by Hugh Thomas
At the start of his premiership, Negrín told Azaña that, if he were to be Prime Minister, he would be so ‘one hundred per cent’.1 He insisted on so being for the rest of the war. The management of a war demanded different arts from the management of the Cortes, and Negrín was successful where his rivals failed. His arrogance, the inevitable consequence of the entry of such a first-class brain into politics, however, made him ten enemies a day. Other politicians were furious that such a newcomer should behave so dictatorially towards them, and be so contemptuous of their intrigues, and ambitions, as well as so intolerant of their failures. Members of Negrín’s cabinet were angered by his irregular habits of eating and drinking, and of calling conferences at all hours. Others accused Negrín of a lack of those Roman virtues which they said were necessary to win the war, and of having indeed Roman vices of gluttony and a taste for excess. No doubt, the new Prime Minister was incapable of working with a team of ministers, especially a coalition of such disparate individuals as was necessary in the republic. But he was a man for whom personal freedom was a passion. He was also insistent on his right to personal privacy. There was no sign that his lavish living, his pleasure in the company of women, and his gargantuan eating and drinking interfered with his work. Largo Caballero reported that, sometimes, when he sent for Negrín, he was told he was abroad; Largo said nothing, thinking that his mission had to do with arms purchases. In fact, Largo later alleged, Negrín was driving about France with girls in fast cars.1 One should take such remarks with reserve since they were made by a puritan of seventy about a bon viveur. Yet Prieto recalls him dining two or three times the same night in different places.2 ‘Never have I seen the equal,’ said Azaña, of his appetite.3 Nevertheless the President was initially pleased: ‘When I speak with the head of the government,’ he wrote in his diary on 31 May, ‘I no longer have the impression that I am speaking with a dead man … that is an advantageous innovation.’4 Later, Azaña became disillusioned. Negrín and he lived in different worlds; Azaña was looking back, wondering what had gone wrong, and who was the most responsible; Negrín, with no political past, thought only of the future. The relation between the President, who theoretically could dismiss the Premier, and the latter, who had a duty to listen to the President’s advice though not to accept it, went through vicissitudes. ‘Karamazov’, Besteiro nicknamed the Prime Minister, in November 1938; at that time he alone believed in victory.5
The policy of Negrín as Prime Minister was one of a realistic opportunism. A moderate socialist with a predilection for ‘planning’, he was ready to make any political sacrifice to win the war. That led him, as it had led Largo Caballero, into close relations with Russia, since, as before, Russia remained the main source of arms. Furthermore, the realism of the Spanish communist party, throughout Negrín’s ministry, caused it to seem the most useful political group in Spain. Thus Negrín had to accept things from the Russian military advisers, and from the Spanish communist party, which he disliked. As minister of finance, Negrín had been specially concerned with the dispatch of the Spanish gold to Moscow. His consequent relation with Russia resembled that of Faust with Mephistopheles.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Negrín was a mere instrument of Russian policy. Few politicians have successfully used a communist party, and not been later swallowed by it. But in the 1930s and in Spain, the possibility did not seem so far-fetched. Negrín’s personal self-confidence and his ebullient but secretive nature led him to think that he could slough off the communist connection when it was necessary. When, from the early summer of 1938, he was seeking peace with the nationalists, he did not confide in the communists nor in anyone else. It would be foolish to suppose that so independent-minded an intellectual, with so bad a temper, could be subservient to anyone. While Largo was referred to by the Russians as ‘comrade’, Negrín insisted on being named ‘Señor Presidente’.1 Negrín had no close relations with the leaders of the Spanish communist party and he disliked La Pasionaria. Indeed, despite the eclipse of the anarchists, the communists increased their power less under Negrín than they had under Largo. Hernández wrote later that a time would have come when they would have had to ‘liquidate’ Negrín.2 La Pasionaria later spoke of Negrín’s ‘dark thoughts’ and alleged that, so far from Negrín being a tool of the communists, they, the communists, were victims of his wrong judgement.3
This war was a mortal struggle in which most Spaniards had lost close friends or relations in appalling circumstances. No quarter would be offered to the vanquished. Negrín’s main mistake was to have allowed his disdain for revolutionary folly to cause him to overlook communist repression of the revolutionaries. Negrín was here naïve; the communist-dominated SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar), for instance, had private prisons, unearthed by the nationalists after their victory.4 Negrín denied that these could have existed, and said that the reports were nationalist propaganda. Ten years later, he admitted that he had been wrong.5 Negrín was, however, surrounded by the wrecks of the reputations of men like Azaña, the ‘strong man of the republic’, and ‘the Spanish Lenin’, Largo Caballero. The anarchists were crushed in spirit by the discovery of the realities of political life. Negrín assumed heavy responsibilities when becoming Prime Minister. He made mistakes. But for the rest of the civil war, this energetic physiologist, with the disorderly private life, represented the spirit of the Spanish republic.1
Negrín’s cabinet owed much to Azaña in its composition. It included two socialists besides the prime minister—Prieto, who brought together the war, navy and air ministries, in a single ministry of national defence, and Prieto’s protégé, Zugazagoitia, the minister of the interior. Negrín kept the ministry of finance himself, and the communists, Hernández and Uribe, retained their ministries of education and agriculture. Azaña’s old friend, the ex–prime minister of July 1936, Giral, and Giner de los Ríos, republicans, became foreign minister and minister of communications and public works. The Basque Irujo became minister of justice and a Catalan, Jaime Ayguadé, brother of the ex-Catalan councillor, became minister of labour. Thus, no members of Largo Caballero’s wing of the socialist party were included in the government. Araquistain, Largo Caballero’s chief remaining supporter, even resigned from the Embassy in Paris. He was replaced by Ossorio y Gallardo, the ‘monarchist without a king’, civil governor of Barcelona in 1909, since 1936 ambassador in Brussels who, it was hoped, would as a Catholic please the French Right.2 Álvarez del Vayo remained chief political commissar and Spanish representative at Geneva. He left the foreign ministry with irritation.3 The ex-lieutenant of carabineers who had been governor of San Sebastián in the early days of the war, the communist Colonel Antonio Ortega, succeeded Wenceslao Carrillo as director-general of security: a bad appointment. The communists also retained other critical positions in the police and Major Díaz Tendero returned as personnel chief in the army.
