The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (22 page)

The Republican Zone

F
rom the start, the rising of the generals had fragmented the country into a mass of localized civil wars. But this was not the main reason for the collapse of the republican state. The central government’s disastrous response to the crisis was one major factor: perhaps the inescapable paralysis of a centre-left government facing a right-wing revolt on one side and left-wing revolution on the other. Another was the disintegration of the mechanism of state, when so many of its functionaries, from the diplomatic corps to the police, to say nothing of the armed forces, supported the nationalists.

The CNT and the UGT, which had borne the brunt of the fighting, rapidly filled the vacuum, creating revolutionary organizations in republican territory. The only real exception was the Basque country. ‘There, the situation is not revolutionary,’ it was observed. ‘Private property is not questioned.’
¹
The membership of the two unions increased enormously, partly out of admiration for what they had done, but mostly for opportunistic reasons as they were now the power in the land. They soon had around two million members each, a striking total when the lost territories are taken into account. The POUM and above all the Communist Party were also to increase rapidly. The communists’ vast gains, increasing their strength to 250,000 members in eight months, came from the middle class attracted by the Party’s disciplined approach, from the ambitious and from right-wingers afraid of arrest, just as left-wingers joined the Falange to survive in the nationalist zone.
²

In the early days of the rising Madrid had the air of a revolutionary city. Militiamen of the UGT and CNT could be seen in almost every street checking identities. Their usual dress consisted of dark blue
monos
(which were like boiler suits) and badges or coloured scarves to denote their political affiliation: black and red for the anarcho-syndicalists, red for the socialists and communists. The lack of opportunity, or the unwillingness, to shave on a regular basis made most of them look especially villainous to foreign observers. None went anywhere without a rifle. ‘Idle young men,’ wrote Azaña in his diary, ‘instead of fighting in the trenches, they show off their martial kit in the streets, rifle slung across the shoulder.’
³

The government’s original refusal to issue arms had left a deep mark. Workers remembered that feeling of impotence when facing the military uprising, and this meant that a vast number of weapons was kept in rear areas during the early months. Also, nationalist ruses like those at Oviedo and San Sebastián meant that there was a reluctance to commit too many men to the front in case there were more unpleasant surprises behind the lines.

The socialist UGT was still the most powerful organization in Madrid, even though the CNT continued to gain rapidly at its expense. Girls wearing the red and blue of the Socialist Youth were everywhere collecting money for left-wing charities, encouraged by their new freedom to talk to whomever they wanted without being thought loose. Schoolchildren dressed as Young Pioneers (an attempt to imitate the Soviet original) might be seen walking along in crocodile chanting slogans in shrill voices like a monotonous multiplication table. Foreign journalists made much of the fact that middle-class jackets and collars and ties were hardly to be seen in the streets any more. However, this probably owed as much to the exceptionally hot weather and the new informality as to the persecution of those in bourgeois clothes.

Once most of the militia left for the various fronts, the revolutionary aspect of Madrid began to wane. There were still beggars on street corners and expensive shops and restaurants soon reopened. The war could almost have been overseas. Only the foreign journalists who crowded the cafés and hotel bars of the Gran Vía seemed to think that the capital was at the centre of events. Meanwhile, the economic situation was deteriorating hopelessly. Because of the shortage of coins and banknotes, the unions began to issue ‘coupons’, which were then taken over by municipal authorities obliged to find ways to help the civilian population survive when every day became more precarious.

The shock of civil war made Spanish workers both outward-looking in their hope for international support against fascism and inward-looking in the way they trusted only the local community. Every town and village had its revolutionary committee, which was supposed to represent the political balance in the community. It was responsible for organizing everything the government and local authorities had done before. On the Pyrenean border, anarchist militiamen in their blue
monos
stood alongside smartly uniformed
carabineros
, checking passports. It was the committee of the border town, not an official of the central government, who decided whether a foreigner could enter the country.

The local committees organized all the basic services. They commandeered hotels, private houses and commercial premises for use as hospitals, schools, orphanages, militia billets and party headquarters. In Madrid the Palace Hotel, one of the largest in Europe, was used in the early days as a refuge for orphans and the Ritz as a military hospital. They established their own security forces to stop random and personally motivated killings disguised as anti-fascist operations. Justice became the responsibility of revolutionary tribunals, whose proceedings were an improvement on the sham trials of the early days. The accused were allowed to have legal assistance and to call witnesses, although standards varied widely and in some places justice remained a grotesque piece of play-acting. Once the initial fears of the first weeks had started to abate, the death penalty became much rarer.

In Asturias the CNT established the Gijón War Committee. The CNT’s strength came from dockers, seamen and, above all, fishermen, who set up a co-operative covering every aspect of their trade. In Avilés and Gijón the fishermen collectivized their boats, docksides and tinning factory.
⁴
The UGT was stronger inland, among the miners. Eventually its committee merged with the anarchists, and a socialist became president of the joint council. On the other hand in Santander socialists took over the war committee, prompting anarchists to attack their authoritarian manner.

