Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  After three abortive risings, the CNT outside Asturias – in particular, the Catalan CNT – failed to respond to the challenge of the October 1934 revolution. Catalan libertarian militants had been persecuted by the ultra-nationalist wing of the Esquerra and the CNT saw the rising in Barcelona as a petty bourgeois affair.

  —I told Durruti: ‘It’s a revolutionary’s duty to channel such a movement along the right road –’ But the fact of the matter was that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Esquerra which was planning to rise, along with the forces in the Workers’ Alliance. Their only excuse – after always saying: ‘We’ll meet in the streets’ – was that the Generalitat had arrested some of their militants. In part those arrests were due to the fact that the CNT had warned the public about the rising …

  The Asturian CNT, ALVAREZ knew, could have been criticized for signing a pact with the UGT at a regional level without a decision having been taken nationally. José María Martínez (who was killed in the October rising) and he attended a Madrid CNT plenum in June 1934, to explain the Asturian CNT’s position. After a great deal of negotiation, a compromise was worked out.

  —If, within two months, a CNT national conference met and voted against such an alliance, we would break our pact with the UGT. If, on the other hand, we were able to persuade the national conference of the correctness of our position, the pact would be made national. The conference was never called …

  The possibility of a national pact with the UGT was not returned to until the CNT’s extraordinary congress in Saragossa two months before the start of the war. That congress, which saw the re-incorporation of a large number of the treintista opposition unions, consecrated the anarchist tendency within the movement.

  The free commune was to be the keystone of the future libertarian society; federations and economic plans, while recognized, were to be created only if the communes considered them necessary. Within time, each commune would be given the agricultural and industrial elements necessary for its autonomy, ‘in accord with the biological principle which affirms that man – in this case the commune – is freer the less he needs from others’, said the resolution on the nature of libertarian communism.

  It was not the CNT rural masses who pushed through this bucolic programme; it was the major Barcelona unions, in particular the textile workers. Abad de Santillán, the anarchist writer, who had himself swung from a position of trusting the ‘spontaneity of the masses’ to that of believing in the need for economic organization, criticized the programme. ‘There’s talk of the family, delinquency, jealousy, nudism and many other things [the resolution had gone into all of these as part of the future life under libertarian communism] but you hardly find a word about work, workplaces or the organization of production’. It was in this condition that the CNT found itself two months later when faced with the task of establishing a revolutionary economic order in Catalonia.

  *

  The anarcho-syndicalist insurrections in the first two years of the new regime destabilized the republic; but they expressed also the incipient working-class discontent with the republic which the socialists, whose participation in the government was damping it down, would themselves feel shortly when they moved to the left. The revolutionary drama lay in the fact that – except in Asturias – the two did not coincide. The socialists in government shared the responsibility for placing the militants of the rival union beyond the law; the anarcho-syndicalists refused to see that revolution – if such could be made – required more than the CNT alone, and thus contributed gravely to the lack of unity in the working class.

  E. October 1934, the Popular Front, orthodox and dissident communists

  In 1934 the first shots of the civil war were fired, and postures were assumed which were to make the conflict virtually inevitable.

  Amongst the working-class organizations the socialist party, after two years of junior partnership in the liberal republican-socialist coalition, veered sharply to the left in 1933–4. The rise of fascism, Hitler’s accession to power, Dollfuss’s corporative social christian dictatorship which seemed to share common aspects with the CEDA, and was shortly to drown the Austrian socialists in blood, were among the international factors. At home, unemployment – 1933 was the worst year of the depression in Spain; the ineffectiveness of agrarian reform; the repression of anarcho-syndicalists in Casas Viejas; the great number of political prisoners; and the increasing resistance being offered by employers, were among the factors that explained the change from reformist collaboration to revolutionary opposition in little more than a year. A month before the socialist ministers left the coalition government in 1933, Largo Caballero, the Labour Minister and UGT secretary-general, said that his conviction that it was impossible to ‘carry out socialist tasks within a bourgeois democracy’ had been confirmed.65 The defeat at the 1933 general elections doubtless further served to radicalize sectors of the party. The Landworkers’ Federation (now accounting for nearly half the UGT’s strength, which had quadrupled in eighteen months) was declaring that without revolution there could be no agrarian reform. The socialist youth declared for revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  —Disappointment at the results of collaboration with the petty bourgeoisie was so great that the party and youth saw revolution as the only way forward. This wasn’t surprising, maintained Sócrates GOMEZ, a Madrid socialist youth leader, because the conquest of proletarian power was a fundamental principle of our party, which was the most class-conscious, marxist socialist party in Europe …

  Even Prieto, the centrist socialist leader, warned that the party would unleash revolution if the new government attempted a coup d’ é tat. Not everyone in the party agreed; nor did all those who did agree have the same reasons for doing so. None the less, with the inevitability of a pendulum’s swing, a large sector of the party went from being the unconditional sustaining force of the republican alliance to total rupture with it. This extreme posture was given additional support by the evidence that, sooner or later, the CEDA, the largest single party in the new parliament, would demand direct governmental participation rather than confine itself to parliamentary support. ‘Better Vienna than Berlin’ became a socialist slogan. The conquest of power – or at least, the denial of power to the CEDA – became an increasingly immediate aim.

