by Paul Preston
An obvious conclusion to be drawn from the clashes between the Communists and the CNT is the extraordinary level of press freedom prevailing in a tense wartime situation. The denunciations in the CNT press of alleged abuses by the police and the prisons are remarkable indications of the maintenance of democratic norms. Even more so were some of the decisions of the popular tribunals. Noteworthy in this regard were the acquittals of the anarchist militiamen who shot Pablo Yagüe and of rebel supporters like Agustín Muñoz Grandes or Bobby Deglané. Even more striking were the condemnations by the tribunals of both anarchists and Communists found guilty of theft or murder. There was no equivalent in the rebel zone and even less was there anything like General Miaja’s closure of the Siam Embassy operation as illegal, the Madrid Junta’s creation of a committee to investigate anarchist allegations of police irregularities or the Republican government’s insistence that the struggle against the fifth column be conducted according to the law. For Cazorla, it was deeply frustrating, as he saw it, that so many were getting away with so much because security was so lax.
Random violence was largely under control by the end of 1936 and the new system of popular justice was working relatively well. The procedures and the ample facilities provided for the defence of those accused dramatically distinguished Republican justice from the summary trials in the rebel zone. There were increasing numbers of cases of religious personnel being absolved of accusations of disloyalty to the regime.36 Indeed, certainly before 1938, as was shown by the frequent acquittals that Cazorla tried to reverse with preventative arrests, trials often erred in their leniency. The trial of Captain Ramón Robles Pazos, on 26 January 1937 at an emergency court, and the parallel fate of his elder brother José, accused of espionage on behalf of the fifth column, are illustrative of the workings of both the Republican judiciary and the security services and their Russian advisers.
The thirty-seven-year-old Captain Robles Pazos was a reactionary Africanista officer. At the beginning of the war, he was an instructor at the Infantry Academy housed in the Alcázar of Toledo.37 He had been in Madrid when his insurrectionary comrades fortified themselves in the Alcázar. On 21 July 1936, on his way to join them, he was arrested in Getafe in the south of the capital and taken to a checa in the Paseo de las Delicias. He swore that he was loyal to the Republic, and, after a few hours, was released and ordered to present himself at the Ministry of War. Despite not reporting for military service, he remained free until 16 October when he was arrested by agents from Madrid’s principal police station, the Comisaría de Buenavista. Charged with breaking his oath of loyalty to the Republic, he was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo. Astonishingly, he escaped the evacuation and subsequent massacre of prisoners on 7, 8 and 9 November. This suggests that someone of considerable influence was looking out for him. And it was scarcely coincidental that, from the end of August, his elder brother José was working in some capacity in the Soviet Embassy.
On 17 November, Ramón was transferred to the prison near the Ventas bullring, where he remained until, on 26 January 1937, he was tried for disloyalty. Again swearing that he was entirely loyal to the Republic, he was released provisionally on condition of appearing before the court on the 15th and 30th of each month. When he failed to do so, he was summoned to stand trial again on 27 February. He then sent an obsequious letter to the president of the court (‘that you preside over with such dignity’). In it, he asked the judge to inform ‘the comrades of the court’ that he would be unable to appear as ordered on the entirely mendacious grounds that he had received orders to join the Republican forces on the Teruel front on 24 February. The court decided on his absolution because of this fictitious service at the front.38
In fact, on 28 January, two days after his first trial, Ramón had taken refuge in the Chilean Embassy. Three weeks later, he moved to the French Embassy, from where he wrote his letter of 22 February claiming to be about to fight for the Republic at Teruel. It seems that he was provoked into going into hiding at the Chilean and French embassies because his pretence of loyalty to the Republic was in danger of being exposed. In late December the previous year, his brother José had been arrested and it is likely that Ramón feared what he might, under interrogation, reveal about their contacts. José claimed that he had tried to persuade Ramón to fulfil his military duties, but the security services suspected that he was handing him information from the Soviet Embassy for the fifth column. In January 1938, Ramón managed to get evacuated to France and, after some difficulties, reached the rebel zone in mid-May. He was not subjected to the rigorous investigation applied to most officers who crossed the lines. Indeed, within five weeks, he was incorporated into the rebel forces with the rank of major, a promotion backdated to 10 December 1936, and given command of a unit of Regulares. This was on the basis of favourable reports from fifth columnists of his complete commitment to the rebel cause. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and decorated several times. In 1942, he fought in Russia as a volunteer with the Blue Division, the force sent by Franco in support of Hitler. Thereafter, he enjoyed a highly distinguished military career, being promoted to brigadier general in 1952, to major general in 1957 and to the highest rank in the Spanish army, lieutenant general, in 1961, and the highest possible postings as Captain-General of the VII (Valladolid) and IX (Granada) Military Regions.39 These subsequent career achievements suggest that Ramón’s links with José were damaging to the Republic.