In the Basque country, things were very different. Juntas of defence were replaced by the autonomous Republic of Euzkadi, which came into existence on 1 October. (The Basque red, green and white flag, the
ikurrina
, had already replaced the republican tricolour.) The formal establishment of the Basque government, with José Antonio Aguirre as president, or
lehendakari
, was confirmed by a meeting of municipal delegates in traditional fashion exactly a week later when oaths were sworn under the sacred oak tree of Guernica. The conservative Basque nationalist party held the most important portfolios, while republicans and socialists were allowed the lesser ones.
⁵
The anarchists, who were strong in San Sebastián and the fishing communities, neither demanded nor were offered any role in the administration. The Basque nationalists established a very rigid control with their paramilitary militia, the Euzko Godarostea, which excluded left-wingers and non-Basques. However, both the UGT and the CNT later formed their own battalions to fight in the army corps of Euzkadi. The mixed feelings of the Basques, loyal to the Republic which gave them autonomy, yet far closer in social and religious attitudes to the nationalists, was to create a disastrous mistrust within the alliance.
⁶

Of all these regional moves to self-government, the most extraordinary and the most important took place in Catalonia. The journalist John Langdon-Davies described the contradictions in Barcelona, calling it ‘the strangest city in the world today, the city of anarcho-syndicalism supporting democracy, of anarchists keeping order, and anti-political philosophers wielding power’.
⁷
On the evening of 20 July Juan García Oliver, Buenaventura Durruti and Diego Abad de Santillán had a meeting with President Companys in the palace of the Generalitat. They still carried the weapons with which they had stormed the Atarazanas barracks that morning. In the afternoon they had attended a hastily called conference of more than 2,000 representatives of local CNT federations. A fundamental disagreement arose between those who wanted to establish a libertarian society immediately and those who believed that it had to wait until after the generals were crushed.

Companys had defended anarchists for nominal fees when a young lawyer. His sympathy for them was unusual among Catalan nationalists, who often referred to them in almost racial terms as ‘Murcians’, because the major source of anarchist strength had been among non-Catalan immigrant workers. Although some Catalan politicians later denied his words, Companys is said to have greeted the anarchist delegates thus:
⁸
‘Firstly, I must say that the CNT and the FAI have never been treated as their true importance merited. You have always been harshly persecuted and I, with much regret, was forced by political necessity to oppose you, even though I was once with you. Today you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia because you alone have conquered the fascist military…and I hope that you will not forget that you did not lack the help of loyal members of my party…But you have won and all is in your power. If you do not need me as president of Catalonia, tell me now and I will become just another soldier in the fight against fascism. If, on the other hand…you believe that I, my party, my name, my prestige, can be of use, then you can depend on me and my loyalty as a man who is convinced that a whole past of shame is dead.’

Whether or not these were Companys’s exact words, Azaña later described this as a plot to abolish the Spanish state. But the Catalan president was a realist. Official republican forces in Barcelona amounted to about 5,000 men of the paramilitary corps and events elsewhere had shown that it was very dangerous to rely on them entirely. The regular army no longer existed in Barcelona, for most of the rebel officers had been shot and the soldiers had either gone home or joined the worker militias. Meanwhile, with rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks and from elsewhere, the anarchists were estimated to have some 40,000 weapons distributed among their 400,000 members in Barcelona and its suburbs. It would have been folly for Companys to have considered attacking them at their moment of greatest strength and popularity. The anarchists also appeared to be his best allies against the reimposition of Madrid government. Companys expressed the situation drily: ‘Betrayed by the normal guardians of law and order, we have turned to the proletariat for protection.’

The Catalan president had presented the anarchists with a fundamental dilemma. García Oliver described the alternatives: ‘Libertarian communism, which is tantamount to an anarchist dictatorship, or democracy which signifies collaboration.’
⁹
Imposing their social and economic self-management on the rest of the population appeared to violate libertarian ideals more than collaborating with political parties. Abad de Santillán said that they did not believe in any form of dictatorship, including their own.
¹⁰

At their Saragossa conference only seven weeks before, the anarchists had affirmed that each political philosophy should be allowed to develop the form of social co-existence which best suited it. This meant working alongside other political bodies with mutual respect for each other’s differences. Though genuine, this was a simplistic view, since the very idea of worker control and self-management was anathema both to liberal republicans and the communists. These two groups would in time win, first by forcing the anarchists to renounce many of their principles and then by expelling them from positions of power.
¹¹

Even if the anarchist leaders sitting in the Catalan president’s ornate office, having just been offered the keys of the kingdom, could have foreseen the future, their choice would have been no easier. They had the strength to turn Catalonia and Aragón into an independent non-state almost overnight, but that would have created a major confrontation with the socialists and communists at a critical moment. The Madrid government also controlled the gold reserves, and a boycott by the rest of republican Spain and by foreign companies could have destroyed the Catalonian economy in a very short time. Yet what seems to have influenced their decision the most were the obvious needs of unity to fight the military rising and concern for their comrades in other parts of Spain. The demands of solidarity overrode other considerations. They could not abandon them in a minority which might be crushed by the Marxists.

The libertarian leaders therefore proposed a joint control of Catalonia with other parties. On their recommendation the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was set up on 21 July. Although in the majority, they said that they would recognize the right of minorities and take only five of the fifteen posts. Ingenuously, they hoped that they would receive similar treatment in the other areas of republican Spain where they were in a minority.
¹²

The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias literally ran everything from security and essential services to welfare; the Generalitat was nothing more than a shadow government, or rather a government-in-waiting, ‘a merely formulaic artefact’.
¹³
Its councillors might make plans and charts, but they had little to do with what was already being put into practice on the ground. The all-important conversion to war industry had been started by Juan García Oliver and Eugenio Vallejo during the initial fighting. The Generalitat did not set up a war industries commission until August and for a long time it had little influence,
¹⁴
yet although the Catalan administration had lost the political initiative, it had not entirely lost power. The CNT was incapable of controlling either the economy, which stayed in the hands of the Generalitat, or the banking system, which was now in the hands of the socialist UGT.