Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  Comorera publicly accused his predecessor of incompetence; DOMENECH responded by reproving the PSUC leader for abolishing the controls he had set up and establishing a free market in food.

  —I knew that if supplies weren’t controlled a black market would spring up. I practised a sort of dictatorship over supplies and prices. I had already organized seven ship-loads of food and other essentials from the Soviet Union. By saying there were shortages, Comorera created them because people rushed to buy whatever they could. Two months later, he had to introduce rationing, which I had wanted to avoid, although I had had ration cards printed in case the need arose. And when the Russian ships arrived, as all but one did under his tenure, he received them as though he had organized their dispatch …

  Comorera insisted that his predecessor had run up debts of 36 million pesetas, half of which he had now paid off; there was a month’s supply of wheat, and delays in distribution were due to slow unloading. Pere RIBA, a close associate of Comorera, was called to the Barcelona docks; a phone message said an anarchist group had captured a load of flour. He confronted the men, arguing that the flour belonged to the Generalitat. ‘We don’t recognize the Generalitat or anything to do with it.’ An argument started, a shot rang out, and the lorry driver’s mate standing next to RIBA dropped dead to the ground.

  —How could you organize, consolidate the revolution with people like that? Comorera sent me to London and Marseilles to close down the libertarian trading offices.57 The anarchist idea of export was to seize a load of champagne, a load of black stockings, a load of this or that, put it all on a freighter and send it to London to be sold. The owner of the champagne, who had fled to England, slapped an injunction on the cargo which an English court ordered embargoed. But what struck me most was the naïvety of sending black stockings to England where surely only waitresses would ordinarily wear them …

  To the man in the street, the argument about food supplies appeared ‘entirely byzantine’. Living in Tarragona, a small town surrounded by countryside, Edmón VALLES, an unaffiliated left-winger sympathetic to the CNT, remembered going hungry under both systems. There was chaos in Tarragona from the start. When the CNT collectivized food distribution, the system worked, in his view, only because the wheat harvest was just being brought in and there were stocks. By the winter of 1936–7, people were going hungry.

  —But the communists were no better at organizing food supplies. To live on one’s rations was to go hungry; inefficient distribution, moreover, meant that you would eat nothing but broad beans for a fortnight, lentils for the next couple of weeks, chick-peas for the next and so on. Lack of food was one of the major factors in the war-weariness that overtook Catalonia. The republic was unable to solve it … 58

  Under this issue, as under every issue, lay the question of power: the CNT’s failure to consolidate its revolution politically in the first weeks and months of the war. Having refused to take power, the libertarians had joined the Generalitat government, believing this the best way to protect their revolution. Firm in the conviction that power in the factories and streets was the determining factor, they accepted three posts in a cabinet of six liberal republicans, two members of the PSUC and one of the POUM. Within a fortnight, the government decreed the dissolution of all the committees that had held power locally in Catalonia, and their replacement by administrative bodies with the same political composition as the Generalitat. Within two months, the dissident communist POUM had been evicted (its anti-Stalinism having made it the target of the Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Spanish communists) without protest from the CNT. Within six months, the Esquerra republicans and PSUC felt strong enough to order the dissolution of the armed workers’ patrols which had been set up in the first days of the revolution. In future, police forces were to belong to no political party or organization; along with factory collectives – many of them already ‘in pawn’ to the Generalitat59 – the workers’ patrols were seen as the last vestige of proletarian power.

  ‘No more concessions; we can retreat no further,’ the CNT proclaimed, withdrawing from the Generalitat. The POUM called yet again for a workers’ and peasants’ government. The crisis lasted three weeks before a new cabinet was announced. It differed little from the previous one, and not surprisingly, it lasted barely a fortnight. A POUM member of the armed workers’ patrols, Miquel COLL, saw the ambiguities of the proposal to ‘disarm the rear’.