Negrín asked the anarchists to join the cabinet but they refused, saying that they had not provoked the crisis, which they considered ‘unwise, inopportune, and harmful to the conduct of the war’. To join Negrín, they said, would prove a ‘lack of nobility’. On 27 May, their four ex-ministers gave addresses denouncing communist and Left republican opposition to the revolutionary changes in society which they had advocated. Their rank and file heard in detail of the quarrels of Juan Peiró with Negrín over the state seizure of the salt mines of Sallent, of López’s frustrations at the ministry of commerce, and of Federica Montseny’s honest doubts about the anarchist role in government.1 Thereafter, the CNT and FAI continued to collaborate with the government, but no longer exercised responsibility. They withdrew from neither the army nor the ranks of the bureaucracy. Their leaders realized that only Franco would profit from such action; and, after the May Days in Barcelona, this lesson was borne in on even the anarchist youth, even on the comrades of those killed in the fighting in May. Many anarchists continued to suppose that their day would come after the victory, when their numbers
might be expected to tell. There was, in consequence, a loss of vitality on their part, and certain members (including the secretary-general, Mariano Vázquez) became regarded as supporters of Negrín.2 Anarchist strength was far too great for there to be any question of their total ‘liquidation’, as there might be with the POUM: the movement had claimed over two million members in April 1937.3
The anarchists’ loss of power continued in the early summer. The Barcelona control patrols were dissolved on 7 June. Other changes in the Barcelona police handed over effective command to proved non-anarchists—the pro-communist Colonel Ricardo Burrillo becoming director-general of security in Catalonia. General Pozas took over the Catalan army; he seems to have actually joined the communists (PSUC). The FAI lost their posts on the popular tribunals, on 25 May, on the ground that, unlike the CNT, they were not a legally constituted body and, therefore, could not be represented in the institutions of the republic. All CNT-FAI committees in Catalonia by now were replaced by municipal councils. In June, the anarchists, of their own accord, dropped out of the Generalidad, after a series of political intrigues which repelled them. The still agile Companys (and the PSUC) had determined to introduce the learned rector of the university, Dr Pedro Bosch Gimpera, a brilliant anthropologist, of Acción Catalana, to the new government: but the anarchists disliked this extension of ‘Catalanism’. Also they now believed that all real authority in republican Spain rested with Negrín. They were right in that, and there was no Catalan councillor for defence, after the nomination of Pozas as captain-general of Catalonia. Catalan police, even Catalan firemen, were transferred elsewhere in Spain.1
Meantime, the ex-president of the council, Largo Caballero, whose fall had been so swift as to be hardly believable, returned to the secretariat of the UGT, where he was to be safe a few more months, surrounded by those who, as he believed, were ‘clean, pure members of society, members of my own class—people who might make mistakes, but who act in good faith’.2
The government of Largo Caballero between September 1936 and May 1937 had successfully incorporated the revolution within the boundaries of the state. When Largo Caballero took office, the orders of the central government could often do no more than endorse faits accomplis by radical forces. When he left, orders from Valencia were customarily fulfilled. In order to achieve this victory for state power, Largo had welcomed the communist party as an executive organization. A year previously, he could have accepted this. But the realities of political power, the evolution of the communist party itself, and the value which he placed upon his own independence, caused him to repudiate the communists. He could, as he knew, have led a united socialist-communist party. He was unwilling to merge his own party with the communists, and, thereafter, they abandoned him. Thus, in his last hours as Prime Minister, his only supporters, by a paradox, were the anarchists against whom he had fought all his life and whose influence he had systematically reduced during the previous eight months. Equally paradoxically, the forces ranged against Largo were the moderate socialists and the communists, as one in their desire to restrict the further progress of the revolution. A year previously, the same executive of the socialist party which now opposed Largo Caballero—headed by González Peña and Lamoneda—had tried to manoeuvre the supporters of Largo out of control of the party precisely because they feared him, and them, to be too close to the communists. This change can only be understood if it is recalled that for Prieto, as well as for the communists and for Azaña, the chief disturbing factor within the republican camp remained the anarchists, with their surviving cantonalist suspicion of the very idea of the state.
