—They were terrified, they thought the situation was turning out badly. In that they were only displaying their sound sense: anyone could see there was no real way out, that the movement lacked head and feet. Those trotskyists weren’t posing the question of power. When the central government announced its intervention in the Generalitat, Jean Rous, the Fourth International’s delegate, came up to me. ‘I can’t see any solution to this situation,’ I said; and he replied: ‘No, nor can I. There isn’t any.’ It was only after the events that they came to a different conclusion, writing to Trotsky that the situation was ripe for working-class power. The trouble was that Trotsky believed everything the trotskyists in Barcelona – a great number of whom were foreigners, petty intellectuals of mediocre calibre – wrote him … 73
After several weeks, Andrade and his comrades were transferred from the checa in Madrid to the state prison in Valencia. A FAI police chief in Madrid, whom he knew, came to see him and to offer his services to ensure that the transfer was made safely. The next day he returned saying there was nothing he could do, the communists would not allow him to accompany them to Valencia. Then the justice minister, Irujo, sent an assault guard captain, a Basque like himself, to escort the prisoners.
—A rough and ready sort, a peasant, but a fine man. ‘Minister Irujo has sent me to guarantee your safe transfer. Have no fear for your lives, my men will guard you.’ We were taken out and put in a prison wagon. In front, went a car full of plain-clothes communist police; behind the same. It was really quite funny. We had to stop three or four times to urinate. The communist police surrounded us and the assault guards surrounded the police. We got to Valencia safely …
Sixteen months after his arrest, he and five other ranking POUM militants were tried by the republic’s newly created special espionage tribunal on charges of spying and collaboration with the enemy. All six were acquitted of the charges, the evidence having shown, in the court’s words, that ‘all of them were proven long-time anti-fascists’. None the less, they were found guilty of having rebelled against the constituted government during the May events in Barcelona. He and three other members of the executive were sentenced to fifteen years;74 one, Jordi Arquer, to eleven years, and the remaining two acquitted. The POUM and its youth movement were formally outlawed.
* * *
—It was my first real shock. I simply couldn’t believe that Nin was a fascist agent, recalled a PSUC militant, a pre-war socialist youth.
When the PSUC had formed, Alejandro VITORIA had suggested that the POUM be asked to join, for it had within its ranks, in his opinion, the most militant marxists in Catalonia. But no attention was paid to his suggestion; even worse, the PSUC had affiliated immediately to the Comintern which had isolated the party from the POUM, the CNT and the socialists in the rest of Spain, thus reducing the possibility of an understanding with these organizations.
—And now this. I obeyed the party line about the POUM, but without conviction. To have protested would have been to start an internal party struggle when unity and winning the war was the main priority. But it caused me remorse, personally and politically …
He was not alone; but he was in a minority. The PSUC played no part in Nin’s assassination, Pere ARDIACA, editor of the party paper Treball, asserted categorically. The executive committee never discussed the question of liquidating the POUM.
—That was a matter for the PCE central committee and the representatives newly arrived from abroad. We certainly considered the POUM as traitors, as spies and enemy agents whose sole task was to disrupt republican unity in order to prevent victory in the war. This belief, which today we must correct, obviously determined a particular attitude on our part, quite independently of the fact that there may have been one or two enemy agents in the POUM’s ranks. The same could be said of the PSUC – indeed, we had to expel people, and people high up in the party’s ranks, the leadership even. I had been in the BOC before joining the communist party, so I knew that its militants were honest and sincere in their revolutionary beliefs, even if those were different to ours …
If his party had pursued the same policy with the POUM as with the CNT, meeting jointly from time to time, the POUM’s policy, he was convinced, could have been influenced and the May events prevented. Instead, the PSUC had held to its positions, contributing thereby to the POUM membership maintaining its positions because they saw themselves under attack from the PSUC.
