The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo

A close reading of the lucid prose that characterized the articles suggests that the visit to Seville was an important turning point in the process of his radicalization. In the first, he recounted the involvement of an alarming number of the officers in the Seville garrison. In the second, he described the indecision, not to say collusion, of the Republican Civil Governor, Eduardo Valera Valverde. He went on to comment on the role of the local aristocracy in the failed coup. In the third, after some sarcastic comments on the inactivity of the police, he praised the workers of the city. As far as he was concerned, the coup had been defeated because the Communist and anarchist workers who dominated the labour movement in the city had unanimously joined in the general strike called by the minority UGT. In the fourth, he reiterated his conviction that it was the workers who had saved the day, whether they were the strikers in the provincial capital or the landless labourers from surrounding villages who had readied themselves to intercept any column of rebel troops that Sanjurjo might have sent against Madrid.44 (#litres_trial_promo)

The entire experience consolidated Carrillo’s growing conviction that the gradualism of the Republic, particularly as personified by its ineffectual provincial governors, could never overcome the entrenched social and economic power of the right. His belief that what was needed was an outright social revolution was shared by an increasing number of his comrades in the Socialist Youth but not by its executive committee. Around this time, he undertook a propaganda tour of the provinces of Albacete and Alicante. He later believed that the itinerary chosen for him by the Besteirista executive was a dirty trick designed to cause him considerable discomfort. While some of the villages selected were Socialist-dominated, most were controlled by the CNT. In Elda and Novelda, heavily armed anarchists prevented his meetings going ahead. In Alcoy, he started but the meeting was disrupted and he had to flee by hitchhiking to Alicante. Such experiences were part of the toughening up of a militant.45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet another stage in the process took place when he was imprisoned after falling foul of the Law for the Defence of the Republic. Ironically, his mentor Largo Caballero had enthusiastically supported the introduction of the law on 22 October 1931 because he perceived it as directed against the CNT. Its application saw Carrillo and Serrano Poncela arrested in January 1933, and then tried for subversion because of inflammatory articles published in Renovación during the state of emergency that had been decreed in response to an anarchist insurrection. This was the uprising in the course of which there took place the notorious massacre of Casas Viejas in Cádiz. While Carrillo and Serrano Poncela were in the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid, anarchist prisoners were brought in. They aggressively rebuffed the attempts at communication made by the two young Socialists. Carrillo later regarded that first short stay in prison as a kind of baptism for a nascent revolutionary.46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Carrillo might have been in the vanguard of radicalism, but he was not alone. Given that the purpose of his reforms had been humanitarian rather than revolutionary, Largo Caballero was profoundly embittered by the ferocity and efficacy of right-wing obstacles to the implementation of his measures. The hatred of capitalism so powerful in his youth was reignited. Largo Caballero’s closest theoretical adviser was Luis Araquistáin, who, as his under-secretary at the Ministry of Labour, had shared his frustration at rightist obstruction. Greatly influenced by Araquistáin, Largo Caballero began to doubt the efficacy of democratic reformism in a period in which economic depression rendered capitalism inflexible. It was inevitably those Socialist leaders who were nearest to the problems of the workers – Largo Caballero himself, Carlos de Baraibar, his Director General of Labour, and Araquistáin – who were eventually to reject reformism as worse than useless. Writing in 1935, Araquistáin commented on the Socialist error of thinking that, just because a law was entered on the statute book, it would be obeyed. He recalled, ‘I used to see Largo Caballero in the Ministry of Labour feverishly working day and night in the preparation of far-reaching social laws to dismantle the traditional clientalist networks [caciquismo].’ It was useless. While the Minister drafted these new laws, Araquistáin had to deal with ‘delegations of workers who came from the rural areas of Castille, Andalusia, Extremadura to report that existing laws were being flouted, that the bosses [caciques] still ruled and the authorities did nothing to stop them.’ The consequent fury and frustration inevitably fed into a belief that the Socialists needed more power.47 (#litres_trial_promo)

By the autumn of 1932, verbally at least, Largo Caballero was apparently catching up with the radicalism of his young disciple. The scale of his rhetorical radicalization was revealed by his struggle against the moderate wing of the Socialist movement led by Julián Besteiro. At the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE, which opened on 6 October, Besteiro’s abstentionist positions were defeated by the combined efforts of Prieto and Largo Caballero, and Largo Caballero was elected party president.48 (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the Thirteenth PSOE Congress represented the last major Socialist vote of confidence in the efficacy of governmental collaboration. It closed on 13 October. The following day, the Seventeenth Congress of the UGT began. It would be dominated by the block votes of those unions whose bureaucracy was in the hands of Besteiro’s followers, the printers (Andrés Saborit), the railway workers (Trifón Gómez) and the landworkers’ Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Lucio Martínez Gil). Accordingly, and despite the growing militancy of the rank and file of those unions, the Seventeenth Congress elected an executive committee with Besteiro as president, and all his senior followers in key positions. Largo Caballero was in fact elected secretary general, but he immediately sent a letter of resignation on the grounds that the congress’s vindication of the role of Besteiro and Muiño in the December 1930 strike constituted a criticism of his own stance. He was convinced that the mood of the rank and file demanded a more determined policy.49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Largo Caballero’s position was influenced by events abroad as well as by those within Spain. He and indeed many others in the party, the union and particularly the youth movement were convinced that the Republic was seriously threatened by fascism. Aware of the failure of German and Italian Socialists to oppose fascism in time, they advocated a seizing of the initiative. Throughout the first half of 1933 the Socialist press had fully registered both its interest in events in Germany and its belief that Gil Robles and his followers intended to follow in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini. Largo Caballero received frequent letters from Araquistáin, now Spanish Ambassador in Berlin, describing with horror the rise of Nazism.50 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the summer of 1933, Largo Caballero and his advisers came to believe that the Republican–Socialist coalition was impotent to resist the united assault by both industrial and agricultural employers on their social legislation. In consequence, Largo Caballero set about trying to regain his close contact with the rank and file, which had faded somewhat during his tenure of a ministry. The first public revelation of his newly acquired radical views began with a speech, in the Cine Pardiñas in Madrid on 23 July, as part of a fund-raising event for Renovación. In fact, the first part of the speech was essentially moderate and primarily concerned with defending ministerial collaboration against the criticisms of Besteiro. However, a hardening of attitude was apparent as he spoke of the increasing aggression of the right. Declaring that fascism was the bourgeoisie’s last resort at a time of capitalist crisis, he accepted that the PSOE and the UGT had a duty to prevent the establishment of fascism in Spain. Forgetting that, in the wake of the defeat in 1917, he had resolved never to risk conflict with the apparatus of the state, he now announced that if the defeat of fascism meant seizing power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the Socialists, albeit reluctantly, should be prepared to do so. Enthusiastic cheers greeted the more extremist portions of his speech, which confirmed his belief in the validity of his approach towards a revolutionary line. Serrano Poncela and Carrillo and others regarded Largo Caballero as their champion and themselves as the ‘pioneers’ of his new line. ‘The emblematic figure of Largo Caballero’ was described, in terms that recalled the sycophancy of the Stalinist Bolshevik Party, as ‘the highest representative of a state of consciousness of the masses in the democratic republic, as the life force of a class party’.51 (#litres_trial_promo)

