The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo

Carlos de Baraibar, who had replaced Carrillo as the old leader’s favourite, recalled sarcastically that:

a group of leaders of the JSU visited me to let me know that they had decided en masse to join the Communist Party. I knew nothing about it, but they made their case so eloquently that I was left with the impression that their lives had been rendered so impossible within the Socialist movement that, to be able to go on fighting effectively for the cause, the poor creatures had had no alternative but to join the Communists. Nevertheless, it seemed to me monstrous that this had been done without them consulting with senior comrades other than, as I later discovered, Álvarez del Vayo. They had been advised throughout by the man we called ‘the eye of Moscow’, the secret representative of the Comintern or rather of Stalin.

Largo Caballero also referred to ‘Medina’/Codovila as ‘el ojo de Moscú’.76 (#litres_trial_promo)

When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order Delegation, in the early hours of 7 November, he used written orders for the evacuation of prisoners left by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.77 (#litres_trial_promo) The Norwegian Consul, the German Felix Schlayer, claimed that the preparation of the necessary document was the price paid by Muñoz to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia.78 (#litres_trial_promo) Evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations. Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of 8,000 prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.79 (#litres_trial_promo)

Among those pushing for the evacuation of the prisoners were the senior Republican military authorities in the capital, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also involved were Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day, and Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov. In fact, according to the principal expert on Soviet security services in Spain, Orlov was away from Madrid from 13 October to 10 November in Cartagena.80 (#litres_trial_promo) However, his subordinate, Josif Grigulevich, was his liaison with Carrillo. They became active collaborators and friends. Grigulevich would certainly have transmitted to Carrillo the Russian view that the captive military officers who had refused to fight for the Republic should simply be liquidated.

Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Known by his pseudonym of ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had been instrumental in the founding of the Fifth Regiment, from which the Republic’s Popular Army evolved. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar, and his conviction that rebel supporters within Madrid should be eliminated was reflected in his vehement articles and speeches. Conscious that the prisoners were already boasting that they would soon join their rebel comrades, Gorev and other Soviet advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate them. As the rebel siege tightened, Vicente Rojo and Miaja fully concurred.81 (#litres_trial_promo)

Miaja soon established a close relationship with Carrillo’s deputy, José Cazorla, one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners.82 (#litres_trial_promo) Taciturn and efficient, Cazorla believed that rebel supporters had to be eliminated. To carry out this task, as will be seen, he frequently relied on the advice of Russian security personnel. As concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old Vicente Rojo, recently promoted lieutenant colonel. Rojo believed that the fifth column was made up of spies, saboteurs and agitators and feared that they could play a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, he wrote, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.83 (#litres_trial_promo)

The public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo answered to Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, and it is clear that they were in constant touch with the Russians. In the Ministry of War, there were meetings between Mije, Gorev and Rojo. Pedro Checa also had a key meeting at PCE headquarters with Gorev’s messenger Mikhail Koltsov.84 (#litres_trial_promo) This was almost certainly the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed with the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the 8,000 but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups. Accepting this argument, Checa despatched three men to ‘two big prisons’, which almost certainly meant San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo – from which prisoners were indeed taken away on the morning of 7 November.85 (#litres_trial_promo) The removal of prisoners was known as a saca. Clearly, three men alone could not organize a large-scale saca, which required written authorizations, means of transport, escorts and other facilities.

Accordingly, Koltsov’s account seems to confirm Carrillo’s statement that the Consejería de Orden Público had begun to function late on the night of 6 November or in the early hours of 7 November and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. This required committed personnel, and Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela turned to ‘Carlos Contreras’ (Vittorio Vidali). Although in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern, Vidali was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Vidali and Josif Grigulevich, who was briefly his assistant at the Fifth Regiment, belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky. Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina.86 (#litres_trial_promo)

Enrique Castro Delgado, the Communist commander of the Fifth Regiment, described how, on the night of 6 November, he and Vidali/Contreras gave orders to the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s fifth column must be destroyed before it begins to move.’87 (#litres_trial_promo) The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. There were many JSU members in the Fifth Regiment. In a revealing interview in 1986, two years before his death, Grigulevich stated that, in Madrid, he had worked under the orders of Santiago Carrillo, heading a special squad (brigada especial) of Socialist militants in the Dirección General de Seguridad dedicated to ‘dirty’ operations. The squad was formed by Grigulevich from what he called ‘trusted elements’ recruited from members of the JSU who had been part of the unit responsible for the security of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid.88 (#litres_trial_promo)