—My party had no hand in Nin’s assassination; that I can state categorically. The assassination took place in Madrid. Everyone knows who was responsible, but I’m not in a position to name names because officially I don’t know. None the less, there can be no doubt whatever that any charges against Nin should have been heard, at the very least, in a court. His assassination is a heavy legacy indeed.
Though we had nothing to do with the POUM’s persecution, we regarded it with favour. Later, at the POUM trial, we were stupefied by the evidence given, but at the same time it never occurred to us to protest because we shared the prosecution’s opinion …
*
Two months after the POUM’s repression, Negrín, the prime minister, issued a decree dissolving the Council of Aragon: ‘moral and material needs of the war imperiously demand the concentration of authority in the hands of the state.’ Aragon was the CNT’s last bulwark; to strike a blow against it was to strike another blow in the battle for central government control over Catalonia, for Aragon was Catalonia’s battle front and also to some extent its agricultural hinterland. The harvest was just about in, the first full crop under collectivization.
The communist agricultural minister’s decree legalizing the collectives for a further year was now revealed as a hollow promise to ensure the harvest was reaped. Lister’s 11th division was sent to Aragon; the communist commander was ordered by Prieto, the socialist defence minister, to carry out the government’s dissolution decree. His forces swept through Aragon, arresting CNT leaders, including the Council of Aragon’s president and other councillors, as well as village collectivists. Before leaving for Aragon, the division’s political delegates told the men that the CNT had set up the council in order to establish a libertarian communist regime, recalled Timoteo RUIZ, the peasant lad who had started the war with a lance and was now a junior staff officer in the division.
—We were told that the peasantry was hostile to the council and frequently crossed to the enemy lines. When we got there we went round the villages disarming the people. We told them there was a war on, that it was being fought to defend the republic and ensure the triumph of democracy, and that the peasantry must be respected. What they were doing didn’t correspond to the needs of the war. The peasants welcomed us as though we were their liberators, delighted to have their lands, tools and livestock back and to be able to work their land as they wanted …
Overwhelmed by the way the peasantry appeared to have suffered, the collectivization seemed to him ‘the most counter-revolutionary experience of the war’. One peasant came up to him and said that when ‘those men with red and black neckerchiefs and bristling with arms came through here they seemed to me like the guardia civil – only worse. The guardia used to lay down the law here – but they didn’t tell us how to work our land.’
—What we were determined to put an end to was the dragooning of the peasantry into collectives, not the collectives themselves. We weren’t opposed to the latter – how could we be when we were encouraging their creation everywhere? No, it was forced collectivization, the abolition of money, which demoralized the peasantry and stopped them from working as hard, which we were opposed to … 75
Antonio ROSEL, the Aragonese communist foundryman who had listened to so many peasants’ complaints about the collectives when he served on a joint UGT–CNT commission, was arrested by a communist military patrol in the streets of Caspe. He produced his party card, informed the troops that he was a member of the communist party’s regional committee.
—‘We don’t give a dam
n about anyone or anything here. We’re in charge and that’s that.’ They couldn’t have cared less. Lister was proclaimed a liberator by the people. But he overstepped his orders. It required a great deal of care to ensure that in liquidating a bad experiment we didn’t go to the other extreme. But that was what happened. We went from an anarchist dictatorship to a communist one. People who had been, and always would be, enemies of the working class because their interests were fundamentally opposed, were now given encouragement and support simply because of their hostility to the CNT. Later, these same people turned their hostility on the communist party and the republican government …
His experience was a clear indictment of the dangers inherent in out-and-out support of the anti-libertarian peasantry. At the same time, few libertarians were prepared to defend their own creation, the Council of Aragon. In the opinion of Ernesto MARGELI, secretary of the Mas de las Matas collective, all but one of its members, the economics councillor, had proven themselves useless. Macario ROYO, the CNT national committeeman who had been on the commission which set up the council, had lost confidence in its president, Joaquín Ascaso, and Ortiz, the commander of the 25th division. ‘Their headquarters was more like a house of pleasure than anything else,’ he observed after a visit to complain that they were preventing collectivists from fetching fertilizer from a warehouse which they had declared in a war zone. ‘If it had been the communists or republicans sabotaging the collectives, I might have understood. But no! It was CNT militants.’ There hung over some of the Council’s leading members a cloud of immorality which was offensive to libertarians.
