THE defeat of the Catalonian proletariat marked a new stage in the advance of the counter-revolution. Hitherto, the reaction had developed under cover of collaboration with the CNT and UGT leaders, and even from September to December in the Generalidad with the POUM leaders. Thus, the gap between the openly bourgeois programme of the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc and the revolutionary aspirations of the masses had been obscured by the centrists.[1] Now the moment arrived for the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc to dispense with the centrists.
The process is a familiar one in recent history. When blows to the left have sufficiently strengthened the right, the latter are then enabled to turn against the centrists whose services, heretofore, had been indispensable in crushing the left. The result of the suppression of the revolutionary workers is a government far to the right of the régime that suppressed them. Such was the result of the bloody suppression of the Spartacists in 1919 by Noske and Scheidemann. Such was the aftermath of the ‘stabilization’ of Austria by Renner and Bauer. It was now the turn of the Spanish centrists to pay the price for having abetted the crushing of the Catalonian proletariat.
The first item of the bill presented by the Stalinists to the Valencia cabinet was the complete suppression of the POUM. Why the POUM? Like all renegades, the Stalinists understand the dynamics of revolutionary development better than their allies who have always been reformists. In spite of its vacillating policies, the POUM had in its ranks many revolutionary fighters for the interests of the proletariat. Even the POUM leaders, unready for revolution, would be driven to resist the naked counter-revolution. Stalin has understood that even the capitulators, the Zinovievs and Kamenevs, will be a danger on the day the masses rebel. Stalin’s formula is; wipe out every possible focus, every capable figure, around whom the masses can rally. That bloody formula, already carried out in the August and January trials in Moscow, was now applied to Spain and the POUM.
The left socialists recoiled. One of their organs, Adelante (of Valencia) said editorially on May 11:
If the Caballero government were to apply the measures of repression which the Spanish section of the Comintern is trying to incite, it would approximate a Gil Robles or Lerroux government; it would destroy working-class unity and expose us to the danger of losing the war and wrecking the revolution... A government composed in its majority of people from the labour movement cannot use methods reserved for reactionary and fascist-like governments.
The cabinet convened on May 15, and Uribe, the Stalinist Minister of Agriculture, bluntly put the question to Caballero: was he prepared to agree to the dissolution of the POUM, confiscation of its broadcasting stations, presses, buildings, goods, etc., and imprisonment of the Central Committee and local committees which had supported the Barcelona rising? Federica Montseny awoke sufficiently to the occasion to present a dossier to prove that a plan had been prepared, both in Spain and abroad, to strangle the war and revolution. She accused Lluhi y Vallesca and Gassol (Esquerra), and Comorera (PSUC), together with a Basque representative, of having participated in a meeting in Brussels at which it was agreed to annihilate the revolutionary organizations (POUM and CNT-FAI) in order to prepare for ending the civil war by the intervention of ‘friendly powers’ (France-England).
Caballero declared he could not preside over repression against other workers’ organizations, and that it was necessary to smash the false theory that there had been a movement against the government in Catalonia, much less a counter-revolutionary movement.[2]
As the Stalinists continued to press their demands, Montseny sent for a package containing hundreds of scarves adorned with the shield of the monarchy. Thousands of these had been found in the hands of the PSUC provocateurs and Estat Catala members, who were to have planted them in POUM and CNT buildings. The two Stalinist ministers rose and rushed out of the meeting, and the ministerial crisis had begun.
Caballero looked at the others. He wanted them to state their positions. The bourgeois and Prieto ministers solidarized themselves with the Stalinists and went out. Such was the last meeting of the Caballero cabinet.
* * * *
Outlawry of the POUM was the first demand of the counterrevolution, but the Stalinists followed it up with other basic demands which Caballero and the left socialists would not accept responsibility for.
Friction between the Stalinists and left socialists had, indeed, been developing for some months. A stealthy campaign against Caballero himself had been waged in the Stalinist press since March, when the flow of adulatory telegrams to the ‘leader of the Spanish people’ from ‘the workers of Magnitogorsk’ had been turned off like a faucet. The Stalinist campaign had been the subject of comment in the organs of the CNT and POUM, and of resentful polemics in the left socialist press. The befuddled anarchists interpreted the Stalinist campaign in terms of the original sin of politics: this was the way political parties acted toward each other. The POUM sought to make easy capital among socialist workers by berating the Stalinists for attempting to absorb the socialists. Juan Andrade, the POUM commentator, saw more clearly, recognizing that Caballero was resisting the Anglo-French directives in their fullest implications. But the main POUM line of shouting ‘absorption’ lost it the opportunity to make use of the real conflicts between Caballero and the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc. For there were real conflicts. Not, of course, as basic as the conflict between reform and revolution; but important enough so that a bold revolutionary policy could have driven a wedge between the Stalinists and Caballero’s mass base, could have aroused the UGT workers to the meaning of the road which Caballero had followed for eight months.
Stalinist inroads into Caballero’s ranks were a fact. It is a familiar enough phenomenon in the labour movement that when two organizations follow the same policy, the one with the stronger apparatus will proceed to absorb the other. By holding identical views with the Stalinists on the People’s Front, winning the war before making the revolution, conciliating foreign opinion, building a regular bourgeois army, etc., Caballero had ceased to differ from Stalinism in the eyes of the masses. With the native Stalinist apparatus tremendously reinforced by Comintern functionaries and funds—the International Brigades came in with hundreds of such functionaries attached to them—the Stalinists were in a position to recruit at Caballero’s expense.
Particularly was this true in the youth. The socialist youth had been Caballero’s strongest support but its fusion with the Stalinist youth had left him the loser, although the latter had not had one-tenth the membership of the socialist youth. The usual Stalinist methods of corruption—trips to Moscow, adulatory relationships with the Russian and French YCI,, the offer of posts in the Central Committee of the party, etc.—had been successful. Shortly after fusion, the socialist youth leadership had entered the Communist party and the ‘united’ youth organization came under rigidly Stalinist control. Dissenting branches were ‘reorganized’ and left wingers expelled as Trotskyists. Caballero was scarcely in a position to protest at the outcome, having himself connived at the bureaucratic method of fusion, without a congress of the socialist youth having been held to pass on the decision. Under the slogan of ‘unifying the whole youth generation’, the Stalinist leadership bulwarked itself by recruiting indiscriminately anyone who could be persuaded to accept a card. Santiago Carillo at a Central Committee Plenum of the Communist party shamelessly advocated recruiting of ‘fascist sympathizers’ among the youth. Leaning on backward elements, including many Catholics, the Stalinists were able for a time to muzzle the thousands of left wingers still in the youth organization.
Nevertheless, Caballero’s losses to the Stalinists had not led him to break with them. Absorption of his following only made him feel weaker and make further concessions.
Only when Caballero discovered that Stalinist inroads were less serious than he had supposed, and that he was more likely to lose his following to the left than to Stalinism, did he come into serious conflict with the Stalinists. The two biggest sections of the socialist youth, the Asturian and Valencian organizations, denounced the Stalinist top leadership and refused to accept seats in the ‘united’ National Committee. In the delegates’ meeting of the Madrid UGT, the Caballero ticket carried all eight seats on the Municipal Council allotted to the UGT, against a Stalinist ticket. In the Asturian Congress of the UGT, the Caballero group held 87,000 votes against 12,000 for the Stalinists. These indices, shortly before the government crisis, showed that Caballero could have the dominant following in the UGT, and that he would have to pacify his following and not the Stalinists in the coming period.
There was one step, above all, which Caballero could not accept responsibility for: the final moves in smashing the workers’ control of the factories. Whatever else happened, the UGT masses were firmly convinced; they would never give up the factories. The Madrid organ of the UGT declared repeatedly: ‘The ending of the war must signify also the ending of capitalism.’
That the exploiters of all life cease to be masters of all the means of production, it has sufficed that the people take up arms in the struggle for national independence. From the great financial establishments to the smallest shops, they are, in actual fact, in the hands and under the direction of the working class... What vestiges remain of the old economic system? The revolution has eliminated all the privileges of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. (Claridad, May 12, 1937)
Claridad,[3] indeed, continually studded its pages with quotations from Lenin. That these quotations were often enough damning commentary on Caballero’s political conceptions hardly requires documentation. Quotations appeared from The State and Revolution, while Caballero strengthened and rebuilt the bourgeois state apparatus which would inevitably attempt to wrest the factories from the workers. But, unless he was prepared to lose the support of the masses of the UGT, Caballero could not himself participate in wresting the factories from the workers. Caballero was just enough of a labour politician to recognize that the state he had himself revived was alien to the workers and that the bourgeois-Stalinist slogan of ‘state control of the factories’ meant smashing the power of the factory committees.
We may sum up the fundamental differences between Caballcro—i.e., the bureaucracy of the UGT—and the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc in this way: Caballero wanted a bourgeois democratic republic (with some form of workers’ control of production co-existing with private property), victorious over Franco. The bourgeois-Stalinist bloc was ready to accept whatever Anglo-French imperialism proposed, which, at the stage of the overthrow of Caballero, was a stabilized bourgeois régime based on participation in the regime of the capitalist-landlord forces behind Franco, parliamentary in form, but actually Bonapartist since unacceptable to the masses. ‘
Caballero’s perspective was not so fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc, that they could not go along together for a considerable distance. They had gone along together for eight months. Was May 15 the correct moment for the rightists to break with Caballero? Should not the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc have bided its time for a few more months while the army and police were still further strengthened as bourgeois institutions? Should they not have carried the CNT ministers deeper and deeper into the swamp? Were they not risking a regroupment of forces by forcing the two mass labour organizations out of the cabinet? Were not the Stalinists too nakedly revealing their reactionary rôle by becoming the only labour group, apart from the long-hated Prieto group, to participate in the government?
The Stalinists probably overestimated their ability to secure expressions of support for the new cabinet from enough UGT unions to obscure the fact that the labour unions as a whole were opposed to the new government. Even in the bureaucratically controlled UGT of Catalonia, the Stalinists proved unable to prevent many of the most important unions from declaring support for Caballero. Elsewhere the Stalinists got only a handful of unions to sanction the dismissal of Caballero.
If, however, the Stalinists miscalculated their ability to provide a labour ‘front’ for Negrin, they were undoubtedly correct in other calculations. For them, the Barcelona events revealed that the CNT ministers were no longer of use in keeping the CNT masses in line; the fighting of May 3-8 had revealed the chasm between the leaders and the masses of the CNT. Further governmental participation of the CNT would provide little brake to the resistance of the masses and, on the other hand, could only speed up a split between these leaders and the masses. For the next period, the Olivers and Montsenys were more useful as a ‘loyal opposition’ outside the government. As oppositionists they could regain control over their following, yet their opposition would be of a kind that would not unduly embarrass the Negrin Government.
As for the opposition from Caballero, its temper and quality had already been experienced: his ‘revolutionary criticism’ of the People’s Front government of February-July 1936, and his even more radical declarations during the first war cabinet of July 19-September 4, 1936. In those periods Caballero had channelized discontent—and then had entered the government himself. If unforeseeable obstacles arose to endanger the government, the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc could always return to the status of May 15, for the centrists were demanding nothing more than that: ‘One cannot govern without the UGT and CNT’ was the slogan of Caballero and the CNT leaders. Meanwhile, it was safe to predict that Caballero’s opposition would not take the form of revival of the network of workers’ committees and the co-ordinating of them into soviets-and only along that road did the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc have anything serious to fear.
If dropping the UGT and CNT involved no serious dangers, it offered immediate and far-reaching advantages for the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc. Their immediate requirements were
Complete control of the army. The mobilization and army reorganization decrees had been carried out by Caballero, as Minister of War, to a considerable extent. The regiments formed of drafted soldiers were built entirely on the old bourgeois model, largely officered by old army officers or the hand-picked graduates of the government-controlled training schools. Any attempts among the conscripts at election of officers’ and soldiers’ committees had been stamped out. But the workers’ militias which had carried the brunt of the struggle during the first six months were not yet all ‘reorganized'; their masses resisted fiercely any systematic replacement of their officers, most of whom came from their own ranks.
Even on the Madrid front the CNT and UGT militias, despite partial reorganization, retained most of their former officers and continued to print their own political papers at the front. On the Catalan fronts, the anarchist militias refused to honour the decrees which the CNT ministers had signed. Equally important, Caballero became alarmed enough, after the loss of Malaga, to arrest General Asensio and the Malaga commander, Villalba, for treason, and cleaned out of the staffs many bourgeois friends of Prieto and the Stalinists. Caballero’s caution thereafter in army reorganiation was a serious obstacle to the Prieto-Stalinist programme. For a ruthless reorganization of the militias into bourgeois regiments, officered by bourgeois appointees in consonance with the old military code, and a purge of radical army leaders thrown up by the July days, it was necessary to wrest the army entirely from Caballero.
The War Ministry offered the best vantage point from which to begin wresting control of the factories from the workers. In the name of the exigencies of the war, the ministry could step in and break the hold of the workers in the most strategic industries: railroad and other transportation, mining, metals, textiles, coal and oil.
The Stalinists had already begun to prepare for this in April by a barrage against the war-supply factories. Unfortunately for the Stalinists, they had organized this campaign (a persistent weakness of campaigns carried out obediently under orders of Comintern representatives from Moscow) at a time when the atmosphere was not yet propitious for a pogrom. Their charges were refuted by joint statements of the CNT and UGT organizations in the Catalonian factories involved and, as we have seen, were disavowed even by Premier Tarradellas who, as Minister of Finance, disbursed to the factories the funds received from the Valencia treasury. It was clear, then, that this campaign could not be successfully consummated from outside but that the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc needed the Ministry of War to further their inroads into workers’ control of the factories.
In Caballero’s cabinet the Ministry of the Interior, which controlled the two main police bodies (Assault and National Republican Guard) and the press, was presided over by Angel Galarza, a member of the Caballero group. The revolutionary workers had sufficient reason to denounce his policies. Above all, Caballero and Galarza had sanctioned the decree forbidding police to join political and trade union organizations; and quarantining the police against the labour movement could only mean, inevitably, pitting them against the labour movement.
Nevertheless, the Caballero group recognized that repression of the CNT would be a fatal blow to the Caballero base, the UGT, and Caballero needed the CNT as a counterweight to the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc. Galarza had sent five thousand police to Barcelona, but had refused to carry out the Prieto-Stalinist proposals for complete liquidation of the POUM and reprisals against the FAI-CNT. Here again the Caballero group had built the instrument for hostilities against the workers, but drew back at carrying out its complete implications. Once Caballero and Galarza had induced the Generalidad, during the Barcelona fighting, to extend control of public order by the central government to Catalonia, the moment was ripe to oust Galarza, in order for the Stalinists to secure control of the police and press in Catalonia and elsewhere.
The Prieto-Stalinist programme for conciliation with the Catholic Church—halfway house to conciliation with Franco—was being resisted by Caballero. Backbone of the monarchy and of the bienio negro, the two black years of Lerroux-Gil Robles, the churches had been the fortresses of the fascist uprising. To be a member of a labour organization has always, in Spain, had to mean to be against the church, for the official catechism has declared it to be mortal sin to ‘vote liberal’. The masses had spontaneously forced the closing of all Catholic churches in July. One could scarcely propose a more unpopular measure than to permit the church organization to operate freely again and in the midst of civil war! Furthermore, it was actually dangerous to the anti-fascist movement; for with the Vatican on the side of the Franco regime, it would inevitably use the church organization to help Franco. Yet this was the proposal of the Basque Government and its allies, Prieto and the Stalinists. Caballero had done many things to curry favour with the Anglo-French imperialists; but to permit the church organization to operate freely in the midst of the civil war was too much for him.
* * * *
These causes of conflict between Caballero and the reactionary bloc arc clearly revealed in the demands expressed by the various parties on May 16, during the customary visits to President Azaña, to acquaint him with the position of each group on the ministerial crisis.[4]
Manuel Cordero, spokesman for the Prieto Socialists, Piously declared his organization stood for a government including all factions—but ‘I have insisted very particularly on the necessity of an absolute change in the policy of the Ministry of the Interior’.
Pedro Corominas, for the Catalan Esquerra, declared: ‘Whatever be the solution that is adopted, it will be necessary to strengthen it and do away with difficulties of personal origin, by greater and more frequent contact with the Cortes of the Republic.’ In other words, the government policy should be dictated by the remnants of the Cortes elected in February 1936 under an electoral agreement which gave the overwhelming majority of the Cortes to the bourgeois parties!
Manuel Irujo, for the Basque capitalists, spoke fairly bluntly:
I have advised His Excellency for a government of national concentration presided over by a socialist minister who has the confidence of the [bourgeois] republicans. Since Caballero... has lost the political confidence of the groups of the Popular Front, it would be advisable to form a government, in our opinion, of Negrin, Prieto, or Besteiro, with the co-operation of all the political and trade union organizations which would accept the proposed bases.
As specific demands, I feel obliged to make two, at present. The first is the necessity of proceeding, with such guarantees and restrictions as the war and public order dictate, to the re-establishment of the constitutional régime of liberty of conscience and religion.
The second demand refers to Catalonia. The Catalan republicans would have preferred earlier and effective intervention by the Government of the Republic in assuming control of public order in support of the Generalidad. What is more, in now carrying out these duties, I feel that it is an unescapable duty of the Government that it liquidate to the bottom the problem which disturbs Catalonian life, firmly doing away with the causes of the disorder and insurrection, be they circumstantial or endemic...
It was to this Irujo that the Prieto-Stalinist bloc were soon to intrust... the Ministry of Justice.
Salvador Quemades, for the Left Republicans, Azaña’s own party, required that the next cabinet ‘must have a decided policy in the matter of public order and of economic reconstruction, and that the commands of war, marine and the air force be placed in a single hand’. Prieto was already Minister of Marine and Air. This meant adding to his posts that of control of the army (as was done).
The Stalinists demanded:
The President of the Council (Premier) occupy himself exclusively with affairs of the Presidency. The War Ministry to be separately conducted by another minister.
Elimination of Galarza from the new cabinet because of ‘his lenity in the problems of Public Order’.
The Ministers of War and of the Interior ‘should be persons who enjoy the support of all the parties and organizations which form the Government’. Which meant that these key posts, essential to the further schemes of the Basque-Prieto-Stalinist bloc, should pass to them.
The CNT declared it would support no government not headed by Caballero as Premier and Minister of War. The UGT issued a similar declaration. President Azaña, knowing the cards were already stacked, delegated Caballero to form a new cabinet with all groups represented. Caballero, in true centrist fashion, proceeded to cut the ground from beneath himself. He had already weakened his chief ally, the CNT, by his conduct in the Barcelona events. He now offered to cut the representation of the CNT from four ministries to two, Justice and Sanitation. To the Prieto group he offered two ministries, but these were to combine Finance and Agriculture, Industry and Commerce. Education and Labour were the two ministries for the Stalinists. The bourgeoisie, which in the previous ministry had enjoyed no posts except ministries without portfolios, were to have the ministries of Public Works and Propaganda (Left Republicans), the ministry of Communications and Merchant Marine (Union Republican), and ministries without portfolios for the Esquerra and Basque Nationalists. Caballero’s proposed government was thus decidedly to the right of its predecesssor. Caballero’s conciliationism to the right could only impiess the masses as meaning that the intransigence of the right denoted superior strength, and paved the way for the Right assuming all power with impunity.
The Stalinists rejected Caballero’s compromise, and refused to participate in his cabinet except on the terms they had laid down. The Prieto group promptly declared it would not participate if the Stalinists refrained. The bourgeois parties followed suit. Caballero could now either form a government of the UGT-CNT or surrender the government to the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc.
Caballero conducted himself during the ministerial crisis according to the traditional rules of bourgeois politics, which is to say, that he kept the masses completely in the dark about developments and made no attempt to rally the workers against the right. So, too, the CNT. Later it became known that the day the cabinet had collapsed, Caballero had assured the CNT he was ready, if necessary, to have the UGT and CNT assume power. However, he begged off within a few hours, on the grounds of opposition within the UGT. ‘During the government crisis the UGT played a double game,’ said a FAI manifesto afterward: ‘The bourgeois and communist influences are so strong within this organization that its revolutionary sector, that is, the one which is inclined to work with us, was paralysed. That meant a victory not only for the bourgeois-communist bloc but also for France, England, and Russia, who had obtained what they wanted.’ In other words, the anarchists leaned on Caballero, he pointed to the opposition, and in the general paralysis of the masses induced by their leaders, the rightist government came to power.