With the FJS experiencing a growth in numbers, many of them poorly educated, it was decided in 1932 to hold an annual summer school to train cadres. The sessions were to take place at Torrelodones to the north-west of Madrid. The second school was held in the first half of August 1933 with appearances by the major barons of the PSOE. Besteiro spoke first on 5 August with a speech entitled ‘Roads to Socialism’. It was obvious that his aim was to discredit the new extremist line propounded by Largo Caballero in the Cine Pardiñas. Insinuating that it was merely a ploy to gain cheap popularity with the masses, he condemned the idea of a Socialist dictatorship to defeat fascism as ‘an absurdity and a vain infantile illusion’. Without naming Largo Caballero, he spoke eloquently about the dangers of a cult of personality – which was precisely what Carrillo and the radical group within the FJS were creating around their champion. This might have been the fruit of genuine wide-eyed admiration on Carrillo’s part, but it also served his ambition. Moreover, this approach would later be repeated in his relationship with Dolores Ibárruri, better known as ‘Pasionaria’. Besteiro’s speech was received with booing and jeers. El Socialista refused to publish it. This was a reflection of the fact that the paper was now edited by Julián Zugazagoitia, a follower of Prieto who was sympathetic to the FJS and, for the moment, loyally followed the line of the PSOE’s president, Largo Caballero.52 (#litres_trial_promo)

The following day, 6 August, Prieto spoke. His language was neither as patronizing nor as confrontational as that of Besteiro, although he too warned against the dangers of easy radicalism. While defending, as Largo Caballero had done, the achievements of the Republic so far, he also spoke of the savage determination of the economic establishment to destroy the Republic’s social legislation. Nevertheless, he called upon the 200 young Socialists in his audience who dreamed of a Bolshevik revolution to consider that the weakness of the ruling classes and of the state and military institutions in the war-torn Russia of 1917 was simply not present in the Spain of 1933. He also warned that, even if a Socialist seizure of power were possible, capitalists in other parts of Europe were unlikely to stand idly by. It was a skilful speech, acknowledging that the FJS was morally justified in hankering after a more radical line, but rejecting such radicalism as practical PSOE policy. This was not what the assembled would-be cadres wanted to hear. Prieto was received with less outright hostility than Besteiro but the response was nonetheless cool, and his speech was also ignored by El Socialista.53 (#litres_trial_promo)

Largo Caballero was not at first scheduled to speak at the summer school. However, Carrillo informed him that the speeches by Besteiro and Prieto had caused great dissatisfaction and invited him to remedy the situation. Largo Caballero accepted readily, convinced that he had a unique rapport with the rank and file. In a somewhat embittered speech, he revealed his dismay at the virulence of rightist attacks on Socialist legislation and suggested that the reforms to which he aspired were impossible within the confines of bourgeois democracy. He claimed to have been radicalized by the intransigence of the bourgeoisie during his twenty-four months in government: ‘I now realize that it is impossible to carry out a Socialist project within bourgeois democracy.’ Although he affirmed a continuing commitment to legality, he asserted that ‘in Spain, a revolutionary situation that is being created both because of the growth of political feeling among the working masses and of the incomprehension of the capitalist class will explode one day. We must be prepared.’ Just as it alarmed the right, the speech delighted the young Socialists and shouts could be heard of ‘¡Viva el Lenin Español!’ The coining of the nickname has been attributed variously to the Kremlin, to Araquistáin and to Carrillo.54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Less than a month after the summer school, on 11 September, the Republican–Socialist coalition had fallen. Largo Caballero was interviewed by Carrillo for Renovación. Among other incendiary statements, he declared that ‘we are at the gates of an action that will lead the proletariat to social revolution … Socialism will have to resort to the maximum violence to displace capitalism … It is the task of the youth movement to firm up those who are indecisive and to push aside the passive elements who are of no use for the revolution.’55 (#litres_trial_promo) A new government was formed by the leader of the corrupt Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux. Lacking adequate parliamentary support, Lerroux was rapidly obliged to resign. He was replaced at the beginning of October by his deputy, Diego Martínez Barrio, who governed with the Cortes closed. Elections were called for 19 November.