Ernesto MARGELI was amongst those arrested. Taken to Lister’s command post in an olive grove near Caspe, he was interrogated by an officer.
—‘You’re not defending this flag,’ he said, pointing at the republican flag in the room. ‘And what about you?’ I replied. ‘It’s the Russian flag you defend!’ The officer shouted at me angrily. Then he started questioning me again. They were obsessed with the idea that the CNT had stocks of arms, an ammunition dump in Aragon somewhere …
One night he and the other prisoners were lined up against a wall under car headlights; the attempt to frighten them into talking was clear enough. MARGELI always gave the same answer. He knew nothing – but even if he had known he wouldn’t tell them. ‘None of you ever belonged to a working-class party or organization before the war. You’re all new.’
Released after five days, thanks to the CNT national committee’s intervention, he returned to Mas de las Matas the day before Lister’s troops reached it. Having been originally arrested while on a trip from the village, he was now arrested again. With the exception of one companion, who had already shared his fate, all the others on the village committee fled to the safety of a CNT division in the neighbouring township of Hijar.
Lister’s men ordered a new village council appointed, composed of republicans – ‘a bit soft, but not right-wingers’ – examined the accounts of the municipality and the collective, and questioned the men about jewellery collected on behalf of the Council of Aragon. On none of these scores could they find anything illegal; MARGELI and his companion were allowed to go free. They were told to call an assembly of the collectivists. Assault guards attended.
—Everyone was told that he was free to leave the collective if he wanted. We asked each member individually. The right-wingers, those who had been obliged to join, took the opportunity of leaving. There may have been villages where Lister’s men dissolved the collectives, but not in Mas de las Matas …
Nor in Alloza where the same procedure was carried out by a group of assault guards. Juan MARTINEZ, the medium-holding peasant there who had thought the collectives were not a bad idea, remembered the moment when a captain told the villagers they were free to choose.
—Most of the people left, and were happy to do so. Those who remained – about a quarter of the original number – were under no pressure to do so; nobody bothered them, nobody tried to break up their collective. In fact, one or two of the peasants with bigger holdings left their land in because they were frightened the situation might change again …
Several hundred CNT militants on local and regional committees were arrested and some killed. The aim of the sweep appeared to be not to smash the collectives, but to smash CNT domination in Aragon.
Estimates as to how many people remained in the collectives after the communist action are difficult to make. Ernesto Margeli, who shortly afterwards enlisted in the 26th (ex-Durruti) division, estimated that in Mas de las Matas it was as high as 60 per cent. In Alloza, where pre-war there had been no CNT, it was significant that perhaps one quarter of the collectivists refused to leave.76
—The people now showed more determination to keep their collectives going, more solidarity. Older peasants, men of forty-five or fifty, many of whom had never belonged to the CNT before, expressed their determination to continue the experiment and asked for advice and guidance, recalled Félix CARRASQUER at his school of collectivist administrators. In fact, things were much easier now that the younger militants were out of the way, there were none of those byzantine discussions of the past …
At the front, there was a considerable movement among CNT troops to retaliate. Sevilla PASTOR, libertarian youth member from Mas de las Matas serving in the 26th division, was prepared to leave the front and fight it out. He, and others like him, were restrained by their commanders who told them that other, diplomatic means had to be found to solve the problem.
