Spain: A Unique History (34 page)

In the spring of 1936 the leaders of the Comintern encountered a situation in Spain without any precedent. For fifteen years, down to 1935, the Comintern had preached immediate revolution and had gone from defeat to defeat, usually in isolation. In 1936, after adoption of the electoral alliance of the Popular Front, the Left found itself in power in Spain, and the Communists, though not in the government, were allied with a leftist administration, something that had never happened before. As Hitler's rearmament continued, Stalin sought to reduce the fear of Communist revolution in Europe so as to gain allies against Germany. The first victory of this new tactic had occurred in Spain (even though Spain had not been the primary objective), and for the first time allies of the revolutionary Left were in power in a large European country. If the latter played their cards right, the new tactic might make it possible to achieve the preliminary goals of revolution by legal and parliamentary means, a totally unprecedented situation. Thus the Comintern sent instructions to the PCE between April and July 1936 to work to moderate the more extreme and violent actions of the revolutionaries, whether anarchist or Socialist. Whereas for fifteen years the Comintern had done virtually nothing but preach revolutionary civil war, in Spain it sought to avert the civil war that was looming, for the latter could open a Pandora's box that might ruin what was suddenly, for the Comintern, the most promising political process in any country in the world.

Nonetheless, the program, propaganda, and activities of the PCE in Spain during the months before the Civil War were far from being either "moderate" or "counterrevolutionary," as the extreme revolutionary Left and some historians would later claim. Comintern policy directed the PCE to champion a policy of "legal radicalization," making use of the Left's complete domination of parliament to go much farther than the program of Azaña and Casares Quiroga. Communist tactics sought to avoid unnecessary violence and extremist strikes but encouraged widespread legal confiscation of property, strong state censorship, falsification of new elections, and making illegal all the conservative and rightist political organizations, all this in order to create a complete monopoly for the Left. Through semilegal means this would transform the Spanish system into a new all-Left Republic, a "people's republic," which would for a time remain semipluralist, but only for leftist groups. In the Comintern scheme of things, at some future date the all-Leftist Republic was to give way to a "Worker-Peasant Government," which in turn would then create conditions, in the final phase of a three-step process, for a Communist regime. That, of course, would lie at some undetermined point in the future. Whether or not such a scheme would ever be workable, the Spanish Communists, thanks to Comintern tutelage, had the only coherent strategy of any of the revolutionary movements in Spain, though in immediate tactics they were not the most extreme. Nothing so clear-cut would be found in the planning (if one can call it that) of the two large movements, the anarchosyndicalists of the CNT and the revolutionary Socialists.

The Communists concentrated their activity and propaganda especially in the capital, as Lenin had earlier done in Russia, and the sight of thousands of uniformed Socialists and Communists marching in Madrid with banners hailing the Soviet Union — the young women chanting the scandalous slogan "Children yes, husbands no!" — gave frightened conservatives a greatly exaggerated notion of the power and numbers of the Communists. In April they had managed to take control of a merged Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU — United Socialist Youth) and by the end of June 1936 claimed to have 100,000 party members in Spain, but that was probably an exaggeration. Even so, if the real figure was only half that, it was equivalent in proportionate terms to the numbers of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in November 1917. The difference, of course, was that Spanish society was politically much more diverse and more mobilized than that of Russia.

Comintern leaders in Moscow feared outbreak of civil war in Spain, which they thought might come either from a military revolt or another premature anarchist insurrection that would play into the hands of the Right. After the military insurrection began, they were appalled by the violent outbreak of revolution that followed the "arming of the people" in the Republican zone, and immediately outlined a program that insisted on complete unity of the Left, moderation of the revolution, and total priority for the military effort, abandoning the multiparty revolutionary militia in favor of a disciplined new "Ejército Popular" (People's Army), modeled on the Red Army that had won the Russian civil war of 1918-20.
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Stalin decided on direct military intervention in the Spanish conflict after only two months, in mid-September. He had first to determine whether the Spanish Left was capable of sufficient unity to make a realistic effort at winning, and the formation of an all-Popular Front government under Largo Caballero apparently convinced him of that. Soviet intervention advanced incrementally, through a series of steps. Economic assistance was provided by the Soviet trade unions early in August, and formal diplomatic relations were then established with the Republic for the first time, Soviet diplomats arriving late in the month. Next, a small number of Soviet aviators came as "volunteers" to fly in the Republican air force, and the decision to send major Soviet military support was finally taken in mid-September, the first Soviet arms arriving at the close of the month, with major shipments arriving before the end of October.

Altogether, Soviet military assistance was substantial, amounting to 5,000 trucks, 800 warplanes, 330 tanks, and sizable numbers of artillery, machine guns, and rifles. In addition, nearly 250 fighter planes were manufactured according to Soviet specifications in the Republican zone. Conversely, the number of Soviet military personnel sent to Spain was very limited, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000, of whom few more than 200 were killed. None of them were simply soldiers, since all the Soviet personnel consisted either of airplane or tank crews, technicians, or higher-level advisors. In addition, the Soviet and Comintern network assisted in large-scale acquisition of arms and other supplies on the international market.
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All this was paid for after the Republican government shipped most of the gold reserve of the Bank of Spain (fourth largest in the world), amounting to more than $600 million, to Moscow at the close of October 1936. Leaders of the Republican government contended that the Non-Intervention Policy of the Western powers left them with no major source of military supply other than the Soviet Union, and the latter in turn periodically converted varying amounts of the Spanish reserve into rubles or other foreign exchange to pay for shipments, until by 1938 it declared that the entire gold supply had been exhausted. During the final year of the war some $200 million in credits were extended to the Republican government to cover the last shipments of arms.