  The mass catholic party was seen by a large spectrum of republican opinion, ranging from the centre to the left, as an ‘enemy of the republic’, a fascist threat. Innumerable public statements by party leaders, including Gil Robles, could be adduced to support the latter view.66 Its counter-revolutionary, anti-socialist policies were undeniable; its initial refusal to declare itself unambiguously republican suspicious; its rhetoric menacingly fascistic on occasions, especially at its youth movement’s rallies (El Escorial, April 1934, and Covadonga, Asturias, in August of the same year). Despite the latter, the fact remained that it was a clerical-conservative parliamentary party67 whose ambiguities were those of its mass following: a bourgeoisie frightened of revolution and unsure whether the republican regime would further or contain that threat. Inspired by the social catholicism of Pope Leo XIII, its principles were the defence of Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order, Work and Property. Its determination to smash the left, its aim of revising the constitution to accord with the ‘affirmation and defence of the fundamental principles of christian civilization’, and its long-term corporativist aims were the principal threat to the left republican and working-class organizations.

  During 1934, there was certainly an element of provocation in the CEDA’s rhetoric. Sooner or later, it feared, a revolutionary coup would take place; advisable, therefore, to face it from a ‘position of power before the enemy was better prepared’.68

  Nowhere more than in the mining valleys of Asturias had the socialist radicalization, especially amongst the youth, taken firmer root. Many had believed that the seizure of power was the only way forward since General Sanjurjo’s abortive monarchist rising in
Seville in 1932. At the beginning of 1934 the first defence groups – a euphemism – were formed. This was followed in March by a momentous political agreement: the Asturian UGT and CNT signed a pact agreeing, ‘in the face of the economic and political situation under the bourgeois regime, to joint action with the exclusive aim of bringing about the social revolution’. The new revolutionary regime would be based on ‘socialist federalist principles’. The Workers’ Alliance, which had been created in Catalonia by the Bloc Obrer i Camperol (Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, one of the two parties which later founded the POUM), was to reach its culmination in Asturias, where proletarian unity had a long tradition (see section D).

  —Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists in Asturias were different to their counterparts in the rest of the country. Relations between the two, though they had been bad at times, were on the whole good, asserted Alberto FERNANDEZ, a prominent socialist youth member. The originality of the Workers’ Alliance was that it was initiated by the two trade union organizations. Only after did the political parties join …

  —We thought collaboration with the UGT was essential, especially as the working class had seen that the republic was not going to satisfy its aspirations, stressed Eladio FANJUL, a FAI steelworker from La Felguera.

  Only one proletarian party, the Spanish communist party, initially refused to join the Workers’ Alliance which it went so far as to castigate as ‘the nerve centre of the counter-revolution’.69 Barely a fortnight before the October rising, however, the party, whose call for a single front with the socialist party and CNT had gone unanswered, embarked on what it termed an ‘audacious tactical turn’ and joined. The change marked the breaking out of a self-imposed ghetto and the party’s first real entry into working-class politics which was to reap it very considerable gains.

  The rising was precipitated when, in the first days of October, Gil Robles withdrew his party’s support from the government; the outcome of the crisis was that three CEDA members – although not Gil Robles – joined the radical government. Republican leaders as far to the right as Miguel Maura wrote to the president of the republic and broke all relations with the country’s ‘existing institutions’, maintaining that the president was guilty of handing over the republic to its enemies. The socialist party leadership in Madrid, which had turned down a communist proposal for a general strike, gave the order on its own to launch an armed uprising.

  In the small township of Figueredo, just south of Mieres in Asturias, Alberto FERNANDEZ of the socialist youth had been waiting two nights for the signal. At 2 a.m. on 5 October he heard the sound of an old car advancing and jumped out on to the road. It was the Avance (the Oviedo socialist newspaper) car. Antonio Llaneza, son of the great mineworkers’ leader, was in it.

  —He took my hand and said with great feeling: ‘This is what we have been waiting for. A la calle (Into the streets).’ ‘To the very limit?’ ‘Yes.’ That meant it was the revolution. The seizure of power. The inauguration of socialism. Not simply to restore the republican regime to what it had been in its first two years, as some later said. We set off …

  Within forty-eight hours, the miners and metalworkers had captured nearly seventy guardia civil posts in the mining valleys, won their first pitched battle against the army on the outskirts of Oviedo and were fighting in the city; to the south, they had pinned down army units sent from León. Foreshadowing what would happen in most parts of Popular Front Spain less than two years later, revolutionary committees were set up in the villages and townships. Each set about making the revolution, instituting forms of war communism. For two weeks in the Nalón and Caudal mining valleys the proletariat held power.