—Many different thoughts went through my mind. But in the end it always came back to the same thing: the most important objective was to fight the main enemy, the one in the trenches opposite. Most of us felt like that …
Saturnino CAROD had great difficulty persuading his troops not to abandon their positions to fight the communists in the rear. Had they done so then, or three months before during the May events in Barcelona, the way would have been left open for the enemy to walk into Aragon and Catalonia, he thought. That catastrophe was avoided only because he and others in similar positions were able to contain the troops. But seeing the equipment Lister’s division deployed in tanks, machine-guns and machine-rifles caused him further despair. ‘We hadn’t realized the difference between our divisions and theirs until then. Now, with rage in our hearts, we realized how under-equipped we were’ …
Once the sweep was finished there were fraternization gatherings. CAROD began to wonder whether Lister (whose division was used as a shock force, not for manning the lines) had not come to regret his action, for he began to offer his services to various villages and collectives in the region. Relations between communist and anarchist units improved somewhat, although never to the point CAROD believed necessary. Throughout the war, he reflected, the anarcho-syndicalists lived with their eyes fixed on the front line and turned towards the rear.
—Always expecting to be stabbed in the back, always knowing that if we created problems, only the enemy across the lines would stand to gain. It was a tragedy for the anarcho-syndicalist movement; but it was a tragedy for something much greater – the Spanish people. For it can never be forgotten that it was the working class and peasantry which, by demonstrating their ability to run industry and agriculture collectively, allowed the republic to continue the struggle for thirty-two months. It was they who created a war industry, who kept agricultural production increasing, who formed the militias and later the army. Without their creative endeavour, the republic could not have fought the war …
*
The last word on the collectives can safely be left with the nationalists. An official report on the Levant, issued a year after the end of the war by the nationalist ministry of industry and commerce, wrote: ‘The number of collectivized industries and businesses has been truly extraordinary; it can be said that almost the totality of industry and commerce operated in this form. At the present time there remain groups which have not been totally de-collectivized; this is because of the passivity shown by thos
e concerned who, seeing that their attitude does not endanger them, are doing everything possible to delay de-collectivization.’77
Not even enemy victory had yet crushed the movement.
* * *
I have decided to end the war rapidly in the north. The lives and property of those who surrender with their arms and who are not guilty of murder will be respected. But if the surrender is not immediate, I shall raze Vizcaya to its very foundations, beginning with the war industry. I have the means to do so.
General Mola, Proclamation to the people of Euzkadi (March 1937)
* * *
44. See Points of Rupture, D.
45. In which he was following Kropotkin’s teachings in The Conquest of Bread: the revolution would not dispossess the smallholders but would ‘send its young people to help them reap the corn and bring home the harvest’. (See Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, p. 86.)
46. Among the major agreements reached at the congress were those to abolish all money, including local currency, and substitute a standard ration book; to permit smallholders to remain non-collectivized as long as they did not ‘interfere with the interests of the collective’ from which they could expect no benefits; to organize the collectives at district rather than local level; and to refuse the Council of Aragon the monopoly of foreign trade. (See Leval, op. cit., pp. 83–90, 197, 203; also Mintz, L’ Autogestion dans l’Espagne Révolutionnaire, pp. 100–102.)
47. The problem of collectivists’ freedom to leave villages – permanently or on trips – exercised the imagination of observers from the start. With the abolition of money, the collective held the upper hand since anyone wishing to travel had to get ‘republican’ money from the committee. This meant justifying the trip. In those times, it must be remembered, travel was not likely to be undertaken unless there was considerable need. In Mas de las Matas, the collective prided itself on sending people to Barcelona for specialist medical attention; and the collective paid the bus fares of families to visit their sons at the front. But for a person without a union card to leave the village, even on a short trip, it was necessary to get a pass, according to a right-winger. Ill-health in Alloza was seen as a valid justification and the schoolmaster’s father-in-law left to have a hernia operation, taking the opportunity not to return. As lorries went frequently to Barcelona with produce it was not difficult to get a lift. Conditions obviously varied from collective to collective and, as in many other aspects, generalization is impossible.
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