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3. The Meaning of a Defeat
Pelai Pagès is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Barcelona and the author of many books, including a history of the Spanish Communist Party (1920-1930), the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia (1936-1939) and, most recently, the Modelo Prison of Barcelona (936-1939).BETWEEN MAY 3-8, 1937, THERE WERE A SERIES OF ARMED CLASHES in Barcelona and other Catalan towns between various social and political forces of the Catalan anti-fascist coalition. In Land and Freedom, Ken Loach has boldly and convincingly set out the events at the rear of the Catalan front which climaxed in the annihilation of the dissident Workers Party of Marxist Unification or POUM by the intervention of Stalinist Soviet Russia.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR WAS TOUCHED OFF BY A REVOLT of the army opposed to the Republic in July 1936. The conflict unleashed a revolutionary process which embodied a great deal of popular and worker spontaneity, as well as a good deal of political irrationality as it developed. In part, the revolution surged up from grassroots worker organizations with a sophisticated political consciousness along with a high level of organizational and political maturity. After five years of failed Republican reformism, these political forces had begun to consider the possibility of achieving their immediate objectives through the vehicle of a social revolution. A War Which Ignited a Revolution
First, we should familiarize ourselves with the profound economic, social, and political transformations which began during that same month of July 1936 on the territory that remained under Republican control. A social revolution was working its way up from the spontaneous actions of the masses who belonged to these organizations with a history full of struggles, sacrifices, repression, and a great deal of sorrow. I have no intention of turning the revolution into a glorious myth. As is the case in all revolutions accompanied by a good deal of spontaneity and/or voluntarism, many errors were made and numerous acts committed which were unpardonable from any point of view. Without presuming to justify anything, it seems obvious to me that a revolution which sprang out of an act of violence as grave as a military insurrection had to engender a particular historical mindset. This psychology only becomes explicable when set within the larger context of the kind of violence that unleashed multiform hatreds and encompassed sentiments having little to do with revolution.
Amid the confusion, some time was needed to clarify the situation. An extremely complex logic of reality began to unfold. On one side was the war with all its cruelty and drama. For the most part, the working class, whatever its ideological bent, was well aware that a victory for the army would mean the victory of fascism, barbarism, and hopelessness. Elsewhere, without following any preconceived plan, a shift of political and social hegemony had been engineered in Catalonia and the other territories of Republican Spain which propelled the working class into a position of historical protagonist, a position it had never before attained. This hegemonic shift was responsible for launching the revolutionary transformations.
We are dealing with a complex reality. Yet at the same time, war and revolution viewed in their totality appear to be elements of alternative realities, at least at the outset.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT IN AN EXTREMELY COMPLEX INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT which, to a great extent, foreshadowed World War II. When the Spanish conflict began, the aggressiveness of European fascism was being spurred on by the weakness of the Western democracies which proved incapable of standing up to the incursions of fascism. Simultaneously, in the Soviet Union, a process of the consolidation of the autocratic rule of Stalin was under way. Stalin emerged from the turbulent years of the 1930s with the Trotskyist opposition purged and a specific political project in place whose contours and content could soon no longer be questioned by anybody. Only from this perspective can we explain the big show trials of the Bolshevik Old Guard which facilitated the annihilation of Lenin's revolutionary colleagues whose inauguration coincided with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the service of the supreme truth of socialism incarnated in Comrade Stalin, everything was justified at any cost. The International Situation: A Causal Framework
Many would be taken in by this subterfuge, especially when Russia emerged as the only force standing up to the fascist challenge. Stalin played the anti-fascist card very capably and was able to exploit the profound anti-fascist and anti-war mood prevailing among the European public. This enabled Stalin to pull off an abrupt shift in his international policy, proposing the Popular Front strategy of 1935 as a magic formula to stop fascism in its tracks. French and Spanish Communists applied this policy in their own countries and it helped boost their popularity. Who in Europe could doubt that Comrade Stalin was throwing into concentration camps and executing anybody other than the genuine enemies of socialism? Safeguarding the socialist fatherland constantly threatened by fascism became the motive force used to justify everything. This threat also came to encompass the eradication of a cancer which, under the guise of purported political dissidence, menaced the Soviet Union from within.
When the war broke out in Spain, nobody questioned the position of neutrality adopted and maintained by the USSR throughout the first few months of the conflict. More surprisingly, the USSR zealously adhered to the non-intervention agreement while, from the outset, the governments of Italy and Germany had no compunctions about publicly subscribing to the accords while simultaneously supplying weapons and troops to the military insurrectionists. Only in October did Stalin finally decide to intervene in the Spanish Civil War.
SOVIET AID TO THE REPUBLIC WAS HARDLY AN ACT OF PURE BENEVOLENCE. In October 1936, the first contingents of the International Brigades arrived in Barcelona duly organized and equipped by the Communist parties of Europe and the U.S. With them also came the Soviet ambassador to Madrid, Mikhail Rosenberg; the Counsel-General to Barcelona, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko; and a host of military advisors and political commissars. Dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, Stalin began to give advice freely to Francisco Largo Caballero, then the President of the Republican government, on how to run the war. There was no dearth of advisors ready to pass on this "advice" whenever needed. The entire policy of the Spanish CP and PSUC was tightly controlled by new grey eminences such as the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, the French-Catalan André Marti, the Hungarian Erno Geroe, and the terrible Bulgarian Stapanov. Out of touch with our reality in my view, all of them arrived in anti-fascist Spain to teach us how to stifle a revolution and lose a war. The Soviet Intervention in Spain
Obviously, my judgment comes after the fact and may appear sectarian. Moreover, some may believe in the selfless courage of such international allies. But the time has come for us to uncover the cynicism behind the story and call things by their names. We know that from the moment Stalin's agents arrived in Spain, the destruction of the POUM became an obsession. The astonishing thing is that we are talking about a small party numbering 30,000 in December 1936 and mainly rooted in Catalonia. However the POUM was the critical conscience of the Russian Revolution which was then drowning in blood. The leaders of the POUM represented the first defenders of the October Revolution in Catalonia. Some, like Andreu Nin had lived almost a decade in the Soviet Union and possessed a keen knowledge of the intricacies of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This obsession with the POUM spread and led to the exit of the POUM from the Autonomous Catalan Government in the name of anti-fascist unity in December 1936.