Grigulevich’s assertion is sustained by the record in the Francoist archive, the Causa General, of the post-war interrogations of JSU members of what came to be three brigadas especiales. Grigulevich had arrived in Spain in late September and worked for Contreras for some weeks before beginning to collaborate with Carrillo in late October or early November. Carrillo, Cazorla and the unit’s members knew Grigulevich as ‘José Escoy’, although he was known to others as ‘José Ocampo’.89 (#litres_trial_promo) The documents in the Causa General are further corroborated by a report, written in the autumn of 1937, by the Republican police that referred to the frequent visits made to Carrillo’s office by Russian technicians specializing in security and counter-espionage matters. The report stated that these technicians had offered their ‘enthusiastic collaboration to the highest authority in public order in Madrid’, which would seem at first sight to have been a reference to Carrillo although it might have referred to Miaja since he was the authority under whom Carrillo worked. If the latter, it would mean that Carrillo’s activities were covered by Miaja’s approval, as he was quick to emphasize shortly after the publication of The Spanish Holocaust. Of course, his collaboration with the Russians would have happened anyway given the Soviet links with the Communist Party. The report went on to state that Carrillo had directed these technicians to ‘the chief and the officers of the brigada especial’.90 (#litres_trial_promo) This was confirmed by Grigulevich, who later described himself as ‘the right hand of Carrillo’ in the Consejería de Orden Público.91 (#litres_trial_promo) According to the records of the Soviet security services, their friendship was so close that years later Carrillo chose Grigulevich to be secular ‘godfather’ to one of his sons. Carrillo’s three sons were born in Paris between early 1950 and late 1952. During those years, Grigulevich was living in Rome under the name Teodoro Bonnefil Castro. The Russian security services had managed to create an identity for him as a Costa Rican businessman and his success in this role had seen him named as first secretary in the country’s Embassy to Italy. The ease of connections between Rome and Paris certainly made it possible for him and Carrillo to meet.92 (#litres_trial_promo)

It is clear that Miaja, Rojo, Gorev and the senior leadership of the Communist Party were all anxious to see the prisoner question resolved with the greatest urgency. There is no doubt that Miaja and Rojo approved of prisoner evacuations although not necessarily of executions. What is likely is that, in the meetings immediately following the creation of the Junta de Defensa, they delegated responsibility to the two-man leadership of the PCE. Checa and Mije, who, like the Russians, certainly did approve of the execution of prisoners, passed organizational responsibility to Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. To implement their instructions, the trio drew on members of the JSU who were given posts in the Public Order Delegation headed by Serrano Poncela, effectively head of the Dirección General de Seguridad for Madrid. They could also count on assistance from Contreras/Vidali and the Fifth Regiment and from Grigulevich and the brigada especial. However, they could do nothing against the will of the anarchist movement, which controlled the roads out of Madrid. Given that the anarchists had already seized and murdered prisoners, it was not likely that they would offer insuperable opposition to the Communists. Indeed, the formal agreement of senior elements of the CNT militias was soon forthcoming.

The inaugural session of the Junta began at 6.00 p.m. on 7 November.93 (#litres_trial_promo) Before the meeting, at around 5.30 p.m., Carrillo, coming out of Miaja’s office in the Ministry of War, met a representative of the International Red Cross, Dr Georges Henny, with Felix Schlayer, the Norwegian Consul. Carrillo invited them to meet him in his office immediately after the plenary session. Before returning for that meeting, Schlayer and the Red Cross delegate went to the Cárcel Modelo where they learned that several hundred prisoners had been taken away earlier that day. On coming back to the Ministry of War, they were greeted amiably by Carrillo, who assured them of his determination to protect the prisoners and prevent any murders. When they told him what they had learned at the Cárcel Modelo, he denied knowledge of any evacuations. Schlayer reflected later that, even if this were true, it raises the question as to why Carrillo and Miaja, once having been informed by him of the evacuations, did nothing to prevent the others that continued that evening and on successive days.94 (#litres_trial_promo)

Later the same evening, a meeting took place between, on the one hand, two or three representatives of the JSU who controlled the newly created Public Order Council and members of the local federation of the CNT. They discussed what to do with the prisoners. Despite mutual hostility, liaison between both organizations was necessary, since the Communists held sway inside Madrid, controlling the police, the prisons and the files on prisoners, while the anarchists, through their militias, controlled the roads out of the city. The only record of the meeting is constituted by the minutes of a session of the CNT’s National Committee held the next morning. Those minutes include a report by Amor Nuño Pérez, the Councillor for War Industries in the Junta de Defensa, who had been one of the CNT representatives at the previous evening’s negotiation with the JSU. Amor Nuño’s report outlined what had been agreed at that encounter with the JSU. The minutes did not include the names of the other participants at the CNT–JSU meeting. However, it is reasonable to suppose that the JSU representatives included at least two of the following: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. The gravity of the matter under discussion and the practical agreements reached could hardly have permitted the Public Order Council to be represented by more junior members of the JSU. If Carrillo was not there, which is unlikely, it is inconceivable that he, as both Public Order Councillor and secretary general of the JSU, was not fully apprised of the meeting.

