by Paul Preston
There is no doubt that the anarchists and the POUM were infuriated by the police campaign to disarm the militia patrols over the previous three months. The insurrectionary response to Aiguader’s initiative from the CNT suggested some prior preparation. The scale of armament held by the CNT saw the crisis escalate extremely seriously if hardly into a mini-civil war. Anarchist and POUM militias came on to the streets of Barcelona and several other towns. After a cabinet meeting to discuss the situation, one of the anarchist ministers, possibly García Oliver, said: ‘This is just the beginning. The attack is going to be full-scale and definitive.’ Companys declined to pull back the forces surrounding the telephone building and seized the opportunity to press home the offensive against the CNT patrols and finally reassert the power of the state.61
Barricades went up in the centre of Barcelona. The Friends of Durruti, along with other anarchists and the POUM, confronted the forces of the Generalitat and the PSUC for four days. PSUC headquarters in the Passeig de Gràcia was unsuccessfully attacked by three armoured cars. Working-class districts and the industrial suburbs were in the hands of the anarchist masses, but their lack of co-ordination gave the advantage back to Companys.62 Although the origins of the crisis lay deep in the wartime circumstances of Catalonia, the Generalitat and the PSUC realized that they had to seize the chance to break the power of the CNT. The central government also saw the opportunity to limit the power of the Generalitat. García Oliver and Carlos Hernández Zancajo of the UGT were sent to Barcelona to discuss the situation with the CNT leadership. They were humiliated, kept waiting while the anarchists finished a lengthy dinner. When they requested food, two thin sandwiches were sent out to them. They returned to Valencia without achieving anything.63
Such cheap victories aside, the situation exposed the fundamental dilemma of the CNT. The anarchists could win in Catalonia only at the cost of all-out war against other Republican forces. The CNT’s Madrid newspaper Frente Libertario denounced the revolutionaries as the allies of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. García Oliver broadcast from the Generalitat on behalf of the CNT ministers in the central government and called on the incredulous militants to lay down their arms. The bulk of the Catalan anarchist leadership was unwilling to recall CNT militias from Aragon to fight the Generalitat and the central Republican government. On 7 May, the government in Valencia sent the police reinforcements which finally decided the outcome. It did so only in return for the Generalitat surrendering control of the Army of Catalonia and responsibility for public order in Catalonia. Several hundred members of the CNT and the POUM were arrested, although the need to get the war industries working as soon as possible limited the scale of the repression. The backdrop to these events was the Francoist advance into the Basque Country. As Manuel Domínguez Benavides, a prominent journalist, wrote, while Euskadi was being bombed, ‘the POUM and the FAI organized a bloody revolutionary carnival’.64
The events of 3 May took the Russians by surprise. Some of their senior guerrilla advisers were unexpectedly trapped in Barcelona by the fighting. The senior military adviser, General Grigory Shtern, wrote later that, far from being resented as having inspired the events, Russians ‘could pass serenely among the barricades of both sides and be greeted by the anarchists with a clenched-fist salute’.65 If the Russians and the PCE had not planned the entire affair, they certainly leaped at the opportunities presented by it. Having boasted of leading an insurrection which was really the work of elements of the CNT, the POUM would now be the sacrificial goat.66 Andreu Nin and the rest of the POUM leadership had far exceeded the CNT in the militancy of their revolutionary pronouncements during the crisis. Moreover, since the principal beneficiaries of the events were the military rebels and their Axis allies, there was a strong suspicion among Communists, Socialists and Republicans that there had been an element of fascist provocation behind the activities of the POUM and the CNT. It was a frequent complaint of Cazorla and others that the CNT was porous and easily infiltrated. The internationalist POUM was extremely welcoming to the recruitment of foreign volunteers. Specifically, in January 1937, an operative of the NKVD in Berlin had reported to Moscow that German agents had infiltrated the POUM.67 Franco boasted to the German Chargé d’Affaires, General Wilhelm Faupel, that ‘the street fighting had been started by his agents’, which was a reference to attacks on CNT members carried out by elements of the right-wing Catalan nationalist party Estat Català on the night of 2 May on instructions from Salamanca. Similarly, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano boasted to the Francoist Ambassador in Rome that Italian agents had contributed to the disorder. Indeed, there was no shortage of Italians in the CNT, some of whom may well have been infiltrated agents of the Italian secret police, the OVRA.68