In the run-up to the November 1933 elections, Carrillo’s editorial line in Renovación increasingly adopted an extremist rhetoric of violence intermingled with frequent quotations from Lenin. Carrillo himself wrote on 7 October that a general strike would not be sufficient for a revolution and that other ‘techniques’ were required, a veiled reference to his desire to see the workers armed.56 (#litres_trial_promo) A voracious reader at this period of his life, he was starting to devour the more accessible works of Marx, Engels and, above all, Lenin, as well as the few works by Stalin that had been translated into Spanish. He read novels and personal accounts of the Russian revolution and was an enthusiast of Soviet cinema. In later life, he would recall his romantic view of what it meant to be an heroic Bolshevik revolutionary.57 (#litres_trial_promo)

Embittered by the frustrations of the previous two years, Largo Caballero ensured that the electoral coalition with the Republicans was not renewed and the Socialists went into the elections alone – a fatal tactical error. Intoxicated by the adulation of the FJS and influenced by the distress of the landless labourers, Largo Caballero irresponsibly blamed the Left Republicans for all the deficiencies of the Republic while confidently assuming that all the votes cast in 1931 for the victorious Republican–Socialist coalition would stay with the PSOE. There was little basis for such a belief. To make matters worse, during the campaign he alienated many of the liberal middle-class progressives who had previously voted for the coalition. His refrain that only the dictatorship of the proletariat could carry out the necessary economic disarmament of the bourgeoisie might have delighted his youthful supporters and the rural sectors of the UGT, but it frightened many potential voters.

In the course of the election campaign, the openly fascist Falange Española was launched on Sunday 29 October at the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid. Recruits were issued with truncheons (porras). In his inaugural speech, the leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, made much of his commitment to violence: ‘if our aims have to be achieved by violence, let us not hold back before violence … The dialectic is all very well as a first instrument of communication. But the only dialectic admissible when justice or the Fatherland is offended is the dialectic of fists and pistols.’58 (#litres_trial_promo)

Since the existing electoral law favoured coalitions, Gil Robles eagerly sought allies across the right-wing spectrum, particularly with the Radical Party. The election results brought bitter disappointment to the Socialists, who won only fifty-eight seats. After local deals designed to exploit the electoral law, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas – or Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups) won 115 seats and the Radicals 104. The right had regained control of the apparatus of the state and was determined to use it to dismantle the reforms of the previous two years. The President, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, did not invite Gil Robles to form a government despite the fact that the CEDA had most seats in the Cortes although not an overall majority. Alcalá Zamora feared that the Catholic leader harboured more or less fascist ambitions to establish an authoritarian, corporative state. So Alejandro Lerroux, as leader of the second-largest party, became Prime Minister. Dependent on CEDA votes, the Radicals were to be Gil Robles’s puppets. In return for dismantling social legislation and pursuing harsh anti-labour policies in the interests of the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals would be permitted to enjoy the spoils of office. Once in government, they set up an office to organize the sale of state favours, monopolies, government procurement orders, licences and so on. The PSOE view was that the Radicals were hardly the appropriate defenders of the basic principles of the Republic against rightist assaults.

Thus the November 1933 elections put power in the hands of a right wing determined to overturn what little reforming legislation had been achieved by the Republican–Socialist coalition. Given that many industrial workers and rural labourers had been driven to desperation by the inadequacy of those reforms, a government set on destroying these reforms could only force them into violence. At the end of 1933, in a country with no welfare safety-net, 12 per cent of Spain’s workforce was unemployed, and in the south the figure was nearer 20 per cent. Now employers and landowners celebrated the victory by cutting wages, sacking workers, evicting tenants and raising rents. Even before a new government had taken office, labour legislation was being blatantly ignored.

Outrage across the Socialist movement knew no bounds but nowhere more vehemently than in the FJS. Carrillo’s response in Renovación took the form of a banner headline ‘ALL POWER FOR THE SOCIALISTS’. His editorial came under the sub-heading ‘They stole our election victory’. The tactical error of Largo Caballero in rejecting a coalition with the Republicans was a key element in the PSOE’s electoral defeat, but that did not prevent Carrillo from laying the blame at the door of the Republicans. He trumpeted the general view within the party that the elections had been fraudulent.59 (#litres_trial_promo) In the south, it is certainly true that the Socialists had been swindled out of seats by the power over the starving braceros of the local bosses, the caciques. In rural areas where hunger, insecurity and unemployment were endemic, it had been easy to get votes by the promise of jobs or the threat of dismissal. Armed thugs employed by the caciques frequently prevented Socialist campaigners reaching meetings and disrupted others. They were a threatening presence standing next to the glass voting urns on election day.

In Spain as a whole, the PSOE’s 1,627,472 votes had won it 58 seats in the Cortes, while the Radicals’ 806,340 votes had been rewarded with 104 seats. The united parties of the right had together got 3,345,504 votes and 212 seats at 15,780 votes per seat, while the disunited left had received 3,375,432 votes and only 99 seats at 34,095 votes per seat.60 (#litres_trial_promo) In some southern provinces, such as Badajoz, Córdoba and Málaga, the margin of right-wing victory was small enough for electoral fraud to have swung the result. The bitterness of the Socialist rank and file at losing the elections unfairly was compounded by dismay at the subsequent untrammelled offensive of the employers. Popular outrage was all the greater because of the restraint and self-sacrifice that had characterized Socialist policy between 1931 and 1933. According to Largo Caballero, delegations of workers’ representatives from the provinces came to Madrid to beg the PSOE executive committee to organize a counter-offensive. Efforts were made by the Caballerista party executive to reach an agreement with the Besteirista executive of the UGT on action to block any attempt to establish fascism, to restore the monarchy or to establish a dictatorship. At a joint meeting of the PSOE and UGT executives on 25 November, Besteiro, Saborit and Trifón Gómez made it clear that the UGT executive was hostile to any kind of adventurism. A furious Largo Caballero declared that ‘the workers themselves were calling for rapid and energetic action’. Even Prieto finally agreed with Largo on the need for ‘defensive action’. Eventually, a joint committee of the PSOE and the UGT would be set up to elaborate this ‘defensive action’.61 (#litres_trial_promo)