Perhaps, indeed, in his numerous sessions with Azaña during the days of the crisis, Caballero had broached the subject of a UGT-CNT government-and been refused. For Azaña constitutionally had the power to reject cabinets which did not suit him. The 1931 constitution endows the president with truly Bonapartist powers. Azaña himself had experienced this as premier, when in 1933 his cabinet, though still wielding a majority in the Cortes, was dismissed by President Zamora to make way for the semi-fascist government of Lerroux. These Bonapartist powers had not been wiped out on July 19. Azaña had quietly retired to a country retreat in Catalonia, had remained quiescent for most of the period of Caballero’s rule. When members of the Caballero group were reproached for not having done away with the presidency during these months, they had patronizingly explained that the constitution and the presidency no longer existed, it was purely formalism to say that they did and, on the other hand, it was very useful for securing aid from abroad to continue the pretence of constitutionalism .... and now, here was a very lively President Azaña, condescendingly receiving the spokesmen for the various parties, receiving reports from Caballero on his progress in getting together a cabinet, while Azaña’s party, the Left Republicans, were in the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc... In any event, Caballero saved this bloc the unpleasantness of a public controversy over the presidential prerogatives. He informed Azaña that he had failed to form a cabinet and Azaña promptly designated Negrin to form a government of the bourgeoisie, the Prieto group, and the Stalinists.
LA PASIONARIA christened the new cabinet ‘the government of victory’. ‘We have made up our minds,’ she said, ‘to win the war quickly, though that victory cost us an argument with our dearest comrades.’ The Stalinists launched a world-wide campaign to prove that victory had been held up by Caballero and that it would now be forthcoming.
The annals of the Negrin government, however, proved to be not the record of military victory, nor even of serious attempts at military victory, but of ruthless repression of the workers and peasants. That reactionary course was dictated to the government by the Anglo-French rulers to whom it looked for succour. The spokesman for the Quai d’Orsay, Le Temps, indicated the real meaning of the ministerial crisis:
The republican government of Valencia has reached the point where it must decide. It can no longer remain in the state of ambiguity in which it has hitherto lived. It must choose between democracy and proletarian dictatorship, between order and anarchy. (May 17.)
The next day the Negrin cabinet was formed. Le Temps approved but peremptorily pointed the road the new régime must resolutely travel:
It would be too early to conclude that the orientation in Valencia is toward a more moderate government determined to free itself finally from the control of anarcho-syndicalists. But this is an attempt which, in the end, will have to be made no matter what the resistance of the extremists may be.
Clear directives, indeed!
The government, wrote an ardent sympathizer with its reactionary course, the New York Times correspondent, Matthews:
... intends to use an iron hand to maintain internal order... By so doing, the government hopes to win the sympathy of the two democracies that mean most to Spain—Great Britain and France—and to retain the support of the nation that has been most helpful, Russia. The government’s main problem now is to pacify or squash the anarchist opposition. (May 19, 1937.)
‘In a word, the government unloosed a completely repressive machinery without any regard for the state of the war, or the requirements of keeping up the morale of the war,’ as a FAI statement of July 6 put it. ‘Anarchists are being eliminated as an active factor. The Caballero Socialists, if they persist in their present tactics, may be outlawed within three months,’ wrote the Stalinist, Louis Fischer (The Nation, July 17).
In Caballero’s cabinet Garcia Oliver, the ‘one hundred per cent anarchist’, had laboured mightily, fashioning democratic tribunals and judicial decrees, while the counter-revolution advanced behind him. The Generalidad had used Nin for the same purpose during the early months of the revolution. Now the government named as its Minister of Justice, the Basque capitalist and devout Catholic, Manuel Irujo. That such a man could hold this office meant: the time for pretending is over. Irujo in 1931 had voted against adoption of the republican constitution as a radical and atheistic document. Was he not then just the man for the Minister of Justice?
Irujo’s first step was to dismantle the popular tribunals which, each constituted by a presiding judge and fifteen members designated by the different antifascist organizations, had been set up after July 19, 1936. The FAI members were now barred from the tribunals—by the device of, decreeing that only organizations legal on February 16, 1936, could participate. The FAI, of course, had been outlawed by the bienio negro! Most of the presiding judges had been left-wing attorneys. Roca, former sub-secretary of the Ministry, has since told how, in September 1936, the Ministry of Justice had called a meeting of the old judges and magistrates and had asked for volunteers to go to the provinces and set up the tribunals. Not one would volunteer. They knew the fascists would have to be convicted. Now the tribunals were cleansed of the left-wing attorneys who were replaced by the once-reluctant judges, for the tribunals no longer were to ferret out fascists but to prosecute workers. Daily bulletins listing fascists and reactionaries put at liberty were issued by Irujo’s Ministry.
The complaints on this score were absolutely ignored for months. Finally—after his party had betrayed Bilbao and Santander—Frente Roja (August 30) denounced Irujo for ‘sheltering fascists’. ‘It is intolerably ridiculous that at the same time as the fascist conquest of Santander, there should be distributed in Valencia the shameful lists of fascists and reactionaries that have been absolved and put at liberty.’ But this was merely for the record. The Stalinist ministers continued to sit in the cabinet with this man.
On June 23, the government decreed special courts to deal with sedition. Among ‘seditious acts’ were included: ‘giving military, diplomatic, sanitary, economic, industrial or commercial information to a foreign state, armed organization or private individual’, and all offences ‘tending to depress public morale or military discipline’. The judges were to be appointed by the Ministries of Justice and Defence, empowered to sit in secret session and to bar any third parties. The decree concludes:
Attempted or frustrated offences, conspiracies and plans, as well as complicity in sheltering of persons subject to this decree, may be punished in the same way as if the offences had actually been committed. Whoever, being guilty of such offences, denounces them to the authorities shall be free of all punishment. Death sentences may be imposed without formal knowledge of the cabinet.
The confession clause, the punishment for acts never committed, the secret trials, were translated directly from Stalin’s laws. The sweeping definition of sedition made treason of any opinion, spoken or written or indicated by circumstantial evidence, which was construable as critical of the government. Applicable to any worker who agitated for better conditions, to strikers, to any governmental criticism in a newspaper, to almost any statement, act or attitude other than adoration of the régime, this decree was not only unprecedented in a democracy, it was more brazen than Hitler or Mussolini’s juridical procedure.
On July 29, the Ministry of justice announced that trials under this decree were being prepared for ten members of the Executive Committee of the POUM. These men had been arrested on June 16-17—before the new decree. That meant that the decree, to cap everything else, was an ex post facto law, punishing crimes allegedly committed before the law was passed! Thus, the most unquestioned juridical principle of modern times was expressly repudiated.
Irujo sponsored another decree, adopted and issued by the government on August 12, which declared:
Whoever censures as fascist, as traitor, as anti-revolutionary, a given person or group of persons, unreasonably or without sufficient foundation, or without the [court] authority having pronounced sentence on [the accused]...
Whoever denounces a citizen for being a priest or for administering the sacrament... causes an unnecessary and disruptive disturbance of public order when not committing an irreparable crime worthy of penal punishment.
This decree not only outlawed sharp ideological criticism of anybody in the governmental bloc, but also put an end to ferreting out of fascists by the workers. It also ended all forms of surveillance of the Catholic priesthood—just after the Vatican had openly thrown full support to Franco. Denunciations ‘without the court authority having pronounced sentence’ in practice applied only against criticism from the left. The Stalinists continued, of course, to denounce the POUM as fascists, though no sentence had been passed.
Press censorship operated under a system which not only destroyed free criticism but required that the very acts of censorship be concealed from the people. Thus, on August 7, Solidaridad Obrera was suspended for five days for disobeying censors’ orders, the specific act of disobedience being—according to Gomez, General Delegate of Public Order in Barcelona, who had given the order-’that they should not publish white spaces’. That is, deletions by the censor who worked from galleys must be hidden from the masses by inserting other material! As a silent protest, the CNT press had been leaving censored spaces blank.
On August 14, the government issued a decree outlawing all press criticism of the Soviet government:
With repetitions that permit divining a deliberate plan of offending an exceptionally friendly nation, thereby creating difficulties for the government, various newspapers have occupied themselves with the USSR unsuitably... This absolutely condemnable licence should not be permitted by the council of censors... The disobeying newspaper will be suspended indefinitely, even though it may have been passed by the censor; in that case the censor who reads the proofs is to be held for the Special Tribunal charged with dealing with crimes of sabotage.
The censorship decrees no longer referred to the radio. For, on June 18, police detachments had appeared at all the radio stations belonging to the trade unions and political parties and closed them down. Thenceforward, the government monopolized radio broadcasting.
One of the most extraordinary uses of the press censorship came when the Stalinist-Prieto bloc on October 1 split the UGT by a rump meeting of some unions which declared the Caballero-led Executive Committee deposed. While the new ‘Executive’ freely published a stream of abusive declarations, the statements of the Caballero Executive were cut to pieces, as were the headlines in the CNT press referring to it as the rightful Executive. Formal protests of the CNT press against the government, thus taking sides in the inner union fight, were fruitless.
Despite terrible instances—in almost every city captured by the fascists—of Assault and Civil Guards in large numbers going over to the fascists during the siege, the Ministry of the Interior proceeded to cleanse the police, not of the old elements, but of the workers sent in by their organizations after July 19. Examinations were decreed for all who entered the services in the past year. The Security Councils, formed by the anti-fascists among the police to clean out fascist elements, were ordered dissolved. More, the director-general of the police, the Stalinist, Gabriel Moron, ordered the ranks not to make denunciations of fascist suspects in the police, on pain of dismissal (CNT, September 1).
Held to a slower pace until the political pre-conditions had been more fully achieved, the economic counter-revolution was now speeded up. In agriculture, the road to be followed had been mapped by the very first decree, October 7, 1936, which merely confiscated estates of fascists, leaving untouched the system of private property in land, including the right to own large properties and to exploit wage labour.
Despite the decree, however, collectivized agriculture became widespread during the first months of the revolution. The UGT was at first unfriendly to the collectives, and changed its attitude only after the movement developed strong roots in its own ranks. Several factors explained the speedy development of collectivized farming. Unlike the old Russian moujik, the Spanish peasants and agricultural workers had built trade unions for decades, and had provided considerable sections of the membership of CNT and FAI, UGT, POUM and the Socialist Party. This political phenomenon flowed in part from the economic fact that the division of the land was even more unequal in Spain than in Russia, and almost the entire Spanish peasantry was dependent partially or wholly on wage labour on the big estates. Hence, even those with a bit of land were weakened in the peasants’ traditional preoccupation with his own plot of ground. Collective labour also derived strength from the almost universal necessity for joint work in providing water for the dry land. To these factors were added the enthusiastic aid given to the collectives by many factories, providing equipment and funds, the equitable purchasing of produce from the collectives by the workers’ supply committees and the co-operative markets, the friendly collaboration of the collectivized railroads and trucks in bringing the produce to town. Another important factor was the peasant’s realization that he no longer stood alone. ‘If, in some locality, a crop is lost or greatly reduced because of a long drought, etc.’ wrote the head of the CNT agrarian federation in Castille, speaking for 230 collectives, ‘our peasants don’t have to worry, don’t have to fear hunger, for the collectives in the other localities or regions consider it their duty to help them out.’ Many factors thus joined to encourage the swift development of collective agriculture. ‘
But with the Stalinist Uribe’s assumption of the Ministry of Agriculture, first in Caballero’s cabinet and then in Negrin’s, the weight of the government was thrown against the collectives. ‘Our collectives did not receive any sort of official aid. On the contrary, if they received anything at all, it was obstruction and calumnies from the Minister of Agriculture and from the majority of institutions that depend upon this Minister,’ reported the CNT’s Castilian agrarian federation (Tierra y Libertad, July 17). Ricardo Zabalza, national head of the UGT’s Peasant and Landworkers’ Federation declared:
The reactionaries of yesterday, the erstwhile agents of the big landowners are given all sort of assistance by the government while we are deprived of the very minimum of it or are even evicted from our small holdings...
They want to take advantage of the fact that our best comrades are now fighting on the war fronts. Those comrades will weep with rage when they find, upon leave from the war fronts, that their efforts and sacrifices were of no avail, that they only led to the victory of their enemies of old, now flaunting membership cards of a proletarian organization [the Communist party].
These agents of the big landowners, the hated caciques—overseers and village bosses—had been the backbone of the political machine of Gil Robles and the landowners. Now they were to be found in the ranks of the Communist party. Even such an outstanding chieftain of Gil Robles’ machine as the secretary of the CEDA in Valencia had survived the revolution... and joined the Communist party.
Uribe justified the assault on the collectives by claiming that unwilling peasants were being forced to join them. One need scarcely comment on the irony that a Stalinist should complain of forced collectivization, after the Draconian slaughters and exiles of the ‘liquidation’ of the Russian kulaks! Uribe would undoubtedly have produced evidence on this score, had he been able to find it, but none was forthcoming. Both big peasant and landworkers’ federations, the affiliates of the CNT and UGT, opposed forced collectivization, favoured voluntary collectives, and denounced the Stalinists as supporters of the caciques and reactionary rich peasants. In June, the Socialist Adelante sent a questionnaire to the various provincial sections of the UGT peasants’ organization: almost unanimously they defended the collectives, and to a man reported that the main opposition to the collectives came from the Communist party, which for this purpose recruited the caciques and utilized the governmental institutions. All declared the October 7 decree was creating a new bourgeoisie. In a letter of protest to Uribe, Ricardo Zabalza described the simple but effective system of the Stalinists in attacking the collectives: old caciques, kulaks, landowners, were recruited and organized by the Stalinists and thereupon demanded the dissolution of the local collective, making claims on its land, equipment, stores of grain. Every such controversy brought in its wake the ‘mediation’ of Uribe’s representatives who invariably decided in favour of the reactionaries, imposing ‘settlements’ whereby the collectives were gradually deprived of their equipment and land. When asked to explain this strange behaviour, said Zabalza, the government agents declared they were acting under specific orders from their superior: Uribe. It was not surprising then that the UGT Peasants’ Federation of Levante Province denounced Uribe as ‘Public Enemy Number One’. Irujo’s wards, the ex-fascists recently released, became, by the very fact of release, eligible to demand return of their lands. When one of these returned as landlord, peasants fiercely resisted—and the Assault Guards were sent against them.
In the cities and industrial towns, too, the government proceeded to destroy all elements of socialization. ‘It is unquestionably true that had the workers not taken over control of industry the morning after the insurrection, there would have been complete economic paralysis,’ wrote the Stalinist, Joseph Lash, ‘but the improved schemes of workers’ control of industry have not worked out very well.’ (New Masses, October 19.) There was a half-truth in this but the whole truth leads not back to the old proprietors but forward to the workers’ state. Planning on a national scale is obviously impossible through factory and union apparatus alone. What is needed is a centralized apparatus, i.e., a state. Had the CNT understood this, and initiated the election of militia and peasant and factcuy committees, joined in a national council which would have constituted the government—that would have been a workers’ state, which would have given, full scope to the workers’ committees and yet achieved the necessary centralization.
Instead, the anarchist leaders fought a losing battle, arguing as to just how much authority the state should have. Peiro, ex-minister of industry, for example: ‘I was prepared to nationalize the electric industry in the only way compatible with my principles-leave its administration and direction in the hands of the trade unions and not in the hands of the state. The state has only the right to act as accountant and inspector.’ Formally correct: Lenin said that socialism was simply bookkeeping. But only a workers’ state would faithfully accept the functions of accountant and inspector, while the existent Spanish state, a bourgeois state, must fight socialization. Here again the anarchists, continuing to make no distinction between a workers’ and bourgeois state, yielded to the bourgeois state, instead of fighting for the workers’ state.
Through the Ministry of Defence, factories were taken over one by one. On August 28, a decree gave the government the right to intervene in or take over any mining or metallurgical plant. Quite explicitly, the government stated that workers’ control was to be limited to protection of working conditions and stimulation of production. Resisting factories found themselves without credits or, having made deliveries to the government, payment was not forthcoming until the government’s will was accepted. In many foreign-owned plants, the workers had already been stripped of any form of authority. The Department of Purchases of the Ministry of Defence announced that on a given date it would make contracts for purchases only with enterprises functioning ‘on the basis of their old owners’ or ‘under the corresponding intervention controlled by the Ministry of Finance and Economy.’ (Solidaridad Obrera, October 7.)
The next step, for which the Stalinists had been campaigning for months, was militarization of all industries necessary to war -transportation, mines, metal plants, munitions, etc. This barracks régime is reminiscent of Gil Robles under whom munitions workers were also militarized-strikes and trade union membership forbidden. The militarization decree is sugar-coated by being titled ‘militarization and nationalization decree’. But to militarize factories already in workers’ hands, coupled with government recognition of full indemnification of former owners, simply ends workers’ control and prepares for returning the factories to their former owners.
The long-delayed session of the Cortes opened October 1, and fittingly symbolized this government. Negrin made a dull, grey speech, notable, however, for a long passage declaring that ‘one must prepare for peace in ‘the midst of war’. (The perturbed CNT press was not allowed to analyse the meaning of this talk of peace.) Caballero did not appear, the ostensible reason being his pre-occupation with the crisis in the UGT. His followers were silent while Gonzales Pena, on behalf of the socialist delegation, declared unconditional support for the government as, of course, did the Stalinists. Angel Pestana, once a CNT leader, and now just re-admitted to the organization, pledged unconditional support to the government on behalf of his Syndicalist party. Twice during his speech, however, he was peremptorily silenced by Barrio who presided. The first time he was attempting to complain of Stalinist use of intimidation in proselytizing the army; the second time he was criticizing the failure to cleanse the rear of fascists and espionage elements. Thus, not a hint of the spirit of the masses penetrated the chamber.
Above all, the government was symbolized by new-found friends—reactionary deputies—who now appeared for the first time in Spain since July 1936.
Miguel Maura was there! Chief of the extreme right republicans, Minister of the Interior in the first republican government, an implacable enemy of the trade unions, the first minister of the republic to re-institute the dreaded ‘law of flight’ to shoot political prisoners—Maura had fled the country in July. His brother, Honorio, a monarchist, had been shot by the workers; the rest of his family had gone over to Franco. In exile, Maura had made no contact with the Spanish Embassies.
Portela Valladares was there! Governor-General of Catalonia for Lerroux after the crushing of Catalan autonomy in October 1934, he had been the last premier of the bienio negro, just before the February 1936 elections. He had fled Spain in July. What he had done in the interim was unknown. Now he rose in the Cortes: ‘This parliament is the raison d’etre of the Republic; it is the title to life of the Republic. My first duty before you, before Spain, before the world, is to assure the legitimacy of your power... Today is for me one of intimate and great satisfaction, in having contributed with you to seeing our Spain in transition to a serious and profound reconstruction.’ At the end of the session, he and Negrin embraced. To the press, Valladares praised ‘the prevailing atmosphere as he had observed it in Spain’. He went back to Paris, while the Stalinist press proved statistically that the presence of Valladares and Maura, signifying the centre’s support of the régime, gave a statistical majority of the electorate to the government.[1]
The ardour of the Stalinist press was cut abruptly by the reproduction in the fascist Diario Vasco, October 8, 1937, of a letter of Valladares to Franco, dated October 8, 1936, offering his services to the ‘national cause’.
The Stalinist welcome to Valladares and Maura was ‘offset’ by a passing reference of La Pasionaria to the unwelcome presence in the Cortes of another reactionary a minor figure, a member of Lerroux’s ruling party of the bienio negro. The deputy, Guerra del Rio, was given the floor to answer, in effect, that if the government rested on the Cortes, here he was. La Pasionaria subsided. CNT attacks on Maura and Valladares were deleted by the censor.
Was it for this then that the masses had shed their blood?
But we have still to tell the story of the government’s conquest of Catalonia and Aragon.
ON May 5, Catalan autonomy had ceased to exist. The central government had taken over the Catalan Ministries of Public Order and Defence. Caballero’s delegate in Barcelona had broadcast: ‘From this moment, all the forces are at the orders of the central government... These do not consider any union or anti-fascist organization as an enemy. There is no other enemy than the fascists.’ But a week later the Ministries of Defence and Public Order were surrendered by Caballero’s delegate to the representatives of Negrin-Stalin, and the pogrom began in earnest. The POUM went down with hardly a ripple. The PSUC opened a monstrous campaign against it identical in language, slogans, etc., with the witch-hunts of the Soviet bureaucracy before the Moscow trials. ‘The Trotskyists in the POUM have organized the latest insurrection on orders from the German and Italian secret police.’ The POUM’s answer to the PSUC was—to institute a libel suit against the Stalinist editors in a court filled with bourgeois and Stalinist judges and officials!