Shortly after the fighting in Barcelona had ended, Largo Caballero was removed as Prime Minister and not simply because of his mistakes during the crisis. Certainly, President Azaña, who had been besieged in the Palau de les Corts Catalanes during the May events, would never forgive Largo for the delay in arranging his evacuation. The Minister without Portfolio, José Giral of Izquierda Republicana, informed Azaña that the Republicans, the Communists and the Socialists were united in wanting major change. They were frustrated not only by Largo Caballero’s ludicrous pretensions of being a great strategist but also by his practice of taking decisions without cabinet discussion. When ministers complained that they were not told what was happening, he would tell them to read the newspapers. All three groups were united in dissatisfaction with Largo Caballero’s sympathy with the CNT and his failure to confront the issue of public order. They were equally keen to see the removal of his incompetent Minister of the Interior, Ángel Galarza.
A stormy cabinet meeting on 14 May was provoked by the Communist ministers, with the prior agreement of the Socialists and Republicans. They demanded a change in military strategy and for the POUM to be declared illegal. When the Prime Minister refused, reluctant to punish the POUM when the FAI and the Friends of Durruti were being left unpunished, they left the meeting. Largo Caballero tried to carry on without them only to be astonished when the other ministers supported them.69 He was forced to resign, and the government was offered to Dr Juan Negrín, a victory for the political forces that had opposed the revolutionary factions. From this point on, the revolutionary achievements of the initial stages of the war would be steadily dismantled, leaving policy to follow the direction dictated by the Republicans and moderate Socialists who took over the key ministries.
The humanitarian concerns which underlay the new Prime Minister’s determination to put an end to the terror were closely linked to his perception that atrocities were being used to justify the refusal of the democratic powers to help the Republic. Between September 1936 and May 1937, as Treasury Minister, Negrín had done everything he could to keep the Republic afloat. He had worked hard to ensure that national resources were put at the service of the war effort, whether by sending the Republic’s gold reserves abroad to protect their availability for arms purchases or by strengthening the frontier guards (Carabineros) to re-establish state control over foreign exchange and to curb the activities of the many illegal CNT frontier posts on the French–Catalan border. His efforts to stop the illegal repression were put on a different plane by his elevation to the premiership.
In his new cabinet, Negrín appointed as his Minister of the Interior the Basque Socialist Julián Zugazagoitia, who was equally committed to the re-establishment of law and order. Together with the choice of another Basque, Manuel Irujo, as Minister of Justice, this ensured that, despite the Soviet determination to destroy the POUM, there would be no Moscow trials in Spain. A series of other important appointments were made to bring public order under greater control. Another Socialist, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, was named as Zugazagoitia’s under-secretary, and his first actions were to disband a squad which had carried out extra-judicial executions on the orders of Ángel Galarza and to close down the notorious prison of Santa Úrsula in Valencia. Anot
her Socialist, Paulino Gómez Saiz, was named Delegate for Public Order for Catalonia, in order to impose greater control over the region. The highly efficient Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Burillo was made police chief in Barcelona and a professional policeman, Teodoro Illera Martín, was sent to the city as Delegate of the Dirección General de Seguridad. Burillo had been commander of the Assault Guard barracks in Calle Pontejos on 13 July 1936 when Calvo Sotelo was murdered – a crime in which he played no part but for which he would be executed in 1939. He was a Communist but also loyal to Negrín.70 The one disastrous appointment was that of Colonel Antonio Ortega Gutiérrez as Director General of Security on 27 May 1937. Negrín appointed Ortega believing him simply to be a professional soldier and a Socialist follower of the Minister of Defence, Indalecio Prieto. As he noted later in his draft memoirs, he would never have accepted the recommendation had he known that Ortega’s loyalty would be to the PCE rather than to the government.71