Needless to say, the FJS was not slow with a radical rhetoric in response to the changed situation. Pushing the logic of Largo Caballero’s declarations to their logical extremes, Carrillo declared in that first editorial after the elections: ‘the proletariat knows where it stands and has understood that it must take the road of insurrection’. By the following week, the main headline in Renovación was ‘LONG LIVE SOCIAL REVOLUTION’, and Largo Caballero was quoted as saying that a social revolution was necessary to secure all power for the Socialists. Such overt militancy broadcast in Renovación and also in El Socialista led to a police raid on the Gráfica Socialista printing works and the temporary banning of both papers.62 (#litres_trial_promo)

The accentuation of revolutionary rhetoric was a response to the growing wave of militancy and, in Largo Caballero’s case, a merely verbal extremism intended to calm rank-and-file desperation. Largo Caballero’s vain hope was that his threats could both scare the right into limiting its belligerency and persuade the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, to call new elections. In Carrillo’s case, it was more genuinely revolutionary. The following – and equally provocative – issue of Renovación had to be submitted to government censorship, as a result of which it was not permitted to appear and both Carrillo and his closest ally Segundo Serrano Poncela were arrested and imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo. After a few days, they were tried for subversion but found not guilty by an emergency court. When Renovación reappeared, Carrillo’s editorial line was slightly more restrained. Under the headline ‘Another Fascist Shriek’, he responded to a speech made in the Cortes on 19 December in which Gil Robles had laid out the policies that the new Radical government would have to implement in order to stay in power with CEDA votes. His demands revealed the narrow interests defended by the CEDA. They included amnesty for those imprisoned for the military rising of August 1932, a revision of the religious legislation of the Constituent Cortes and a sweeping attack on social reforms. All the decrees that had been most welcomed by the landless peasantry – the law of municipal boundaries, that of obligatory cultivation and the introduction of mixed juries – were to be revised. He also called for a reduction of the area of land subject to expropriation under the agrarian reform bill. Carrillo’s editorial ended with a perspicacious comparison of Gil Robles’s tactics with those of the authoritarian Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss, a call for an energetic response and a threat that the FJS would not go down without a fight.63 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 13 December 1933, the UGT’s National Committee discussed the PSOE’s calls for action in response to the deteriorating position of the working class in both rural and urban Spain. Against the calls for calm from Saborit and Trifón Gómez, Carrillo’s ally Amaro del Rosal, the hot-headed president of the Federation of Bank and Stock Exchange Workers, proposed that the UGT join the PSOE in organizing a revolutionary movement to seize power and establish socialism. He was supported by, among others, Carlos Hernández Zancajo, leader of the transport workers. Del Rosal’s proposal was defeated, but further acrimonious debate led to a decision to call an extraordinary congress of the UGT to resolve the bitter divisions between the moderate Besteiristas and the young revolutionary supporters of Largo Caballero.64 (#litres_trial_promo) When that meeting took place on 31 December, one after another the leaders of the major federations of the UGT – the mineworkers, the textile workers, the bakery workers, the hotel workers, the metalworkers, the bank workers and the transport workers – rose to declare that they supported the line of the PSOE executive and not that of the UGT. They were opposed only by the representatives of the Besteirista strongholds, the printers, the landworkers’ Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT) and the railwaymen. Amaro del Rosal proposed that the UGT join with the PSOE in organizing ‘a national revolutionary movement to seize power and establish socialism’. When he and Carlos Hernández Zancajo talked of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proposal was defeated by twenty-eight votes to seventeen.65 (#litres_trial_promo)

As their mouthpiece Renovación was in constant difficulties with the authorities, receiving fines and, on some days, the entire print-run being seized, Carrillo understandably saw this as a deliberate attempt to destroy the paper economically. As a result, under the headline ‘They are pushing us into clandestinity’, he wrote that, as a revolutionary group, the FJS might have to go underground. Indeed, the FJS began tentatively to organize its own militias. Carrillo’s efforts in this regard were central to what passed for the creation of Socialist militias prior to the general strike of October 1934 in Madrid. Both through the pages of Renovación and via numerous circulars, the FJS issued instructions about the creation of a paramilitary organization.66 (#litres_trial_promo)

Not fully perceiving the emptiness of Largo Caballero’s rhetoric, Carrillo could legitimately feel that he had full backing for this from the senior party leadership. The PSOE had named a special commission, presided over by Largo Caballero, to examine the practical side of organizing a revolutionary movement and, after another tense meeting on 9 January 1934, the UGT’s National Committee had reluctantly agreed to participate. Largo Caballero then insisted that the PSOE’s policies be submitted to the UGT’s National Committee. This was to meet on 27 January.67 (#litres_trial_promo) In the meanwhile, on 13 January, the PSOE executive approved a five-point programme of immediate action, drawn up by Largo Caballero himself. This called for (1) the organization of a frankly revolutionary movement; (2) the declaration of such a movement at the right moment, preferably before the enemy could take definitive precautions; (3) contacts to be made between the PSOE and the UGT and any other groups ready to cooperate in the movement; and, in the event of triumph, (4) the PSOE and the UGT, in collaboration with other participants in the revolution, to take political power, and (5) the implementation of a ten-point reform programme drawn up by Prieto.68 (#litres_trial_promo)