On May 28, La Batalla was suppressed permanently and the POUM radio seized. The Friends of Durruti headquarters were occupied and the organization outlawed. Simultaneously, the official anarchist press was put under iron political censorship. Yet the POUM and CNT did not join in a mass protest. ‘We formulate no protest. We only make public the facts,’ wrote Solidaridad Obrera, May 29. The POUM youth organ, Juventud Comunista (June 3) grandly remarked: ‘These are cries of panic and of impotence against a firmly revolutionary party ....’ And: ‘The [libel] trial goes forward. The PSUC organ must appear before the Popular Tribunals and they shall be revealed before national and international labour for what they are: vulgar calumniators.’ Naturally, on a technicality the trial was soon dismissed.
On the night of June 3, the Assault Guards attempted to disarm one of the remaining workers’ patrols. Shots were exchanged. There were dead and wounded on both sides. Here was the government’s opportunity to finish off the patrols. But here, also, was the POUM’s opportunity to force the CNT leaders to defend the workers’ elementary rights by demanding a united front for simple, concrete proposals—defence of free assembly, the press, the patrols, common defence of workers’ districts against the Stalinist hooligans, freedom of political prisoners, etc. The anarchist leaders could have hardly rejected these proposals without compromising themselves irreparably before their membership. Even against the CNT leaders’ will, united front committees could have been created in the localities to fight for such simple, concrete demands.
For the POUM leaders, however, to raise such simple demands meant: we have been wrong in estimating the May days as a defeat of the counter-revolution; it was a defeat of the workers and now we must fight for the most elementary democratic rights. Secondly, it meant: we have been wrong in leaning on the CNT leaders, limiting ourselves to the general, abstract proposal of a ‘revolutionary front’ of CNT-FAI-POUM which implies that the CNT is a revolutionary organization with which we can have a common platform on fundamental policies.[1] We must say openly, that a united front for the most elementary workers’ rights is the most than can be expected of the anarchist leadership, if even that.
Not once in the year had the POUM called for a united front with the CNT for concrete tasks of struggle! The whole policy of the POUM leadership essentially consisted of nothing but trying to curry favour with the CNT leadership. Not once did they characterize the capitulatory policy of the CNT leadership, not even when they expelled the Friends of Durruti and left them to the mercies of the Assault Guards!
In its darkest hour the POUM was completely isolated. On June 16, Nin was arrested in his office. The same night, widespread raids caught almost all the forty members of the Executive Committee. A few who escaped were forced to give themselves up because their wives were seized as hostages. The next morning the POUM was outlawed.
The Regional Committee of the CNT did not come to the defence of the POUM. La Noche (CNT) of June 22, published in bold-face: ‘About the espionage service discovered in the last days. The principal ones implicated were found in the leading circles of the POUM. Andres Nin and other known persons arrested.’ There followed some general reflections on slander, with copious references to Shakespeare, Gorki, Dostoievski and Freud .... If censorship was to be blamed, then where were the CNT’s illegal leaflets? In Madrid, CNT did come to the defence of the POUM, and was followed by Castilla Libre and Frente Libertario, militia organ. On June 28, the National Committee of the CNT addressed a letter to the ministers and their organizations reminding them that Nin, Andrade, David Rey, Gorkin, etc., ‘had acquired their prestige among the masses by long years of sacrifice’. ‘Let them solve their problem in the USSR as they can or circumstances advise them. It is not possible to transplant to Spain the same struggle, prosecuted with blood and fire, internationally by means of the press and here by means of the law utilized as a weapon.’ The letter indicated an entire lack of understanding of the significance of the persecutions. ‘Before all it imports us to declare that the CNT, by its intact and powerful strength, today perfectly organized and disciplined, is above all fear that tomorrow this method of elimination can overcome us. Placed above this semi-internal struggle,’ etc. This pompous chest-beating meant that the CNT masses would not be aroused by their leaders to the counter-revolutionary meaning of the persecutions.
Above all, the great masses had not been prepared to understand the Stalinist system of frame-up and slander. Currying favour with Stalin, the anarchist leaders had been guilty of such statements as that of Montseny: ‘Lenin was not the true builder of Russia but rather Stalin with his practical realism.’ The anarchist press had preserved a dead silence about the Moscow trials and purges, publishing only the official news reports. The CNT leaders even ceased to defend their anarchist comrades in Russia. When the anarchist Erich Muehsam was murdered by Hitler, and his wife sought refuge in the Soviet Union, only to be imprisoned shortly after her arrival, the CNT leadership stifled the protest movement in the CNT ranks. Even when the Red Generals were shot, the CNT organs published only the official bulletins.
By mid-July, the POUM’s leaders and active cadres were all in jail! Over its buildings flew the violet-yellow-red flags of the bourgeoisie. The Lenin barracks were occupied by the Republican ‘People’s Army’. Its presses had been destroyed or given to the PSUC. On the bulletin board of Batalla was a copy of Julio, PSUC youth organ, headlining: ‘Trotskyism is synonymous with counter-revolution.’ The POUM’s dormitories, ex-Hotel Falcon, had become a prison for POUM members and the head-quarters of the Spanish G.P.U. Its members were dispersed, disoriented, living in fear of nightly raids by the Assault Guards. ‘Small groups work on their own hook,’ wrote an authoritative eyewitness early in July. ‘It reminds one very much of the crumbling of the Communist Party of Germany in January 1933. The working class remains passive and permits anything to happen. The CNT press prints only official notices. No protest! Nowhere even a word of protest! The POUM has been swept away like a speck of dust. “Like under Hitler”, say the German comrades. The Russian Bolshevik-Leninists would add: “Almost like under Stalin”.'
In July, the local FAI committees began illegal propaganda. Unfortunately it did not centre around rallying the workers to the concrete tasks of freeing the political prisoners. One typical leaflet recalled the German Social Democracy’s propaganda on the eve of Hitler, demanding the help of the state—Staat greif zu!—against its own bands. Protesting Stalinist assaults on anarchist youth buildings, ‘How long? It is time for the Government Council to speak, or lacking that, the Delegate General of Public Order and the Chief of Police’, read one pathetic leaflet.
Nor were the illegal POUM leaflets, which now began to appear, much better. They, who had always reproached the Bolshevik-Leninists for seeing only Stalinism as the enemy, became themselves anti-Stalinist and nothing more. One typical leaflet, for example, addressed itself to everybody on the left and on the right: to the anarchists as well as to the ‘young separatists’ of the Estat Catala. ‘The men of the Left cannot betray their postulates. The Separatists cannot sell Catalonia by their silence.’ And the final slogan! ‘Prevent the establishment of the dictatorship of a party behind the lines.’ What of the Estat Catala and Esquerra, Prieto and Azaña, accomplices of the Stalinists, indeed the main beneficiaries?
Thus, false policies facilitated the deadly advance of the counter-revolution. Only the small forces of the Bolshevik-Leninists, who had been expelled as ‘Trotskyists’ from the POUM, and had formed their organization in the spring of 1937—only this small band, working under the three-fold illegality of the state, the Stalinists and the CNT-POUM leadership, clearly pointed the road for the workers. Not only the ultimate road of the workers’ state but the immediate task of defending the democratic rights of the workers. That the CNT masses could be aroused was shown by the protection they accorded Bolshevik-Leninists distributing illegal leaflets. At one meeting (of the woodworkers’ union), lorries of Assault Guards arrived and attempted to arrest the distributors. The meeting declared that the leaflet distributors were under their protection and would repulse with arms any attempt to break in. The police were forced to leave without our comrades.
A Bolshevik-Leninist leaflet of July 19 points the road: the united front of struggle of the CNT-FAI, POUM, the Bolshevik-Leninists and the dissident anarchists:
Workers: demand of your organization and your leaders a united front pact which must contain:
Struggle for the freedom of the workers’ press! Down with political censorship!
Liberation of all revolutionary prisoners. For the liberation of comrade Nin, transported to Valencia!
Joint protection of all centres and enterprises in the possession of our organizations.
Reconstitution of strengthened Workers’ Patrols. Cessation of disarming the working class.
Equal pay for officers and soldiers. The return to the front of all the armed forces sent from Valencia. General offensive on all fronts.
Control of prices and distribution through committees of working men and working women.
Arrest of the provocateurs of May 3: Rodriguez Salas, Ayguade, etc.
To achieve this, all workers form the united front! Organize Committees of Workers, Peasants and Combatants in all enterprises, barracks and districts on the land and at the front!
But not in a day, or a month, does a new organization win the leadership of the masses. The road is long and hard—and yet the only road.
* * * *
By July, according to the official CNT figures, eight hundred of their members in Barcelona alone were imprisoned, and sixty had ‘disappeared’—euphemism for assassination. The left socialist press reported scores of its leading militants everywhere seized and jailed.
One of the most repulsive phases of the counter-revolution was its merciless persecution of the foreign revolutionists who had come to Spain to fight in the ranks of the militias. A single report to the CNT on July 24, counted 150 foreign revolutionists in a Valencia prison-arrested on ‘the charge of illegally entering Spain’. Hundreds were expelled from the country and the CNT cabled the workers’ organizations in Paris, appealing to them to prevent the German, Italian, Polish exiles from being delivered into the hands of their consulates.
But the foreigners arrested and expelled did not meet the worst fate. Others among them were selected to complete the amalgam between the POUM and the fascists. Maurin was in fascist hands, in danger of death. Nin, Andrade, Gorkin were too well known to the Spanish masses. The POUM had too many thousands of its best men at the front. Too many of its leaders had died fighting fascism: Germinal Vidal, the Youth Secretary, at the taking of the AtarAzañas barracks on July 19; his successor, Miguel Pedrola, commandant on the Huesca front; Etchebehere, commandant at Siguenza; Cahué and Adriano Nathan, commandants on the Aragon front; Jesus Blanco, commandant on the Pozuelo front, etc. Among the POUM’s military figures were men like Rovira and Josh Alcantarilla, famed throughout Spain. A few unknown foreigners, fighting in the POUM battalions, would serve to add to the credibility of the fantastic charges.
Georges Kopp, a Belgian ex-officer, serving in the POUM’s Lenin Division, had just returned to Barcelona from Valencia, where he had been given a major’s commission-the highest commission awarded foreigners—when the Stalinists arrested him. Then the Stalinist propaganda factory went to work. Robert Minor, American Stalinist leader, announced that the paucity of arms on the Aragon front—this was the first time the Stalinists admitted this charge of the CNT—was now explained: ‘The Trotskyist General Kopp had been carting enormous supplies of arms and ammunition across no-man’s land to the fascists!’ (Daily Worker, August 31 and October 5.)
The choice of Kopp, however, was a GPU blunder of major proportions, comparable to the story of Romm’s meeting with Trotsky in Paris or Piatakov’s flight to Norway. For Georges Kopp, forty-five years old, was a militant of long standing in the Belgian revolutionary movement. When the Spanish war broke out, he was chief engineer in a large firm in Belgium. It had been usual for him to experiment at night. He circulated the story that he was trying out a new machine, perfecting it by the actual process of manufacture. What he manufactured, however, were the ingredients for millions of rounds of cartridges. Left socialists organized illegal transport to Barcelona. When Kopp discovered that he was under suspicion, he took leave of his four children and headed for the frontier. The very day he fled, the police raided his laboratory. In absentia, Kopp was sentenced by the Belgian courts to fifteen years at hard labour: five for making explosives for a foreign power, five for leaving the country without permission while a reserve officer in the Belgian Army, and five for joining a foreign army. Twice wounded on the Aragon front, he soon won the rank of commandant.[2]
Kopp cannot answer the Stalinist slanderers for they have killed him. He was in a Barcelona jail with our American comrade, Harry Milton. In the middle of the night, Kopp was dragged out. That was in July, and the last time he was ever seen.
On July 17, a group of POUM members were released from prison in Valencia. It is a fact that most of them were extreme right-wingers, such as, Luis Portela, editor of El Comunista, Jorge Arquer, etc. Consequently their subsequent testimony was particularly cogent. Upon release, they went to Zugazagoitia, Minister of Interior, who told them that Nin had been taken from Barcelona to one of the private prisons of the Stalinists in Madrid. Arquer thereupon requested a safe-conduct to search for Nin. The minister, a Prieto man, told him: ‘I guarantee you nothing; what is more, I advise you to go to Madrid because, with my safe-conduct or without, you would endanger your life. These communists don’t respect me and they do as they please. And there would be nothing strange if you were seized and shot immediately by them.’ Publicly, however, Zugazagoitia was still saying that Nin was in a government prison. On July 19, however, Montseny, for the CNT, publicly charged that Nin had been murdered. Embarrassed by the numerous inquiries from abroad about specific prisoners’ whereabouts which the government was unable to answer for the simple reason that most of the prominent ones were in private Stalinist ‘preventoriums’, it was arranged that the prisoners be transferred from the Stalinist jails in Madrid and Valencia to the formal keeping of the Ministry of Justice. Nin was not among them. Irujo issued a statement that Nin was ‘missing’. Fled, the Stalinists said, toward the fascist lines. But the truth finally got out. On August 8, the New York Times reported that ‘nearly a month ago a band of armed men “kidnapped” Nin from a Madrid prison. Although every effort has been made to hush up the affair, it is now a matter of common knowledge that he was found dead on the outskirts of Madrid, a victim of assassination.’ As a personal friend of Nin and Andrade, the great Italian novelist, Ignazio Silone, had tried to save them. ‘But,’ he warned, ‘unless the revolutionary proletariat of other countries is watchful, the Stalinists are capable of every crime.’ Alvarez del Vayo, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Caballero’s cabinet, notoriously Stalin’s agent in the Caballero group, had the effrontery to tell the wife of Andrade that Nin had been murdered by his own comrades. (It is only just to add that del Vayo has since been excluded by the Socialist organization—Caballero-led—of Madrid.) Premier Prieto shrived his soul for this and other crimes by dismissing the Stalinist Police Chief, Ortega... and replaced him with the Stalinist, Moron.
To cap the suppression of revolutionists with slander is scarcely a new invention. When, in Paris, the June 1848 insurrection was drowned in blood, the National Assembly was assured by the left democrat, Flaucon, that the insurrectionists had been bribed by monarchists and foreign governments. When the Spartacists were shot down, Ludendorff charged that they—and indeed, the social democrats who shot them too!—were agents of England. When the counter-revolution got the upper hand in Petrograd, after the July days, Lenin and Trotsky were indicted as agents of the Kaiser. The destruction of the generation of 1917 is now carried out by Stalin under the charge that they have sold themselves to the Gestapo.
The parallel goes further. While Kerensky was shouting that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents, Tseretelli and Lieberin the soviets—were, under questioning, dissociating themselves from the charge, limiting themselves to demanding the outlawry of the Bolsheviks for planning an insurrection. But, profiting from Kerensky’s charge, the Mensheviks did not ascend the housetops to proclaim the Bolsheviks’ innocence.
So, too, in Spain. The Stalinists were not even as successful as Kerensky: the indictment handed down against the POUM leaders made no mention of collaboration with Franco or the Gestapo. The charge was based on the May days and similar subversive and oppositional deeds. Prieto and other collaborators of the Stalinists told the ILP delegation they did not believe the Stalinist linking of POUM to the fascists. They ‘merely’ did not come to the defence of the POUM. Companys not only disavowed belief in the charges but made the fact public. Thus there was a division of labour: if you don’t believe the slanders, then you must believe the POUM was organizing an insurrection, i.e., they were either counter-revolutionists or revolutionists, whichever you preferred, A narrower division of labour was that between the world Stalinist press, which repeated the ‘Trotskyist-fascist’ slanders, and the anti-POUM-CNT propaganda of Louis Fischer, Ralph Bates, Ernest Hemingway, Herbert Matthews, etc., who ‘merely’ repeated such myths as that the POUM militias played football in no-man’s land with the fascists.
* * * *
Already by the end of June, Catalan autonomy, though guaranteed by statute, was completely suppressed. The authorities distrusted anybody who had any tie with the Catalan masses, no matter how tenuous. With the exception of the most reactionary sector, the old Civil Guards, all the police in Catalonia were transferred to other parts of the country. Even the firemen were transferred to Madrid. Parades were forbidden, and union meetings could be held only by permission of the delegate of public order on three days’ notice—as under the monarchy!
The workers’ patrols had been wiped out, their most active members imprisoned, their chiefs ‘disappeared’.
Having done all this with the aid of the screen provided by CNT ministers still sitting in the Generalidad, the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc now dispensed with their services.
A June 7 bulletin of the FAI published a Stalinist communication which had been intercepted, saying:
Based on the provisional composition of the government, our party will demand the presidency. The new government will have the same characteristics as that of Valencia; a strong government of the People’s Front whose chief task will be to calm the spirits and demand punishment for the authors of the last counter-revolutionary movement. The anarchists will be offered posts in this government but in such a manner that they will be compelled to refuse to collaborate, and in this manner we shall be able to present ourselves to the public as the only ones willing to collaborate with all sections.
The anarchists challenged the PSUC to deny the authenticity of this document, but there were no challengers.
At the end of June, came the ministerial crisis. The CNT agreed to whatever demands were made, and the new ministry was formed. Publication of the ministerial list on June 29, however, revealed to the CNT that, without their knowledge, a minister without portfolio had been added—an ‘independent’ named Dr. Pedro Gimpera, a notorious reactionary and anarchist-baiter. Companys blandly refused to withdraw him. The CNT at last withdrew, leaving a government of the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie.
The only difference between the Stalinist bulletin exposed by the FAI and the actual course of the ministerial crisis was that the Stalinists had not asked for the presidency... But six weeks later, without any previous hint, the Stalinists clashed with President Companys.
In November 1936, when the CNT intelligence service had seized Reberter, the Chief of Police, and had him tried and shot for organizing a coup d’etat, the investigation had implicated Casanovas, President of the Catalan parliament. But the Stalinists had supported Companys in prevailing upon the CNT to let Casanovas leave the country and Casanovas had fled to Paris. After the May days, he had returned to Barcelona with impunity. He spent the next three months pleasantly re-establishing himself in political life. During all these nine months, he had not been subject to a word of condemnation from the Stalinists. (Stalin has employed this method systematically in Russia: a bureaucrat is involved in a misdeed; he is permitted to go on because all the more servile for knowing that his crime is detected, then—sometimes years later—Stalin needs a scapegoat and the wretch is pilloried.) On August 18, the Catalan parliament opened. Without a previous word of warning to their allies—it could obviously have been settled behind closed doors—the PSUC delegation of four publicly attacked Casanovas as a traitor. The Esquerra had been tricked into a position where it had to reject Casanovas’ offer to resign. With this excellent little whip, the Stalinists began to drive the Esquerra as they pleased, ending with the announcement of Companys’ early resignation from the presidency, after the Stalinists had boycotted the October 1 session of the Catalan parliament.
Why did the Stalinists break with Companys? He had done their bidding in so much! Why, then, was Companys now slated to go?[3]
He had made one unforgivable break with the Stalinists. Companys had publicly declared that he had known nothing of the plans for outlawing the POUM; had protested against the transfer of the prisoners from Barcelona; and had sent to Madrid the chief of the Catalan press bureau, Jaime Miravittlles, to see the Stalinist Police Chief, Ortega, on behalf of Nin. When Ortega showed him the ‘crushing proofs’—a document ‘found’ in a fascist centre, linking one ‘N’ to a spy ring, Miravittlles—by his own account—had burst out laughing, and declared the document was such an obvious forgery no one would dream of taking it seriously. Companys had then written to the Valencia government that Catalan public opinion could not believe Nin was a fascist spy.
Not that Companys was going to fight for the POUM prisoners. Having salved his conscience—and made the record for any future overturn!—Companys relapsed into silence. That his silence did not save him from attack indicated that the Stalinists could not forgive any ally who exposed their frame-ups: the fame-up is the very foundation-stone of Stalinism today.
But there was a more profound reason for the break with the Esquerra. The Nin incident merely indicated that Companys was not hardened enough for the future moves of the Stalinists. He was, after all, a nationalist, desiring a return to Catalan autonomy. And for Stalinism, Spain and Catalonia were merely pawns which they were ready to sacrifice, with which they were ready to do anything that Anglo-French imperialism dictated, in return for a military alliance for Stalin in the coming war. That is why there had to be a selection even from among the Prieto socialists and the Azaña republicans: only the most brutalized, most corrupt, most cynical could weather the coming storms created by the Stalinists, and remain in collaboration with them.