According to Diego Abad de Santillán, 60,000 weapons were in the hands of leftists in Barcelona, mainly members of the CNT–FAI. On arriving in Barcelona, Vidarte and Burillo began to close down the Patrulles de Control and to confiscate their arms. This process was resisted with considerable violence by the CNT–FAI in the course of which, on 4 June, a sergeant of Carabineros and four Assault Guards were killed. According to Vidarte, a significant role in this resistance was played by Manuel Escorza del Val, who had run the Investigation Committee of the Central Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. Those responsible for the deaths were arrested, but Negrín insisted that there be no executions.72 Illera dismissed seventy-two policemen of the Generalitat whom he claimed were involved in theft, murder and smuggling, exactly the kind of crimes linked to Antonio Martín Escudero, ‘el Cojo de Málaga’. Illera inevitably clashed with the man he had come to replace, Dionisio Eroles Batlló of the FAI, who, until Negrín took over the government, had been the Generalitat’s head of public order. Illera also faced fierce opposition from the leader of the CNT–FAI Patrulles de Control, Aurelio Fernández Sánchez.73
Negrín was fully aware of Irujo’s efforts to stop violence in the Republican rearguard when he had been Minister without Portfolio.74 Now, on taking up the post of Minister of Justice, Irujo reflected Negrín’s attitude to the repression when he declared: ‘the paseos have finished … There were days when the government did not control the levers of power. It was unable to prevent social crimes. Those times have passed … We must not let the monstrous brutality of the enemy be used to excuse the repugnant crimes committed on our side.’75 Revolutionary justice was being replaced by conventional bourgeois justice. Trained judges were placed at the head of the Tribunales Populares. One of the first things that Irujo did was to professionalize the prison service to ensure no repetition of the atrocities of November 1936. The prison regime was relaxed in a way unimaginable in the rebel zone. Catholic clergy and religious were released. The Red Cross was allowed full access to prisons.76 Many civilian prisoners were allowed out on parole for the births, marriages, illnesses or deaths of family members. As a result of these measures, Irujo was for a time denounced by the anarchist press as a Vaticanist caveman and a bourgeois reactionary, but eventually he was congratulated for his work by an anarchist delegation. Similarly, in the Ministry of the Interior, Zugazagoitia would use his position to save the lives of prominent Falangists in Republican custody.
An illustration of the personal ethics of Negrín and Irujo was the extraordinary case of Amelia de Azarola. She was a Basque nationalist and an anti-fascist who was also the wife of, and deeply in love with, Julio Ruiz de Alda, one of the founders of the Falange. She was arrested in August 1936, shortly before he was murdered in the massacre of the Cárcel Modelo. She was tried on 29 March 1937 for ‘hostility to the regime’. Both Irujo and Negrín showed up as witnesses at her trial. Irujo knew her as a firm Republican from her native village in Euskadi. Negrín had studied medicine with her at Madrid University and spoke of her activities then as a left-wing student and as a Republican. In consequence, she was found not guilty, but Cazorla refused to release her and had her detained as a hostage for a possible prisoner exchange. She was permitted to work in the women’s prison of Alacuás just outside Valencia. After intervention by Negrín, in the autumn of 1937, Dr Azarola was released by the DGS and permitted to return to her home in Barcelona under protective custody and then, in early 1938, she was exchanged and went to Navarre.77
The prison at Alacuás where Dr Azarola worked had once been a Jesuit residence, refurbished on the orders of Irujo. Light, airy, with a gymnasium and swimming pool, conditions there were relatively comfortable. Queipo de Llano’s sister Rosario arrived there in July 1937, and encountered a distinguished roster of Francoists, including José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s sister Carmen, his aunt María Jesús and his sister-in-law Margot Larios, as well as María Luisa Millán Astray, the sister of the founder of the Foreign Legion, Franco’s niece, Pilar Jaraiz Franco, a cousin of the Duque de Alba and female relatives of several prominent rebel officers.78
