to fight in the civil war; Spanish exiles also played a large part in improving Communism’s fortunes there after years of failure.
Communist parties had been founded after 1917 throughout Latin America, and attracted many intellectuals, but as in many countries outside the developed world they did not flourish in the 1920s. Extreme repression by authoritarian states, backed by the influential Catholic Church, explains much of their weakness, but so does the Comintern’s narrow obsession with the proletariat – a tiny class in most Latin American states. They therefore found it difficult to compete with broader populist parties, and to harness the radicalism of the peasantry. Some Marxists, like the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, formed a socialist party that sought to unite a broad front of workers, intellectuals and indigenous peasants, but he was strongly condemned by the Comintern for his populism. The Comintern did support two uprisings in El Salvador in 1932 and in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s – both of which had strong peasant participation. Neither succeeded, and the Comintern played very little role in the rebellion of the Nicaraguan Communist leader, Augusto Sandino.
Prospects for Communist parties improved after the beginning of the Comintern’s Popular Front policy, especially where there was significant industry and a powerful labour movement. In Mexico, a relatively weak Communist party forged an informal alliance with the reforming socialist President Cárdenas, and in Chile Communists actually won elections in 1938 as part of a Popular Front government under the left-liberal Pedro Cerda. In Chile, as in Mexico, Communists benefited enormously from their role in the Spanish war.41
V
Not everybody on the left, however, saw Spain as a vindication of Comintern strategy, and it exacerbated what was to become a major split in international Communism – that between Stalinists and Trotskyists. Active in exile in Turkey, then France, Norway and Mexico, Trotsky became one of the main Marxist critics of Stalin. He despaired of the popularity of the USSR amongst the Western intelligentsia: ‘Under the pretence of a belated recognition of the October revolution, the “left” intelligentsia of the West has gone down on its knees before the Soviet bureaucracy.’42 Yet by the time he wrote this, in 1938, the love affair between Soviet Communism and Western leftist intellectuals was already beginning to sour. The Moscow show trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938 and the purges of the Comintern bureaucracy had an ever-greater cumulative effect and deeply disturbed many Communists and fellow travellers. Paul Nizan refused to discuss them, even with his friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.43
However the crisis of the Popular Front policy, and particularly events in Spain, were the main causes of disillusionment. The Popular Front was a shaky compromise. Communists were dropping their old revolutionary goals, temporarily, to appeal to reformist socialists. But at the same time they remained an anti-liberal, disciplinarian party that sought to retain working-class support. This was the essence of Soviet Communism, and for Stalinists the iron discipline of the party was what gave the party its advantage in the fight against fascism. It was a tricky, and ultimately impossible, balance to maintain.
It was Communism’s ‘realism’ and moderation that initially caused problems for the Comintern, as it found itself having to deal with an eruption of popular radicalism. In France, Blum’s government came to power amidst massive strikes and factory occupations; Trotskyist groups within the Socialist Party were even arguing that the time was ripe for revolution. The Popular Front granted significant concessions to workers in the Matignon agreements, including the 40-hour week, but the strikes continued. Maurice Thorez supported Blum: now the workers had gained so much, they should ‘know how to end a strike’. But afraid of being outflanked from the left, the Communists soon began to go along with worker demands and relations with the liberals and Socialists became tense. Meanwhile, Blum’s decision not to intervene on the Spanish Republicans’ side for fear of triggering a European war led to further conflict. The Socialists began to fear Communist strength (as also happened in Chile, where socialists began to worry that Communists were exploiting popular radicalism, to their disadvantage).44 However, it was the centrist Radicals, believing workers had won too much at Matignon, who ultimately destroyed the Popular Front, and in 1938 Blum was forced out of power.