  —The patrols, in fact, were no longer revolutionary, were no longer serving the purpose they had been set up for. The members lacked discipline, weren’t carrying out their duties, had become lax. On revolutionary grounds, the Generalitat would have been right to abolish them. But the Generalitat – or rather the PSUC which was behind it all, a communist party without an ounce of communism – had very different ideas. They wanted to control the entire police force in order to be able to take over strategic strongholds, like the Telephone Exchange, which were still controlled by the CNT …

  A week after the new cabinet’s formation, a leading PSUC-UGT leader (and former treintista), Roldán Cortada, was assassinated. The CNT denounced the murder which the UGT attributed to FAI ‘uncontrollables’. The funeral was turned into a massive demonstration of communist strength. A central government force took over Catalan frontier posts from the CNT, and at Puigcerdá three anarchists were killed. Andreu CAPDEVILA, who had been taken from the factory floor to become the CNT’s acting president of the Economics Council, and who was now the Generalitat economics councillor, was aghast that workers were killing each other. During a cabinet meeting, he turned to Comorera.

  —‘This is something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Workers being murdered by fellow workers.’ Comorera, barely raising his voice, replied: ‘Oh, it’s of no particular importance.’ He wasn’t a man who really felt anything about the working class; a bourgeois, cold and ambitious, he had given himself over body and soul to the communists …

  The May day parade – the first since the revolution – was banned by the Generalitat; while massive UGT-CNT rallies were jointly organized in Valencia and elsewhere, people in Barcelona went to work as usual. All the organizations were on the alert. In the CNT woodworkers’ union, Eduardo PONS PRADES heard that the libertarian defence committee of Poble Sec had ordered some boxes to be removed from the basement: hand-grenades and short arms. The spark that set off the explosion came on Monday, 3 May. During the siesta hour, police forces led by the communist police commissioner moved into the Telephone Exchange in the Plaça de Catalunya, which a CNT-dominated workers’ control committee (as such, legally recognized by the collectivization decree) had held since the start of the revolution. There was shooting, the CNT telephone workers resisted, and the news spread like wildfire through an already tense city. Pere RIBA, Comorera’s close associate, recalled that he had known of the decision since a party executive committee meeting several days before.

  —‘Pedro’ [Ernö Gerö,60 the Comintern adviser to the PSUC] always attended these meetings. Perhaps it was he who brought up the matter, though I can’t be sure because I didn’t attend the meetings. It was high time such a step was taken. The CNT listened in to all the conversations between the central government, the Generalitat and abroad. That couldn’t be allowed to continue. We had tried unsuccessfully to get a member on to the control committee to stop the listening in. So it was decided to take more energetic measures.61 Of course, had the PSUC been in a position to listen in to telephone conversations it would have done so also. The party always wanted to be well-informed … 62

  For several months, RIBA remembered, it had been openly said in inner party circles that the situation with the CNT–FAI could not continue. ‘These people are going to have to be eliminated,’ Comorera told him on one occasion.63

  It was unlikely, however, that this was considered the opportune moment for anything as drastic; more probably, the PSUC and its Esquerra ally expected the CNT, as usual, to protest at the Telephone Exchange take-over and then, u
nwillingly, accept it. Instead, this turned into a trial of strength. Fighting broke out which lasted, intermittently, for five days. On the one side, the PSUC, Esquerra, Estat Català and police forces; on the other, the libertarians and POUM.

  The dissident communists of the POUM were unhappy at the turn of events: they had not wanted this to happen. But, recalled Juan ANDRADE of the executive committee, once the workers were in the streets, ‘we had to support them.’ Moreover, the party saw that the repression was aimed at it.

  —The Generalitat’s step in taking over the Telefónica was counter-revolutionary; but it was also just. The CNT acted as owner of the exchange, controlling calls, listening in, censoring even. This state of affairs couldn’t continue …

  For the PSUC the fighting was a putsch by a group of ‘uncontrollables’ which included anarchists and POUMists.