The economic counter-revolution in Catalonia advanced against the collectives. To the honour of the local sections of the libertarian movement, they stood their ground. For example, the strong anarchist movement in Bajo Llobregat (heart of armed struggles against the monarchy and the republic) declared in its weekly, Ideas, on May 20:
Here is what we must do, workers! You have the opportunity to be free. For the first time in our social history the arms are in our hands: don’t drop them. Workers and peasants! When you hear that the government, or anybody else, tells you that the arms should be at the front, answer them that that is certainly so, that the thousands of rifles, machine guns, mortars, etc., that are kept in the barracks, that are used by the carabineros, Assault and National Guards, etc., should be sent to the front because to defend your fields and factories, nobody can do that better than you.
Remember always that airplanes, cannons and tanks are what are needed at the front quickly to crush fascism... that what the politicians arc looking for is to disarm the workers, to have them at their mercy, and to take away from them what has cost so much proletarian blood and lives. Let nobody permit the disarming of anybody; let no village allow another to be disarmed; let us all disarm those who try to disarm us. This should be, must be, the revolutionary slogan of the hour.
The gap between the pusillanimity of the central organs of the CNT and the fighting spirit of the local papers, close to the masses, was as wide as that between craven cowards and revolutionary workers.
But tens of thousands of Assault Guards, concentrated behind the lines, struck systematically at the collectives. Without centralized direction, the villages were overpowered, one by one. Libertad, one of the dissident illegal anarchist papers of Barcelona (incidentally, it paid its contemptuous respects to Solidaridad Obrera, which had denounced the illegal organs), described the situation in the countryside in its issue of August 1:
It is useless that the censorship, in the power of one party, prevents a word being said about the thousands of blows inflicted on the workers’ organizations, the peasant collectives. In vain that they prohibit mention of that terrible word, counter-revolution. The working masses know perfectly that the thing exists, that the counter-revolution advances under the protection of the government, and that the black beasts of reaction, the disguised fascists, the old caciques, are again raising their heads.
And how should they not know it, if there is not a village in Catalonia where the punitive expeditions of the Assault Guards have not been, where they have not assaulted the CNT workers, destroying their branch organizations or what is worse, destroyed those portentous works of the revolution, the collectives of the peasants, in order to return the land to the old proprietors, almost always known as fascists, ex-caciques of the black epoch of Gil Robles, Lerroux or Primo de Rivera?
The peasants took the goods of the bosses—which in justice did not belong to them—to place them at the service of collective labour, permitting the old bosses to dignify themselves, if they wished, by work. They believed, the peasants, that so noble a work was guaranteed by its own efficiency, if fascism were not triumphant, and it could not triumph. Scarcely did they suspect that in the midst of war against the terrible enemy, with the government being men of the left, the public forces [police] would come to destroy that which had been created with such fatigue and joy. For this inconceivable thing to happen, there had to come to power, by dirty means, those called communists. And the workers, ready always to make the greatest sacrifices to defeat fascism do not end wondering how it is possible that they be attacked from behind, that they be humiliated and betrayed, when there still is so much lacking for conquering the common enemy...
The technique of repression is always the same. Lorries of Assault Guards that enter the village like conquerors. Sinister registrations in the branch organizations of the CNT. Annulment of municipal councils where the CNT is represented. Plundering searches and arrests. Seizure of the food of the collectives. Return of the land to their old proprietors.
This movingly simple description was followed by a long list of villages, the dates on which they were assaulted, the names of those arrested or killed—and in the ensuing months the list grew longer and longer.
In industry and commerce, the juridical basis of the collectivized establishments rested on the insecure foundation of the collectivization decree of October 24, 1936. But immediately after the May days, the Generalidad repudiated the decree! The occasion was the attempt of the CNT to release the factories from the stranglehold of the customs officials, without whose certification of ownership of export goods arriving abroad were being sequestered under claims of emigrated former owners. The anarchist-led Council of Economy (of the Ministry of Industry) adopted on May 15 a proposed decree to record the collectivized establishments as the official owners in the Mercantile Register. But the bourgeois-Stalinist majority in the Generalidad rejected the proposal on the ground that the October 24 collectivization decree ‘was dictated without competency by the Generalidad’ because ‘there was not, nor is there yet, legislation of the [Spanish] State to apply’ and ‘article 44 of the [Spanish] Constitution declares expropriation and socialization are functions of the [Spanish] State’, i.e., the Catalan autonomy statute had been exceeded! The Generalidad would now await action by Valencia. But Companys had signed the October decree! That was during the revolution...
The chief agency of economic counter-revolution was the GEPCI, the long-established businessman’s organization taken bodily into the Catalan section of the UGT by the Stalinists but repudiated by the UGT nationally. With union cards in their pockets, these men did with impunity what they would never have dared before July 19 against the organized workers. Many of them were now no longer petty manufacturers but great entrepreneurs. They received ‘preferential consideration in securing financial credits, raw materials, export services, etc., as against the factory collectives. One little item will destroy the Stalinist myth that these were petty little storekeepers, one-man establishments. In June 1937 the UGT clothing workers drafted a scale of wages, identical with those in the clothing collectives, and sought to negotiate with the capitalist-owned clothing factories. The employers rejected the demands. But who were the employers? Members, to a man, of GEPCI, that is, like the employees whom they were refusing wage rises, they were members of the UGT in Catalonia! (Solidaridad Obrera, June 10.) Would the most reactionary trade union bureaucrat, of the stamp of Bill Green or Ernest Bevin, propose that bosses and workers be in one ‘union’? No, that vast step backward could come only from the Stalinists, aping Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
In June, under the slogan of ‘municipalization’, the PSUC launched a campaign to wrest the transportation, electric, gas, and other key industries from workers’ control. On June 3, the PSUC delegation formally proposed, in the Barcelona Municipal Council, that it municipalize public services. On the morrow, of course, the CNT councillors would be thrown out, and the Stalinists would have the public services in their hands for the next step in returning them to their former owners. But this time they were confronted, not merely by the temporizing CNT leaders—who proposed that municipalization was ‘premature’ in this field, one ought to begin with housing—but with the mass response of the workers involved. The Transport Workers Union plastered every block of the city with huge posters: ‘The revolutionary conquests belong to the workers. The workers’ collectives are the product of these conquests. We must defend them... To municipalize the urban public services, yes—but only when the municipalities belong to the workers and not to the politicians.’ The posters demonstrated that since the workers had taken control, there had been a thirty per cent increase in plant facilities, lowering of fares, additional workers employed, big donations to the agricultural collectives, subventions to the harbour workers, social insurance to families of deceased or wounded workers, etc. For the moment, the Stalinist advance was beaten in this field.
But the Stalinists continued toward their goal of destroying the worker-controlled factories. The Catalan Generalidad set September 15 as the deadline for proving the legality of collectivized factories. Since much of the collectivization was done overnight to speed the civil war against the fascists, few factories had established any juridical procedure. What, indeed, were the legalities involved in the expropriations? The original decree of October 24, 1936, we have discussed in our chapter on the first Generalidad cabinet. It was designed precisely to provide entering wedges for the future. And the Generalidad had now repudiated it! At leisure and at will, the Generalidad would now examine the legal title of the social revolution and find it undoubtedly full of legal flaws. What a preposterous business! But a tragic one.
It was in the food industries, distribution, markets, etc., that the Stalinists had got their first grip, holding the Ministry of Supplies in the Generalidad since December, when they had promptly dissolved the workers’ supply committees, which then had been provisioning the cities under controlled prices. Even through the temporizing of the CNT press and the opacity of the censorship, the accounts now reflected what was happening here:
... Collectives, socialized undertakings and co-operatives, embracing both members of the UGT and CNT, have been made the target of attack on the part of those who hid in desertion on the 19th of duly... The dairymen of both unions are being arrested right and left. The cows and the dairy farms, organized legally on a co-operative basis, are being confiscated, although their statutes have been officially approved by the Gencralidad for several months. These cows and dairy establishments arc being handed over to their former owners... The same thing is happening, although still on a small scale, in the bread industry ... Our markets, the central fish market, etc., although collectivized legally, are also suffering from these vicious attacks by the former bourgeoisie. They are being encouraged by the poisonous campaigns conducted daily in the press of the party that has constituted itself the Champion for the Defence of the GEPCI (Corporations and Units of Petty Merchants and Manufacturers). It is no longer merely a fight against the CNT collectives, but against all the revolutionary conquests of the UGT-CNT...
A hard fist against the fascists and counter-revolutionaries hiding behind a trade union card! (Solidaridad Obrera, June 29.)
‘Is the Ministry of Supplies at the service of the people, or has it been transformed into a bigger merchant?’ asked the CNT press. ‘The basic articles of food are: rice, string beans, sugar, milk, etc. Why are these not included among those items that the Committee of Distribution, recently formed by the UGT-CNT, distributes equally among all the stores of Barcelona, regardless of the organization to which they belong?’ Instead, these basic articles were uncontrolled, left to the mercy of the GEPCI. La Noche (June 26) responding to the bitterness of the masses: ‘The death penalty for thieves! Scandalous abuses of the merchants at the expense of the people.’ And, after showing, from the official statistics, the precipitous rise of food prices between June 1936 and February 1937, La Noche said: ‘Nor would it have been so bad if the prices had remained at that level! One can speak to the housekeepers about the increase in the cost of living since February. It is reaching inaccessible figures... We must create some form of protection for the interests of the people against the egoism of the merchants who are carrying on with full impunity.’
Yes, it was in food supplies that the Stalinists had their grip longest. And the result: hunger, yes, actual hunger stalked Catalonia. The bitterness of the masses breaks through in Solidaridad Obrera (September 19):
Proletarian mothers with sons at the front here suffer stoically of hunger together with their innocent little ones... We say that sacrifices ought to be by all and it is an inconceivable situation that in actuality there are places where, by paying prices outside the reach of any worker, it is possible to obtain all kinds of food. These luxurious restaurants are veritable foci of provocation and should disappear, as ought to disappear all privileges of any sector. Flagrant inequality, privilege, is in such cases a terrible dissolvent of popular cohesion. It must be eliminated at all costs... Protected... there has entered into action a repugnant caste of speculators and profiteers who traffic in the hunger of the people...
We repeat that our people do not fear sacrifices but do not tolerate monstrous inequality... Respect the proletariat that fights and suffers!
Yes, the masses do not fear sacrifices. The workers of Petrograd suffered the most extreme privations—not even running water in the city during the civil war. But what there was belonged to all equally. It is not the bare pangs of hunger that contort the faces of the Barcelona workers and their women and children. It is that while they hunger, the bourgeoisie eat luxuriously—and this in the midst of civil war against fascism! But that is the inevitable consequence of not finishing with bourgeois ‘democracy’.
To those who have been impressed by Stalinist ‘common sense’ in modestly fighting for democracy: Do you begin to understand what it meant in the concrete, in the seared souls of the Spanish people?
THE fertile province of Aragon was the living embodiment of victorious struggle against fascism. It was the only province actually invested by the fascists and then conquered from them by force of arms. It was especially the pride of the Catalan masses, for they had saved Aragon. Within three days of the victory in Barcelona, the CNT and POUM militias were off for Aragon. The PSUC then was small and contributed little or nothing. Imperishable names of battles there—Monte Aragon, Estrecho Quinto, etc.—were associated solely with the CNT and POUM heroes who had won them. It was in the victorious conquest of Aragon that Durruti acquired his legendary fame as a military leader, and the forces he brought to the defence of Madrid in November were the picked troops whose victorious morale had been welded in Aragon victories.
Not the least of the reasons for the successes in Aragon had been that, under Durruti’s leadership, the militias marched as an army of social liberation. Every village wrested from the fascists was transformed into a fortress of the revolution. The militias sponsored elections of village committees, to which were turned over all the large estates and their equipment. Property titles, mortgages, etc., went into bonfires. Having thus transformed the world of the village, the CNT-POUM columns could go forward, secure in the knowledge that every village behind them would fight to the death for the land that was now theirs.
Backed by their success in freeing Aragon, the anarchists met with little resistance there from the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc in the first months. Aragon’s municipal councils were elected directly by the communities. The Council of Aragon was at first largely anarchist. When Caballero’s cabinet was formed, the anarchists agreed to give representation to the other anti-fascist groups in the Council, but up to the last days of its existence the masses of Aragon were grouped around the libertarian organizations. The Stalinists were a tiny and uninfluential group.
At least three-fourths of the land was tilled by collectives. Of four hundred collectives, only ten adhered to the UGT. Peasants desiring to work the land individually were permitted to do so, provided they employed no hired labour. For family consumption, cattle were owned individually. Schools were subsidized by the community. Agricultural production increased in the region from thirty to fifty per cent over the previous year, as a result of collective labour. Enormous surpluses were voluntarily turned over to the government, free of charge, for use at the front.
Libertarian principles were attempted in the field of money and wages. Wages were paid by a system of coupons exchangeable for goods in the co-operatives. But this was merely pious genuflection to anarchist tradition, since the committees, carrying on sale of produce and purchase of goods with the rest of Spain, perforce used money in all transactions, so that the coupons were merely an internal accounting system based on the money held by the committees. Wages were based on the family unit: a single producer was paid the equivalent of 25 pesetas; a married couple with only one working, 35 pesetas, and four pesetas weekly additional for each child. This system had a serious weakness, particularly while the rest of Spain operated on a system of great disparity in wages between manual and professional workers, since that prompted trained technicians to migrate from Aragon. For the time being, however, ideological conviction, inspiring the many technicians and professionals in the libertarian organizations, more than made up for this weakness. Granted that, with stabilization of the revolution, a transitional period of higher wages for skilled and professional workers would have had to be instituted. But the Stalinists who had the effrontery to contrast the Aragon situation with the monstrous disparity of wages in the Soviet Union, appeared to have forgotten completely that the family wage—which is the essence of Marx’s ‘to each according to his needs’—was a goal toward which to strive, from which the Soviet Union is infinitely further away under Stalin than under Lenin and Trotsky.
The anarchist majority in the Council of Aragon led in practice to the abandonment of the anarchist theory of the autonomy of economic administration. The Council acted as a centralizing agency. The opposition was in such a hopeless minority within Aragon, and the masses were so wedded to the new order, that there was no record of a single Stalinist mass meeting in Aragon in direct opposition to the Council. Many joint meetings were celebrated, with Stalinist participation, including one as late as July 7, 1937. Neither at these meetings nor elsewhere in Aragon did the Stalinists repeat the calumnies which the Stalinist press elsewhere was spreading, in order to prepare the ground for an invasion.
Many workers’ leaders from abroad saw Aragon and praised it: among them Carlo Rosselli, the Italian anti-fascist leader, serving as a commandant on the Aragon front (on leave in Paris when he and his brother were assassinated by the Italian fascists). The prominent French socialist, Juin, wrote strong praise of Aragon in Le Peuple. Giustizia a Liberta, the leading Italian anti-fascist organ, said of the Aragon collectives: ‘The manifest benefits of the new social system strengthened the spirit of solidarity among the peasants, arousing them to greater efforts and activity.’
The manifest benefits of social revolution, however, scarcely weighed in the balance against the grim necessities of the bourgeois-Stalinist programme for stabilizing a bourgeois regime and winning the favour of Anglo-French imperialism. The preconditions of such favour was destruction of every vestige of social revolution. But the masses of Aragon were united. The destruction must, therefore, come from outside. Once the Negrin government came to power, a terrific barrage of propaganda against Aragon was laid down in the bourgeois and Stalinist press. And, after three months of this preparation, the invasion was launched.
On August 11, the government decreed the dissolution of the Council of Aragon. In its stead was appointed a GovernorGeneral ‘with the faculties which the prevailing legislation attributes to civil governors’—legislation from the days of reaction. The Governor-General, Mantecon, proved only a figurehead, however. The real job was done by military forces under the leadership of the Stalinist, Enrique Lister.
One of the manufactured heroes of the Stalinists (CNT published his picture with the title, ‘Hero of many battles. We know it because the Communist party has told us so’—irony was the only way of getting past the censor), Lister marched his troops into the rear of Aragon. The municipal councils elected directly by the population were forcibly dissolved. Collectives were broken up and their leaders jailed. As with the POUM prisoners in Catalonia, not even the Governor-General knew the whereabouts of the members of the CNT Regional Committee arrested by Lister’s bands. They had, indeed, carried safe-conducts from the Governor-General but that did not save them. Joaquin Ascaso, President of the Council of Aragon, was jailed on the charge... of stealing jewels! The government censorship forbade the CNT press to publish the news of Ascaso’s imprisonment, refused to divulge the place of his incarceration, and from their foully reactionary viewpoint, they were right. For Ascaso was flesh and blood of the masses, as the dead Durruti had been, and they would have torn the jail down with their bare hands.
Suffice it to say that the official CNT press—none too anxious to arouse the masses—compared the assault on Aragon with the subjection of Asturias by Lopez Ochoa in October 1934.
To justify the rape of Aragon, the Stalinist press published fantastic tales. Frente Rojo wrote:
Under the régime of the extinguished Council of Aragon, neither the citizens, nor property, could count on the least guarantee... The government will find in Aragon gigantic arsenals of arms and thousands of bombs, hundreds of the latest model machine-guns, cannons and tanks, reserved there, not to fight fascism on the battle fronts, but the private property of those who wished to make of Aragon a bastion from which to fight the government of the republic... Not a peasant but had been forced to enter the collectives. He who resisted suffered on his body and his little property the sanctions of terror. Thousands of peasants have emigrated from the region, preferring to leave the land than to endure the thousand methods of torture of the Council... The land was confiscated, and rings, lockets, and even the earthen cooking pots were confiscated. Animals were confiscated, grain and even the cooked food and wine for home consumption... In the Municipal Councils there were installed known fascists and Falangist chiefs. Holding union cards they officiated as mayors and councillors, as agents of the public order of Aragon, bandits by origin making a profession and a government regime of banditry.
Was anybody expected seriously to believe this nonsense? The police mentality of the Stalinists was evident in the alibi that an insurrection was preparing. Unfortunately, it was not true. The arms? The Aragon front had come under complete government control on May 6, with a Stalinist party member, General Pozas, in supreme command. Prior to that the CNT, POUM, FAI press from October 1936 on had abounded in long and precise complaints that the Aragon front was being deprived of arms, and that the armed guard of the Aragon collectives—actually, with the front irregular and shifting, part of the frontline defences—were dangerously stripped of arms. For eight months these charges had been made, from press, platform, and radio and with it the charge that Russian aid was being conditioned by Stalinist control of the disposition of incoming arms. The Stalinists had met these specific charges with dead silence. Now, in the pogrom atmosphere of August 1937, their answer was that arms were there! No one was, nor could be expected to believe this poppy-cock, not even the party members.
But the charges do not require serious rebuttal. For on September 18, the man who presumably had been the chief culprit, who had terrorized, installed, fascists, etc., etc., etc., Joaquin Ascaso, was released from prison: If the Stalinists were ready to prove their charges against Ascaso even in their corrupted courts, why did they not do so? The answer is: the charges were balderdash. What was terribly real, however, was the destruction of the Aragon collectives.
After the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc conquered Aragon and the story of their invasion began to seep out to the world labour movement where the Stalinists did not dare to attempt to repeat their fantastic charges, they adopted a new tack which sought to move away from these charges to the assertion that the dissolution of the Council was required in order to re-organize the Aragon front. Thus Ralph Bates wrote
... There have been exaggerated charges against the Council of Aragon, but I think the following can be substantiated by detailed evidence: the wholesale application of extreme measures in land and social reform had confused and even antagonized non-anarchist peasantry and workers; anarchist control of village military committees had undoubtedly hampered efficient conduct of operations... The problem, therefore, was to bring this strip of Aragon under the control of the Valencia government, as part of a campaign to reform the Aragon military forces. (New Republic, October 27, 1937.)
This latest alibi had two functions: first, to get away from the preposterous charges on which the dissolution had first been justified; second, to cover up the fact that, although the central government had been in complete control of the Aragon front since May, its so-called offensives had been fiascos. The infinite infamy of all this will become apparent if we now turn to the military question itself and examine the Aragon front as part of the whole programme of military strategy.
MILITARY warfare is merely the continuation of politics by forcible means. A proclamation dropped over the enemy lines, expressing the aspirations of the landless peasants, is also an instrument of warfare. A successfully incited revolt behind enemy lines may be infinitely more efficacious than a frontal attack. Maintenance of the morale of the troops is as important as equipping them. To guard against treacherous officers is as important as training efficient officers. In sum, the creation of a workers’ and peasants’ government for which the masses will work and die like heroes is the best political adjunct of military struggle against the fascist enemy in civil war.
