The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (52 page)

The Soviet military advisers nevertheless continued to exert pressure by saying to any Spanish officer who objected to their plans that they ought to ask their government whether Soviet assistance was still required. Such activity took place despite the statement in Stalin’s letter that Soviet personnel had been ‘categorically ordered [to] keep strictly to the functions of an adviser, and an adviser alone’. After the socialist newspaper
Adelante
published on 30 April 1937 an article ‘which contained provocative attacks addressed at the USSR and its leaders’, Voroshilov, in a coded telegram, gave orders to the chief adviser, General Stern. ‘Visit Caballero personally and declare, in response to his request for us to send our pilots, etc., to Spain, that considering this disloyal attitude, we not only cannot send them any more of our men, but we will also have to withdraw the men who are in Spain now, unless they disavow this provocative article in
Adelante
and punish the ones who are guilty for its publication, and unless they apologize to us.’
¹²

Largo Caballero’s position was also being eroded from within. He could no longer ignore the fact that his close friend, Álvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister, was an active Party supporter. The communist Enrique Castro described their attitude to the foreign minister when he said in a paraphrase of Lenin that ‘he is a fool, but more or less useful’. Largo Caballero tried to limit Álvarez del Vayo’s control over the appointment of commissars to the army. On 17 April he published a decree placing the corps of commissars directly under his orders.
¹³
The communist press exploded in outrage. ‘Who can feel hostile to this corps of heroes?’ it demanded. ‘Who can show themselves to be incompatible with those forging the People’s Army? Only the declared enemies of the people.’
¹⁴
Once hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’, Largo was now a ‘declared enemy of the people’. La Pasionaria gave a remarkable example of what Orwell later called double-speak. According to her, restricting the commissars would ‘mean leaving our soldiers at the mercy of officers, who could at a moment disfigure the character of our army by returning to the old days of barrack discipline’. Yet the communists were the chief advocates of drill, saluting and privileges for officers.

Caballero’s attempts to prevent communist recruiting drives within the armed services also came to nothing. A Soviet officer reported back to Moscow: ‘As Largo Caballero has banned party work in units, we have taught our friends to carry out their party work under the guise of amateur creative activities. For example, we organized a celebration dinner on the eve of the [1 May] holiday to which representatives of the anti-fascist committee were invited, as well as those from the Party committee, the editorial office of
Mundo Obrero
, and the best commanders of other units of “friends” (Líster and others).’
¹⁵

The communists also set up a police school in Madrid, where students who refused Party membership were failed. The secret police was taken over by NKVD agents in the late autumn of 1936 and it soon became the communists’ most feared weapon. Even Wenceslao Carillo, the director-general of security, found himself powerless against them. Many of the Spaniards who were recruited for this work could hardly be described as ‘anti-fascist’, but they were given Party cards nevertheless. When the first Soviet ambassador, Rosenberg, made his comment about scum always coming to the top in revolutions, he failed to add that much of it was creamed off into the secret police afterwards. Meanwhile, the campaign to win over the paramilitary forces like the Assault Guard was helped by Margarita Nelken, a socialist member of the Cortes and another secret communist. This was the manoeuvre to which General Asensio Torrado had objected, earning the Party’s bitter enmity.

On frequent occasions the communists in the police, stirred up by the paranoia of their NKVD controllers, arrested and interrogated members of other parties. Soon after the battle of Brihuega, Antonio Verardini, the chief of staff of Mera’s 14th Division, went to Madrid on a 24-hour leave. There he was arrested on the orders of José Cazorla, the communist councillor of public order, and accused of espionage and treason. As soon as Mera found out he left for the capital with Sanz, the commander of the 70th Brigade, and a lorryload of heavily armed soldiers. On his arrival he told General Miaja that if Verardini was not freed by the communists his men would free him by force. Miaja obtained his release immediately. Mera was to return to Madrid on a similar mission when the communist persecution of the POUM reached its height. On the second occasion he had heard that Mika Etchebehere, the woman militia commander, had been arrested for ‘disaffection to the Republic’. It was only by seeing the director-general of security that he obtained her release and had her brought to his headquarters so that she could not be snatched again.