Irujo had accepted the post of Minister of Justice on the condition that freedom of conscience would be respected and religious practice legalized. Safe-conducts and identity cards were provided for priests and religious and efforts were made to establish the right to practise the liturgy. He created the Office of Religious Orders and worked tirelessly until he succeeded in arranging for the first public Mass to be said in the Basque Delegation in Valencia, on 15 August 1937, and for the first chapel to be reopened in Barcelona. These achievements provoked strident CNT criticism. Jesús de Galíndez, who worked in the Office of Religious Orders, served as an altar boy at that first Mass. The fifth column tried to undermine the initiative by spreading the rumour that the chapel was deconsecrated and that anyone who attended Mass there would be excommunicated. They realized that, with the churches open, they had lost one of their principal propaganda weapons against the government.79
The one thing that Irujo and Zugazagoitia could not do was to control the activities of Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the NKVD station chief known as Aleksandr Orlov. Theoretically, Orlov had various tasks – counter-espionage, especially within the International Brigades, the organization of guerrilla and sabotage activities and the creation of a small, elite Republican secret police force to counter internal opposition to the government. This latter was his principal activity and the fruit of this was the Brigadas Especiales. Their initial purpose was to combat the fifth column, but they had soon been turned against those elements of the Spanish left perceived as subversive traitors. On 3 May 1937, Grigulevich led one of the Brigadas Especiales to Barcelona to eliminate, under the cover of the disorder, a number of prominent foreign Trotskyists linked to the POUM.80 It has been suggested that Grigulevich’s group may have been responsible for the murder, on the night of 5–6 May, of the Italian anarchists Camilo Berneri and Francesco Barbieri. Since Berneri constituted a far greater danger to Mussolini than to Stalin, it is possible that this was the work of the Italian OVRA. The CNT’s own investigation concluded that Berneri had been killed by members of Estat Català working for the OVRA.81
As far as a paranoid Stalin was concerned, Orlov’s principal task was the eradication of foreign dissident Communists in Spain. Indeed, Russian security personnel in Republican Spain were much more concerned with this task than with any action against the POUM, which was considered to be the job of the Spanish police. Many eastern Europeans were arrested and imprisoned by agents of a Catalan unit, similar to the Madrid-based Brigadas Especiales, known as the Grup d’Informació. It was part of the secret service of the Generalitat’s Defence Council with which Orlov had established links. The arrested Trotskyists were taken to the convent of Santa Úrsula in Valencia, where they were interrogated and tortured by Russians, Germans and east Europeans, all members of their respective Communist parties.82
One of Orlov’s victims was Mark Rein, the son of the Russian Menshevik leader Rafail Abramovich. Rein had come to S
pain as correspondent for several anti-Stalinist publications including the New York Jewish daily, Forward. On 9 April 1937, he left the Hotel Continental in Barcelona and was never seen again. He had been abducted and murdered by agents of the Grup d’Informació.83 Another of Orlov’s targets was Andreu Nin, more as a one-time close collaborator of Trotsky than as leader of the POUM. Already, in a report to Moscow in late February 1937, Orlov had noted that the war effort was being undermined by ‘inter-party conflicts in which the energy of most people is devoted to winning authority and power for their own party and discrediting others rather than to the struggle against fascism’. After dismissive comments about both Gorev and Berzin, he went on to say:
the time has come when it is necessary to analyze the threatening situation … and forcefully present to the Spanish Government (and Party leaders) the full gravity of the situation and to propose the necessary measures – if the Spanish Government really wants help from us: (1) bringing the army and its command into a healthier state of discipline (shooting deserters, maintaining discipline, etc.) and (2) putting an end to the inter-party squabbles. If, in the face of immediate danger, we do not bring the Spanish Government to its senses, events will take a catastrophic turn.84