Nuño reported that the CNT and JSU representatives, on the evening of 7 November, had decided that the prisoners should be classified into three groups. The fate of the first, consisting of ‘fascists and dangerous elements’, was to be ‘Immediate execution’ ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ – the responsibility being that of those who took the decision and of those who implemented it. The second group, of prisoners considered to be supporters of the military uprising but, because of age or profession, less dangerous, were to be evacuated to Chinchilla, near Albacete. The third, those least politically committed, were to be released ‘with all possible guarantees, as proof to the Embassies of our humanitarianism’. This last comment suggests that whoever represented the JSU at the meeting knew about and had mentioned the earlier encounter between Carrillo and Schlayer.95 (#litres_trial_promo)

The first consignment of prisoners had already left Madrid early in the morning of 7 November, presumably in accordance with the instructions for evacuation issued by Pedro Checa in response to Koltsov/Miguel Martínez. Thus some prisoners were removed and killed before the formal agreement with the CNT made later that evening. There is no record of there being any difficulty about their getting through the anarchist militias on the roads out of the capital. That is not surprising since there were CNT–FAI representatives on Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation. Nevertheless, the agreement guaranteed that further convoys would face no problems at the anarchist checkpoints and that they could also rely on substantial assistance in the gory business of executing the prisoners. The strongest CNT controls were posted on the roads out to Valencia and Aragon which the convoys would take. The necessary flotillas of double-decker buses and many smaller vehicles could not get out of Madrid without the approval, cooperation or connivance of the CNT patrols. Since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela knew this only too well, it is not plausible that they would have ordered evacuation convoys without first securing the agreement of the CNT–FAI. This undermines Carrillo’s later assertions that the convoys were hijacked by anarchists. The grain of truth in those claims resides in the certainty that the anarchists took some part in the actual killing.

The first decisions taken by Carrillo and his collaborators had been the saca on the morning of 7 November at San Antón and, in the afternoon, the larger one at the Cárcel Modelo. The prisoners were loaded on to double-decker buses. Convoys consisting of the buses escorted by cars and trucks carrying militiamen shuttled back and forth over the next two days. Their official destinations were prisons well behind the lines, in Alcalá de Henares, Chinchilla and Valencia. However, of the more than 1,000 prisoners removed, only about 300 arrived there. Eleven miles from Madrid, on the road to Alcalá de Henares, at the small village of Paracuellos del Jarama, the first batch, from San Antón, were forced off the buses. At the base of the small hill on which the village stood, they were lined up by the militiamen, verbally abused and then shot. In the evening of the same day, the second batch, from the Cárcel Modelo, suffered the same fate.96 (#litres_trial_promo) A further consignment of prisoners arrived on the morning of 8 November. The mayor was forced to round up the able-bodied inhabitants of the village (there were only 1,600 in total) to dig huge ditches for the approximately 800 bodies which had been left to rot. When Paracuellos could cope with no more, subsequent convoys made for the nearby village of Torrejón de Ardoz, where a disused irrigation channel was used for the approximately 400 victims.97 (#litres_trial_promo)Sacas continued, with intervals, until 3 December. Some expeditions of prisoners arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. The total numbers killed over the four weeks following the creation of the Junta de Defensa cannot be calculated with total precision, but there is little doubt that it was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500.98 (#litres_trial_promo)

All these sacas were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or taken to Chinchilla or Alcalá de Henares. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This suggests that ‘to be released’ (libertad) and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.99 (#litres_trial_promo) The specific orders for the evacuations of prisoners were not signed by Carrillo, nor by any member of the Junta de Defensa. Until 22 November, such orders were signed by Manuel Muñoz’s second-in-command in the Dirección General de Seguridad, the head of the police Vicente Girauta Linares. Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. On 22 November, he followed Muñoz to Valencia. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself or by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.100 (#litres_trial_promo) In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. The anthology of this colossal archive, published in 1945, reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ and carried twenty-six names. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which listed 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.101 (#litres_trial_promo) Explicit orders for the execution, as opposed to the ‘liberation’ or ‘transfer’ of prisoners, have not been found.