José had been arrested by the Brigada Especial of Vázquez Baldominos and Grigulevich, the force specialized in counter-espionage. Linking this with the activities of his brother, it is reasonable to suppose that José was suspected of passing important information about Soviet personnel to the fifth column. The international situation obliged the Soviet Union to play down its aid to the Spanish Republic, so any knowledge of Russian activities was sensitive and José Robles, as some kind of liaison officer between Vladimir Gorev and the Republican General Staff, seems to have had high-level access. Rumours flew around Valencia that Robles had been arrested on espionage charges and shot while in Soviet custody. Café gossip had it that he had carelessly let slip military information.40 The parallel experience of Ramón suggests that more than carelessness was at stake. The internationally renowned journalist and Sovietologist Louis Fischer, who had privileged access to both the Russian hierarchy in Spain and the highest levels of the Spanish government, was convinced that Robles’s execution was the work of the Russians.41
The novelist John Dos Passos was informed at the United States Embassy that José Robles, his friend from way back, had been seen alive in a prison camp by the American military attaché, Colonel Stephen Fuqua, on 26 March 1937.42 Robles was executed at some point between then and 22 April. On the morning of that day, Dos Passos told Ernest Hemingway and their friend the novelist Josephine Herbst that he had just learned that Robles had been executed after being tried for giving away military secrets.43 In 1939, Dos Passos said that he had been told regretfully by ‘the then chief of the Republican counter-espionage service’ of Robles’s death at the hands of ‘a special section’.44 That phrase would suggest David Vázquez Baldominos, as Inspector General of the police and commander of the Brigadas Especiales, but there is far more reason to suppose that Dos Passos’s informant was Vázquez Baldominos’s secretary, Pepe Quintanilla. Like his brother, the artist Luis Quintanilla, Pepe was in contact with Hemingway, Herbst and Dos Passos. Given his post, Pepe Quintanilla had to know about Grigulevich and the Brigadas Especiales.45 The contrasting fates of the two brothers underline the difference between the relative laxity of the popular tribunals and the deadly seriousness of the Brigadas Especiales.
The clashes between Cazorla and the CNT in Madrid were merely a reflection of a much wider problem at the heart of Republican Spain. For the Communists, substantial sectors of the PSOE and the bourgeois Republican parties, the war effort was the central priority and that required the full reconstruction of the state. In contrast, the revolutionary elem
ents of the left, the CNT–FAI and the POUM, were determined to collectivize industry and agriculture and opposed state control in economic and military issues even after the Republican debacle at Málaga in February 1937 had starkly revealed the shortcomings of the militia system. The anarchists, despite their occasional rhetoric, also opposed the reorganization of public order. In the eyes of the Republicans, Socialists and Communists, the activities of the CNT and the POUM were on the same spectrum of subversion as those of the fifth column.