When the UGT’s National Committee met on 27 January to discuss the various projects, against the fierce opposition of Besteiro, the PSOE’s revolutionary project was approved by thirty-three members of the committee. Only Trifón Gómez of the Railway Workers’ Union and Lucio Martínez Gil of the FNTT voted for the executive, which immediately resigned en masse. Two days later, a new UGT executive was elected, with Largo Caballero as secretary general and including some of the most radical members of the FJS: Ricardo Zabalza of the FNTT, Carlos Hernández Zancajo and Amaro del Rosal. On 30 January, the National Committee of the FNTT had also met to debate the revolutionary proposals. An identical situation had arisen within its ranks. The entire executive, all Besteiristas, resigned, and a new committee of young Caballeristas was elected under Zabalza’s presidency. The organizations of the Socialist movement were falling in quick succession to the extremist youth. A meeting of the most influential section within the PSOE, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, was packed by young Socialists, who passed a motion of censure against its president, Trifón Gómez, obliging him to resign. He was replaced by supporters of Largo Caballero, with Rafael Henche as president and Julio Álvarez del Vayo as vice-president backed by a group of the most fervent ‘bolshevizers’, including Hernández Zancajo and Santiago Carrillo.

With Largo Caballero now controlling both the UGT and PSOE executives and the FJS in the hands of his most fervent supporters, a joint committee was immediately established to make preparations for a revolutionary movement. It consisted of Juan Simeón Vidarte, Pascual Tomás and Enrique de Francisco for the Socialist Party, Felipe Pretel, José Díaz-Alor and Carlos Hernández Zancajo for the UGT and Santiago Carrillo for the FJS. Carrillo was thrilled and would take the appointment more seriously than most of the others on the committee. It was a remarkable appointment for someone who had only recently had his nineteenth birthday. With his large glasses and chubby, beardless cheeks, he looked even younger. Operating from UGT headquarters in Madrid, the committee contacted the PSOE, UGT and FJS organizations in each province and issued seventy-three instructions for the creation of militias, the acquisition of arms, the establishment of links with sympathetic local units of the army and the Civil Guard and the organization of squads of technicians able to take over the running of basic services. The response from the provinces was deeply discouraging and there is little evidence, apart from the flurry of communications generated by the committee, that any practical action was taken.69 (#litres_trial_promo)

Since all sections of the Socialist movement were outraged at the perceived injustice of the election results and the rapid dismantling of the few social advances made from 1931 to 1933, a resort to revolutionary verbalism was understandable. However, when it came to organizing real confrontation with the apparatus of the state, despite the Caballeristas’ sweeping conquest of the leadership positions in the PSOE, the UGT and the FJS, there was considerable trepidation. Most union functionaries and militants remained cautious, and even Largo Caballero and his older trade union supporters were far from comfortable with the bolshevizing policies of Carrillo and the other young radicals. Largo Caballero might call for the dissolution of the army and the Civil Guard and for the arming of the workers.70 (#litres_trial_promo) However, for him and for the older trade unionists, revolutionary threats were little more than that: threats that they had neither the inclination nor the expertise to implement. The young bolshevizers, in contrast, felt an intense exhilaration about the ideas expressed in the pages of Renovación. They too had little idea of how to implement their rhetoric and were thus united with Largo Caballero only in irresponsibility and incompetence.

The provincial sections barely responded to the hopeful missives of the revolutionary committee. That, together with Largo Caballero’s cautious trade union instincts, ensured that, except in the mining districts of Asturias, the activities of the revolutionary committee never went much beyond rhetoric. The committee issued a ‘secret’ instruction that a revolutionary movement would be launched in the event of the CEDA joining the government. Since it was meant to be a warning to the President of the Republic, Alcalá Zamora was told about it and Gil Robles and other leaders of the right were fully aware of its existence. The lack of secrecy and the lack of any link between the chosen ‘revolutionary moment’ and any real working-class struggles effectively gave all the cards to the government. On 3 February, the new UGT executive met to decide whether to try to stop all strike action so that the movement could harness its energies for the projected revolution. Revealingly, it was decided, at the urging of Largo Caballero, that UGT members should not be asked to abstain from strike action in defence of their economic interests.71 (#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, in issue after issue, the FJS gave ever more coverage to the achievements of the Soviet Union while calling for social revolution, armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat.72 (#litres_trial_promo) Such indiscreet, not to say strident, revolutionism provided the perfect excuse throughout the spring and summer of 1934 for the government’s uncompromising repression of strikes that were not revolutionary but rather had only limited economic objectives.

Concern about the intentions of the right had intensified with the appointment at the beginning of March of a new Minister of the Interior, the thirty-nine-year-old Rafael Salazar Alonso. Although a member of the Radical Party, he was effectively the representative of the landowners of Badajoz, with whom he had many personal connections.73 (#litres_trial_promo) Shortly after taking up his post, Salazar Alonso told the Director General of the Civil Guard that his forces need not be inhibited in their interventions in social conflicts.74 (#litres_trial_promo) Gil Robles was delighted with Salazar Alonso who, on 7 March, declared a state of emergency and closed down the headquarters of the FJS, the Communist Party and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Renovación was banned and did not reappear until early April.