While the sacas were taking place, Carrillo had started to issue a series of decrees that would ensure Communist control of the security forces within the capital and put an end to the myriad parallel police forces that had sprung up in the first weeks of the war. On 9 November, he issued two decrees that constituted a significant step towards the centralized control of the police and security forces. The first required the surrender of all arms not in authorized hands. The second stated that the internal security of the capital would be the exclusive responsibility of forces organized by the Council for Public Order. This signified the dissolution, on paper at least, of all checas.102 (#litres_trial_promo) Under the conditions of the siege, Carrillo was thus able to impose, by emergency decree, measures that had been beyond the government. Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay between the announcement of the decree and its successful implementation. The anarchists resisted as long as they could and the Communists never relinquished some of their own checas. Nevertheless, by his decree of 9 November, Carrillo returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions, although many of their militants were given positions in Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.103 (#litres_trial_promo)

Explicitly included within these reformed services was ‘everything relative to the administration of the arrest and release of prisoners, as well as the movement, transfer etc of those under arrest’. They were under the control of the Public Order Delegation.104 (#litres_trial_promo) All functions of the Dirección General de Seguridad were controlled by Serrano Poncela. However, he followed the instructions of Carrillo or his deputy José Cazorla. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the Dirección General de Seguridad.105 (#litres_trial_promo)

Within Serrano Poncela’s Delegation, there were three sub-sections. The first dealt with investigation, interrogations and petitions for release. This was headed by Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT. After interrogations had been carried out, this section made recommendations to the Delegation and final decisions were taken by Carrillo. This function was entirely compatible with the decisions taken at the meeting between JSU and CNT members on the evening of 7 November. The second sub-section, headed by Serrano Poncela himself, dealt with prisons, prisoners and prison transfers. It used small tribunals of militiamen set up in each prison to go through the file-cards of the prisoners. The third sub-section dealt with the personnel of the police and other more or less official armed groups in the rearguard.106 (#litres_trial_promo)

The procedures that would be applied to prisoners between 18 November and 6 December were established on 10 November at a meeting of the Public Order Delegation. Serrano Poncela laid down three categories: army officers with the rank of captain and above; Falangists; other rightists. This was roughly similar to what had been agreed at the meeting on 7 November between members of the CNT–FAI and representatives of the JSU, one of whom had almost certainly been Serrano Poncela himself. When lists of prisoners were compiled, they were passed to Serrano Poncela. He then signed orders for their ‘release’, which meant their execution. It seems that those expeditions of prisoners that arrived safely at their destination consisted of men not listed for execution by the prison tribunals. Serrano Poncela had to report every day to Carrillo in his office in the Junta de Defensa (in the Palace of Juan March in Calle Núñez de Balboa in the Barrio de Salamanca). Carrillo also often visited the office of Serrano Poncela at Number 37 in nearby Calle Serrano.107 (#litres_trial_promo)

The procedure was that agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners whose names were listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated orally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists, sometimes Communists and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, and were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses.108 (#litres_trial_promo)

That Carrillo was fully aware of this is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November 1936. One of the anarchist consejeros asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuations had to continue, given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.109 (#litres_trial_promo)

In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more sacas until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. The sacas and the executions have come to be known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, the name of the village where a high proportion of the executions took place. Those executions constituted the greatest single atrocity perpetrated in Republican territory during the war. Its scale is explained but not justified as a response to the fear that rebel forces were about to take Madrid. Whereas previous sacas had been triggered by spontaneous mass outrage provoked by bombing raids or by news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, the extra-judicial murders carried out at Paracuellos were the result of political-military decisions. The evacuations and subsequent executions were organized by the Council for Public Order but could not have been implemented without help from other, largely anarchist elements in the rearguard militias.

The brief interlude after the mass sacas of 7 and 8 November was thanks to Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice who arranged for the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez to be named Special Inspector of Prisons.110 (#litres_trial_promo) The first initiative taken by Melchor Rodríguez on the night of 9 November was decisive. Hearing that a saca of 400 prisoners was planned, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all sacas cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no sacas between 10 and 17 November, when Melchor Rodríguez was forced to resign his post by Juan García Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice. His offence was to have demanded that those responsible for the killings be punished.111 (#litres_trial_promo) After his resignation, the sacas started again.112 (#litres_trial_promo)

Manuel Azaña, who had succeeded Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, and at least two government ministers in Valencia (Manuel Irujo and José Giral) had learned about the sacas.113 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, a speech made on 12 November by Carrillo suggests that, at the time, secrecy was not a major priority. Speaking before the microphones of Unión Radio, he boasted about the measures being taken against the prisoners:

it is guaranteed that there will be no resistance to the Junta de Defensa from within. No such resistance will emerge because absolutely every possible measure has been taken to prevent any conflict or alteration of order in Madrid that could favour the enemy’s plans. The ‘Fifth Column’ is on the way to being crushed. Its last remnants in the depths of Madrid are being hunted down and cornered according to the law, but above all with the energy necessary to ensure that this ‘Fifth Column’ cannot interfere with the plans of the legitimate government and the Junta de Defensa.114 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 1 December 1936, the Junta de Defensa was renamed the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid by order of Largo Caballero. Having led the government to Valencia, the Prime Minister was deeply resentful of the aureole of heroism that had accumulated around Miaja as he led the capital’s population in resisting Franco’s siege. Thus Largo Caballero wished to restrain what he considered the Junta’s excessive independence.115 (#litres_trial_promo) Serrano Poncela had already left the Public Order Delegation at some point in early December and his responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla.

