The Battle for Spain

by Antony Beevor

  In the Basque country, things were very different. Juntas of defence were replaced by the autonomous Republic of Euzkadi, which came into existence on 1 October. (The Basque red, green and white flag, the ikurrina, had already replaced the republican tricolour.) The formal establishment of the Basque government, with José Antonio Aguirre as president, or lehendakari, was confirmed by a meeting of municipal delegates in traditional fashion exactly a week later when oaths were sworn under the sacred oak tree of Guernica. The conservative Basque nationalist party held the most important portfolios, while republicans and socialists were allowed the lesser ones.5 The anarchists, who were strong in San Sebastián and the fishing communities, neither demanded nor were offered any role in the administration. The Basque nationalists established a very rigid control with their paramilitary militia, the Euzko Godarostea, which excluded left-wingers and non-Basques. However, both the UGT and the CNT later formed their own battalions to fight in the army corps of Euzkadi. The mixed feelings of the Basques, loyal to the Republic which gave them autonomy, yet far closer in social and religious attitudes to the nationalists, was to create a disastrous mistrust within the alliance.6

  Of all these regional moves to self-government, the most extraordinary and the most important took place in Catalonia. The journalist John Langdon-Davies described the contradictions in Barcelona, calling it ‘the strangest city in the world today, the city of anarcho-syndicalism supporting democracy, of anarchists keeping order, and anti-political philosophers wielding power’.7 On the evening of 20 July Juan García Oliver, Buenaventura Durruti and Diego Abad de Santillán had a meeting with President Companys in the palace of the Generalitat. They still carried the weapons with which they had stormed the Atarazanas barracks that morning. In the afternoon they had attended a hastily called conference of more than 2,000 representatives of local CNT federations. A fundamental disagreement arose between those who wanted to establish a libertarian society immediately and those who believed that it had to wait until after the generals were crushed.

  Companys had defended anarchists for nominal fees when a young lawyer. His sympathy for them was unusual among Catalan nationalists, who often referred to them in almost racial terms as ‘Murcians’, because the major source of anarchist strength had been among non-Catalan immigrant workers. Although some Catalan politicians later denied his words, Companys is said to have greeted the anarchist delegates thus:8 ‘Firstly, I must say that the CNT and the FAI have never been treated as their true importance merited. You have always been harshly persecuted and I, with much regret, was forced by political necessity to oppose you, even though I was once with you. Today you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia because you alone have conquered the fascist military…and I hope that you will not forget that you did not lack the help of loyal members of my party…But you have won and all is in your power. If you do not need me as president of Catalonia, tell me now and I will become just another soldier in the fight against fascism. If, on the other hand…you believe that I, my party, my name, my prestige, can be of use, then you can depend on me and my loyalty as a man who is convinced that a whole past of shame is dead.’

  Whether or not these were Companys’s exact words, Azaña later described this as a plot to abolish the Spanish state. But the Catalan president was a realist. Official republican forces in Barcelona amounted to about 5,000 men of the paramilitary corps and events elsewhere had shown that it was very dangerous to rely on them entirely. The regular army no longer existed in Barcelona, for most of the rebel officers had been shot and the soldiers had either gone home or joined the worker militias. Meanwhile, with rifles from the Sant Andreu barracks and from elsewhere, the anarchists were estimated to have some 40,000 weapons distributed among their 400,000 members in Barcelona and its suburbs. It would have been folly for Companys to have considered attacking them at their moment of greatest strength and popularity. The anarchists also appeared to be his best allies against the reimposition of Madrid government. Companys expressed the situation drily: ‘Betrayed by the normal guardians of law and order, we have turned to the proletariat for protection.’

  The Catalan president had presented the anarchists with a fundamental dilemma. García Oliver described the alternatives: ‘Libertarian communism, which is tantamount to an anarchist dictatorship, or democracy which signifies collaboration.’9 Imposing their social and economic self-management on the rest of the population appeared to violate libertarian ideals more than collaborating with political parties. Abad de Santillán said that they did not believe in any form of dictatorship, including their own.10

  At their Saragossa conference only seven weeks before, the anarchists had affirmed that each political philosophy should be allowed to develop the form of social co-existence which best suited it. This meant working alongside other political bodies with mutual respect for each other’s differences. Though genuine, this was a simplistic view, since the very idea of worker control and self-management was anathema both to liberal republicans and the communists. These two groups would in time win, first by forcing the anarchists to renounce many of their principles and then by expelling them from positions of power.11

  Even if the anarchist leaders sitting in the Catalan president’s ornate office, having just been offered the keys of the kingdom, could have foreseen the future, their choice would have been no easier. They had the strength to turn Catalonia and Aragón into an independent non-state almost overnight, but that would have created a major confrontation with the socialists and communists at a critical moment. The Madrid government also controlled the gold reserves, and a boycott by the rest of republican Spain and by foreign companies could have destroyed the Catalonian economy in a very short time. Yet what seems to have influenced their decision the most were the obvious needs of unity to fight the military rising and concern for their comrades in other parts of Spain. The demands of solidarity overrode other considerations. They could not abandon them in a minority which might be crushed by the Marxists.