Santiago Carrillo’s own ever more vehement advocacy of ultra-revolutionary positions saw him arrested again in February 1934 for a speech made at the small town of Campo de Criptana in the province of Ciudad Real. His offence was to have insulted the President of the Republic, whom he accused of opening the way to fascism by dissolving the Constituent Cortes. During his short stay in the prison of Ciudad Real, Carrillo heard the news of the Austrian Socialist uprising against Dollfuss. It fired his growing enthusiasm for violence as the only valid means to combat fascism. Although the Austrian insurrection was crushed, he would incessantly cite it as an example for Spanish Socialists.75 (#litres_trial_promo) At the Fifth Congress of the FJS held in the third week of April 1934, an airy commitment to an armed insurrection was made. A new executive committee was elected with Hernández Zancajo as president and Carrillo as secretary general. Carrillo’s closest friends among the bolshevizers – José Laín Entralgo, Federico Melchor, Serrano Poncela, José Cazorla and Aurora Arnaiz, all of whom later joined the Communist Party – were elected on to the committee. There was much talk of armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Espartaco, a theoretical journal, was created. Its first issue appeared three months later and contained an attack on the PSOE’s parliamentary group (minoría). Over the next few months, Prieto and those Socialists who believed in parliamentary action would be denigrated in the belief that they constituted an obstacle to the inevitable revolution.76 (#litres_trial_promo)

The extent to which the FJS was moving ahead of its idol Largo Caballero was illustrated by the decision of the new FJS executive, without consultation with the leadership of either the PSOE or the UGT, to call a general strike in Madrid. This was a response to the passage through the Cortes, while the FJS congress was in session, of the CEDA’s amnesty law for right-wing attacks on the Republic, which encompassed the plotters responsible for the military coup of August 1932. While the President dithered about signing it into law, the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular). It had been planned since January, and Renovación had warned that it might culminate in a fascist ‘march on Madrid’. The JAP held hundreds of meetings to drum up support and arranged special trains with subsidized tickets. Coinciding with the political crisis over the amnesty, the rally inevitably had the appearance of an attempt to pressurize Alcalá Zamora into signing the law. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an obviously anti-Republican gesture. In order to prevent the rally being the starting point for a ‘march on Madrid’, the FJS committee called a general strike. In the event, despite the giant publicity campaign and the large sums spent, torrential rain and the impact of the strike on the transport facilities offered by the organizers ensured that fewer than half of the expected 50,000 actually took part.77 (#litres_trial_promo) The real initiative for the strike was probably taken not by Carrillo and the FJS but by the Izquierda Comunista. This Trotskyist group had been founded by Trotsky’s one-time friend and collaborator Andreu Nin and was led in Madrid by Manuel Fernández Grandizo, who used the pseudonym Grandizo Munis. Nevertheless, the strike order was actually issued by the FJS.78 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Izquierda Comunista was, like the FJS, part of the Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance). It was the brainchild of Joaquín Maurín, leader of the quasi-Trotskyist Bloc Obrer i Camperol (Worker and Peasant Bloc), who argued that only a united working class could resist the great advances of the authoritarian right.79 (#litres_trial_promo) For Largo Caballero, the Alianza Obrera was just a possible means of dominating the workers’ movement in areas where the UGT was relatively weak, less an instrument of rank-and-file working-class unity than a liaison committee dominated by Socialists linking existing organizations.80 (#litres_trial_promo) In Madrid, the Socialist leadership effectively imposed its own policy on the Alianza. Throughout the spring and into the early part of the summer of 1934, the Socialist members blocked every revolutionary initiative proposed by the Izquierda Comunista representative, Fernández Grandizo, claiming cynically that the UGT had to avoid partial strike actions and save itself for the ultimate struggle against fascism. The one exception seems to have been the general strike in protest against the JAP rally at El Escorial. Nevertheless, Carrillo was an enthusiast for the Alianza Obrera, since he was deeply committed to the idea of working-class unity.

Leaving aside the anarchists, there were effectively two processes going on within the workers’ movement in 1934. On the one hand, there were the young revolutionaries of the Socialist and Communist youth movements and the Alianza Obrera. On the other, there were the traditional trade unionists of the UGT who were trying to protect living standards against the assault of the landowners and industrialists. In a way that was damaging to both, Largo Caballero spanned the two, giving the erroneous impression that entirely economic strikes had revolutionary ends. Repression had intensified since the appointment as Minister of the Interior of Salazar Alonso. Deeming all strikes to be political, he deliberately provoked several throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. He seized the flimsiest excuses for heavy-handed action and defeated the printers, construction workers and metalworkers one after the other.

Salazar’s greatest victory, which to his great satisfaction pushed the Socialists ever nearer to having to implement their revolutionary threats, took place in June. After much agonized debate, the leaders of the landworkers’ union concluded that a general strike was the only way to halt the owners’ offensive. Under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard, the FNTT’s newly elected general secretary Ricardo Zabalza called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law. Although the strike action was economic in motivation, Salazar Alonso seized the chance to strike a blow at the most numerous section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. He undermined compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour by criminalizing the actions of the FNTT with a decree declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint on to lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Much was made by Renovación of the arrival in Madrid of hundreds of bedraggled rural workers en route to their homes in the south. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years of imprisonment. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936.81 (#litres_trial_promo)

The FJS was also subjected to various obstacles to its normal functioning. Renovación received a crippling fine at the beginning of July. The following week, Salazar Alonso issued a decree prohibiting the use of the clenched-fist salute. Inevitably, this hardened the FJS revolutionary rhetoric and pushed the organization close to the Communist Youth.82 (#litres_trial_promo) On 26 July 1934, attracted by the incessant praise for the USSR in the pages of Renovación, the leadership of the Communist Youth proposed negotiations with the FJS with a view to a possible unification. Although the invitation was preceded by patronizing remarks which described the FJS as reformist social democrats, the conversations went ahead. The FJS was represented by Carrillo, Melchor, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla; the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas by Trifón Medrano, Segismundo Álvarez and Fernando Claudín (Claudín would later develop into the most sophisticated thinker in the Spanish Communist Party). The talks were dominated by Carrillo, who presented the FJS as the revolutionary vanguard of the Socialist movement while the UJC was merely a very junior offshoot of the tiny Communist Party.