By these methods, the workers and peasants of Russia defeated imperialist intervention and White Guard armies on twenty-two fronts, despite the most rigid economic blockade ever imposed on any nation. In the organization and direction of the Red Armies under these adverse conditions, Trotsky seemed to perform miracles, but these were miracles compounded of revolutionary politics, of the capacities for sacrifice, labour and heroism of a class defending its newly-won freedom.
That reactionary political policies determined the false military policies of the Loyalist government can be demonstrated by surveying the course of the military struggle.
From July 19 until September 4, 1936—seven decisive weeks—the Giral cabinet of the People’s Front was at the helm, with the unconditional political support of the Stalinists and the Prieto Socialists (Prieto, indeed, was unofficially part of the ministry, establishing an office in the government on July 20).
The Giral government had about $600,000,000 in gold at its disposal. Recall that the real embargo on the sale of munitions to Spain was not established until August 19, when the British Board of Trade revoked all licences for export of arms and planes to Spain. Thus, the Giral régime had at least a month in which to purchase stores of arms—but the damning fact is that it bought almost nothing! The story of the treacherous attempt of Azaña-Giral to reach a compromise with the fascists has already been told. One further fact: Franco and his friends waited six days before forming their own government. Gil Robles later revealed that they waited in expectation of a satisfactory arrangement with the Madrid government. By that time the militias had emerged from the ranks of the workers and Giral no longer had the power to meet Franco’s demands.
The most important gains of the first seven weeks were the successful march on Aragon by the Catalan militias, using socialization of the land as much as they used their rifles; and the attack of the loyalist warships on Franco’s transportation of troops from Morocco to the mainland.
‘The loyalty of a large part of the navy decisively prevented Franco from transporting large numbers of Moroccan troops to the mainland in the first two weeks of the war. The naval patrol in the south made transport by sea extremely hazardous. Franco was forced to resort to airplane passage, but this was slow work. In this respect, again, the government was given a chance to organize defence and take stock,’ wrote two Stalinists at the time.[1] What they failed to add was that the warships were under the command of elected sailors’ committees, which, like the militias, had no faith in the Giral government and carried on operations, despite the passivity of the government. The significance of this fact will become apparent when we come to the naval policy of the Caballero-Stalinist-Prieto cabinet.
The terrible defeats of Badajoz and Irun finished the Giral cabinet. Why Irun fell was told in a moving dispatch by Pierre Van Paasen:
They fought to the last cartridge, the men of Irun. When they had no more ammunition, they hurled packets of dynamite. When dynamite was gone, they rushed forward barehanded and tackled each their man, while the sixty times stronger enemy butchered them with bayonets. A girl held two armoured cars at bay for half an hour by hurling glycerine bombs. Then the Moroccans stormed the barricade of which she was the last living defender and tore her to pieces. The men of Fort Martial held three hundred foreign legionnaires at a distance for half a day by rolling rocks down the hill on which the old fort is perched.
ran fell because the Giral government had made no attempt to provide its defenders with ammunition. The Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias of Catalonia, having already transformed the available factories into munitions works, had sent several carloads of ammunition to Irun by way of the regular railroad from Catalonia to Irun. But that railroad runs part-way through French territory. And the government of ‘comrade’ Blum, the ally of Stalin, had held up the cars at Behobia, just across the frontier, for days... they rumbled across the bridge into Irun after the fascists had won.
The Giral cabinet gave way to the ‘real, complete’ People’s Front government of Caballero-Prieto-Stalin. Undoubtedly, it had the confidence of a large part of the masses. The militias and the sailors’ committees obeyed its orders from the first.
There were three major military campaigns that the new government had to undertake. There were, of course, other tasks, but these were the most important, the most pressing, and essentially the simplest.
Morocco and Algeciras
Franco’s military base during the first six months was Spanish Morocco. From here he had to bring his Moors and Legionnaires and military stores.
The first successes of the Loyalist navy under the sailors’ committees in harassing Franco’s communication lines with Morocco were followed by others. On August 4, the Loyalist cruiser Libertad effectively shelled the fascist fortress at Tarrifa in Morocco. It was a deadly blow at Franco. So deadly that it was answered by the first open Italian act of intervention: an Italian plane proceeded to bomb the Libertad. When Loyalist warships steamed into position for a large-scale shelling of Ceuta in Morocco while fascist transports were loading, the German battleship Deutschland brazenly steamed back and forth between the Loyalist warships and Ceuta to prevent the bombardment. A week later a Spanish cruiser stopped the German freighter Kamerun, found her loaded to the decks with arms for Franco, and prevented her from landing at Cadiz. Whereupon Portugal openly went over to the fascists, permitting the Kamerun to unload at a Portuguese port and forwarding the munitions by rail to Franco. German naval commanders received orders to fire on any Spanish vessel attempting to stop German munition shipments. The Loyalist naval operations, if continued, were fatal to Franco, and his allies had to unmask completely to save him.
At this point the Caballero cabinet was formed and Prieto, now in the closest collaboration with the Stalinists, and always ‘France’s man’, became head of the Naval Ministry. He put an end to naval operations off Morocco and the straits of Gibraltar, and recalled the Loyalist forces which had held Majorca.
The task of the hour was to prevent the Moors and Legionnaires from landing at Algeciras and constituting that army which was soon to make that fearful march from Badajoz straight through to Toledo, through Toledo and Talavera de la Reina to the gates of Madrid. The first line in that task belonged to the navy. It was not used for this purpose.
Instead, in mid-September, almost the whole fleet—including the battleship Jaime I, the cruisers Cervantes and Libertad, and three destroyers—were ordered to leave Malaga and go all the way around the peninsula to the Biscayan coast! They left behind the destroyer Ferrandiz and the cruiser Gravina. On September 29, two fascist cruisers sank the Ferrandiz, after having shelled and driven away the Gravina. What considerations determined that the naval forces go off to the Biscayan coast, while news dispatches reported—to quote but one instance—an armed trawler conveying Moroccan troops from Ceuta and escorted by the Canarias, the Cervera and a destroyer and torpedo boat crossed the straits this evening. The convoy landed the troops at Algeciras without hindrance. It transported from Morocco a supply of field and other guns and abundant supplies of ammunition. (New York Times, September 29) What considerations? Certainly not military ones, for the forces sent to Biscay were more than sufficient to hold their own with the fascists’ armed convoy; and certainly barring communications from Morocco was the chief task of the navy.
The American military expert, Hanson W. Baldwin, writing (in the New York Times of November 21) on the naval question in Spain said:
The Spanish navy has been to a great extent neglected, particularly in the recent troubled years of the republic’s history, and it has never been properly led or manned. But with efficient, well-drilled crews, Spain’s handful of cruisers and destroyers could be a force to be reckoned with, particularly in the narrow basin of the Mediterranean, where well-handled ships long ago could have cut General Franco’s line of communication to his reservoir of manpower in Africa...
Judging from the somewhat obscure reports, most of the ships—despite the officers’ efforts—continued to fly the red, yellow and mauve of [Loyalist] Spain or else hoisted the Red flags at their gaffs...
... but altogether the role of the navy in the civil war has to date been a minor one. The occasional engagements in which the ships have participated have had in most instances an opera bouffe quality and have attested to the poor marksmanship and seamanship of the crews.
The Loyalist operations of September 27, at Zumaga near Bilbao, however, demonstrated accurate firing. The real point, however, was that it would have been a simple matter to equip the Loyalist warships with able crews. Toulon, Brest, and Marseilles were filled with thousands of socialist and communist sailors, veterans of the navy, including skilled gunners and officers. They could more than have manned the fleet, and other ships that could have been built at the main construction docks, in Cartagena in Loyalist hands.
Returning eventually from the northern coast, the fleet was anchored far from the strait, at Cartagena—and there it stayed, except for a few pointless trips down the coast. That it existed at all, one learned on November 22, when foreign submarines entered the port of Cartagena and loosed torpedoes, one damaging the Cervantes. The same day the Ministry of Marine announced reorganization of the fleet to combat attempted blockades... and that was the last heard of that project. Franco’s transports moved at will from Ceuta to Algeciras, bringing tens of thousands of troops and the armaments they required.
In a letter to Montseny, demanding that the anarchist ministers publicly fight against the false governmental policies, Camillo Berneri said of the navy: ‘The concentration of the forces coming from Morocco, the piracy in the Canaries and the Balearics, the taking of Malaga, are the consequences of this inactivity. If Prieto is incapable and inactive, why tolerate him? If Prieto is bound by a policy which paralyses the fleet, why not denounce this policy?’
Why did Prieto and the governmental bloc follow this suicidal policy? It was simply one factor of the whole policy which rested on securing the goodwill of England and France. What these were seeking is clear. An aggressive Loyalist naval policy, as the August incidents off Morocco had shown, would have precipitated the decisive stage of the civil war. It would have threatened to crush Franco immediately. Germany and Italy, their prestige involved in supporting Franco, would perhaps have been driven to desperate steps in his defence, such as, the open resort to use of the Italian and German navies in sweeping the Loyalists out of the straits. But England and France could not have tolerated Italo-German control of the straits (it might be retained thenceforward). That open war would thus begin was, of course, not a certainty. Especially prior to November 9, 1936, when Germany and Italy formally recognized the Burgos régime, Germany and Italy might have retreated before precipitating war. Had revolutionists been at the helm and boldly moved in August and September to a systematic naval campaign, and succeeded in cutting off Morocco from Spain, the probability was that Italy and Germany would have retreated as gracefully as they could. Anglo-French imperialism, however, was not interested in a Loyalist victory but in staving off a war crisis while resisting encroachments on their imperialist interests in the Mediterranean. And they had their way due to the Anglo-French orientation of the Loyalist government. Each month that passed thereafter, involving Germany and Italy more deeply, rendered more and more likely an international explosion if the Loyalist navy were activized. It simply ceased to exist as a Loyalist weapon.
Here is the first terrible instance of how anti-revolutionary politics hamstrung the military struggle.
The same Anglo-French orientation explains the failure to strike by land at Algeciras, the Spanish port at which the fascist forces were landing from Morocco. Malaga was strategically located to be the spearhead for this drive. Instead, Malaga itself was left defenceless. Chiefly defended by CNT forces, who pleaded in vain from August until February for the necessary equipment, Malaga was invaded by an Italian landing force, while the fleet which could have stopped them rode at anchor in Cartagena. Malaga fell on February 8. For two days before that, the militias had received no instructions from the military headquarters and then, the day before Malaga fell, they discovered that the headquarters had already been abandoned without a word to the defending militiamen. It was not a military defeat, but a betrayal. The base treachery was not the last-minute desertion by the general staff but the political policy which dictated the inactivity of the navy and disuse of Malaga as a base against Algeciras.[2]
If not by sea or by land, there was still another way of striking at Franco’s Moroccan base. We quote Camillo Berneri:
The fascist army’s base of operations is in Morocco. We should intensify the propaganda in favour of Moroccan autonomy on every sector of Pan-Islamic influence. Madrid should make unequivocal declarations, announcing the abandonment of Morocco and the protection of Moroccan autonomy. France views with concern the possibility of repercussions and insurrections in North Africa and Syria; England sees the agitation for Egyptian autonomy being reinforced as well as that of the Arabs in Palestine. It is necessary to make the most of such fears by adopting a policy which threatens to unloose revolt in the Islamic world.
For such a policy money is needed and speed to send agitators and organizers to all centres of Arab emigration, to all the frontier zones of French Morocco. (Guerra di Classe, October 24, 1936.)
But the Loyalist government, far from arousing French and English fears by inciting insurrection in Spanish Morocco, proceeded to offer them concessions in Morocco! On February 9, 1937, Foreign Minister del Vayo delivered to France and England a note, the exact text of which was never revealed but was stated later, without denial by the cabinet, to include the following points:
Proposing to base its European policy on active collaboration with Great Britain and France, the Spanish government proposes the modification of the African situation.
Desiring a rapid end to the civil war, now susceptible of being prolonged by German and Italian aid, the government is disposed to make certain sacrifices in the Spanish zone of Morocco, if the British and French governments should take steps to prevent Italo-German intervention in Spanish affairs.
The first inkling of the existence of this shameful note came a month after its dispatch, in the French and English press on March 19, when Eden made a passing reference to it. The CNT ministers swore they had not been consulted in its dispatch. Berneri addressed them bitingly: ‘You are in a government which has offered France and England advantages in Morocco, while from July, 1936, it should have been obligatory on us to proclaim officially the political autonomy of Morocco... the hour has come to make known that you, Montseny, and the other anarchist ministers are not in agreement with the nature and purport of such proposals... It goes without saying that one cannot guarantee English and French interests in Morocco and at the same time agitate for an insurrection there... But this policy must change. And to change it, a clear and strong statement of our own intentions must be made—because at Valencia, some influences are at work to make peace with Franco.’ (Guerra di Classe, April 14, 1937.) But the anarchist leaders remained silent, and Morocco remained undisturbed in Franco’s power.[3]
The Aragon Offensive against Saragossa-Huesca
Thumb through the Spanish or the French or American press of August-November 1936 and note the sharp contrast between the Loyalist defeats on the central and western fronts and the victories on the Aragon front. The CNT, FAI, and POUM troops predominated in Aragon. They obeyed the military orders of the bourgeois officers sent by the government but kept them under surveillance. By the end of October, having captured the surrounding heights of Monte Aragon and Estrecho Quinto, the Aragon militias were in position to take Huesca, the gateway to Saragossa.
The importance of taking Saragossa can be readily understood by a glance at the map. It lies athwart the road from Catalonia and Aragon to Navarre, the heart of the fascist movement. Saragossa taken, the rear of the fascist army facing the Basque province would be endangered, as well as the rear of the forces converging on Madrid from the north. An offensive on this front, therefore, would have enabled the initiative in the military struggle to pass to the Loyalists. Moreover, Saragossa had been one of the great strongholds of the CNT, and had only fallen to the fascists because of the outright treachery of the civil governor, a member of Azaña’s party and his appointee.
As late as the end of September, a general strike of the workers was still going on in Saragossa, though its leaders were being killed by slow torture for refusing, to call it off. A strong attack on Saragossa would have been accompanied by an uprising of the workers within, as the anarchists pledged.
To take the strongly fortified cities of Huesca and Saragossa, however, required planes and heavy artillery.
But from September onward, there developed a systematic boycott, conducted by the government against the Aragon front. The artillery and planes which arrived from abroad, beginning in October, were sent only to the Stalinist-controlled centres. Even in the matter of rifles, machine-guns and ammunition, the boycott was imposed. The Catalonian munition plants, dependent on the central government for financing, were compelled to surrender their product to such destinations as the government chose. The CNT, FAI, and POUM press charged that the brazen discrimination against the Aragon front was dictated by the Stalinists, backed by the Soviet representatives. (Caballero’s friends now admit this.) The government plans for liquidating the militias into a bourgeois army could not be carried out so long as the CNT militias had the prestige of a string of victories to their credit. Ergo, the Aragon front must be held back. This situation, among others, drove the CNT leaders into the central government. The two principal figures figures of Spanish anarchism, Garcia Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti, transferred their activities to Madrid, Durruti bringing the pick of the troops of the Aragon front. But the boycott of the Aragon front continued despite all anarchist concessions. For it was fundamental to the strategy of the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc to break down the prestige and power of the CNT, no matter what the cost. Six months of anarchist and POUM press complaints and demands for an offensive on the Aragon front, met with dead silence from the bourgeois-Stalinist press. Then the Stalinists proceeded to slander the CNT militiamen’s inactivity on that front, and to adduce that fact as proof of the need for a bourgeois army. The CNT-POUM counter-proposal for a unified command and a disciplined army under workers’ control was defeated.
For many months the Stalinists denied to the outside world their sabotage of the Aragon front. But when the fact became too well known, the Stalinist produced an alibi: there were arms aplenty sent to the Aragon front but the ‘Trotskyists’ diverted them across no-man’s land to the fascists. (Daily Worker, October 5, 1937.) Like all Stalinist frame-up stories, this one carried its inherent falsity on its face. The POUM—the alleged Trotskyists—had at most ten thousand men on this front. The dominant force here was the CNT. Were they—with their press clamouring for these arms—such dolts as not to see what the POUM was doing? Or is this story merely a preparation for the day when the Stalinists will accuse the CNT of having connived with the POUM in diverting arms to the fascists?
The pitiful armament on the Aragon front has been described by the English author, George Orwell, who fought there in the ILP Battalion. The infantry ‘were far worse armed than an English public school Officers’ Training Corps’ with ‘worn-out Mauser rifles which usually jammed after five shots; approximately one machine gun to fifty men; and one pistol or revolver to about thirty men. These weapons, so necessary in trench warfare, were not issued by the government and could be bought only illegally and with the greatest difficulty’.
‘A government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear,’ concluded Orwell, ‘is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists. Hence the feeble war policy of the past six months, and hence the compromise with which the war will almost certainly end.’ (Controversy, August 1937.)
Thus, the government surrendered the opportunity provided in Aragon to wrest the initiative and carry the war into fascist territory.
The Northern Front
Bilbao, and the industrial towns and iron and coal mines surrounding it, constituted a concentrated industrial area second only to Catalonia. For war purposes, it was even superior to the Catalonian area, which had to build its metallurgical plants up out of nothing when the civil war began. Bilbao should have become the centre of Spain’s greatest munitions source. From this material base, the northern armies should have driven sharply south toward Burgos and east against Navarre, to effect a junction with the troops from the Aragon front. The strategy dictated was of the most elementary kind.
The Basque capitalists, however, were the masters in the Biscayan region. As an English sphere of influence for centuries, it had no enthusiasm for joining Franco and his Italo-German allies. Neither, however, had the Basque bourgeoisie any intention of fighting to the death against Franco. Thanks to the support of the socialist and communist parties, the Basque capitalists had not had their factories seized by the workers after July 19. But they had no guarantee that a Loyalist victory over Franco would not be followed by seizure of their factories also.
The property question determined the military conduct of the Basque regional government. This was seen as early as mid-September 1936 when the fascists advanced on San Sebastian. Before the attack was well launched, San Sebastian surrendered. Before the Basque bourgeoisie retreated, they drove out of the city the CNT militiamen who wanted to destroy factory equipment and other useful materials, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the fascists. As a further precaution, fifty armed Basque guards were left behind to protect the buildings. Thus, the city was delivered intact to Franco. The bourgeoisie reasoned; destroyed property is gone forever; but if we eventually make peace with Franco, he may give us back our property...
When this happened, I wrote, on September 22, 1936: ‘The northern front has been betrayed.’ The anarchist ministers have since revealed that this was the opinion in the Caballero cabinet. What delayed the completion of outright betrayal for six months, however, was the stupidity of Franco’s officers who took over San Sebastian. The fifty guards left behind to protect the buildings were shot; bourgeois proprietors who had remained behind to make their peace with Franco were imprisoned, some of them executed. The inhabitants were terrorized. The Basque front stiffened—for a little while.
By December, however, the Basque government was again feeling its way to an armistice. At a time when Madrid was still rejecting all negotiations, for exchange of prisoners, the Basques negotiated such an agreement:
The fact that the Basque group was negotiating in San Sebastian became known only yesterday. The writer learned, however, that the delegation had left Bilbao more than a week ago... proceeded to Barcelona but its mission there ended unsatisfactorily. The Basque delegates expressed their disappointment with the state of affairs in the Catalan capital... and it is thought that they also took offense at the attitude of the Catalans toward the church.
In any case the result has been that they decided to sound out the San Sebastian leaders in the hope of arranging some sort of compromise and perhaps ultimately a truce.
It is known that during the last month or two the northern front has been quiet, with much fraternizing between those in the opposing front lines. (Hendaye frontier dispatch, New York Times, December 17, 1937.)
Any doubt as to the substance of this report was dispelled the same day by ‘Augur’, the ‘unofficial’ voice of the British Foreign Office. ‘The British have been working to promote local armistices between the rebels and loyalists. The offer of the Basque regional government at Bilbao to conclude a Christmas truce was directly due to discreet intervention by British agents who hope this may lead to a complete suspension of hostilities.’ The French, added ‘Augur’, ‘are exercising similar influence in Barcelona where their success is less marked because the desires of President Companys to end the bloodshed have been overawed by the communists and anarchists’. (New York Times, December 17, 1936.)
Nothing of this, of course, appeared in the Loyalist press, where the censorship was now in full blast. Such circumstantial accounts, particularly one bearing the name of ‘Augur’, appearing in papers of the stature of the New York Times and the Times of London, required at the last, a formal denial, if denial could be made. Neither the government nor the Stalinist press, however, dared deny the facts: for they were true.