  The libertarian leaders therefore proposed a joint control of Catalonia with other parties. On their recommendation the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was set up on 21 July. Although in the majority, they said that they would recognize the right of minorities and take only five of the fifteen posts. Ingenuously, they hoped that they would receive similar treatment in the other areas of republican Spain where they were in a minority.12

  The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias literally ran everything from security and essential services to welfare; the Generalitat was nothing more than a shadow government, or rather a government-in-waiting, ‘a merely formulaic artefact’.13 Its councillors might make plans and charts, but they had little to do with what was already being put into practice on the ground. The all-important conversion to war industry had been started by Juan García Oliver and Eugenio Vallejo during the initial fighting. The Generalitat did not set up a war industries commission until August and for a long time it had little influence,14 yet although the Catalan administration had lost the political initiative, it had not entirely lost power. The CNT was incapable of controlling either the economy, which stayed in the hands of the Generalitat, or the banking system, which was now in the hands of the socialist UGT.

  The contradictions of political power were to confront the anarchists in many forms. Their manifesto of 1917, for example, had condemned all festivals, such as bullfights and indecent cabarets which can brutalize the people. But to act as dictatorial censors was an even worse affront to their beliefs. Meanwhile the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres, now 30,000 strong,15 were sticking posters over the walls of the red light district, trying to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of life. They offered and ran training courses for them to acquire skills for productive work, but other anarchists were less patient. According to the sympathetic French observer Kaminski, they shot pimps and drug dealers on the spot.

  A notable phenomenon of the war was the spontaneous growth of a
women’s movement after the 1936 elections. It was born, not of literature or theory from abroad (except perhaps a few translations of Emma Goldman), but of women’s instinctive conviction that the overthrow of the class system should mean the end of the patriarchal system as well. The anarchists had always declared the equality of all human beings, but as the Mujeres Libres emphasized, relationships still remained feudal. The most blatant way in which the anarchists had failed to live up to their professed ideals was the different levels of pay for men and women in most CNT enterprises. The Socialist Youth was another major focal point for feminism.

  Little headway was made outside the cities, although the greatest demonstration of the new equality was the fact of having militiawomen fighting in the front line. No figures are available, but there were probably not many more than 1,000 women at the front. There were, however, several thousand under arms in the rear areas and a women’s battalion took part in the defence of Madrid. (The German ambassador was shocked when, one day, Franco ordered the execution of some captured militiawomen and then calmly continued to eat his lunch.) This move towards equal participation was severely curtailed under the increasingly authoritarian direction of the war effort as the military situation deteriorated. By 1938 women had returned to a strictly auxiliary role.16

  One observer in Barcelona commented on the attitude towards buildings. He wrote that the people were inclined to destroy symbols, but that they respected in a naive and sometimes exaggerated way everything which seemed useful. Religious buildings, patriotic monuments and the women’s prison were demolished or burned down, while hospitals and schools were respected almost with the reverence which the nationalists accorded to churches.

  The most important achievement of the republican government of 1931–3 had been in education and reducing illiteracy. The measures limiting Church involvement in education created a great void in the system to begin with, but the school-building and teacher-training programmes were correspondingly ambitious. The Republic claimed to have built 7,000 schools as opposed to only 1,000 during the previous 22 years. An illiteracy rate of nearly 50 per cent in most areas under the monarchy was drastically reduced. Many imaginative projects, such as García Lorca’s travelling theatres, were part of an energetic attempt to help the rural mass free itself from the vulnerability of ignorance. All the time, independently of government-sponsored efforts, the casas del pueblo of the UGT and the ateneos libertarios of the anarchists continued their efforts in this direction.17 During the war it was above all the earnest study of uneducated militiamen in the trenches which so impressed foreign visitors like Saint-Exupéry.

  The outward signs of working-class power were everywhere in Barcelona. Party banners hung from public buildings, especially the black and red diagonal flag of the CNT. The anarchists had installed their headquarters in the former premises of the Employers’ Federation, while the communist-controlled PSUC led by Joan Comorera had taken over the Hotel Colón. The POUM had seized the Hotel Falcón, though their main power base was in Lérida. The POUM was growing because it seemed to offer a middle course between the anarchists and the communists. But, as Andrés Nin, their leader, had once been closely associated with Trotsky, the Stalinists hated the POUM even more than the anarchists. They ignored the fact that Trotsky and his Fourth International frequently attacked the POUM.