In Spain, the Communists were less willing to make compromises with the more radical left, for here Soviet security was at stake. The victory of the left in the 1936 elections was, in some areas, accompanied by a social revolution: anarcho-syndicalist-inspired workers took over factories and expelled their owners; peasants seized land, and set up collectives and cooperatives. Just as Lenin had rejected factory councils in 1918, the Communists were convinced that egalitarian experiments merely undermined the war effort. Victory demanded centralization and economic efficiency. They argued that the time was only ripe for a market socialist (or ‘NEP’) type of regime, ruled by a coalition of ‘progressive forces’, including elements of the bourgeoisie, with private ownership permitted. At the same time, they were virulently hostile to the leftist-Communist POUM, led by Trotsky’s old associate Andreu Nin. Therefore they and their ally, the technocratic Republican Prime Minister Juan Négrin, attracted a great deal of support from middle-class groups anxious about the power of workers and anarchists.45 In May 1937 the Republican government, with Communist support, moved against the anarchists and POUM in Barcelona. Resistance was crushed, and the Soviet secret service, which had a significant contingent in Spain, sent its assassins to murder Nin and arrested other remaining POUM activists.46
George Orwell, like many of his generation, was eager to help the Spanish Republic. But unlike most, he ended up with the Trotskyist POUM, by chance rather than ideological conviction. Orwell was in Barcelona during the May days, and his account of his experiences published in 1938, Homage to Catalonia, proved one of the most powerful and influential denunciations of Soviet-style Communism of the era. Initially he had disagreed with his POUM comrades’ hostility to the Communists. As he observed, the Communists ‘were getting on with the war while we [POUM] and the Anarchists were standing still’. But after experiencing Communist and Republican oppression in Barcelona, he changed his mind. He now declared that the Communists were at fault for stifling popular radicalism: ‘Perhaps the POUM and Anarchist slogan: “The war and the revolution are inseparable”, was less visionary than it sounds.’47 He reasoned that the Communists’ social conservatism alienated the Western working class, which might otherwise have put pressure on governments to support the Spanish Republic, whilst undermining a potential revolution in the territory occupied by Franco.
The debate over ‘who lost Spain?’ continues.48 The Soviet secret police’s obsession with purging enemies on the left doubtless undermined support for the Republic. But probably more significant in democracy’s defeat were the paucity of help from abroad and the strength of Franco’s German and Italian allies. Stalin, it seems, remained committed to Spain to the end, but he had to husband his resources for the defence of the USSR against Germany, and against Japan, which had invaded China in July 1937.49
Trotsky was one of the unexpected beneficiaries of the Spanish Popular Front’s failure. Soviet behaviour in Spain, together with the show trials, fuelled disillusionment on the left, and Trotsky attracted Communist dissidents to his cause. The murders of Nin and other supporters gave the movement its martyrs, though its greatest martyr was to be Trotsky himself, killed with an ice-pick by one of Stalin’s assassins in August 1940. In 1938 Trotsky founded the Fourth International, a new force on the left to rival the second, social democratic, and the third, Communist, internationals.
Trotskyi
sm was a leftist, Radical branch of Bolshevism, and its ideas were typical of the various left oppositions that had existed within the Soviet party since 1917. It championed a revival of ‘socialist democracy’, and denounced Stalinism for its authoritarianism. But it did not advocate pluralist, liberal democracy. It adhered to the Marxist-Leninist commitment to the single, vanguard party, though politics and the economy were to be run in a participatory way. Trotsky was also reluctant to be too harsh on the Stalinist system itself. He argued that a ‘bureaucratic caste’ had emerged under Stalin, but he insisted that this was not a ‘new class’; the USSR had not become a ‘state capitalist’ system, but was still a ‘workers’ state’, even if a ‘degenerated’ one. In the international sphere, Trotskyism was more optimistic and revolutionary than Stalinism, and it was deeply hostile to the nationalism underlying Popular Front politics. His theories of ‘permanent revolution’ and ‘combined and uneven development’ both justified a revolutionary politics in the developing world. Unlike Stalinists, who stuck more rigidly to Marxist phases of development, Trotskyists believed that underdeveloped, agrarian societies could skip phases and make rapid revolutionary leaps to socialism. They always, however, insisted that only the proletariat could be in the vanguard, even when leading the bourgeoisie and the peasants in their ‘permanent revolution’.50
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