In addition, the Comintern organized in the autumn of 1936 the famous "International Brigades" of volunteers to assist the Republican army. Most of the volunteers were Communists, and until September 1937 the Brigades were not formally integrated into the structure of the Republican forces. Though their numbers were relatively limited (amounting to no more than 42,000 men, compared with the more than a million men mobilized by the Republican forces in Spain), they played an important role in key battles between the autumn of 1936 and the summer of 1938.

The Comintern was also extremely active in the propaganda war, but the Communist line was carefully differentiated according to three different levels of discourse. On the international level, it completely denied the existence of any revolution in Spain, insisting that the struggle was simply one of fascism versus democracy, the Republic merely representing parliamentary democracy, as in "France, England, or the United States." Within the Republican zone, the Communist line championed the wartime Republic as the first European "people's republic," not a Communist regime, which needed to discipline and channel the extremism of the anarchists and others. In Catalonia the line was slightly different, as the new Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC — United Socialist Party of Catalonia) had to contest the hegemony of the CNT and declared itself the "partit únic bolxevic revolucionari de Catalunya" (sole Bolshevik revolutionary party of Catalonia), the only force capable of leading a victorious revolution, carefully disciplined and channeled.

Within the Soviet Union, no effort was made to conceal the revolutionary character of the Spanish conflict, officially defined as the "Spanish national-revolutionary war." This Soviet definition held that it was simultaneously a Spanish war of national liberation from Germany and Italy, and a revolutionary struggle of emancipation and dominance for the popular classes of Spain. This formula subsequently became official in Soviet historiography, and to some extent is repeated in historical accounts in Russian to this day. It was also officially adopted by the writers and propagandists of the PCE, who continued to employ the same formula until the final years of the Franco regime.

During the Civil War, the PCE became a mass organization for the first time, by early 1937 swelling to more than a quarter million members. More than any other group, the Communists preached the priority of military strength and winning the war, and soon gained a disproportionate number of command positions in the Ejército Popular, which adopted the Soviet red star as insignia, the German Communist clenched fist as military salute, and the Soviet system of political commissars to maintain loyalty and morale.

Even before the war began, the Comintern had specified that the goal of the Popular Front would be, depending on possibilities, the establishment of a newstyle "people's republic," the first regime of this kind having been introduced by the Soviets in conquered Mongolia in 1924. The people's republic was not a Communist regime but an "advanced middle-class parliamentary republic" that, in the theory of the Comintern, would prepare a later transition to Communism as the conclusion of a three-step process. Communist spokesmen officially designated the new revolutionary republic of the war years as people's republic in March 1937, but this concept was never accepted by the other leftist parties. The type of economic structure appropriate for such a regime, the Communists said, was not the sweeping revolutionary collectivism inaugurated by the anarchists and the rest of the extreme revolutionary Left in Spain, but the New Economic Policy (NEP) established in the Soviet Union in 1921, which stipulated a mixed economy based mostly on private property, with only major industry nationalized by the state. According to the Communists, another priority was to win the lower-middle classes to the support of the Republic, possible only under their policy but not under the policy of the extreme revolutionary Left. Communist spokesmen vehemently denied that this involved "counterrevolution," as the latter constantly charged, insisting that only a carefully channeled and limited revolution was possible so long as the war lasted. Within the Republican zone, Communists stressed that a people's republic was completely different from a bourgeois, capitalist republic, since decisive political, military, and economic power was no longer in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
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Communist military and political influence increased steadily during the first year of the war, and then expanded further after Largo Caballero was replaced by the Socialist Juan Negrín as prime minister in May 1937. Contrary to what was later charged by many critics, Negrín had not been handpicked by the Communists, but was chosen by the semimoderate sector of the Socialists (to which he belonged) and by Manuel Azaña, president of the Republic. He was more a pragmatist than a revolutionary but believed strongly in a Socialist Spain that must at all costs win the war. Negrín seems to have been convinced that if Franco won the war, Hitler and Mussolini would take over Spain. He never became a mere stooge or puppet of the Communists, but he cooperated very broadly with them, especially in military affairs, because they provided the strongest military support and because he considered continued Soviet assistance indispensable to winning the war.
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Communist influence reached its height in 1938, achieving a position of partial hegemony in Republican affairs, but at no time did it completely control the Republican government or army. By the last months of 1938, this partial hegemony produced ever greater resentment among the non-Communist forces, until by the first part of 1939 the Communists, though still powerful, found themselves with few allies outside the prime minister and part of the army.

Stalin, in turn, began to lose hope for Republican victory, and during the late spring and summer of 1938 Soviet diplomats signaled to their counterparts in Germany and other countries that the Soviet Union might be willing to terminate support for the Republic so long as Hitler and Mussolini ended their support for Franco. The Axis leaders, however, were not interested in such a deal, and Stalin therefore could find no "exit strategy" from Spain.

Non-Communist Republicans would later charge for many years that in the end Stalin simply "abandoned" the Republic, while trying to leave the non-Communists stigmatized with responsibility for the defeat. Available evidence suggests the contrary. A final large shipment of Soviet arms began to enter Catalonia in the last days of 1938, though Franco overran the region before the deliveries were complete. Hours before the coup d'état against Negrín led by Col. Segismundo Casado in Madrid on March 6, the last words from Moscow urged the Communists and other Republicans to resist to the last. Soviet policy only changed in August 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, opening the way for the start of the Second World War in Europe.

Subsequently one of the few things on which the spokesmen of the extreme revolutionary left and the Franco regime could agree was that the Communists had controlled the Negrín government, creating the first example of the kind of people's republics imposed by the Soviets after 1945 on the lands that they occupied in eastern Europe. Leading figures of the Spanish Communist Party in exile, such as Dolores Ibárruri ("Pasionaria"), claimed the same thing. Such rare unanimity might be thought evidence of accuracy in this assertion, but was that really the case?