The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (31 page)

Caballero’s government also included three of his left socialist supporters and Prieto with two of his social-democrat followers, one of whom, the future prime minister Juan Negrín, became minister of finance. Largo Caballero kept the ministry of war for himself and gave Prieto the air force and the navy. There were also two republican left ministers (one of whom was José Giral), one Catalan Esquerra, one Basque nationalist and two representatives of the centrist Republicans.
¹¹

Caballero had invited his old rivals, the anarchists, to join the governing coalition to broaden the representation of the anti-nationalist groups. The anarchists made the counter-proposal (which was not accepted) of a National Defence Council with Largo Caballero as president, five CNT members, five from the UGT, four liberal republicans and no communists. Such a structure was no more than a euphemism for government and thus a sop to their conscience. They had tacitly admitted the necessity of central co-ordination and collaboration in conventional war. No anarchists, however, joined the government.

The committees started to be given new names and, although most of the original delegates stayed on, they gradually submitted to control from above. A new form of political parity also crept into the municipal councils which replaced the local committees. This distorted their reflection of local political strengths, especially in Catalonia, and assisted the communists, who gained more representation than the actual size of their following justified.

In Valencia the Popular Executive Committee, which had so contemptuously waved aside Martínez Barrio’s delegation from the previous Madrid government, acknowledged the new one on 8 September. But the Comintern envoys were furious when a ‘very popular anarchist from Valencia’ declared at a mass meeting in Madrid on 25 September, ‘There is one party that wants to monopolize the revolution. If that party continues its policy, we have decided to crush it. There is a foreign ambassador in Madrid [the Soviet envoy, Marcel Rosenberg] who is interfering in Spanish affairs. We warn him that Spanish affairs concern only the Spanish.’
¹²

The effective administration in Catalonia, the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias, merged with the Generalitat in a new government on 26 September. It was led by Josep Tarradellas and all the workers’ organizations and all the parties of the Popular Front were represented. This brought together the anarchist CNT, the communist PSUC and the anti-Stalinist POUM. It marked the first outright acceptance of government by the anarchists. They compromised their principles because they knew that the Madrid government would otherwise continue to starve their self-managed collectives of credits and currency for raw materials.

The POUM had been the most outspoken critic of the CNT leadership’s refusal of power in Catalonia; this was partly because it advocated an authoritarian route to the new society, but mainly because it was more aware of the Stalinist threat than the Catalonian anarchists, who could not imagine themselves being challenged in Barcelona. Andreu Nin, the POUM leader and now councillor of justice, had lived long enough in Russia to appreciate how the infiltration of key posts made the size of the Communist Party’s following almost irrelevant. From the Catalan nationalists’ point of view, Companys’s moderate policy was starting to prove its effectiveness. The anarchists might call the Catalan government, which they had joined, the Regional Defence Committee, but what mattered was that three of them were now members of it. This marked the first major step in the loss of anarchist power in Catalonia.
¹³

By the end of September the Defence Council of Aragón was the only major non-governmental organization in the southern part of republican territory which retained control over its own area. This anarchist creation, controlled by the FAI and headed by Joaquín Ascaso, was under heavy pressure from the communist campaign for centralized control. By October its committee acknowledged that it would have to make concessions in order to survive. Popular Front parties were brought into the council and Joaquín Ascaso made a successful diplomatic visit to Madrid. Mutual recognition was agreed upon without compromises that appeared to be too damaging, but it later became clear that the central government and the communists had no intention of allowing the Aragonese council to remain in existence any longer than necessary.
¹⁴

Largo Caballero did not realize at this stage that he was being used to re-establish central state power by the liberals, social democrats and communists. Not until November did he start to understand that he had reloaded what Lenin called ‘the pistol of the state’ and that others were waiting to take it from him.