The Basque bourgeoisie simply had no basic stake in fighting fascism. If the struggle involved serious sacrifice, they were ready to withdraw. One of the factors which gave them pause, however, was the growing CNT movement in the Basque regions. Here the Stalinists and right-wing socialists, sitting in the regional government with the bourgeoisie (the CNT had been dropped when the Defence junta gave way to the government), facilitated the betrayal. On the flimsiest pretext imaginable—the Basque government invited the CNT militiamen to join in celebrating Easter Week and the CNT Regional Committee and press indignantly denounced the religious ceremonial—the whole regional committee and the editorial staff of CNT del Norte were imprisoned March 26, and the printing presses turned over to the Stalinists! Systematic persecution of the CNT thereafter paved the way for going over to Franco.
The Loyalist government was aware of the danger, aware of Bilbao’s failure to transform her plants for munitions purposes, aware of the criminal inactivity of the Basque front which enabled Mola to shift his troops southward to join the encirclement of Madrid. Why did the government do nothing about it? Of course, the cabinet sent numerous emissaries to Bilbao, flattered the Basques, went out of the way to please them, sent generals to collaborate with the Basque leaders—Llano de Encomienda, just freed by a court martial in Barcelona from charges of complicity in the uprising became commander-in-chief of the North!—but these measures naturally proved fruitless. There was only one way to save the northern front: by confronting the Basque bourgeoisie with a powerful united front of the proletarian forces in the region, ready to take power if the bourgeoisie faltered, and to prepare for this by ideological criticism of the Basque capitalists. That way, however, was alien to this government which, above all, feared to arouse the masses to political initiative.
But there was one sector of the northern front which was active, Asturias. We have seen how, within forty-eight hours of news of the rising, five thousand Asturian miners had arrived in Madrid. Within a few weeks, they had cleared out the fascists, except in well-fortified Oviedo, which had been the seat of a strong praetorian garrison since the crushing of the Asturian Commune of October 1934. Every miner in Asturias would have given his life to take Oviedo. Armed with little more than rifles and crude dynamite bombs, the miners besieged Oviedo, soon taking its suburbs. The fall of Oviedo would have freed them for an offensive against Old Castille. Spokesmen for the Asturians begged in Valencia for a few planes and the necessary artillery to batter down Oviedo’s defences. They were sent away empty-handed. What was their crime? The Asturian workers abolished private property in land, collectivized housing and industry. The strong CNT movement, hand in hand with the UGT—here revolutionary in tendency, as was demonstrated by its organ, Avance, under the editorship of Javier Bueno—exclusively controlled production and consumption. It was known that they intended, when Oviedo was theirs, to proclaim there again, as in 1934, the Commune of Asturias . . . The government invited them to shed their blood everywhere except for the commune. Tens of thousands of them, for want of any other course, joined the Loyalists on all the fronts. Their fighting prowess became legendary. But enough of them remained before Oviedo, penning in the garrison, until the very end...
Why Madrid became the Key Front
With Morocco and its communications lines with the mainland undisturbed, with the northern front quiescent thanks to Basque passivity, and with governmental sabotage of the Aragon front, Franco was in a position to dictate the course of the war, to choose his points of offensive at will. He never once lost the initiative to the Loyalists, who had to accept battle when and as the enemy willed.
Thus Franco was enabled to throw his main forces against Madrid. By October the encirclement of Madrid was well on the way. Franco wanted the nation’s capital in order to provide his German and Italian allies with a plausible basis for recognizing his regime. And, indeed, by all accounts, German and Italian recognition were extended on November 9, 1936, in the belief that Madrid was about to fall and that recognition would provide the added incentive to make its fall speedy. By all accounts, too, Franco made his major strategical blunder here, when he attempted, in his haste to take Madrid by frontal attack instead of completing its encirclement by cutting the Valencia road. The fascists stubbornly clung to this strategy for months, giving the Loyalists the opportunity to fortify the area sufficiently to withstand the flank attacks when they came in February and March.
The significant fact to note in the defence of Madrid was the use of revolutionary-political methods. If Madrid fell, the jig was up for the Stalinists. In Spain, their prestige was bound up with the Fifth Regiment of Madrid—in reality an army of over a hundred thousand men—and the Defence junta which from October 11 was responsible for Madrid’s defence and which was Stalinist-controlled. Internationally, the prestige of the Comintern and the Soviet Union would have collapsed irrevocably with the fall of Madrid. The retreat to Valencia and Catalonia would have found a new relationship of forces, with the Stalinists taking a back seat. Out of that new phase might have come a resort to a revolutionary war against fascism, which would have put an end to all the schemes of Eden, Delbos and Stalin. Madrid absolutely had to be held. In dire necessity, the Stalinists abandoned purely bourgeois methods—but only for a time and only within the confines of Madrid.
Methods of defence which, in other cities, were proposed by the local POUM, FAI and CNT organizations and denounced as adventuristic, as alienating the liberal bourgeoisie, were sanctioned here by the Stalinists themselves, on November 7, when the fascist drive reached the city’s suburbs. A CNT leaflet of that week is worth quoting:
Yesterday we warned the people of Madrid that the enemy was at the gates of the city, and we advised them to fill bottles with petrol and attach fuses to them to be lighted and thrown onto rebel tanks when they enter the city.
Today we suggest other precautions. Every house and apartment in the district known to be inhabited by fascist sympathizers should be thoroughly searched for arms. Parapets and barricades should be set up in all streets leading to the city’s centre.
Every house in Madrid in which anti-fascists live must constitute itself a fortress, and every obstacle should be offered as invaders try to pass through the capital’s streets. Fire on them from the upper stories of buildings, against which the fire of their machine-guns will be ineffective. Above all we must purge Madrid of the fifth column of hidden fascists.
One of Mola’s boasts—that four columns were converging on Madrid, with a fifth secretly forming inside had given the workers the splendid slogan: smash the fifth column. Gone now were the governmental—and Stalinist—strictures against ‘illegal searches’, ‘unauthorized seizures and arrests’, etc., etc. Over five hundred Assault Guards were arrested and imprisoned in those days as fascist suspects—the first and last time the Stalinists sanctioned such a purge of bourgeois elements. The Stalinists were on record for ‘all power to the government of the people’s front’, and, therefore, hostile to workers’ committees in the factories and districts. For once, however, desperation caused them to abandon this. The Stalinist-controlled Fifth Regiment issued a manifesto which, among other things, called for the masses to elect street and house committees for vigilance against the fifth column within the city![4] Workers’ committees went through the streets, impressing all able-bodied men into building barricades and trenches. The defence junta organized separate councils for food, munitions, etc., each of which swelled daily into a mass organization. Women’s committees organized kitchens and laundries for the militiamen. Means were found in this non-industrial city to begin—this too on initiative from below—the manufacture of ammunition. The Stalinists did not forget to continue their persecution of the POUM, but even this slowed down and the POUM militants were given room to function in the defence of the city. Those were glorious months, though laden with death: November, December, January. What was this? ‘The people in arms.’
The Stalinists were even so desperate as to welcome the triumphal entry into Madrid of the picked troops from the CNT Aragon front columns, whose heroic conduct destroyed the slanderous myth, already being propagated by the Stalinists, about the Aragon militias. Shortly after bringing these troops, however, the greatest military figure produced by the war, the anarchist Durruti, was killed and the spotlight was turned on Miaja.
But the political methods pursued on the southern, northern and Aragon fronts, remained the same. The incessant campaign of the CNT, the POUM, and sections of the UGT for an offensive on all fronts as the best way to help Madrid, and the only way to lift the siege of the city, was ignored.
Nor did the ‘people in arms’ remain the defenders of Madrid. By January the immediate danger was over, and the Stalinist-bourgeois bloc reverted to ‘normal’. The house-to-house searches for fascists and arms by the workers’ committees were discouraged and then suppressed. Soldiers replaced workers at the street barricades. The work of the women’s committees was taken over by the army. Mass initiative was no longer invited. The current ran now the other way, although the siege of Madrid had not been lifted. POUM, a weekly, was permanently suspended in January. In February, the junta seized the POUM radio and the presses of El Combatiente Rojo. The Stalinist, José Cazorla, the junta’s police commissioner, organized the repression both legally and illegally. If his arrests of workers were not sanctioned by the Popular Tribunals, he took, ‘said acquitted parties to secret jails or sent them into communist militia battalions in advanced positions to be used as “fortifications”.’ Simultaneously, the bars were let down on the right, and Cazorla released many fascists and reactionaries. These charges were made by Rodrigues, Special Commissioner of Prisons (Solidaridad Obrera, April 20, 1937), and the CNT demand for an investigation was refused. The dissolution of the junta completed the move to bourgeois-bureaucratic methods of conducting the defence of Madrid.
The sole military victory of the Caballero cabinet was the Guadalajara defeat of the Italian divisions in March—an unexpected victory as was indicated by the lack of preparations of reserves and materials to complete the rout of the Italians. The failure to co-ordinate the Madrid fighting with offensives on the other fronts, for the political reasons we have outlined, thus by default made Madrid the key front and simultaneously made impossible lifting of the siege of Madrid.
THAT the ‘government of victory’ would inevitably continue the disastrous military policy of its predecessor was apparent the day it was constituted. Prieto would continue his inactive naval policy and his political discrimination in the assignment of aircraft to the fronts. He was now also head of the army, with all services in a single Ministry of Defence, but the Supreme War Council, established in December, had already then been dominated by the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc through their majority of the ministries. (The Stalinist ‘demand’ that the council function normally, raised on May 16, was simply a prop for the myth to make Caballero the scapegoat for the conduct of the war.) The political course which had dictated the previous military strategy—hostility to lighting the flame of revolt in North Africa, support of the Basque bourgeoisie against the workers, persecution of Catalonia and Aragon—all this continued, intensified.
In addition, the Negrin cabinet added new obstacles to prosecution of the war.
On the national question—relations with minority peoples—the Negrin regime moved not only to the right of Caballero, but also to the right of the republic of 1931-33. The bureaucratic centralization for which the monarchists and fascists stood had been an important factor in alienating from them the peoples of Catalonia, Euzkadi (Basques) and Galicia. Once the civil war began, the limited autonomy of the Catalans and Basques had broadened de facto. A declaration of autonomy for Galicia would -have immeasurably facilitated the guerilla warfare there. It was not forthcoming because it would have provided a precedent for Catalonia to seize on. The Negrin régime proceeded, as we have seen, to wipe out Catalan autonomy. Where the Bolsheviks had gained strength for the prosecution of the civil war from the intensified loyalty of the autonomous minority nations, the Loyalist government quenched the fires of national aspirations.
The pay of militiamen was reduced from ten pesetas a day to seven, while the ascending scale for officers was: 25 pesetas for second lieutenants, 39 for first lieutenants, 50 for captains, 100 for lieutenant colonels. Economic distinctions thus sharply reinforced military regulations. One need scarcely emphasize the deleterious effect on the soldiers’ morale of this and their increasing subordination to the officers.
The whole northern front was soon to be betrayed by the Basque bourgeoisie and officers, and by the ‘Fifth Column’ of fascist sympathizers in the Assault and Civil Guards and among the civilian population. The struggle against the ‘Fifth Column’ was indissolubly part of the military struggle. But, as Camillo Berneri had written even before the intensification of repression under Negrin, ‘it is self evident that during the months when an attempt is being made to annihilate the [POUM-CNT] “uncontrollables”, the problem of eliminating the Fifth Column cannot be solved. The suppression of the Fifth Column is primarily to be achieved by an investigatory and repressive activity which can only be accomplished by experienced revolutionists. An internal policy of collaboration between the classes and of consideration toward the middle classes, leads inevitably to tolerance toward elements that are politically doubtful. The Fifth Column is made up not only of fascist elements but also of all the malcontents who hope for a moderate republic.’
While the northern front was left to the Basque bourgeoisie, the Aragon front was subjected to a frightful purge. General Pozas initiated what was ostensibly a general offensive in June. After several days of artillery and aerial conflict, orders to advance were given to the 29th (formerly the POUM’s Lenin) division and other formations. But on the day for the advance, neither artillery nor aviation was provided to protect it... Pozas later claimed this was because the air forces were defending Bilbao—but the day of advance was three days after Franco had taken Bilbao. The POUM soldiers fully realized that they were being exposed deliberately. But not to go into fire would have given the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc a case against the Aragon front. They went into the line of fire. One flank was ostensibly assigned to an International Brigade (Stalinist)—but shortly after the advance began, it received orders to withdraw to the rear. The lieutenant-colonel in charge of a formation of Assault Guards on the other flank later congratulated the POUM troops: ‘At Sarinena I was warned against you on the ground that you might shoot us in the back. Not only did it not happen but thanks to your bravery and your discipline, we have avoided a catastrophe. I am prepared to go to Sarinena to protest against those who sow the seeds of demoralization, to effect the triumph of their partisan political aims.’
During this offensive, Cahué and Adriano Nathan, POUM commanders, were killed in action. Police were at that moment coming for Cahué, to arrest him as a ‘Trotskyist-fascist’.
When the attack was over, the 29th was sent to the rear. That, customarily, had meant to give up rifles—there were still not enough for front-line and reserves simultaneously on this front! But the suspicious POUM troops refused to yield their arms. They declared themselves ready to return to the front. A few days later two battalions of the division were ordered to march on Fiscal (on the Jaca frpnt) to repulse a fascist attack. Not only did they crush the attack but they reconquered positions and material previously last. Then they were retired to await new orders—but not sent back to their division. Why? To disarm them. Pozas ordered it. They were concentrated in the village of Rodeano and surrounded by a Stalinist brigade. They were relieved of all their valuables—watches, chains, even good underwear and new shoes. Their leaders were arrested, the rest permitted to go—on foot. Hiking home, many were arrested in the towns on the way. The only reason the same methods were not employed against the rest of the division was that the news leaked out quickly and Pozas feared the CNT divisions would come to its defence. But a few weeks later the 29th was officially dissolved, the remaining men being distributed far and wide in small groups.[1]
The Ascaso (CNT) division was also cut to pieces. Acracia, CNT organ of Lerida, wrote:
Now we know exactly why Huesca was not taken. The last operation at Santa Quiteria furnishes a good proof of it. Huesca was surrounded on all sides and only the betrayal of the air forces (controlled by PSUC) was responsible for the disaster with which this operation ended. Our militiamen were not backed up by the air forces and were thus left defenceless in face of an intensive machine-gunning by the fascist air forces. This is only one of the numerous operations which ended in the same manner on account of the same betrayal by the air forces.
Soon after there was a plenary session of the PSUC Central Committee in Barcelona. Among those prominently participating were ‘comrades’ General Pozas, chief of the Aragon front, Virgilio Llanos, political commissioner of the front, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, chief of staff...
Acceptance of control by the central government had been dangled before the Aragon front troops as the end of all their worries. Instead, it was used to break them down still further. The front correspondent of the anarchist (Paris) Libertaire wrote on July 29:
Ever since the central government took over control, the financial boycott became accentuated. Most of the militiamen have not received their pay for a long time. In Bujaraloz, where the general staff of the Durruti column is located, both—officers and soldiers—have not seen a cent for the last three months. They cannot wash their clothes for lack of soap. In many a place visited after several months of absence, I found comrades whom I knew well: now they looked pale, thin and visibly weakened. The physical state of the troops is such that they cannot keep up any prolonged exercises; they cannot march for more than fifteen kilometers a day. In the region of Farlete the troops live by hunting, without which they would starve to death.
Systematic persecution of the chief forces of the Aragon front scarcely laid the basis for military victories, although at Belchite and Quinto the 25th division (CNT) gave a good account of itself. But the alleged success of the July offensive on the Aragon front was so much newspaper talk. ‘Results?’ wrote the illegal anarchist organ, Libertad (August 1): ‘Two villages lost in the Pirineo sector and three thousand men lost. This is what they call a success. Disastrous, calamitous, shameful success!’
After the fall of Santander (August 26), the persecution of the CNT troops abated somewhat. But now came a terrible lesson in the consequences of creating counter-revolutionary forces of repression, such as the Stalinist-controlled Karl Marx division. In the midst of an offensive in the Zuera sector, ‘fifty officers of that division and six hundred soldiers passed over to the fascists. As a result of these desertions a battalion was destroyed. Despite the mettle of the CNT forces, the operation could not be terminated well. The enemy had the necessary time to recover and it was impossible to continue the attack. After a summary court martial that was immediately convened, thirty officers of the Karl Marx Division have been shot. In addition, the political commissar of the division, Trueba, a PSUC member, has been dismissed.’ (Amigo del Pueblo, illegal organ of Friends of Durruti, September 21.) Needless to say, the CNT press was forbidden to publish the facts.
The Northern Front
As a government pledged to class collaborations even more completely than Caballero’s, the Negrin government did nothing to counter the more and more brazen sabotage of the Basque bourgeoisie. This front was almost inactive throughout the period from November 1936 to May 1937 when the fascists moved to wipe it out altogether. Nor had those six months been utilized in economic-military’, preparations. One must emphasize again that the Euzkadi (the Basque country) was second only to Catalonia as an industrial region and superior to it in being a region of heavy industry, with iron and steel plants in the midst of iron and coal mines. Nothing was done to develop out of this a great war industry. For this crime, the Stalinists bore equal responsibility, for two party representatives were ministers in the autonomous government. The coup against the CNT in March, when its regional committee had been imprisoned and its press confiscated, was now followed by systematic repression of the workers, with public meetings prohibited. Thus, the one force which might have prevented betrayal was crushed by the Stalinist-bourgeois bloc.
In the Caballero cabinet, as we have said, there were constant fears about the loyalty of the Basques. Irujo’s constant threats of giving up altogether merely reflected the fact that the bourgeoisie had no serious stake in the struggle against fascism and would not fight under conditions destructive of their property. Consequently, when Franco began to move in the north, Caballero planned a large-scale offensive on the southern Madrid front to draw the fire of the fascist forces. According to his friends, 75,000 fully equipped troops were to have gone into action but two or three days before the offensive was to begin, his resignation was forced. Negrin’s first act was to withdraw these troops. Be that as it may, the fact was that no offensive was launched to relieve Bilbao, either on the Madrid or Aragon front, until mid-June—too late.
But the decisive factor in the loss of Bilbao was open treachery. ‘Not even the insurgent heavy guns,’ wrote the New York Times correspondent, ‘could have destroyed some of these underground fortifications with their three armoured concrete tiers and blockhouses spaced about three miles apart all the way to the Biscay coast. The Insurgents themselves say that the “iron ring” of fortifications would never have been taken had not the Basques been out-manoeuvred’. ‘Out-manoeuvred’, however, was a fascist euphemism for betrayal. After the city fell, this fact was admitted by the Basque delegation in Paris which put the blame on an engineer in charge of building the fortifications, who fled to Franco with the plans. Analysis of the delegation’s story revealed that the engineer in question had fled months before. Why was not the intervening period utilized to re-design the fortifications? But the alibi was a subterfuge. For, as any tyro in military science knew, mere possession of the plans could not have solved the problem for the fascists of breaking through the fortification. They were let through the iron ring.
Suppose we were to accept the Basque alibi. Why, then, was Bilbao not defended in a siege such as Madrid—less advantageously situated—had withstood? It is an elementary axiom of military science that no large city can be captured until its massive buildings—veritable fortifications—have been razed to the point they offer no further protection to beleaguered troops. The process of razing buildings by shelling and bombing required enormous equipment such as the fascists did not have less than an eighth of Madrid had been so razed after a year’s shelling and bombing.
But the bourgeoisie did not wait for the shelling of Bilbao at all! On June 19, they surrendered the city, as they had San Sebastian the previous September. The uniform Basque policy of giving up cities intact has no parallel in any modern war, not to speak of civil war
The pro-Loyalist correspondent of the New York Times (June 21, 1937) wrote:
Details learned today of the last hours of Basque rule at Bilbao show that some 1,200 militiamen, who had before the civil war been soldiers of the regular army, decided in the early hours of the morning, after the bridges had been blown up, that chaos had gone far enough, and took control of the city in the capacity of police. The Asturian and Santander militiamen were driven out of the city.
Assisted by some regular police and Civil Guards, this battalion accepted the surrender of their fellow-militiamen in the city and took their arms away, and afterwards hoisted a white flag on the telephone building. During the night they went around houses assuring the people that there was no cause for panic, placed guards on public buildings, and in the evening formed a cordon in the main street which prevented the excited crowds from pressing too closely on the National troops when they marched into the city.