At the end of the war, Serrano Poncela gave an implausible account of why he had left the Public Order Delegation. He told the Basque politician Jesús de Galíndez that he did not know that the words ‘transfer to Chinchilla’ or ‘release’ on the orders that he signed were code that meant the prisoners in question were to be executed. The use of such code could have been the method by which those responsible covered their guilt – as suggested by the phrase ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ in the minutes of the meeting of the evening of 7 November. Serrano Poncela told Galíndez the orders were passed to him by Santiago Carrillo and that all he did was sign them. He told Galíndez that, as soon he realized what was happening, he resigned from his post and not long afterwards left the Communist Party.116 (#litres_trial_promo) This was not entirely true since he held the important post of JSU propaganda secretary until well into 1938. In an extraordinary letter to the Central Committee, written in March 1939, Serrano Poncela claimed that he had resigned from the Communist Party only after he had reached France the previous month, implying that previously he had feared for his life. He referred to the disgust he felt about his past in the Communist Party. He also claimed that the PCE had prevented his emigration to Mexico because he knew too much.117 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, he even went so far as to assert that he had joined the PCE on 6 November 1936 only because Carrillo had browbeaten him into doing so.118 (#litres_trial_promo)

Subsequently, and presumably in reprisal for Serrano Poncela’s rejection of the Party, Carrillo denounced him. In a long interview given to Ian Gibson in September 1982, Carrillo claimed that he had had nothing to do with the activities of the Public Order Delegation and blamed everything on Serrano Poncela. He alleged that ‘my only involvement was, after about a fortnight, I got the impression that Serrano Poncela was doing bad things and so I sacked him’. Allegedly, Carrillo had discovered in late November that ‘outrages were being committed and this man was a thief’. He claimed that Serrano Poncela had in his possession jewels stolen from those arrested and that consideration had been given to having him shot.119 (#litres_trial_promo) Serrano Poncela’s continued pre-eminence in the JSU belies this. Interestingly, neither in his memoirs of 1993 nor in Los viejos camaradas, a book published in 2010, does he repeat these detailed charges other than to say that it was during their time together in the Consejería de Orden Público that their differences began to emerge.120 (#litres_trial_promo)

The claim that he personally had nothing to do with the killings was repeated by Carrillo in his memoirs. He alleged that the classification and evacuation of prisoners was left entirely to the Public Order Delegation under Serrano Poncela. He went on to assert that the Delegation did not decide on death sentences but merely selected those who would be sent to Tribunales Populares (People’s Courts) and those who would be freed. His account is brief, vague and misleading, making no mention of executions and implying that the worst that happened to those judged to be dangerous was to be sent to work battalions building fortifications. The only unequivocal statement in Carrillo’s account is a declaration that he took part in none of the Public Order Delegation’s meetings.121 (#litres_trial_promo) However, if Azaña, Irujo and Giral in Valencia knew about the killings and if, in Madrid, Melchor Rodríguez, the Ambassador of Chile, the Chargé d’Affaires of Argentina, the Chargé d’Affaires of the United Kingdom and Félix Schlayer knew about them, it is inconceivable that Carrillo, as the principal authority in the area of public order, could not know. After all, despite his later claims, he received daily reports from Serrano Poncela.122 (#litres_trial_promo) Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping sacas raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same.

Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was just one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.123 (#litres_trial_promo)

For instance, in more than one interview in 1977, Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been sacas before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Consejero de Orden Público. Carrillo’s admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.124 (#litres_trial_promo) Elsewhere, he claimed that, after he had ordered an evacuation, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’125 (#litres_trial_promo) This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery of documentary proof of the CNT–JSU meeting of the night of 7 November.

Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 5 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an ‘amplified’ plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Such a meeting, with additional invited participants, was midway between a normal meeting and a full Party congress. Francisco Antón, a rising figure in the Party and known to be Pasionaria’s lover, declared: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Consejero de Orden Público and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause that greeted these remarks had died down, Carrillo rose and spoke of the work done to ensure that the 60 per cent of the members of the JSU who were fighting at the front could do so ‘in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is not a crime, it is not a manoeuvre, but a duty to demand such a purge.’126 (#litres_trial_promo)

Comments made both at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 one of the Comintern’s delegates in Spain, wrote indignantly to the head of the Comintern, Giorgi Dimitrov, of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo simply because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.127 (#litres_trial_promo) In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov wrote proudly that the Communists took note of the implications of Mola’s statement about his five columns and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleanse Madrid of fifth columnists’. In this report, Stepanov explained how, in July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investigations into what had happened at Paracuellos including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.128 (#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is possible that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.129 (#litres_trial_promo)

What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow, and commissioned by Carrillo when he became secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’130 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rather unexpectedly, at the meeting of the Junta Delegada de Defensa on 25 December 1936, Carrillo resigned as Consejero de Orden Público and was replaced by his deputy, José Cazorla Maure. He announced that he was leaving to devote himself totally to preparing the forthcoming congress which was intended to seal the unification of the Socialist and Communist youth movements. It was certainly true that a JSU congress was to be held, for which he was preparing an immensely long speech. However, it is very likely that the precipitate timing of his departure was also connected with an incident two days earlier.131 (#litres_trial_promo) On 23 December, a Communist member of the Junta de Defensa, Pablo Yagüe, had been shot and seriously wounded at an anarchist control post when he was leaving the city on official business. The culprits then took refuge in the local anarchist headquarters, the Ateneo Libertario, of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the CNT Comité Regional refused to hand them over to the police. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. At the meeting of the Junta at which this was discussed, he called for them to be shot.132 (#litres_trial_promo) It was the prelude to a spate of revenge attacks and counter-reprisals. Ultimately, Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta de Defensa to condemn to death the anarchists responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was beyond its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal where the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty on the grounds that Yagüe had not shown his credentials to the CNT militiamen at the checkpoint.133 (#litres_trial_promo)

Despite the Yagüe crisis, there can be little doubt that Carrillo needed to devote time to the JSU. The organization had expanded massively since July 1936 and its importance in every aspect of the war effort can scarcely be exaggerated. The PCE’s determination to consolidate its control of the JSU could be seen in Carrillo’s role in the national youth conference held in January 1937 in Valencia. It replaced the congress which had initially been scheduled to establish the structure and programme of the new organization. A congress had formal procedures that required the election of representative delegates, and wartime circumstances made that virtually impossible. A conference had the advantage of permitting Carrillo to choose the delegates himself. Thus he was able to pack the proceedings with hand-picked young Communists from the battle fronts and the factories. He then exploited that to perpetrate the sleight of hand whereby the conference made decisions corresponding to a congress. To the astonishment and chagrin of those FJS members who still harboured the illusion that the new organization was ‘Socialist’, the entire event was organized along totally Stalinist lines. All policy directives were pre-packaged, there was virtually no debate and there was no voting.134 (#litres_trial_promo)

One of the delegates from Alicante, Antonio Escribano, reflected later that ‘Ninety percent of the young Socialists present did not know that Carrillo, Laín, Melchor, Cabello, Aurora Arnaiz, etc had gone over lock, stock and barrel to the Communist Party. We thought that they were still young Socialists and they were acting in agreement with Largo Caballero and the PSOE. If we had known that these deserters had betrayed us, something else would have happened.’135 (#litres_trial_promo) The impression that the proceedings were carried out under the auspices of Largo Caballero was shamelessly given by Carrillo, who declared, ‘It is necessary to say that Comrade Lar­go Caballero has, as ever, or more than ever, the support of the Spanish youth fighting at the front and working in the factories. It is necessary to say here that Comrade Lar­go Caballero is for us the same as before: the man who helped our unification, the man from whom we expect much excellent advice so that, in defence of the common cause, the unity of Spanish youth may be a reality.’136 (#litres_trial_promo)

As newsreel footage revealed, apart from Julio Álvarez del Vayo and Antonio Machado, the poet and alcalde (mayor) of Valencia, the stage party was made up of Communists headed by Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri. Carrillo opened his long speech with thanks to the Communist Youth International, the KIM, for its support. He made especially fulsome reference to the KIM representative, Mihály Farkas, introduced as ‘Michael Wolf’, with whom his relationship was growing closer. No longer the revolutionary firebrand of the Cárcel Modelo, Carrillo explained that, while the Socialist Youth, the FJS, had tried to undermine the government in 1934, now the JSU supported the Republican government’s war effort. According to Carrillo’s close collaborator Fernando Claudín, Farkas/Wolf had considerable input into Carrillo’s speech. Thus the Comintern line was paramount in Carrillo’s talk of broad national unity against a foreign invader. Central to his rhetoric was the defence of the smallholding peasants and the small businessmen with some bitter criticisms of anarchist collectives. There was also the ritual denunciation of the POUM (the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) as a subversive Trotskyist outfit. With the guidance of Codovila and Farkas/Wolf, Carrillo had already started down the road of linking the POUM to the Francoists. The primary function of the JSU was no longer the fomenting of revolution but the education of the masses – the basic reformist aspiration of the Republican–Socialist coalition for which he had previously excoriated Prieto and the PSOE centrists. This was Comintern policy, although it also made perfect sense in the wartime context.137 (#litres_trial_promo)