During that spring of 1937 the communist police and the anarchist militia confronted each other in Madrid in an increasingly bitter struggle. The CNT exploded the greatest scandal by publishing the accusations of Melchor Rodríguez, the delegate in charge of prisons, who had put an end to the evacuation and killing of nationalist prisoners the previous November. Melchor Rodríguez revealed that José Cazorla, the communist in charge of public order, had organized secret prisons holding socialists, anarchists and republicans, many of whom had been freed by popular tribunals, to torture and execute them as spies or traitors. Largo Caballero used this on 22 April to dissolve the Junta de Defensa controlled by the communists and re-establish the authority of the Valencia government over Madrid. Nevertheless, there was little he could do to rein in the actions of the NKVD, known in the Soviet Union as ‘the unsheathed sword of the revolution’.

The prime minister realized, however, that he could not reveal the dangerous growth of communist power without confirming the suspicions of the British government. At the same time he could count on fewer and fewer allies in his own cabinet. The moderate socialists, such as Prieto and Negrín, were considering the amalgamation of the Socialist Party with the Spanish Communist Party and agreed with the communist arguments that the fragmentation of power must be ended in order to win the war.
¹⁶

The liberal republicans of Martínez Barrio’s Unión Republicana and Manuel Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana followed a similar path to the moderate socialists in their opposition to Basque and Catalan separatism, and the revolutionary collectives of the anarchists. Lacking the support of liberals and social-democrats, Largo Caballero could only count on the four ministers of the CNT-FAI as allies against the communists and their plan to take over control of the army. Yet the anarchist movement itself was starting to suffer from a split between its reformist leadership collaborating with the government and its militants in Barcelona and in the militia columns.

One radical group, ‘The Friends of Durruti’, was led by a former Catholic and separatist, Jaime Balius. Since March, the Friends of Durruti in its pamphlets and publications had been denouncing the ‘Stalinist counter-revolution’ and the ‘collaborationism’ of the CNT leadership. They claimed to be the guardians of the spirit of 19 July, and demanded a government made up uniquely of the UGT and the CNT. But the basic problem was a deep frustration among the libertarian movement that it was losing all its influence and power. There was a deep regret that they had failed to seize the opportunity the previous July to establish libertarian communism in Catalonia.

The change of atmosphere in Barcelona was remarked upon by observers who returned after a year’s absence. The camaraderie and the optimism were gone. Nightclubs and expensive restaurants supplied by the black market had reopened, while the bread queues started at four in the morning. The anarchists blamed the food crisis on Joan Comorera, the communist PSUC leader who was the Generalitat councillor in charge. Comorera had disbanded the food committees, which the CNT set up in July 1936, and ended bread rationing. The food distribution committees had certainly had their deficiencies, but these were overshadowed by the hoarding and profiteering which followed their abolition. The communists, meanwhile, blamed the anarchist agricultural collectives.
¹⁷
Angry scenes outside shops were frequent. The Assault Guard often rode their horses into the bread queues or dispersed the women with blows from rifle butts.

There had been many more serious developments to make the anarchists and the POUM feel threatened in Catalonia. In the winter the PSUC had set out to exclude the POUM from the Catalan government. The anarchists, who until then had regarded the Communist-POUM battle simply as a Marxist rivalry, began to realize that its outcome would affect them too. The Generalitat, now feeling that it had sufficient power to face down the anarchists, issued a decree on 4 March, dissolving the control patrols and the security council dominated by the FAI. At the same time it amalgamated the Assault Guard and the Republican National Guard into a single force under the command of the councillor for internal security, Artemi Aiguader. The decree also demanded the surrender of weapons.