Leisola, Minister of Justice in the Basque government, remained behind to superintend the betrayal. With the exception of seventeen (of whom we shall soon hear again), all fascist hostages were released and sent toward the fascist lines as a goodwill offering before the troops had reached the city. Simply put: the regular army of the Basques, directed by the bourgeois leaders, joined hands with the ‘republican police’ in attacking the Asturians and militia from the rear, disarmed as many as they could, and dismantled the houses and street barricades which the workers had prepared for street fighting. Shortly after the occupation, the same police donned Carlist berets and became Franco’s regular police.
CNT and UGT press attempts to sound the alarm after the fall of Bilbao were cut to ribbons by the censorship. The Basque general staff was permitted to remain in command of the retreating troops. When, within a few weeks, the fascists began a second offensive, the industrial town of Reinosa, key to Santander’s defences, collapsed, and once again the Basques made no attempt to defend the city itself.
Two days before the fall of Santander, the Basque general staff and remaining members of the government fled to France on a British warship. Under what terms, was revealed by the New York Times dispatch of August 25:
At the time of the fall of Bilbao the Basques freed all their hostages except seventeen. Now these are considered to be in the gravest peril as the Basques admit that it is no longer possible to protect them from extremist elements in Santander.
When the British Embassy agreed to take off the hostages, it arranged also to evacuate the Basques who have been guarding them as well as any remaining members of the Basque government...
It is hoped that the whole manoeuvre will be carried out before the more violent elements in Santander are aware of what is happening.
The next day (August 25), the British warship, Keith, with Basque and fascist representatives aboard, arrived at Santander and ‘rescued’ the Basque officials and the seventeen fascists.
President Aguirre was not in Santander. He banqueted the way across Spain, saying nothing, then joined his colleagues at Bayonne, France, where they issued the following statement:
The delegation of the Basque government, in refuge in Bayonne, take the responsibility of subscribing to the following: Franco’s offensive against Reinosa ended in terrible consequences. In a terrain composed of great mountains and deep gorges, Franco’s troops advanced with incomprehensible velocity. The military technicians were amazed at the rapidity of this advance, not only of the infantry, but of the heavy and mountain artillery, as well as the cumbersome services belonging to the different regiments and arms.
This was an impossible or very difficult achievement and proves that the accidents of terrain were not utilized for resisting Franco’s army.
In the face of this advance the troops of the Santander army offered no resistance to the enemy. Not only did they not come into contact with the enemy, but they did not lend themselves to retreating in a way that could be organized for defence.
The Santander army’s organization was undone from the moment the offensive began. Neither communications, nor the sanitary services, nor means for avoiding surprise attacks, functioned. No line of resistance could be established, for the battalions which did not surrender at the first encounter were on the run through the countryside in the most complete disorder.
Neither the general staff of Santander nor that of the Army of the North controlled the offensive at any moment. Once past Reinosa they could find neither the positions nor the situation of their troops, nor any unity on which they could count.
Reinosa was surrendered to the enemy with no time for evacuating the population. The artillery factory fell into the hands of the rebels, with its shops for naval construction almost intact, and all the material in construction, including 38 batteries of artillery.
The only resistance that the enemy encountered in its advance is that which the Basque battalions offered, rushing to the front. The incomprehensible conduct [of the others] ended by making the corps of the Basque army realize that it had been the victim of treachery, and that the advance of the Franco troops was being facilitated in such a way that the whole Basque army should fall into his power.
The Basques, having resisted nearly ninety days against a brutal offensive [against Bilbao] incomparably more terrible than that of Rcinosa, without having the means at its disposal that the Santander army had, cannot explain in any reasonable way the fact that in such a manner a terrain of eighty kilometers was lost in eight days. It is necessary to add to these data that the offensive against Euzkadi was a surprise while that of Reinosa had been announced and was anticipated.
When the real situation was confirmed to it, the high command of the Basque army preoccupied itself in saving its troops and in preventing its effectives from falling into the hands of the enemy. To this mission it has consecrated all its efforts with the aid of the Basque government, which in this grave and difficult moment continued to give proof of its capacity and serenity.[2]
Somebody committed treachery, but not us, was the sum and substance of this amazing document, apart from its slander of the Asturian and Santander militiamen, fifteen thousand of whom had been executed by machine-guns after being surrounded in Santander.
A Paris press dispatch of August 26 named some of the traitors, reporting that the commandant of the Assault Guards, Pedro Vega, the commandant of the Basque troops, Angel Botella, and Captain Luis Terez, presented themselves to the nearest outpost of the fascist troops and offered the surrender of Santander, but warned that a battalion of the FAI militia had decided to fight to death.
Who, knowing anything of the CNT and Asturian militiamen, would imagine that they had not stood at their posts ready to fight to the death? A thousand instances of their last-ditch heroism can be told. Why should they surrender or not fight, above all, the Asturian militiamen, who had learned in October 1934 that agreements ruling out reprisals were not kept by the reactionaries? On the other hand the Basques could not name a battle in which they stood up to the last. The Aguirre document’s alibi was threadbare. There was no striking contrast between what they did at Bilbao and the events at Santander. On the contrary, they merely followed the same pattern.
We repeat: the bourgeoisie had no serious stake in the struggle against fascism. Surrender of their property intact to Franco, with a prospect of eventual reconciliation, was infinitely preferable to them than destruction of their property in a death struggle. That they had not gone over to Franco to begin with was primarily due to their British connections. But during the offensive against Bilbao, that problem was ‘solved’: The British had come to an understanding with Franco concerning the Basque provinces. As revealed by the authoritative Frederick Birchall in the New York Times, British banks had extended to Franco, via Dutch connections, vast credits which were to be secured by products from the Bilbao region. Then came the gap in the ‘iron ring’. But even without a final settlement with Britain, the fascists would have received Bilbao and Santander untouched, as San Sebastian had been delivered to them the previous September.
That others were also treacherous, we are ready to concede to Aguirre. Once again, before the fascist troops entered Santander, yesterday’s ‘loyal’ Assault and Civil guards were patrolling the streets, disarming Asturian militiamen and preventing street fighting. These police were under the Ministry of the Interior (a Prieto man), and directly under a Stalinist director-general of police, who had dissolved the councils of anti-fascist guards for cleansing the police of dubious elements.
What of that Supreme War Council, the ‘real functioning’ of which had been one of the Stalinist demands which was not satisfied by Caballero, which could only be satisfied by Negrin?
What of the two Stalinist ministers in the Basque government, who had fled from Bilbao—we may be sure they knew their colleagues better than we!—even before Aguirre? What eyewitness testimony could they offer? It is a fact that their having ever existed cannot be discovered from the Stalinist press![3]
The Basques had shifted the blame from their own shoulders with vague accusations. That treachery had occurred, they had authoritatively testified to. It is a fact that the government instituted no investigation, no hearings, and made no statement on this question!
The UGT and CNT’s comments on the loss of Santander were cut to ribbons by the censor, for they sought to draw some lessons. Nevertheless, a wave of bitterness shook the masses. Was it for this that they had fought? Verbal concessions, at least, had to be made. Even Prieto’s organ, El Socialista (August 31) had declared: ‘Without revealing any secret we can make this affirmation: treachery was present in Malaga; it was present in Bilbao; it was present in Santander... The general staff abandoned Malaga without a fight; military leaders made their way to France when Bilbao was in danger; others were in agreement with the enemy to facilitate his entrance into Santander.’
The Stalinists attempted to unload all blame onto the Basque bourgeoisie, in a statement of its Political Bureau in mid-September. Its critical paragraphs corroborate our analysis:
The long inactivity of these [Bilbao and Santander fronts] was not made use of in order to organize the Army or seriously to fortify our positions. The cadres which were undermined by treachery were not purged; the promotion of new elements to Commanding positions was not encouraged...
In the Basque provinces, in Santander, the policy which would have satisfied the desires of the workers and peasants was not carried out. The big landlords and the owners of big undertakings which maintained connections with the fascists retained their privileges, and this cooled the enthusiasm of the fighters.
A rotten liberalism secured impunity for the Fifth Column .... the prohibition of public meetings, isolated the government and even the People’s Front from the active strata of the people and prevented the utilization of the courage and enthusiasm of the citizens for defending the towns.
The questionable behaviour and the dishonesty of means employed as well by certain elements (besides other causes which cannot be examined now) helped to undermine the enthusiasm of the population, to weaken the strength of the soldiers... (reprinted, Daily Worker, October 25, 1937.)
Note that the statement did not—and could not—refer to previous agitation by the Communist party for curtailing the privileges of the bourgeoisie, for the very good reason that, precisely in the name of anti-fascist unity, the party led the struggle against interference with the big bourgeoisie. Let us recall the party leader, Diaz’ declaration, at the previous plenary session of its Central Committee
If in the beginning the various premature attempts at ‘socialization’ and ‘collectivization’, which were the result of an unclear understanding of the character of the present struggle, might have been justified by the fact that the big landlords and manufacturers had deserted their estates and factories and that it was necessary at all costs to continue production, now on the contrary they cannot be justified at all. At the present time, when there is a government of the People’s Front, in which all the forces engaged in the fight against fascism are represented such things are not only not desirable, but absolutely impermissible. (Communist International, May 1937.)
After this, what utter hypocrisy to complain that ‘the big landlords and the owners of big undertakings which maintained connections with the fascists retained their privileges’.
Even more important, the Stalinist statement ended, not with criticism of the bourgeoisie, but with the usual denunciation of the Trotskyists and the attribution of the reverses in the north ‘to the lack of unity of firmness of the anti-fascist front’. A pseudo-Marxist critique was thus put at the service of a programme of intensified class collaboration!
At the October first session of the Cortes, the Basque delegation appeared, most of them coming from Paris and returning there afterward. La Pasionaria spoke for the Stalinists: not a word about the treachery of the Basque bourgeoisie. Instead: ‘We know that the salaries which the workers earn are not sufficient to take care of their homes... In this sense, we have the example of what can occur, when the workers are not satisfied; we have the example of Euzkadi, where the workers continued with the same salaries because the same capitalist establishments continued.’ How can one characterize these base words? No other conclusion could be drawn from them, except that the dissatisfied workers had lost the military struggle. The only blame of the bourgeoisie was that they hadn’t given the workers better salaries! If the pseudo-radical reference to ‘the same capitalist establishments’ were anything but demagogy, why did not Pasionaria go on to demand that the other capitalist establishments in remaining Loyalist Spain be given to the workers? On the contrary, the cabinet was systematically taking factories and land away from the workers and giving them back to the old proprietors, as we have seen.
The Fall of Asturias
The Asturian and Santander militiamen—largely CNT and left Socialists—bitterly contested every foot of the ground. The terrain here was even more favourable to the defence than the hilly Santander region. The Asturian dynamiters were still unshakeably holding their grip on the suburbs of Oviedo, immobilizing the garrison there since July 1936. The workers had a small arms and ammunition factory at Trubia in their hands and raw materials from the mining district, and this, with the considerable military stores brought from the Santander region, provided the material basis ‘for holding the north indefinitely. All told nearly 140,000 armed troops were in the Loyalist area of the north. As long as the north held, Franco could launch no big offensive elsewhere. The striking contrast between the defence put up by the Asturians and the previous surrender of Bilbao and Santander was indicated by the fact that not a village was given up before the fascist artillery had razed it. And when encirclement did force retreat, nothing usable was left behind. ‘The retreating Asturians seem determined to leave only smoking ruins and desolation behind them when they are finally forced to abandon a town or village... The insurgents found them all dynamited and usually burned to the ground.’ (New York Times, October 19, 1937.) Every foot of ground cost the fascists huge expenditures of materials and men—until the fall of Cangas de Onis.
Then something happened. Not in the Oviedo region, where the militia held firm. Not among the forces which, after retreating from Cangas de Onis, had established new lines. But in the coastal region east of Gijon, where the Basque troops were, and which was under the direct command of the general staff stationed in Gijon. The fascist Navarrese advanced along the coast from Ribadesella, pushing twenty-eight miles through towns and villages in three days... Even so the chief insurgent forces were fifteen miles east of Gijon when the city surrendered, on October 21.
Why was Gijon not defended? There were still sufficient military stores to conduct a straggle for a period. Again we must repeat: a city of buildings is a natural fortress which must be razed before being taken. The one alternative—to retreat elsewhere—was not present, for there was nowhere else the 140,000 soldiers or the civilians could go. There could be no illusions that Franco would not execute thousands upon thousands, especially of the Asturian militiamen. Yet the government left these men to the mercy of Franco. Already on the 16th, the Associated Press reported the arrival in France of the Governor of Asturias and other governmental officials, who, the customs officers reported, carried papers showing that the central government had authorized their flight. (The next day’s dispatch reported that the Spanish crew of the vessel which had brought them had refused to feed them!) On the 20th, the United Press reported arrival at the Biarritz aerodrome of ‘five Spanish Loyalist war planes and a French commercial plane, bringing fugitive officers from Gijon’. ‘The aviators declared they left Gijon on orders from the chief of their squadron when fighting broke out among the defenders in the streets, and they were cut off from communication with other military units... After questioning, the aviators were liberated and turned over to the Spanish consular authorities at Bayonne.’ From the same source, the same day: ‘The Spanish government renewed pressure today on the French and British to speed up the evacuation of civilians from Gijon and insure the removal of officers of the Loyalist army of 140,000 men forced to retreat to the sea.’ Belarmino Tomas, Governor of Gijon, fled to France on the 20th. Thus, the government saved its functionaries, leaving the armed masses to their fate.
Nor did these masses have the opportunity to die fighting, instead of before execution squads. As a concession to the workers, a Socialist, Tomas, had been made Governor of Gijon. But this was merely a left facade. No measures had been taken in the two months intervening to purge the officialdom of the Basque Army, or the Santander staffs, or the other officers, or to create worker-patrols to cleanse the city of the Fifth Column. The Civil and Assault Guards of Gijon were likewise not sifted. As a result, the masses found themselves in a death-trap.
The coastal column [of the fascists], one of four leading the advance, was nearest to Gijon—fourteen miles away by road—when the city revolted. The Gijon radio opened at 10 a.m. with the sudden announcement: ‘We are waiting with great impatience... Viva Franco!'
Shortly before 3.30 p.m. the red-bereted troops entered the city. Meantime, the Gijon radio had explained that the night before, when the government leaders left, secret organizations of Insurgents had gone into the streets in armed groups and had taken over the city. (New York Times, October 22, 1937.)
Three days later, one discovered the role of the ‘loyal republican police’. ‘The same police force that has always maintained public order and regulated traffiq was on duty there today.’ Once again the praetorian forces of the government and its bourgeois allies had gone over to Franco. It was linguistically appropriate that the formal offer of surrender to Franco came from Colonel Franco, a ‘loyal republican’. Nothing had been destroyed: the small ammunitions plant, the factories, etc., etc., fell intact to Franco. That fact illumined the relation of the governmental officers and functionaries who had fled. Either they had directly aided in the treachery, therefore, the city was intact or, more likely, they dared not inform the soldiers that the city was not to be defended, and, therefore, fled secretly, giving no warning to the armed masses to organize their own defence...
‘El gobierno de la Victoria’, Pasionaria had christened it. Six months demonstrated the grotesque ludicrousness of that christening. The one conceivable ‘justification’ for its repressions against the workers and peasants might have been its military victories. But precisely from its reactionary politics flowed its disastrous military policies. Whether Spain remained under this terrible yoke and went down to the depths, or freed herself from these organizers of defeat and went forward to victory—whatever happened, history had already stamped the government of Negrin-Stalin with its true title: ‘the government of defeat’.
SIXTEEN months of civil war have conclusively demonstrated that all the roads pointed omt to the Spanish people reduce themselves to but two choices. One is the road we point: revolutionary war against fascism. All other paths lead into the road marked out by Anglo-French imperialism.
Anglo-French imperialism has demonstrated that it has no intention whatsoever of aiding the Loyalists to victory. Even the Stalinized New Republic (October 27, 1937) was at long last compelled to admit: ‘It is clear that by now the concern of France and England over a fascist victory in Spain has become—if it was not from the start—a completely secondary consideration.’
The Spanish question is but one factor in the conflict of interests among the imperialist powers, and will be finally ‘settled’—if the imperialists of both camps have their way—only when they come to the point of a general settlement of all questions, i.e., the imperialist war.
Having most to lose, the Anglo-French bloc holds back from the war, although it must eventually fight to hold its own. Until that moment it avoids decisive showdowns, in Spain as elsewhere. It permitted a trickle of aid to the Loyalists from the Soviet Union because it did not want a victory for Franco while his Italo-German allies dominated his régime. British interests have employed the interim to arrange with Burgos for joint exploitation of the British-owned Bilbao region. The first week of November, Chamberlain announced establishment of formal relations with Franco (as small coin to anti-fascist sentiment, the diplomatic and consular officials were designated merely as ‘agents’), while Eden assured Parliament that a Franco victory would not mean a régime hostile to Britain. Thus, the masters of the Anglo-French bloc prepared themselves for a Franco victory.
Whatever fears the Anglo-French bloc may have had about a Franco victory, it never wanted a Loyalist victory. An early victory would have been followed by social revolution. Even now, after six months of repressions by the Negrin government, the Anglo-French rulers still doubt that a Loyalist victory would not be followed by social revolution. They are correct. For the millions of CNT and UGT workers, held in leash by the civil war, at its victorious completion would shatter the bourgeois limits of the People’s Front. Moreover, an imminent Loyalist victory would be such a blow to Italo-German prestige that it would be countered by invasion of Spain on an imperialist scale of warfare and an attempt to bottle up the Mediterranean. The danger to the ‘life-line of empire’ of the Anglo-French bloc would bring war on the immediate order of the day. Anglo-French desire to postpone the war thus led directly to opposition to Loyalist victory.
The only reason the Anglo-French bloc did not openly court Franco was that it dared not abandon its chief advantage in the coming war: the myth of democratic war against fascism, by which the proletariat is being mobilized to support the imperialist war.
The main pre-occupation of Anglo-French imperialism from the first was: how postpone the war, maintain the democratic myth, and yet begin to edge Hitler and Mussolini out of Spain? The answer was also obvious: a compromise between the Loyalist and fascist camps. As early as December 17, 1936, ‘Augur’ semi-officially stated that English agents were working for a local armistice in the North, while French agents were doing likewise in Catalonia. Even the social-patriot, Zyromski, stated in Populaire (March 3, 1937) : ‘Moves can be seen that are aiming at concluding a peace which would signify not only the end of the Spanish revolution, but also the total loss of the social victories already achieved.’ The Caballero Socialist, Luis Araquistain, Ambassador to France from September 1936 to May 1937, afterward declared: ‘We have counted too much, in illusion and hope, on the London committee, that is to say, on the aid of the European democracies. Now is the hour to realize that we can expect nothing decisive from them in our favour, and from one of them much against us, at the least.’ (Adelante, July 18, 1937.)
The Negrin government put itself entirely in the hands of the Anglo-French bloc; and Negrin’s speeches, notably that to the Cortes on October 1, in dwelling on the need for preparing for peace, and his speech after the fall of Gijon, revealed that his government was ready to carry out the Anglo-French proposals for compromise.
The face of Negrin was turned not to the battle fronts but to London and Paris. The government’s orientation was summed up succinctly by the pro-Loyalist Matthews, after the fall of Gijon: ‘On the whole, there is more discouragement here over the London discussion than what has happened in the north.’ Matthews continued:
There was a passage in Premier Negrin’s broadcast last night which so perfectly expressed the government’s opinion that it deserves to be put on record: ‘Once more our foreign enemies are trying to take advantage of the ingenuous candor of European democracies by fine subtleties... I am now warning the free countries of the world, for our cause is their cause. Spain will accept any means of reducing the anguish of this country, but let the democracies not be seduced by the Machiavellianism of their worst enemies, and let them not again be the victim of a base decision.’ (New York Times, October 24, 1937.)
Truly that passage perfectly expressed the government’s opinion. Were not the consequences of this policy so tragic for the masses, one would roar with laughter at the picture of the ‘ingenuous candor’ of perfidious Albion and the Quai d’Orsay. Fearing that he was to be abandoned altogether, Negrin was thus begging his imperialist mentors to remember that he ‘will accept any means of reducing the anguish of this country’. Had he not already proved that by his repressions of the workers?[1]
That the Loyalist government had already agreed to support a compromise with the fascists is attested to, not only by authoritative revolutionary and bourgeois sources, but also by a Stalinist source:
A Spanish government representative who attended King George VI’s coronation outlined to Foreign Minister, Eden, Valencia’s plan for ending the civil war. A truce was to be declared. All foreign troops and volunteers serving on both sides would then be immediately withdrawn from Spain. During the truce no battle lines would be shifted. Non-Spaniards having been eliminated, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union were to devise a scheme, which the Spanish government pledged itself in advance to accept, whereby the will of the Spanish nation regarding its political and social future might be authoritatively ascertained. (Louis Fischer, The Nation, September 4, 1937.)