Although the conflict in Madrid had been intense, it was restrained by the sense of common struggle imposed by the siege. The definitive clash would come in May 1937 in Barcelona, where the greater distance from any active military front created a qualitatively different context in which both social and political tensions had been mounting for some months. Already throughout late 1936, some of the first revolutionary advances in Catalonia were being clawed back and the regional government, the Generalitat, was recovering powers lost when the military coup left the state apparatus in ruins. The Catalan President, Lluís Companys, of the bourgeois Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and the Catalan Communist Party (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya) were trying to re-establish control of the political and military structures of the region. In the POUM newspaper, La Batalla, the party leader, Andreu Nin, and his principal theorist, Juan Andrade, denounced the collaboration between the PSUC and the Esquerra as counter-revolutionary and urged the CNT to join the POUM in opposing it with revolutionary committees.46
Already in the autumn of 1936, Louis Fischer had told Andrade’s wife, María Teresa García Banús, that the Kremlin was determined to exterminate the POUM and urged her to warn her comrades to take precautions.47 By late 1936 the Comintern delegate to the PSUC, the taciturn and enigmatic Ernö Gerö, codenamed ‘Pedro’, had already been directing a campaign to remove Andreu Nin from his post as Justice Councillor in the Generalitat.48 On 11 December, the executive committee of the Comintern sent the following telegram to ‘Luis’ (Victorio Codovilla, delegate to the PCE), ‘Pedro’ (Ernö Gerö) and ‘Pepe’ (José Díaz, the secretary general of the PCE): ‘It is necessary to focus on the political liquidation of the Trotskyists, as counter-revolutionaries, as agents of the Gestapo. After the political campaign, get them out of national and local government bodies, ban their press, expel all foreign elements. Try to do so in agreement with the anarchists.’49
The following day, 12 December, the PSUC’s secretary general, Joan Comorera, set off a cabinet crisis by calling for the removal of Nin from the Generalitat, pointing out that the POUM was a discordant and disloyal element, provoking divisions between the UGT and the CNT. He declared that the POUM, by attacking and insulting the Republic’s only powerful ally, the Soviet Union, was effectively guilty of treachery.50 The Russian Consul General in Barcelona, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, had dinner with Companys that same night and, despite being an old friend of Nin, ‘used every argument, Soviet arms, the foreign situation, raw materials and food shipments’, to make the same point. Since deliveries were imminent and a food crisis looming, Companys, who was in any case happy to see a more compact cabinet, agreed and Nin was removed in the cabinet reshuffle of 16 December.51 After he had been arrested six months later, Nin told his interrogators that when the Catalan Prime Minister, Josep Tarradellas, informed him of his removal, he said that the POUM would be persecuted and its leaders eliminated politically and physically.52
The POUM’s outspoken criticisms of the trial and execution of the old Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev had drawn the fire of the Soviet advisers. Encouraged by Antonov-Ovseenko, the PSUC denounced the POUM leadership as ‘fascist spies’ and ‘Trotskyist agents’ and called for the Party’s extermination.53 However, hostility to the anti-Stalinist leftists was not just about Russian paranoia. There was a growing conviction among Republicans, Socialists, Communists and numerous foreign observers that the Catalan anarchists were not fully committed to the war effort. The CNT was importing and hoarding weapons in Barcelona against the day when they could make their revolution.54 In mid-March 1937, several hundred of the more extreme members of the libertarian movement who had opposed the militarization of the militias abandoned the front at Gelsa (Zaragoza) and took their weapons to the Catalan capital. Inspired by the extremist Catalan separatist Jaume Balius Mir, they aimed to create a revolutionary vanguard and oppose the CNT leadership’s collaboration with the central government. Even García Oliver considered Balius to be a deranged bohemian. On 17 March, they formed the group known as ‘the Friends of Durruti’ and, within a matter of weeks, had recruited five thousand CNT members. The new organization was warmly welcomed by Andreu Nin.55
Part of the CNT leadership, having accepted participation in the Republican government, was more inclined to agree to the need for the prioritization of the war effort. However, at rank-and-file level, especially in Barcelona, there was intense resistance to the loss of revolutionary power. Many anarchists and POUM militants felt that the sacrifices demanded by the Communists, Socialists and Republicans in favour of bourgeois democracy were pointless since the Western powers saw Franco as a better bet for capitalism than the Republic could ever be. The belief of many in the CNT and POUM that the revolution should have priority was seen as treacherous and subversive by all those who were committed to the war effort.