  Barcelona had always been a lively city and the July revolution hardly calmed it. Expropriated cars roared around at high speed, often causing accidents, but such antics were soon stopped when petrol was issued only for essential journeys. Loudspeakers attached to trees on the avenues relayed music and broadcast ludicrously optimistic news bulletins from time to time. These were seized on by groups discussing events such as the attack on Saragossa, whose fall they expected at any moment. It was a world of instant friendship, with the formal expression of address no longer used. Foreigners were welcomed and the anti-fascist cause was explained repeatedly. Workers possessed a simple faith that if everything was made clear, the democracies could not fail to help them against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

  All around a heady atmosphere of excitement and optimism prevailed. Gerald Brenan said that visitors to Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 would never forget the moving and uplifting experience. Foreigners who gave a tip had it returned politely with an explanation of why the practice corrupted both the giver and the receiver. Probably the greatest contrast between Madrid and Barcelona was in the use of hotels. In the capital Gaylords was later taken over by the Communist Party as a luxurious billet for its senior functionaries and Russian advisers. In Barcelona the Ritz was used by the CNT and the UGT as Gastronomic Unit Number One–a public canteen for all those in need.

  The most outspoken champions of private property were not the liberal republicans, as might have been expected, but the Communist Party and its Catalan subsidiary, the PSUC. Both were following the Comintern line of concealing the revolution. La Pasionaria and other members of their central committee emphatically denied that any form of revolution was happening in Spain, and vigorously defended businessmen and small landowners. This was at a time when rich peasants, kulaks, were dying in Gulag camps. The Comintern, without any acknowledgement of such a flagrant contradiction, recorded the communist slogans prescribed for the countryside round Valencia: ‘We respect those who want to work their land as a collective, but we also request respect for those who want to cultivate their land individually’; and ‘To oppress the interests of petty farmers means oppressing the fathers of our soldiers’.18

  This anti-revolutionary stance, prescribed by Moscow, brought the middle classes into the communist ranks in great numbers. Even the traditional newspapers of the Catalan business community, La Vanguardia and Noticiero, praised the Soviet model of discipline. Meanwhile, the anarchist model had already made itself felt throughout the republican zone, but above all down the Mediterranean coastal belt.

  This extraordinary mass movement of worker self-management still provokes powerful controversy. The liberal government and the Communist Party regarded it as a major obstacle to their attempts to organize the war effort. They were convinced that central control was vital in a country such as Spain with its strong parochialism and reluctance to react to a threat unless it was close. For example, the anarchists of Catalonia felt that to recapture Saragossa would be tantamount to winning the war. The advance of the Army of Africa in the south-west could almost have been in a foreign country, as far as they were concerned. The exponents of self-management, on the other hand, argued that there would be no motive for fighting if the social revolution were not allowed to continue. Having done the fighting in July when the government refused to arm them, the anarchists bitterly resented the way the government expected them to surrender all their gains. This fundamental clash of attitudes undermined the unity of the Republican alliance. The advocates of a centralized state were to win the struggle in 1937, but the morale of the population was mortally stricken by the Communist Party’s bid for power in the process.

  The collectives in republican Spain were not like the state collectives of the Soviet Union. They were based on the joint ownership and management of the land or factory. Alongside them were socialized industries, restructured and run by the CNT and UGT as well as private companies under joint worker-owner control. Co-operatives marketing the produce of individual smallholders and artisans also existed, although these were not new. They had a long tradition in many parts of the country, especially in fishing communities. There were estimated to have been around 100,000 people involved in co-operative enterprises in Catalonia alone before the civil war. The CNT was, of course, the prime mover in this development, but UGT members also contributed to it.19

  The regions most affected were Catalonia and Aragón, where about 70 per cent of the workforce was involved. The total for the whole of republican territory was nearly 800,000 on the land and a little over a million in industry. In Barcelona, worker committees took over all the services, the oil monopoly,
the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as Vulcano, the Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry and a host of smaller enterprises.

  Any assumption by foreign journalists that the phenomenon simply represented a romantic return to the village communes of the Middle Ages was inaccurate. Modernization was no longer feared because the workers controlled its effects. Both on the land and in the factories technical improvements and rationalization could be carried out in ways that would previously have led to bitter strikes. The CNT woodworkers union shut down hundreds of inefficient workshops so as to concentrate production in large plants. The whole industry was reorganized on a vertical basis from felling timber to the finished product. Similar structural changes were carried out in other industries as diverse as leather goods, light engineering, textiles and baking. There were, however, serious problems in obtaining new machinery to convert companies which were irrelevant, like luxury goods, or underused because of raw-material shortages, like the textile industry. They were caused principally by the Madrid government’s attempt to reassert its control by refusing foreign exchange to collectivized enterprises.

  The social revolution in Catalonian industry was soon threatened in several ways. A sizeable part of the home market had been lost in the rising. The peseta had fallen sharply in value on the outbreak of the war, so imported raw materials cost nearly 50 per cent more in under five months. This was accompanied by an unofficial trade embargo which the pro-nationalist governors of the Bank of Spain had requested among the international business community. Meanwhile, the central government tried to exert control through withholding credits and foreign exchange. Largo Caballero, the arch-rival of the anarchists, was even to offer the government contract for uniforms to foreign companies, rather than give it to CNT textile factories.20 Recent studies indicate that reductions in industrial output during the course of the war cannot really be attributed to ‘revolutionary disorder’.21