Carrillo boasted that the new organization had had 40,000 members immediately after its creation but now had 250,000. He placed special emphasis on the fact that the JSU was a completely new organization entirely independent of both the PSOE and the PCE, in which neither component had the right to demand its leadership. This was a sophistry to neutralize Socialist annoyance about the fact that, since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela had formally joined the PCE, the JSU executive now had eleven Communists to four Socialists.138 (#litres_trial_promo) It was hardly surprising, given the primordial role of the Soviet Union in helping the Republic, that Carrillo should express such enthusiasm for the Communist Party. It would not be long before he would clinch his betrayal of his erstwhile patron.

In the light of Largo Caballero’s incompetence as a war leader, the PCE was increasingly determined to see his removal as Prime Minister. Within barely a month of the JSU conference, the opportunity arose with the disastrous fall of Málaga to rebel forces on 8 February. The disaster could be attributed to Largo Caballero’s mistakes as Minister of War and those of his under-secretary, General José Asensio Torrado. By mid-May, mounting criticism had forced Largo Caballero to resign and he was replaced by the Treasury Minister, Dr Juan Negrín. An internationally renowned physiologist, the moderate Socialist Negrín shared the Communist view that priority should be given to the war effort rather than to revolutionary aspirations. An early contribution to the process of undermining Largo Caballero’s reputation was made by Carrillo when, in early March 1937, he headed a delegation from the JSU to an amplified plenum of the Central Committee of the PCE. In his speech, he was especially savage in his criticism of the POUM. What entirely undermined his constant claims about the JSU’s independence was his hymn of praise to the Communist Party. Moreover, the way he referred to his pride in leaving past mistakes behind must have galled Largo Caballero: ‘Finally, we found this party and this revolutionary line for which we have fought all our life, our short life. We are not ashamed of our past, in our past there is nothing deserving of reproach, but we are proud to have overcome all the mistakes of the past and to be today militants of the glorious Communist Party of Spain.’ His remarks on his reasons for joining the PCE were even more devastating for Largo Caballero. He referred to ‘those who, when the rebels were nearing Madrid, set off for Valencia’. He went on to say that ‘many of those who today are attacking the JSU were among those who fled’.139 (#litres_trial_promo)

Despite the prominence that came with his earlier position in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid and now as leader of the JSU, Carrillo’s role within the Spanish Communist hierarchy was a subordinate one. He accepted this, doing as he was told with relish. At that March 1937 meeting, he was made a non-voting member of the PCE’s politburo. He attended and listened but took little part in the discussions – being, as Claudín put it, ‘simply the man whose job it was to make sure that the JSU implemented party policy. He did not belong in the inner circles where the important issues were discussed and debated by the delegates of the Comintern (Palmiro Togliatti, Boris Stepanov, Ernst Gerö, Vittorio Codovila), by the top Soviet diplomatic, military and security staff and by the most prominent leaders of the PCE (José Díaz, Pasionaria, Pedro Checa, Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Mije).’ Carrillo himself believed at this stage that he was simply not trusted enough to be admitted to these top-secret meetings and was determined to achieve that trust. Accordingly, he was careful to maintain excellent relations with the Comintern representatives, especially with Togliatti and Codovila, the man he regarded as his mentor. Codovila was certainly satisfied with the progress made by his pupil.140 (#litres_trial_promo)

The extent to which Carrillo had transformed himself into ‘his master’s voice’ was confirmed at the JSU National Committee meeting on 15–16 May 1937 – just as Largo Caballero was being removed from the government. Carrillo roundly criticized Largo Caballero’s supporters within the organization and called for their expulsion. Indeed, throughout 1937 and 1938, together with Claudín, Carrillo presided over the systematic elimination of his erstwhile Caballerista allies from the JSU. Claudín’s efforts earned him the nickname of ‘the Jack the Ripper of the JSU’ (el destripador de las juventudes). This process would return to haunt the PCE leadership at the end of the war.141 (#litres_trial_promo)