Although Caballero’s appointment had been greeted with joy by many, the Comintern was the least impressed. Marty described him in a report to Moscow on 17 October as ‘a bad union bureaucrat’, and recorded that he and Prieto spent most of the time attacking each other in their respective newspapers,
Claridad
and
El Socialista
.
¹⁵

One of the arguments for central control was that evidence of a stable, authoritative government in Madrid might persuade the British and French governments to change their policy on arms sales. This hope was dashed when the reality of non-intervention became clear. The first interventionist states, Germany and Italy, had initially given the nonintervention plan a very cool reception. But then they realized the potential advantage. Ciano soon agreed to the policy in general, but insisted that it should cover every facet, even ‘propaganda aid’. Italy and Germany would then be able to accuse Russia of violating the agreement and so justify their interventionist activities. The Germans agreed to the pact in principle, but argued that it would require a blockade to be enforced. The Soviet government, eager not to be outmanoeuvred, followed similar tactics by insisting that Portugal must be disciplined. Portugal was to become Stalin’s whipping boy on the Non-Intervention Committee, since attacking the dictators was too risky for his tastes.

There seems to be little doubt that the French government had been sincere in its original intentions. The same cannot be said of Eden. His later realization that the ambitions of the Axis were only encouraged by appeasement tends to obscure his conduct in 1936. It was hypocritical to duck responsibility by saying that ‘the Spaniards would not feel any gratitude to those who had intervened’, when the British government failed to act impartially while maintaining its pretensions to being the ‘international policeman’. Moreover, Eden’s argument that supplying the Republic with arms would make Hitler aid Franco was already shown to be fallacious. Even the nationalist recruitment of Riffian mercenaries, a blatant contravention of the Treaty of Fes in 1912 which established the Spanish protectorate, was ignored. And the republican government was so concerned not to upset the French and British empires that it neither granted Morocco its independence nor made serious attempts to stir up anti-colonial feelings there.

Meetings of the Non-Intervention Committee began in London on 8 September, after numerous delays. These were caused mainly by Germany’s refusal to participate until a crash-landed Junkers 52 was returned by the Republic. The committee was organized by the British Foreign Office in London. Lord Plymouth was chairman and the rest of the committee consisted of the ambassadors of the signatory nations, which included every European country except Switzerland. The ambassador of the Republic in London, Pablo de Azcárate, referred to ‘confused discussions, embroiled and sterile at which denunciations and counter-denunciations took place’.
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Eden himself had to admit that ‘the lengthy meetings continued…accusations were met with flat denials and the results of both were sterile’.

The British foreign secretary tried to claim that in October ‘the Russians were openly sending supplies to Spain and the evidence we had at this time was more specific against them than against the dictators in Rome and Berlin’.
¹⁷
Yet in Geneva at the end of September he had recorded that Álvarez del Vayo, the Republic’s foreign minister, ‘left with me documents and photographs to prove the extent to which Hitler and Mussolini were violating the agreement’. Even the German chargé d’affaires was concerned at the way
Wehrmacht
uniforms were being cheered openly on the streets of Seville. And considering the sympathies of the Royal Navy in Gibraltar, it was perhaps not surprising that a blind eye had been turned on the streams of Junkers and Savoias over Gibraltar, which had ferried the Army of Africa between Tetuán and Seville. The American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, later condemned the whole procedure: ‘Each movement of the Non-Intervention Committee has been made to serve the cause of the rebellion…This Committee was the most cynical and lamentably dishonest group that history has known.’
¹⁸

The Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic

D
uring October 1936 the nationalists concentrated their best forces on the renewed attack towards the capital from the south-west. Their relentless advance made it look as if the Spanish Republic was mortally stricken, but the defence of Madrid soon became a rallying call throughout Europe to all those who feared and hated the triumphant forces of ‘international fascism’. The communist slogan that ‘Madrid will be the grave of fascism’ was powerfully emotive and the battle for the capital was to help the party to power. From 38,000 members in the spring of 1936, the Communist Party was to increase to 200,000 by the end of the year and 300,000 by March 1937.
¹