Largo Caballero, despite his obstinacy, vanity, and lack of imagination, was a man of integrity, simplicity and courage who was easily tricked by the communists, who were skilful at public relations. Largo’s dignified departure from the prime ministership marked the end of a whole era in Spanish politics; in terms of efficiency, the change from the plasterer to the professor of physiology could only be for the best. But Negrín could never be so popular in the Spanish working class as Largo Caballero had been.
Book Four
THE WAR OR TWO COUNTER REVOLUTIONS
38
The new republican state over which Dr Negrín presided was a far more formidable one than that which Largo Caballero had inherited from Giral. It had powerful armies: Miaja, with five army corps, in the Army of the Centre; Colonel Morales Carrasco, a regular colonel of engineers, in command of an Army of the South; General Pozas, commanding the Army of the East (including Catalonia and Aragon); and the embattled Army of the North, under General Llano de la Encomienda. The majority of commands in the field were held by ex-regular officers, though some of these, as has been seen, were now politically minded—mostly, like Colonel Cordón (chief of staff to Pozas) or Major Ciutat (chief of staff to Llano de la Encomienda), communist; but there were some who were anarchist in outlook, such as Major Perea, commander of the 4th Army Corps. The most prominent commanders who had not been in the army before 1936 were the communist militia leader, Modesto, in command of the 5th Army Corps, and some of the divisional commanders (such as Lister, Ortiz, Sanz, Trueba, Mera, Jover, and Rovira). Several International Brigade commanders were also to be found in control of divisions (Hans Kahle, ‘Walter’ and ‘Gal’). Thanks to Russia, the equipment was almost adequate; thus the Army of the Centre had some 100,000 rifles for its 180,000 men. There were altogether 450 batteries, with 1,680 cannon in all. The trouble was that the pieces of artillery were various, little of it reached far, and heavy artillery was scarce. Many still had to use a great diversity of charges: for example, the reliable old 77-millimetre Krupp field gun had to use twenty-two different sorts of projectile. Nevertheless, the republic did have a formidable tank force now led by the Russian General ‘Rudolf’. It had about 125 T-26 tanks and over 100 armoured cars.
Opposed to this, the nationalist army, with German and Italian artillery, was probably gun for gun superior to that possessed by the republic, and their tanks, though less formidable, were better organized and used with greater imagination.
In the air force, the republic probably had technical and numerical superiority, but the first would not last much longer, and neither was true of the northern front. The republicans had 450 aircraft, commanded by Hidalgo de Cisneros; 200 were fighters (150 Russian) and 100 bombers (60 Russian). Fighters in the central zone were still led by a Russian (Colonel ‘José’), while most of the squadrons of Chatos, and all those of the Moscas, were flown by Russians. But, from May 1937, Spanish pilots trained in Russia were taking the Russians’ place.1 Other aircraft still included some of the Blochs, Dewoitines, and Nieuports from France of the early days of the war (though the republic had lost 150 aircraft since July 1936) and there were also a few Bristol Bulldogs bought in England, as well as some Letovs and others obtained in France.
In comparison, the nationalists had a little less than 400 aircraft: about 150 had Spanish pilots; 100 German, in the Condor Legion; and about 120 Italian, in their ‘legionary air force’. The Fiat CR-32 was still the characteristic fighter of both the Italian and Spanish services. New aircraft, however, from both Germany and Italy, in particular the Savoia 79 bomber, from Italy, the Heinkel 111 bomber, and above all the famous Messerschmitt 109, came, in the summer of 1937, to dominate their Russian opponents, being faster, lighter, and having greater firepower. The Messerschmitt, for example, had a top speed of over 350 miles an hour, a high rate of climb, bullet-proof fuel tanks, and a theoretical range of 400 miles—a considerable improvement over the Russian aircraft which had served so well during the winter of 1936–7 (even if the range was in practice of less than 400 miles).1
This nationalist technical superiority was also evident in naval matters. The republic had abandoned any attempt to intervene in the Straits of Gilbralter. Though their fleet was still larger than that of their enemies, their lack of officers kept the ships in harbour. Several submarines had been lost, and the north coast was effectively
blockaded. Azaña realized that: ‘No war can be won in the Peninsula if one does not dominate the sea, particularly if the French frontier is closed or hostile.’2 The overall command of the republican navy soon passed to Captain Luis González Ubieta, in place of Admiral Buiza but, save for one fortunate encounter in 1938, the new commander was no better than the last one: Prieto’s éminence grise in the admiralty, Lieutenant Merín, kept his cautious hand over the fleet.