The meetings were tense, if slightly more cordial than might have been expected given the organizations’ history of mutual criticism. No concrete plans were made for formal unification. As Carrillo made clear, the FJS was already preparing a revolutionary action and this would take place within the Alianza Obrera. Nevertheless, Carrillo also indicated that he believed that the FJS should be prepared to make compromises in order to hasten the revolution. Thereafter there was ever more united action on the ground. At a local level, militants of both organizations were already acting together, particularly in cooperation against the JAP. They held joint demonstrations such as that which followed the murder by Falangists on 10 June of the young militant Juanita Rico. Their two news-sheets, Renovación and Juventud Roja, henceforth carried news of each other’s activities. Claudín was deeply impressed by the nineteen-year-old Carrillo’s remarkable self-confidence, the powerful and lucid way in which he presented his arguments, and his profound knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution. Amaro del Rosal was every bit as impressed with the talent, energy and capacity for work of his young comrade.83 (#litres_trial_promo)

Carrillo had also been noticed by others outside the FJS. After the talks with the UJC, Trifón Medrano invited him to meet a representative of KIM – the Communist Youth International – which effectively meant with a Soviet agent. He consulted with his comrades on the FJS executive committee and they agreed that he should go ahead with the encounter. He was excited by the idea of meeting someone whom he imagined to be linked with the assault on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Indeed, such was his admiration of the Soviet Union that his office as secretary general of the FJS was dominated by a large portrait of Stalin. Forty years later, he was to tell Fernando Claudín that, in the internal conflict within the PSOE and the UGT, he associated the workers’ champion Largo Caballero with Stalin and the intellectual Besteiro with Trotsky. When he got to the park where he was to meet the Russian agent, he was bitterly disappointed to be introduced not to a hardened Bolshevik revolutionary but to ‘fat Carmen’ (‘Carmen la gorda’), the pseudonym of a portly German woman who was a Soviet agent within the Spanish KIM Bureau. This first meeting with a representative of the fortress of world communism went from bad to worse. She accused the FJS of being potential Trotskyists. Then, believing erroneously that they had been followed by the police, she suddenly proposed that they flee from the bar where they were having a cold drink. Jumping on a moving tram, she tripped and collapsed on the platform to the immense hilarity of passers-by.84 (#litres_trial_promo)

As the summer wore on, Carrillo continued to push the insurrectionary line in Renovación, whose pages, when the entire issue was not seized by the police, carried more and more sections blacked out by the censor.85 (#litres_trial_promo) In contrast, Largo Caballero was moving in the opposite direction. The UGT’s National Committee met on 31 July to hold an inquest into the failure of the peasant strike. The representative of the schoolteachers’ union criticized the UGT executive for its failure to go to the aid of the peasants and virtually accused Largo Caballero of being a reformist. He responded by condemning such rhetoric as frivolous extremism and by declaring that the Socialist movement must abandon its dangerous verbal revolutionism. He had apparently forgotten his own rhetoric of four months previously and the existence of the joint revolutionary committee. When the schoolteachers’ leader read out texts by Lenin, Largo Caballero replied that the UGT was not going to act in accordance with Lenin or any other theorist. Reminding his young comrade that Spain in 1934 was not Russia in 1917, he stated rightly that there was no armed proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was strong. It was exactly the opposite of his own recent speeches and of the line being peddled by Carrillo and the young hotheads of the FJS. In fact, Largo Caballero seems to have become increasingly annoyed by their facile extremism, complaining that ‘they did just what they felt like without consulting anyone’. Nevertheless, Carrillo was later to write that, as far as he knew at the time, Largo Caballero was forging ahead with detailed revolutionary preparations, for some of which he was using the FJS.86 (#litres_trial_promo)

In fact, Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS revolutionary liaison committee had not done much beyond compiling a large collection of file-cards with details of potential local revolutionary committees and militias. That filing system was the only place where there existed an infrastructure of revolution. Each UGT, PSOE or FJS section made its own arrangements for creating militias, which usually went no further than drawing up lists of names of those who might be prepared to take to the streets. Whatever Carrillo fondly believed, there was no central coordination. Largo Caballero himself admitted that the majority of local party and union leaders thought that ‘the revolution was inevitable but feared it and just hoped that some initiative or incident might see it avoided and so they invested only the minimum effort in its preparation, not wanting to appear to be hostile to it in order to keep the loyalty of their members’. He thus perfectly summed up his own attitude. For the bulk of the Socialist leadership, if not for the bolshevizing youth, there was never any real intention of making a revolution. Largo Caballero was convinced that President Alcalá Zamora would never invite the CEDA to join the government because its leaders had never declared their loyalty to the Republic.87 (#litres_trial_promo)

The loud revolutionary rhetoric of the FJS was followed with relish by both Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. They were aware that the revolutionary committee had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. They also knew – as did Largo Caballero but apparently not Carrillo – that the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Thorough police activity throughout the spring and summer of 1934 had undermined most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee. Most of the few weapons acquired by the left had been seized. Gil Robles admitted later that he was anxious to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the violent reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’88 (#litres_trial_promo) Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.89 (#litres_trial_promo)

In similar terms, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was simply to begin a counter-revolutionary offensive to establish a government determined to put an end to the evil.’ It was not just a question of smashing the immediate revolutionary bid but of making sure that the left did not raise its head again.90 (#litres_trial_promo)

The moment of truth was coming nearer, but the reality would be very different from the Leninist dreams of armed insurrection nurtured by Carrillo and the other young bolshevizers. They had little or no idea of how to convert their threats into action. Largo Caballero and his hardened trade union followers were now using revolutionary phrases less frequently and with decreasing conviction. Their outrage in the wake of the November 1933 elections had given way to alarm at the way in which Salazar Alonso had managed to decimate the organized labour movement during the strikes of the spring and early summer of 1934. Throughout September, there were numerous minor strikes and waves of police activity. On 8 September, in response to a twenty-four-hour strike in Madrid, Salazar Alonso had ordered the Casa del Pueblo to be closed. It was searched, to no avail, by the police. When it was reopened six days later, the police went in again and allegedly found a substantial cache of bombs and firearms. This unlikely discovery was the excuse needed for the Socialist headquarters to be closed again.