The tension generated by the Generalitat’s efforts to claw back its powers from the revolutionary unions was exacerbated by the economic and social dislocation imposed by the war. By December 1936, the population of Catalonia had been swelled by the arrival of 300,000 refugees. This constituted 10 per cent of the population of the entire region and probably nearer 40 per cent of the population of Barcelona itself. After the fall of Málaga, the numbers soared even more. The strain of housing and feeding the new arrivals had embittered existing conflicts. Until December 1936, during which time the CNT controlled the Supply Ministry, the anarchist solution had been to requisition food at artificially low prices. This provoked shortages and inflation as farmers resisted by hoarding stocks. After the mid-December cabinet crisis, the PSUC leader Joan Comorera had taken over the supply portfolio and introduced a more market-based approach. This infuriated the anarchists but did not solve the problem. Catalonia also needed to import food but lacked the foreign exchange to buy it. There were bread riots in Barcelona, as well as armed clashes for control of food stores between the CNT–FAI and the PSUC.56
In parallel with the conflict over food shortages and collectivization, other outbreaks of violence were generated as the forces of order tried to restrain the anarchist Patrulles de Control. In February 1937, more than thirty members of the National Republican Guard (ex-Civil Guard) were killed. At the beginning of March, the Generalitat dissolved the CNT-controlled Defence Committee and assumed the power to dissolve all local police and militia committees. The Assault Guards and National Republican Guards were merged into a single Catalan police corps whose officers were not permitted membership of any political party or trade union. These measures effectively placed the workers’ patrols beyond the law. Ten days later, the central Republican government ordered all worker organizations, committees, patrols and individual workers to hand over their weapons. The Interior Councillor in the Generalitat, Artemi Aiguader of the Esquerra, stepped up the disarming of militia patrols. At the same time, along the French border, there were increasingly bloody clashes between the border police, the Carabineros, and CNT committees over control of customs posts which they had held since July 1936.57
On 24 April 1937, anarchists reacted with an attempt on the life of the chief of the Catalan police, Eusebio Rodríguez Salas of the PSUC, who had been appointed by Aiguader. Matters came to a head the next day with the assassination, at Molins de Llobregat, of Roldán Cortada, a member of the PSUC and secretary to Rafael Vidiella, Labour and Public Works Councillor in the Generalitat. Two days later, a huge official procession through the streets of Barcelona accompanying Cortada’s coffin was or
chestrated as a mass demonstration against the CNT–FAI. At the same time, an extraordinary event took place in the Pyrenean border area of Lleida known as La Cerdanya. The entire area was controlled by the FAI activist and smuggler Antonio Martín Escudero, known as ‘el Cojo de Málaga’ (the cripple from Málaga). As the virtual viceroy of La Cerdanya, Martín made a fortune by smuggling and also by extorting money from wealthy individuals trying to cross the frontier. Important politicians were detained and threatened by his gunmen. Control of the frontier was of considerable importance to the CNT leadership both for the unfettered export of requisitioned valuables and for the illegal import of arms. Information about the movements of the Carabineros and other government forces was passed to him by the CNT, which controlled telephone communications in Catalonia.
The mayors of local towns were determined to put an end to Martín’s reign of terror and finally, in April, they began to get some support from Aiguader and the Generalitat. Informed from Barcelona that forces were gathering against him at the small town of Bellver, Martín led a substantial militia force in an attack on the town. However, in the shooting, the attackers were beaten off and Martín and some of his men were killed.58 Anarchist literature turned the bandit chieftain into a martyr. The entire episode was rewritten to give the impression that the criminal Martín had not been killed in Bellver by the town’s defenders but murdered in Puigcerdà by forces of the Generalitat. Diego Abad de Santillán, the Generalitat’s Economy Councillor, twice went with government delegations to look into complaints against Martín and was fully aware of his murky record but turned a blind eye.59
The disputes over food supplies and the events in La Cerdanya showed how deep rooted was the conflict between the advocates of revolution and those who believed that priority should be given to the war effort. The notion that its culmination in the so-called ‘May events’ was a carefully laid Stalinist plot has no basis. The immediate spark that ignited the long-smouldering clashes in May was a twofold initiative of the Generalitat. A decree prohibiting the traditional 1 May rallies to prevent clashes between the CNT and the UGT was seen as a provocation by the CNT rank and file. Then, on 3 May, a raid on the CNT-controlled central telephone exchange in the Plaça de Catalunya was ordered by Artemi Aiguader and carried out by the belligerent police commissioner Rodríguez Salas. Aiguader was following the instructions of Companys, who had been humiliated to learn that a CNT operator had interrupted a telephone call by President Azaña. Clearly the state needed control of the main communication system, but Companys was warned by a CNT Councillor that the anarchist rank and file would resist.60