  Elsewhere, the rising failed. In Barcelona, the Esquerra, in almost inevitable conflict with the radical government in Madrid, rose on 6 October and was forced to submit by a small army unit six hours later. The CNT, which had refused to join the Workers’ Alliance in Barcelona, refused also to join the uprising; without the CNT’s support, no rising could succeed in the Catalan capital (see sections C and D).

  Indecisively led by Caballero himself, the movement rapidly fizzled out in Madrid. In the countryside, the socialist-led national peasants’ strike of the previous June had left the Landworkers’ Federation dismantled and the peasantry in considerable disarray: they repaid the industrial proletariat’s failure to support their strike by failing to mobilize en masse now.70 In Bilbao, the strike lasted eleven days. Juan IGLESIAS, a shop assistant and treasurer of the Bilbao socialist youth, could not understand why the strikers did not launch an attack on the centre of the city and take it over. Control of the working-class district, centred round the Calle de San Francisco and the casa del pueblo, was complete; some arms, stocks of home-made hand grenades were available.

  —We waited four days, then we decided to act on our own. Two hours before we planned to set off, we received an order not to move …

  Ramón RUBIAL, metalworker and president of the socialist youth in Erandio, on the right bank of the estuary, believed that the counter-order was given when it became clear, after the Catalan failure, that the Bilbao working class would be uselessly sacrificed if it rose. The strike continued, but the workers from the heavy industries on the left bank and the iron-ore mines, where the socialist party and UGT were strongest, did not emulate their Asturian comrades’ insurrectionary bid for power.

  Isolated, the revolution in Asturias could not hold out. In the course of its two weeks, many lessons were offered for future consideration: ammunition, which was in shorter supply than arms, was wasted; the shortage (which the capture of the Oviedo arms factory did little to relieve) afflicted the insurrection. Aerial bombing caused panic amongst the militiamen;71 military expertise (in the shape of a captured guardia civil lieutenant who offered his services) increased the militiamen’s fighting ability. In the rearguard, there was the emergence of a lumpen-proletariat, a certain amount of pillaging and a number of unjustifiable assassinations. And, as defeat threatened from 11 October with the government forces beginning to recapture Oviedo, a number of revolutionary committees took flight.

  On the advice of General Franco, the government called in the Foreign Legion and Moroccan troops – the first time these forces had been used militarily in the peninsula. At the end of the fortnight, Belarmino Tomás, the veteran Asturian socialist leader, negotiated the surrender of the mining villages on condition that the Foreign Legion and Moors did not form the vanguard of the occupying forces.

  Alberto FERNANDEZ, the socialist youth baker from Figueredo, had been wounded in the fighting and was in hospital in Mieres when the troops entered.

  —The Moors took some of the wounded downstairs and shot them. I was lucky. I was saved, thanks to Gen. Burguete, who in 1917 had put down the general insurrectionary strike in Asturias and was now the Red Cross representative. I talked to him while the others were being taken away. Although the revolution had failed, and soon there were 30,000 prisoners in gaol, we thought it had served a positive purpose: it held up the advent of fascism …

  In hiding for nearly five months before getting to France, Ramón ALVAREZ, secretary of the CNT regional committee, shared this view. There had been only one choice.

  —Either we allowed the capitalists and reactionaries time to organize from their positions of power, or we confronted the situation when they weren’t prepared. We chose the latter. If we hadn’t, there might never have been a civil war. No war victims. Instead, there would have been civil victims of capitalist reaction for hundreds of years …

  Severely beaten up in prison, like most of those who had taken part in the revolution, José MATA, a socialist miner incarcerated with 2,000 others in Oviedo gaol, came to think that not even Caballero had intended to launch a socialist revolution. But the insurrection was inevitable.

  —We had to defend the rights we had won and which the Spanish capitalists were trying to take from us. If we hadn’t risen, fascism would have taken over without a struggle – and without a c
ivil war …

  —The CEDA for us was Dollfuss’s corporative social Christian dictatorship. In other words, fascism as we conceived it then, recalled Alberto FERNANDEZ. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps it was something else – the old-style Spanish reaction which, like Franco later in justifying his rising, took on a fascist-style ideology because it lacked any other, and that was what was in fashion …

  Supporters of the centrist socialist leader, Prieto, never had any illusions about making the socialist revolution. The insurrection was to prevent the CEDA entering the government, nothing else, thought Ramón RUBIAL in Bilbao. Prieto hoped that the president of the republic, rather than face the consequences of armed confrontation, would not allow the CEDA to join the government.

  —From a purely insurrectional point of view, the uprising was a mistake; it couldn’t succeed. But politically speaking, thanks to the sacrifice of a great number of socialists, the Republic was ‘reconquered’ as a result. Because of the repression after October – not only in Asturias but in Bilbao and elsewhere – widespread support was gained for the creation and electoral victory of the Popular Front. This, although not really damaging to the ruling class’s interests, gave the latter and its agents the pretext for staging various actions which they and the army then used to justify the need for a rising because of the republic’s so-called ‘inability to maintain law and order.’ Thus, if October led to the reconquest of the republic due to the Popular Front victory, it also led to the civil war …