The next day, 14 September, there took place an event which symbolized the naive hopes of the bolshevizers. Eighty thousand people attended a spectacular joint rally of the FJS and the Communist Youth at the Madrid Metropolitan Stadium. It was in response to a decree by Salazar Alonso, prohibiting those under the age of twenty-one from joining political organizations without written permission from their parents. Although there were speeches by members of the PSOE and the Communist Party, the main speakers were Carrillo for the FJS and Trifón Medrano for the UJC. All spoke of the imminent seizure of power. Greeted by a sea of raised fists, Carrillo declared that ‘if this government at the service of the right does not withdraw the decree, these youth movements will assault the citadels of power and establish a class dictatorship’. He spoke of the identification of the FJS with ‘the chief of the Spanish revolution’, an obvious reference to Largo Caballero. Intoxicated by the moment, he closed his intervention with cries of ‘Death to the Government! Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live the Revolution! Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!’ The event ended with the militants marching out ‘military style’ while waving a profusion of red flags. El Socialista rather ingenuously described the event as ‘a show of strength by the proletariat of Madrid’.91 (#litres_trial_promo)

The crunch came on 26 September, when the CEDA sparked off the crisis by announcing that it could no longer support a minority government. The only solution was either the calling of new elections or the entry into the government of the CEDA. Lerroux’s new cabinet, announced in the early hours of the morning of 4 October, included three CEDA ministers. The arrival in power of the CEDA had been denominated the first step towards the imposition of fascism in Spain. It was the moment for the much threatened revolutionary insurrection. In the event, the efficacy of the threatened revolution was to be in inverse proportion to the scale of the bolshevizers’ bombast. Much of the Socialist movement was paralysed with doubt. The executives of the PSOE and the UGT met and agreed that, if indeed the President did what they were sure he would not do – invite the CEDA to join the government – then the revolution must be launched. Coded telegrams – with messages like ‘I arrive tomorrow’, ‘Angela is better’, ‘Pepe’s operation went well’ – were sent to local committees in every province.

However, having hoped that threats of revolution would suffice to make Alcalá Zamora call new elections, Largo Caballero simply could not believe that he had failed. The revolutionary committee thus did nothing about making the final preparations for the threatened seizure of power. Instead, they spent the next three days in Prieto’s apartment ‘anxiously awaiting’ news of the composition of the cabinet. Largo still believed that Alcalá Zamora would never hand over power to the CEDA. Similarly, the FJS’s revolutionary militias were also lacking leadership and organization. At 11 p.m. on 3 October, two Socialist journalists, Carlos de Baraibar and José María Aguirre, arrived with the unofficial news that a government had been formed with CEDA participation. Several members of the revolutionary committee declared that the time had come to start the movement. Largo, however, stated flatly that ‘until I see it in the Gaceta, I won’t believe it’. He was finally convinced only by the arrival of some soldiers who brought news that the new cabinet had declared martial law. Even then, it was with reluctance that the Socialists prepared for action. They felt that they had no choice. ‘The die was cast,’ wrote Largo.92 (#litres_trial_promo)

Now the extent of his revolutionary intentions was revealed when the UGT gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a pacific general strike. He hoped that the President would change his mind, but he succeeded merely in giving the police time to arrest working-class leaders. In most parts of Spain, the strike was a failure largely because of the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and bringing in the army to run essential services.

The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet revealed the emptiness of the revolutionary bombast of the previous months. It was followed by the creation of an independent Catalan Republic, though it lasted only for ten hours; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. Indeed, the scale of failure was in direct proportion to the scale of the optimistic rhetoric that had preceded it. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.93 (#litres_trial_promo) Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions, and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests was the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.94 (#litres_trial_promo)

Carrillo was arrested late at night on 7 October. He and several other prominent members of the UGT and the FJS were hiding in the Madrid studio belonging to the artist Luis Quintanilla, who was a friend of most of the PSOE top brass. According to Quintanilla, while awaiting the instructions that never came they had idled away the day by making and consuming an enormous paella. According to Carrillo, they had merely shared a French omelette. Quintanilla went to bed around 10.00 p.m. but was awakened shortly afterwards by the arrival of the police. They had been betrayed because Carrillo and other FJS comrades had gone out to enjoy the warm October evening on the studio’s wide terrace. Quintanilla had warned them not to do so because he had a neighbour whom he described as ‘a witch who spent all day snooping’. They sat heatedly discussing the bad news that they were hearing, whether it was about the failure to materialize of the promised military participation or the arrest of sections of the FJS. As expected, the neighbour overheard them and reported them to the police. The officers who arrived were extremely nervous and pointed rifles at the would-be revolutionaries as they were handcuffed and led away. Each one was put in a car with two policemen, one of whom kept a revolver pressed against their side. After a cursory interrogation, Carrillo was transferred the next morning to the Cárcel Modelo and locked in a malodorous cell.95 (#litres_trial_promo) His dreams of revolutionary glory were shattered. Over the next seventeen months in prison, his reflections on the reasons for that failure would profoundly change the direction of his political life.

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The Destruction of the PSOE: 1934–1939 (#u06689297-dae3-577b-8075-89516482163e)