  —The POUMists provided the political platform for the putsch, explained Pere ARDIACA, editor of the PSUC newspaper Treball As I saw it, there were two aspects to this platform: the revolution had to be made at all costs, even at the expense of sacrificing the left-wing petty bourgeois forces which could help in the anti-fascist struggle. Secondly, the Soviet Union’s aid was designed to arm the communists in order to liquidate anarchists and the POUM, and to install a Soviet-style communism in Spain. The POUM’s paper, La Batalla, is there to prove it! Today I believe it is necessary to correct some – but only some – of the ideas we of the PSUC held at the time …

  By dawn on Tuesday, the barricades had gone up. With the exception of the area around the Generalitat, CNT and POUM workers held almost the whole city. Behind the barricades, CNT companions explained to Eduardo PONS PRADES, the young libertarian of the woodworkers’ union, who had just arrived on his bicycle, what was happening.

  —‘The Chinese [the libertarians’ name for the communists] are trying to sabotage the revolution. They’re going to take over the collectives, the workers will simply have to work and keep quiet under their heel.’ It seemed true. When I produced my CNT membership card to a group of civilians who stopped me, they shouted that it was shit. ‘You’ll see what’s going to happen. You think you’re revolutionaries, but all you are is a tribe of defeatists, as Comorera called you’ …

  The historical memory of Kronstadt and the Ukraine and the Bolsheviks’ liquidation of the anarchists, he thought, remained very alive. Inside the woodworkers’ union headquarters, the atmosphere was like that of the first days of the war.

  —‘Only this time we’re going to make the revolution properly, so it puts down roots deep and strong.’ As for the ‘politicians’, their fate was already decided: labour battalions where they could redeem their counter-revolutionary ‘political’ sins …

  Leading anarchists, communists, socialists and President Companys broadcast appeals to end the factional fighting. García Oliver, CNT minister in the central government, who long ago had called for the CNT to take power in Barcelona, rushed from Valencia. In a bathetic radio speech, he proclaimed all those who had been killed his brothers. ‘I kneel before them and kiss them.’ Instantly, behind the barricades, his speech was baptized The Legend of the Kiss – the title of a light opera.

  —‘Another Judas!’ Hernández, the woodworkers’ leader, exploded. ‘What’s the good of reminding us that we’re at war. He should have thought of that a long time ago – and let us get on with making the revolution which is our job. As though the war had any meaning if we can’t make the revolution at the same time!’ …

  On the other side of the barricades there were moments of demoralization. Manuel CRUELLS, Catalan nationalist, felt the same fear he had known on 19 July when he fought the military: ‘We’re going to lose, we’re caught in a trap.’ From behind a cobble barricade, he could see the PSUC holding out in the Hotel Colón in the Plaça de Catalunya; it gave him hope that perhaps the trap would not be sprung. In any case, he wasn’t fighting to crush the CNT.

  —At that moment in fact I was a CNT member. To be a syndicalist was quite distinct from supporting anarchism, the FAI. I was fighting to put an end to the CNT’s irresponsibility. I was disillusioned by the anarchist revolution and knew that, as a Catalan nationalist, I had to fight on the Generalitat’s side. But I had no illusions about the communists. I could see that Companys had no alternative but to play their card since he couldn’t rely on the CNT, although it was the latter which geared into the mentality of the Catalan working class – something that certainly couldn’t be said of the PSUC …

  Companys announced a new four-man government. On his way to take up his new post as Generalitat minister, Antoni Sesé, the UGT secretary-general, was killed. The fighting intensified; assassinations increased. The Italian anarchist, Camillo Berneri, one of the most original of libertarian thinkers, was arrested with his collaborator Barbieri and murdered. The central government in Valencia began to intervene, sending two destroyers to the port, and taking over police and defence from the Generalitat. In Valencia, the CNT viewed the situation with gravity. Joan MANENT, Badalona CNT leader and private secretary to Peiró, the CNT minister of industry in the central government, thought it catastrophic. ‘It was as bad as though we were going to lose the war the next day. The communists staged a provocation and the CNT, always ready to take the bait, fell for it … ’