The importance of Carrillo’s position derived from the fact that the mobilization of the male population, in which the PCE played a key role beginning with the creation of the Fifth Regiment, relied on the continued expansion of the JSU. Its members filled the ranks of the Fifth Regiment and then of the newly created Popular Army as well as those of the Republic’s rearguard security forces. For most of the time during 1937 and 1938, Carrillo devoted himself to building up the PCE’s most valuable asset. However, because he was of military age and should have been in a fighting unit, it was arranged for him to meet his obligations by spending brief periods attached to the General Staff of the commander of Fifth Army Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto. He claimed later to have witnessed parts of the battles of Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. This later provoked outraged jibes by General Enrique Líster. It is almost certainly the case that any visits to the battle front were made in order to check on the JSU’s many political commissars. However, Carrillo’s subsequent attempts to fabricate an heroic military career in response to Líster’s accusations of cowardice were perhaps unnecessary. He could legitimately have argued that he had made a substantial contribution to the Republican war effort through his work in terms of the political education of the great influx of new recruits.142 (#litres_trial_promo)

Indeed, he worked hard to bring both Republican and anarchist youth organizations under the umbrella of the JSU. At every turn, his loyalty to the Spanish Party and the Comintern was unquestionable, symbolized by the large portrait of Stalin that dominated his office. In April 1937, he drafted and presented in Paris an application for the entry of the JSU into the International Union of Socialist Youth, from which, three years earlier, he had removed the Spanish Socialist Youth (FJS). In Britain, France and other democratic countries, the Socialist youth organizations were putting pressure on their respective governments to support the Spanish Republic. It made perfect sense in terms of the Republican quest for international support for Carrillo to try to take JSU into the organization. He later claimed that the idea for this initiative was entirely his own. Since, as he later admitted, a key element of his initiative was to work towards the unity of the Socialist and Communist Youth Internationals, the idea received the approval of the KIM hierarchy. As the creation of the JSU showed, this would be the first step to a Communist take-over of the larger Socialist organization. The initiative led to the JSU being provisionally admitted to the International Union of Socialist Youth and generated the expected increase in support for the Republic.143 (#litres_trial_promo)

He was rewarded for his loyalty by being made the object of a carefully constructed personality cult. He was referred to as the ‘undisputed leader of the youth of Spain’ and as ‘the rudder and great guide of our great Youth Federation’. On the first page of the JSU journal Espartaco, there was a photograph of Carrillo accompanied by a description of him as ‘the leader beloved of all the young masses of Spain, the solid creator of, and the key to, the unity of the JSU. He, along with the executive committee, channels with a safe and steady hand the enormous strength of the young generation that is fighting for the independence of Spain.’ In July 1938, the JSU newspaper Ahora carried a photograph under which the caption was ‘Our secretary general … beloved leader of Spanish youth, whose intelligent and selfless efforts have enabled him to lead the struggle and the labour of our country’s youth in the fight for the independence of the motherland.’ Not long afterwards, Claudín was to be found referring to Carrillo in identical terms. There was some ribaldry in other organizations about the interruptions to the war effort constituted by great public meetings in which it was not clear if the purpose was to raise the morale of the young militants or to massage Carrillo’s ego.144 (#litres_trial_promo)

In April 1938, Franco’s forces had reached the Mediterranean and split the Republican zone in two. By the summer, the Republic was edging to defeat, with Valencia under direct threat. The Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, decided to mount a spectacular counter-offensive to stem the continual erosion of territory. To restore contact between the central zone and Catalonia, an assault across the River Ebro was planned by his chief of staff General Vicente Rojo. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, Franco poured in massive reinforcements in reaction to the initial Republican success in advancing to Gandesa. For over three months, he pounded the Republicans with air and artillery attacks in an effort to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. Negrín hoped that the Western democracies would finally see the dangers facing them from the Axis. Before that could happen the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. The Munich agreement destroyed the Republic’s last hope of salvation in a European war. By mid-November, the decimated remnants of the Republican army, led by Manuel Tagüeña, abandoned the right bank of the Ebro. The Republic had lost the bulk of its army and would never recover.

In response to food shortages and conscription of ever younger recruits, demoralization was rife. The deteriorating conditions saw a growth of anti-communism. One symptom of this was the effort being made from the autumn of 1938 by the Socialist Party executive to re-establish a separate Socialist Youth. The JSU organizations of Valencia, Alicante, Albacete, Murcia, Jaen and Ciudad Real were in favour of returning to the old FJS model. Carrillo’s knee-jerk, and futile, response was to denounce the dissidents as Trotskyists. His alarm was understandable since JSU members made up a high proportion of the Republican armed forces. The fact that Serrano Poncela played a key role in this crisis, writing a critical report on the JSU passed to the PSOE executive in 1938, perhaps explains Carrillo’s long-term resentment of him.145 (#litres_trial_promo) When the JSU headquarters in Alicante were taken over by supporters of Largo Caballero, the FJS was reconstituted. Busts of Lenin and large portraits of Carrillo were destroyed in an iconoclastic venting of rage.146 (#litres_trial_promo)