The Communist PSUC stepped up the pressure over the following month. It issued a ‘victory plan’, which demanded the complete integration of Catalan forces in the People’s Army, the call-up of all classes between 1932 and 1936, the nationalization of war industries, the militarization of all transport and the government control of all weapons.
¹⁸
The anarchists, although torn in two directions, felt that they had given up enough to their colleagues in the government. ‘We have made too many concessions and have reached the moment of turning off the tap,’ declared their newspaper,
Solidarid Obrera
.
¹⁹

Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM, was exultant that the CNT had reached the end of its tether. He wanted the anarchists to join the POUM in an attack ‘on the counter-revolution’.
²⁰
The battle lines of the so-called ‘events of May’ were being drawn. The POUM could not be defined as ‘Trotskyist’, as Stalinist propaganda continually proclaimed, and certainly not as ‘Trotskyist-Fascist’, which was the usual Comintern epithet–a death sentence in Soviet terms. But Stalinists refused to acknowledge that Trotsky’s Fourth International had condemned the POUM for having joined the Popular Front in the elections, with Trotsky himself repudiating his former colleague in furious articles.
²¹

For Nin, everything that was not revolutionary was reactionary, which was why he despised republican institutions and called on the CNT to install a workers’ democracy. The POUM in its revolutionary fanaticism had even convinced itself that the government of the Popular Front was secretly hatching a plot with the nationalists, a curious mirror image of Stalinist suspicions. It was, however, on more rational ground in its belief that the communists were preparing a purge similar to those taking place in the Soviet Union.
²²

The Civil War within the Civil War

I
n Barcelona towards the end of April a series of developments and incidents increased an already tense situation. On 16 April Companys reshuffled his government, giving the post of minister of justice to Joan Comorera, the leader of the communist PSUC. This caused deep unease, especially among the POUM, whom he had threatened with liquidation. On 24 April an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made against the Generalitat’s commissioner for public order, Eusebi Rodríguez Salas, another leading member of the PSUC.

The next day, 25 April,
carabineros
sent by Juan Negrín took control of the Pyrenean frontier posts, which up until then had been in the hands of CNT militia. They clashed with anarchists in Bellver de Cerdanya and killed several, including Antonio Martín, president of the revolutionary committee of Puigcerdà.
¹
In Madrid, José Cazorla, infuriated by Melchor Rodríguez’s denunciation of his secret prisons, closed down the CNT newspaper
Solidaridad Obrera
. Also on that day, in Barcelona, the communist and UGT leader, Roldán Cortada, was killed in Molins de Rei, probably by an anarchist, but there have long been other theories.
²
The PSUC organized a public funeral, which was to be used as a mass demonstration against the CNT. Meanwhile, Rodríguez Salas unleashed an aggressive sweep through the anarchist bastion of Hospitalet de Llobregat to search for the killers of Cortada.

The fear of open conflict on the streets of Barcelona prompted the Generalitat, with the agreement of the UGT and the CNT, to cancel all May Day parades. On 2 May
Solidaridad Obrera
asked workers not to allow themselves to be disarmed under any circumstances: ‘The storm clouds are hanging, more and more threateningly, over Barcelona.’
³

The very next day the Generalitat, deciding to take back all the power lost since 19 July 1936, seized control of the Telefónica in the Plaza de Cataluña. Although this telephone exchange was directed by a mixed committee of CNT and UGT, together with a delegate from the Catalan government, the anarchists had considered it their own since capturing it the previous July. It allowed them to listen in on any conversations made to and from Barcelona, including those of Companys and Azaña.

At three in the afternoon, the communist commissioner for public order, Rodríguez Salas, arrived at the Telefónica with three trucks full of assault guards. (It is assumed, but not certain, that he was acting on the orders of the councillor for internal security, Artemi Aiguader.) They surprised the sentries and disarmed them, but were then halted by a burst of machine-gun fire from the floor above. The anarchists fired shots out of the windows as an alarm call and within a matter of minutes news of the event had spread to all the working-class quarters of the city.