  —But what did all these manoeuvres and traps matter, reflected his companion, Josep COSTA, Badalona CNT textile leader, if little by little we were being reduced to mere spectators of our own slaughter? Our blood boiled. We had Barcelona surrounded; it only needed the word and we would have cleaned out the communist plotters and their dispossessed, intriguing petty-bourgeois lackeys who were sabotaging the revolution. The war would have ended sooner – with Franco’s victory – no doubt, but it would have spared us having to go on to the same result two years later; would have saved us being the scapegoats for so many things we never did and which were later held against us. But the CNT wasn’t prepared to order troops to leave the front, for that would have let the enemy through. There was only one man who could have put an end to the provocation: Durruti. He wouldn’t have hesitated a moment …

  Unknown to most, the CNT had in Barcelona 500 well-armed and equipped men (all that remained of the 3,000 who had gone to Madrid) of Durruti’s former column, now under the command of Ricardo SANZ, Durruti’s companion and successor. They were returning to the Aragon front where other units of the division were prepared to move on Barcelona; they had telephoned SANZ to ascertain his intentions. He replied that he was at the orders of the CNT, the organization would have to decide. He went to see García Oliver.

  —‘Listen,’ I said to him. ‘What haggling, what bargaining is going on? What’s to be done? The division –’ ‘Ah no, there’s to be none of that,’ he replied. So I knew. None of my troops moved to decapitate the reactionary movement which was the cause of it all. Our representatives in the central government called instead for a cease-fire. My personal feelings didn’t matter; I was a disciplined man, a military commander …

  The CNT leaders continued to call for an end to the fighting. Wilebaldo SOLANO, secretary of the POUM’s youth movement, JCI (Juventud Comunista Ibérica), accompanied Nin to see the CNT regional committee leaders. The POUM leader explained that this was a moment of rupture: the working class had risen, held arms. The movement, which had started spontaneously, must either go forwards or back.

  —We believed we had to take the offensive, demand the Generalitat’s resignation, confront the problem of creating a government of the working-class organizations – to seize power …

  The means, SOLANO thought, were at hand. There had been no difficulty in forming a CNT–POUM column in the north of the city, the Gràcia barrio, which was ready to advance on the PSUC headquarters and the Generalitat.

  —‘Yes, that’s all very interesting,’ the CNT leaders said. ‘But things mustn’t be allowed to get too complicated.’ Their members had ‘shown their teeth’, as one of them put it. ‘Companys will now
reflect on the matter, the situation will probably change, become more radical – and then we’ll confront the PSUC and all that lot.’ Nin explained again. The revolution had reached a critical juncture. It wasn’t a matter of simple government changes. We were at war with Franco, the situation in Catalonia might not be understood in the rest of republican Spain. The revolution had to pass on to a more advanced stage; this had to be explained on the radio, in the press. It was urgent. In effect, he proposed forming a liaison committee to lead the struggle, formulate programmes, take up the problems connected with power. But he didn’t hammer home the point, he was waiting to see their reaction.

  No, they said, we were going too far. Nin always said interesting things, they appreciated him – but this was dramatizing events! They refused to reach agreement. As we got up to leave, one of them patted us on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s been a pleasant evening together.’ I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I’d crossed the city from barricade to barricade twice in a few hours simply to be told what a pleasant evening we’d had …

  A small anarchist organization, the Friends of Durruti, came out openly against the CNT leaders, calling for a revolutionary junta, with the POUM’s participation because the party had come out on the workers’ side. Until then, its relations with the POUM had been notably cool. The call found little echo.64 What carried real weight in the CNT was the neighbourhood defence committees, the middle-level militants who had made the revolution by taking over factories and workplaces in the first days, and who felt that their revolution was being betrayed. Frustrated by the rise of an official communist party where none had seriously challenged them before, angered by its large intake of petty bourgeois whom they saw as their enemy, these militants were fighting not for political power but to crush the PSUC and its allies.