It was coupled with yet another fixation: how to rein in a revolutionary process in Spain which represented the very antithesis of the Soviet revolutionary process and was very unruly from the Communist perspective.
IF THE EXISTENCE OF THE POUM WAS AN AFFRONT TO STALINISM, the revolution was mainly driven and defended at all costs by the CNT. The CNT was the great anarcho-syndicalist trade union which, from the time of its founding in 1910, had spearheaded all the major working class struggles in Catalonia and the other regions of the Spanish state. Along with the CNT, the POUM and other key segments of the socialist left did not want to squander the historical opportunity presented to them by a revolution for which so many workers had given their lives. Many perceived the revolution as the dream of a lifetime come true, a challenge issued only a few times before in history, and a compelling rationale for a war pitting them against the fascist army that had rebelled against the Republic. The Counter-Revolutionary Assault
Opting for thoroughgoing revolution was definitely a class choice, a view not shared unanimously within the anti-fascist camp. Neither was opposition confined solely to those whose class interests predisposed them against a radicalization of the revolution, as was the case with the organizations of the bourgeois left. The socialist right-wing and inevitably the Spanish Communist Party and the Catalonian PSUC very quickly mapped out a course for the return of the Republic to the conditions of institutional normality which existed prior to July 1936. For them, the brunt of the offensive had to be directed against the new political organizations issuing from the revolution. A systematic campaign was begun to rein in the excesses of collectivization in both industry and agriculture. Tensions were sparked which often led to bloodshed and portended the widespread clashes of May 1937.
The Actions of May 1937: Some Irreparable Consequences
THE DECISION WAS MADE TO CANCEL THE 1937 MAY DAY CELEBRATION in Barcelona in order to avoid provocations that might have done serious damage to the anti-fascist cause. But just two days later, tensions boiled over when three trucks full of commandos were sent by the Autonomous Catalan Government to take over the Barcelona telephone exchange under the pretext that the worker committees established by the CNT-UGT would control inter-governmental communications. This was the spark, the dreaded provocation. As on other occasions in the recent past, a fresh spontaneous wave of Barcelona workers took to the barricades. Only this time, workers lined up against each other on opposite sides of the barricades. The situation was Kafkaesque to the extent that a mini-civil war had erupted in the midst of another civil war of greater scope.
Both camps were very clearly defined: the CNT-FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica) and POUM were ready to defend the revolution at any price. The Autonmous Catalan Government, the liberal Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), and the PSUC saw a golden opportunity to put an end to the power of the Committees and finally tame the revolution. The fighting was intense and not just confined to Barcelona. But fortunately, the clashes lasted only a few days. By Saturday May 8, the streets were almost calm once again. In the interim however, Catalonia had lost its autonomous authority in matters of public order and the number of victims reached almost 300 dead and over 2,000 wounded. Moreover, those wounds would never heal.
After the battle, both sides tried to present the confrontation as an unfortunate misunderstanding in which there were no winners or losers. But the fallaciousness of this position soon became obvious because there certainly were winners and losers. The May crisis set off an institutional crisis which led to the fall of the Largo Caballero government and his replacement by Juan Negrin, a moderate socialist leader who soon fell under Communist influence. In the meantime, the authority of the Autonomous Catalan Government continued to wither until its powers were finally annulled entirely when the Republican government was transferred to Catalonia in the autumn of 1938.
Once the possessor of uncontested popular hegemony in Catalan before May 1937, the CNT was now being systematically frozen out of policy-making. CNT members would soon see prominent anarcho-syndicalist activists rotting in jail and exemplary organs of the revolution like the Aragon Defense Council being dissolved. The revolution had been put on a very short leash. A new Communist hegemony was imposed on the ranks of the army and new police apparatus which began to mushroom in the summer of 1937. There now began a new period of the militarization of society, widespread terror, and the nationalization of the economy. Many analysts have come to view these events as an attempt to found what would later become known as a "People's Democracy" in postwar Eastern Europe.
The main victim of the May confrontation was the POUM which stood accused by the Communists of having provoked the fight and being part of an international fascist conspiracy. The libel and slander employed by the PCE and the PSUC against the POUM culminated in the dissolution of the party and the assassination of its principal leader, Andreu Nin.
The suppression of the POUM had implications far deeper than those that come immediately to mind. For the first time in history, Stalin dared to apply outside of the USSR the same system of terror that he employed at home. In Republican Spain and Catalonia, he accomplished this feat with the aid of so few accomplices because there were many segments of the population which welcomed the return to a certain social normality and a chance to concentrate all their energies on winning the war. But as the irony of history would have it, the Republic would begin to suffer its most spectacular defeats after Stalinism had achieved its objectives. The May events obviously had a lasting demoralizing effect on many of those who continued to fight for the Spanish Republic.
Translated from the Spanish by Patrick Flaherty.