The Spanish Communist Party was ordered by the Comintern leaders, Dmitri Manuilski and Georgi Dimitrov, to collaborate in the defeat of the rebellion and the defence of a democratic and independent Spanish Republic. This strategy, decided at the time that the Soviet Union was joining the Non-Intervention Committee, conformed to various political objectives: first, to combat the impression that Spain was undergoing a revolution to install a communist regime; second, to counter the claim of their enemy, relying on outside help, that theirs was a national movement; third, to try to reconcile Leninism with the traditional idea of Spanish liberalism.
²

Nevertheless, the situation was hardly encouraging. The military position became worse day by day. Madrid appeared doomed after the defeat at Talavera while Bilbao was threatened after the loss of Irún and San Sebastián. The republicans had still not managed to take Oviedo, they had failed at Toledo and the anarchists’ offensive against Saragossa had come to a halt. They managed to hold on north of Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama, but that, like all republican successes, was purely a defensive action.

These setbacks and the strong German and Italian support for the nationalists made Dimitrov, the secretary general of the Comintern, consider intervention by the Soviet Union. On 28 August he wrote in his diary: ‘The question of aiding the Spanish (possible organization of an international corps).’ On 3 September he wrote: ‘The situation in Spain is critical.’ And on 14 September he noted: ‘Organize help for the Spanish (in a covert form).’
³

For some years, the question of Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War has been polarized between two schematic versions: it was either a Comintern strategy to establish a Soviet regime serving the orders of Moscow, or on the other hand a heroic USSR, motherland of the proletariat, disinterestedly helping the legally constituted Republic. Neither of these two conflicting interpretations is correct, but the latter is definitely further from the rather complicated truth.
⁴

Since the 1920s the Soviet presence in Spain had increased, mainly in the form of cultural propaganda. The Comintern had done no more than it had in other Western countries: infiltrate and wait. On receiving news of the
coup d’état
of 18 July 1936, the Comintern had gathered as much information as possible from its principal agents, especially the Argentinian Vittorio Codovilla, who had been the Spanish Communist Party’s controller since 1932, while the Soviet authorities considered their position. Stalin, as we have seen, did not come to a decision to intervene until September, two months after the rising. Only then did the Soviet regime consider the possibilities of exploiting the conflict and gaining domestic and international support. The Politburo in Moscow ordered huge demonstrations to be organized while the Comintern initiated an international campaign. Soviet citizens contributed 274 million roubles (approximately £11,416,000) for humanitarian purposes in republican Spain.
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The Soviet government sent Mikhail Koltsov, the most famous
Pravda
correspondent, to Spain, followed by two film-makers, Roman Karmen and Boris Makaseev. Three weeks after their arrival newsreels from the Spanish front were being screened in Moscow cinemas and articles were published almost on a daily basis in the Soviet press. On 21 August the Soviet government appointed Marcel Rosenberg ambassador in Madrid, and a month later the old bolshevik who led the assault on the Winter Palace, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, as consul general in Barcelona. In the meantime Ilya Ehrenburg, the correspondent of
Izvestia
, kept Rosenberg informed on the conflict of Catalan politics and Companys’s complaints against the central government. The Politburo also appointed Jacob Gaikis to the embassy secretariat and Artur Stashevsky as commercial attaché.

Among the military advisers were General Jan Berzin (‘Grishin’), Vladimir E. Gorev (‘Sancho’) as military attaché, Nikolai Kuznetsov (‘Kolya’) as naval attaché and Yakov Smushkevich (‘Duglas’) as air force adviser. The majority of the senior military men in Spain were from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. The Soviet embassy was set up in the Hotel Palace until eight weeks later when it followed the government to Valencia. The Comintern sent its own team, with Palmiro Togliatti (‘Ercole’ or ‘Alfredo’), the leader of the Italian Communist Party in exile and one of the chief influences on Comintern decision making. He later became the main adviser to the Spanish Communist Party. The Hungarian Erno Gerö (‘Pedro’) performed a similar role with the PSUC in Barcelona. The most terrifying adviser to come to Spain was Aleksander Orlov, the representative of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, who was to take charge of the secret police.
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