At the best, such an arrangement would mean a plebiscite under the supervision of the European powers. With Franco in possession of territory including more than half of the Spanish people, and with the Italo-German and Anglo-French blocs competing for Franco’s friendship, one can imagine the outcome of the plebiscite: unity of the bourgeois elements in both Spanish camps in a Bonapartist regime, decked out at the beginning with formal democratic rights, but ruling the masses primarily through the armed might of Franco’s armies.
Such was the end of the road pointed out by the Anglo-French imperialists and already accepted by the Negrin government. There were still objective difficulties in the way: Franco hoped to win everything and was encouraged to fight on by Italy and Germany. But this much was clear. If not a complete Franco victory, to which England and France were already reconciled, then the best that can come from Anglo-French ‘aid’ was a joint régime with the fascists.
Stalin might find this a bitter pill to swallow. However a compromise with the fascists would be dressed up, it would, nevertheless, be a terrible blow to Stalinist prestige throughout the world. But rather than break with the main objective of Soviet policy—the winning of an alliance with Anglo-French imperialism—Stalin was ready to submit to a settlement dictated by them. He would ‘find a formula’. The same arguments which were used to justify Soviet entry into the non-intervention committee, if accepted, would justify the final act of treachery against the Spanish people.
Let us recall those shabby arguments. ‘The Soviet Union emphatically was not in favour of the non-intervention agreement. With sufficient support from the socialist parties, the labour and anti-fascist movements of the world, besides the support of the communist parties, the Soviet Union would have been able to stop the non-intervention move in its track.’[2] Need we remind anyone that Stalin never tried to rally the world labour movement before he endorsed the non-intervention scheme? If the Stalin régime was powerless to stop the bandits, did it have to join them? The Stalinists understood quite well the rôle of England: ‘The Baldwin cabinet gauged its international action to retain the goodwill of the prospective fascist dictators of Spain [and]... to prevent a victory by the People’s Front... Sufficient has appeared... to make positive the assertion that Britain has come to its own agreement with General Franco.[3] But what mattered the fate of Spain, the future of the European revolution? All that weighed nothing in Stalin’s scale as against the tenuous friendship of imperialist France: ‘The Soviet Union could not come to an open clash with Blum on the non-intervention pact because that would have played into the hands of Hitler and the pro-Nazi faction in the London Tory cabinet which was trying to provoke just such a state of affairs.’[4] Therefore? Pretend that the non-intervention committee has its uses: ‘Rather than to allow collusion between the Nazis and the Tory ministers to confront Spain, the Soviet Union strove to do all it could within the non-intervention committee to stop fascist arms from being shipped to Spain![5] Likewise, we have no doubt, Stalin will strive to do all he can within the committee of compromise to get an equitable arrangement for the participation of the Loyalists in the joint régime with the fascists.
Precisely in these last months, when the Anglo-French scheme was taking final shape, Stalin found a new alibi to supplement those provided by the Franco-Soviet pact and ‘collective security’, with which to push the Loyalists into still greater dependence on the Anglo-French bloc. Louis Fischer gave it crudely enough:
The Spanish war has assumed such large dimensions and is lasting so long that Russia alone, especially if it must help China also, cannot bear the burden. Some other nation or nations must contribute... If England would save Spain from Franco, Russia would perhaps be ready and able to save China from Japan. (The Nation, October 16, 1937.)
Thus, China becomes an alibi for not decisively aiding Spain, while Spain remains an alibi for not saving China! ‘If England would save Spain from Franco...’
The Spanish people were also directed down the road of Anglo-French imperialism by the Communist International, of course, and by the Labour and Socialist International. Apart from pious gestures of organizing fund-raising, the two internationals have called only for the workers to get ‘their’ democratic governments to come to Spain’s aid. The ‘international proletariat’ is called upon to ‘compel the fulfillment of its main demands on behalf of the Spanish people, which are the immediate withdrawal of the interventionist armed forces of Italy and Germany; the lifting of the blockade; the recognition of all the international rights of the lawful Spanish government; the application of the statutes of the League of Nations against the fascist aggressors.’ (Daily Worker, July 19, 1937.) All these ‘demands’ are calls for governmental actions. Since the French Socialists and British Labourites knew that serious governmental action could only take place in the event of war, and since their capitalist masters made plain they were not yet ready for war, they objected to too precipitate nudges from the Comintern. Their accusation of war-mongering, Dimitrov could only answer by terming ‘unworthy speculation on the anti-war sentiments of the masses at large’! But the Socialists and Labourites were at one with the Stalinists in putting the fate of the Spanish people in the hands of ‘their’ governments. For both had already pledged to support their capitalists in the coming war.
* * * *
Whence would come the leadership to organize the Spanish masses in implacable struggle against the betrayal of Spain?
That leadership could scarcely come from the ruling group in the CNT, not the least of whose crimes was its failure to steel the workers against illusions about Anglo-French aid. The very manifesto of July 17, 1937, addressed to the world proletariat, declaring, ‘there is only one salvation: your aid’, launched a slogan perfectly acceptable to the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc: ‘Put pressure on your governments to adopt decisions favourable to our struggle.’ Roosevelt’s Chicago speech was acclaimed by the CNT press. According to Solidaridad Obrera (October 7), it proved that ‘democratic unity in Europe will be achieved only through energetic action against fascism’.
The CNT leaders clung to their old course, merely asking the face-saving formula of ‘anti-fascist front’ to be substituted for Popular Front, in their return to the government. Many of the local anarchist papers, close to the masses, reflected their outrage at the conduct of the leadership. One wrote:
To read a great part of the CNT and anarchist press of Spain makes one indignant or give vent to tears of rage. Hundreds of our comrades were massacred in the streets of Barcelona during the May fighting, through the treason of our allies in the anti-fascist struggle; in Castille alone, almost a hundred comrades have been cowardly assassinated by the communists; other comrades have been assassinated by the same party in other regions; public and covert campaigns of defamation and lies of all kinds are conducted against anarchism and the CNT, in order to poison and twist the spirit of the masses against our movement. And in the face of these crimes our press continues speaking of unity, of political decency; asking loyalty among, all, calm, serenity, sincerity, spirit of sacrifice, and all those sentiments we are the only ones to believe and feel and which only serve for the other political sectors to cover their ambitions and treason... Not to tell the truth from now on would be to betray ourselves and the proletariat. (Ideas, Bajo Llobregat, September 30, 1937.)
But the conduct of the CNT leadership grew even more shameful. The rage of the masses after the fall of Santander forced the Stalinists to utter some mollifying words, calling for a cessation of the campaign against the CNT. Whereupon even the most left of the big CNT papers immediately hailed ‘the rectification that undoubtedly has begun to be produced in the politics of the Communist party’. (CNT, October 6.) The fall of Gijon, isolating the government still more from the masses, led to negotiations for CNT support. All complaints forgotten, the CNT leaders hastened to declare their readiness to enter the government!
Of the UGT leaders, even less need be said. They had uttered not a word in defence of the POUM. Caballero made not a single public speech for five months, while the Stalinists prepared to split the UGT. The pact for united action, signed by the CNT and UGT on July 9, which could have organized the defence of the elementary rights of the workers, remained still-born. Though obviously representing a majority of the provincial federations of the socialist party, the Caballero group went no further than to protest against the actions of the unrepresentative Prieto National Committee. Rather than an ally, the UGT leaders simply further weakened the already impotent CNT leaders.
Of the POUM, one can no longer speak of it as an entity. It was riven irrevocably. All the blows of the leadership had been directed against the left wing, while the right wing had been courted and flattered. El Comunista of Valencia had openly flouted the party decisions, holding to a flagrantly People’s Front line, moving steadily toward Stalinism. Finally, a week before the outlawing of the party, the Central Committee was driven to publish a resolution (Juventud Comunista, June 10) declaring: ‘The enlarged Central Committee... has agreed to propose to the Congress the summary expulsion of the fractional group that in Valencia has worked against the revolutionary policy of our dear party.’
The party congress was never held. Scheduled for June 19, it was preceded by the June 16 raids. The POUM was entirely unprepared for illegal work, as the sweeping success of the raids indicated. Had the congress been held, it would have found the chief centres of the party, Barcelona and Madrid, aligned to the left against the leadership. One left-wing group called for condemnation of the London Bureau and for the creation of a new, the Fourth International. The other declared: ‘It has become clear that there does not exist in our revolution a real Marxist party of the vanguard.’
It was not, then, to the existing organizations as such that one could look for new leadership to prevent a compromise with the fascists. Fortunately, events had only passed the leaders by. Among the masses of the CNT and UGT arose new cadres seeking a way out.
Of special significance were the Friends of Durruti, for they represented a conscious break with the anti-statism of traditional anarchism. They explicitly declared the need for democratic organs of power, juntas or soviets, in the overthrow of capitalism, and the necessary state measures of repression against the counter-revolution. Outlawed on May 26, they had soon re-established their press. Despite the threefold illegality of government, Stalinists and CNT leadership, the Amigo del Pueblo voiced the aspirations of the masses. Libertad, also published illegally, was another dissident anarchist organ. Numerous local anarchist papers, as well as the voice of the Libertarian Youth and many local FAI groups, were raised against the capitulation of the CNT leaders. Some still took the hopeless road of ‘No More Governments’. But the development of the Friends of Durruti was a harbinger of the future of all revolutionary workers in the CNT-FAI.
The masses of the UGT and left socialists had long indicated their impatience with the pusillanimity of their leadership. But the first overt sign of revolutionary crystallization came only in October, when over five hundred youth withdrew from the ‘United Youth’ to rebuild a revolutionary socialist youth organization. Simultaneously, the split in the UGT, forced by the Stalinists, effectively awoke many left-wing workers to the problem of saving their unions from the Stalinist destroyers. In this struggle were inescapably posed all the fundamental problems of the Spanish revolution, the nature of class-struggle unionism, the role of the revolutionary party among the masses. From it would crystallize forces for the new party of the revolution.
Here, then, was the Herculean task of the Bolshevik-Leninists. These Fourth Internationalists, condemned to illegality by the POUM leadership even at the height of the revolution, organized by those expelled from the POUM only in the spring of 1937, seeking a way to the masses, must help to fuse the left wing of the POUM, the revolutionary socialist Youth and the politically awakened CNT and UGT workers, to create the cadres of the revolutionary party in Spain. Could that party, if based on revolutionary foundations, be any but a party standing on the platform of the Fourth International?
Where else, indeed, would it seek for international comradeship and collaboration? The Second and Third Internationals were the organs of the betrayers of the Spanish people. Nor was it an arbitrary act, when the left wing of the POUM called for repudiation of the London Bureau, the so-called ‘International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity’. For this centre to which the POUM had been affiliated, had sabotaged the struggle against Stalin’s frame-up system to which the POUM had fallen victim.
While the POUM itself had from the first denounced the Moscow trials and propagated a ‘Trotkyist analysis’, the London Bureau had worked in the opposite direction. It had refused to collaborate in a commission of inquiry into the Moscow trials. Why? Brockway—then launching a joint ILP-CP ‘Unity Campaign’—blurted out the reason: it would ‘cause prejudice in Soviet circles’. Brockway therefore proposed... a commission to investigate Trotskyism! When taxed with this course, Brockway defended himself by impugning the character of the Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey.
Meanwhile the London Bureau was blowing up. The SAP (Socialist Workers Party of Germany) had first attacked the Moscow trials, but soon abandoned criticism of Stalinism, signing a joint pact for a People’s Front in Germany. Juventud Comunista (June 3) reported the split of the London Youth Bureau: ‘The SAP Youth had placed itself in a Stalinist and reactionary position... The Youth of the SAP had signed one of the most shameful documents which the history of the German workers’ movement has known.’ On the very day the POUM leadership was arrested as Gestapo agents, Julio, PSUC youth organ (June 19) under the headline, ‘Trotskyism is synonymous with counter-revolution’, had hailed the policies of the ILP and SAP youth groups and proudly pointed out that the Swedish affiliate of the London Bureau was steadily approaching a Stalinist People’s Front policy.
Even fouler was the position of those other ‘allies’ of the POUM, the Brandler-Lovestone groups. For a decade they had defended the Stalinist bureaucracy’s every crime, on the basis of a false distinction between Stalin’s policies in the Soviet Union and the erroneous policies of the Comintern elsewhere. When Zinoviev and Kamenev were done to death, these lawyers for Stalinism had hailed the dread deed as a vindication of Soviet justice. They had likewise defended the second Moscow trial in February 1937. I was myself present at a public meeting in the Lovestone headquarters when Bertram Wolfe apologized because a POUM representative had just called the trials frame-ups! Only after the execution of the Red Generals had the Lovestone group—with no explanation—begun to reverse its course. In ten years they had done their utmost to aid Stalin in pinning the appellation counter-revolutionary on the Trotskyists, and even when they had been driven to accepting Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalin purge, these foreheads of brass remained as ever the implacable enemies of the resurgence of the revocation in Russia as, indeed, elsewhere. As the SAP, the Swedish affiliate, etc., move out of one end of the London Bureau, they are being replaced by the Brandler-Lovestone movement. The change has scarcely brought improvement!
How did this International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity prepare for the defence of the POUM? Its meeting of June 6, 1937, adopted two resolutions. Resolution No. 1 said:
The POUM alone has recognized and proclaimed the necessity of transforming the anti-fascist struggle into a fight against capitalism under the hegemony of the proletariat. This is the real reason for the ferocious attacks and calumnies of the Communist party allied with the capitalist forces in the Popular Front against the POUM.
Resolution No. 2 said:
Every measure directed against the revolutionary working class of Spain is at the same time a measure in the interests of French and British imperialism and a step towards compromise with the fascists.
In this hour of danger we appeal to all working class organizations of the whole world, and particularly to the Second and Third International... let us at last take up a unified stand against all these treacherous manoeuvres of the world bourgeoisie (my italics).
One resolution for the left, one for the semi-Stalinist right—that is the London Bureau.[6]
‘But are not the principles you propose for the regroupment of the Spanish masses, are they not intellectual constructions to which the masses will feel alien? And is it not too late?’
No! We revolutionists are the only practical people in the world. For we merely articulate the fundamental aspirations of the masses, indeed, what they are already saying in their own way. We merely clarify the nature of the instrumentalities, above all, the nature of the revolutionary party and the workers’ state, which the masses need to achieve what they want. It is never too late for the masses to begin to hew their road to freedom. Pessimism and scepticism are luxuries for the few. The masses have no other choice except to fight for their lives and the future of their children.
If our analysis has not illuminated the inner forces of the Spanish revolution, let us recall a few words of Durruti on the battlefield of Aragon, when he was leading the ill-armed militias in the only substantial advance of the whole civil war. He was no theoretician, but an activist leader of masses. All the more significantly do his words express the revolutionary outlook of the class-conscious workers. The CNT leaders have buried these words deeper than they buried Durruti! But let us remember them:
For us it is a question of crushing fascism once and for all. Yes, and in spite of the government.
No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. The liberal government of Spain could have rendered the fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it temporized and compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this government who want to go easy with the rebels. You never can tell, you know—he laughed—the present government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers’ movement...
We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to fascist barbarism by Stalin. We want the revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry today with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class how to deal with fascism.
I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any government in the world. Maybe the conflicting interests in the various imperialisms might have some influence on our struggle. That is quite possible. Franco is doing his best to drag Europe into the conflict. He will not hesitate to pitch Germany against us. But we expect no help, not even from our own government in the last analysis.
‘You will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins if you are victorious,’ said Van Paasen.
Durruti answered:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time, For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we who built theses palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, we can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.[7]
THE jailing of workers and peasants and the opening of the front lines by ‘republican’ officers to the fascists: that is the story of Loyalist Spain from November 1937 to May 1938. There is time and space to add only a few words as this book goes belatedly to press.
General Sebastian Pozas adequately symbolizes the period: An officer under the monarchy; an officer under the republican-socialist coalition of 1931-1933; an officer under the Lerroux-Gil Robles bienio negro of 1933-1935. Minister of War before the fascist revolt broke out. He moved heaven and earth to get away from Madrid in the dark days of the siege in November 1936. When Catalan autonomy was done away with and the CNT troops were at last subordinated entirely to the bourgeois regime, Pozas was appointed chief of all the armed forces of Catalonia and the Aragon front. He effectively purged the armies of CNT and POUM ‘uncontrollables’, arranging for whole divisions to be wiped out when they were sent under fire without artillery or aerial protection. ‘Comrade’ Pozas, who graced the plenum of the Central Committee of the PSUC, way ‘obviously’ the man to hold the Aragon front against Franco... Now he is in a Barcelona prison, charged—and the military story is only too clear—with betraying the Aragon front to Franco.
The consequences of the alliance with the ‘republican’ bourgeoisie, of the People’s Front programme, are now apparent. The fascists have reached the Mediterranean. They have split the remaining anti-fascist forces in twain. For the time being the race between Franco and the regroupment of the proletariat has been won by Franco. The Stalinists, the Prieto and Caballero socialists, the anarchist leaders, have proven insurmountable obstacles on the road to regroupment, immeasurably facilitating Franco’s victory.
These criminals will soon fall out among themselves. They will attempt to shift the blame on each other. In that attempt, much more will be revealed concerning the machinations whereby they bound the workers and peasants hand and foot, and made impossible a successful war against Franco. But already we know enough to say that no alibis will enable them to clear themselves. All—Stalinists, socialists and anarchists—are equally guilty of having betrayed their followers. All have betrayed the interests of the workers and peasants—the interests of humanity—to the bestial régime of fascism.
Many will escape from Franco, as did the Stalinist and social-democratic functionaries from Hitler. But the millions of workers and peasants cannot escape. For them, today, tomorrow, the next day, as long as life continues, the task of smashing fascism remains to be carried out. Fight or be crushed—they have no other alternative.
The Spanish proletariat—crushed, as Berneri said, between the Stalino-Prussians and the Franco-Versaillaise—may yet touch off a flame that will again light up the world. Passing beyond the Pyrenees, where the period of the People’s Front, as in Spain, is closing, that flame can unite with the hopes of the French proletariat, now faced with a choice between naked bourgeois dictatorship and the road of revolution.
But if the revolutionary conflagration does not break out, or is smothered, what then?
The tragic lessons of Spain are, in any case, of profound concern to the American working class and have an immediate bearing upon ‘purely American’ problems.
Here the issue will soon enough be posed as inexorably as in Spain or France. The simple truth is that American capitalism has arrived at such an impasse that it can no longer feed its slaves. An army of the unemployed as large as that of 1932 now receives at Roosevelt’s hand a fraction of the inadequate hand-out offered in 1933. The production index drops at four and five and six times the rate of the 1929-1932 decline. The government prepares cold-bloodedly for imperialist war as a ‘way-out’. Crisis, unemployment, war—these have become the ‘normal’ characteristics of the declining capitalist order. Since 1929 America has been ‘Europeanized’. We face here the problems which have been faced since the war by the European proletariat.
Pessimism, defeatism, these are the reactions of the few, who thereby deduce from the reformist betrayals in Europe a justification for abandoning the American masses to a like doom. But to the workers and the oppressed toiling masses of city and country, pessimism and defeatism are alien. They must fight or be smashed—they have no other alternative. The vast, inexhaustible vitality of the American working class is the richest capital of the international labour movement. It has yet to be used, yet to be thrown into the breach. In the last four years, the American proletariat has given such evidence of its resources and its power as many of us did not dream of in 1933. It has organized itself within the very citadel of American capitalism—steel, rubber, autos. It can overthrow that citadel—if it has the will to do so and a leadership capable of assimilating the lessons of these catastrophes.
The task of the book is to provide the class-conscious worker and his allies in America with materials for understanding why the Spanish proletariat has been defeated, and by whom betrayed.
The heroism of the Spanish workers and peasants must not be in vain. From their failing hands the banner of struggle to the death against capitalism can be taken up by the American workers. Let them grasp it with the aid of a vanguard which has assimilated all the terrible lessons of Russia, Spain and France, with a strength and assurance such as the world has not yet seen, and carry it through to victory, not only for themselves, but for the whole world of toiling humanity!
