The Spanish Civil War (58 page)

Despite the Germans, trade with Britain continued to be important. Thus exports of sherry, other wines and pyrites would even show an
increase in 1937 over 1935. A trade protocol confirming ‘old links’, in the most ‘accidentalist’ manner, was signed, in December 1936. Thereafter, a British commercial presence, in the shape of Arthur Pack, commercial counsellor at the British Embassy, was maintained in Burgos. This was an effective competitor to HISMA, and was more popular than the Italians’ equivalent to HISMA, the Società Anonima Finanziere Nazionale Italiana (SAFNI), whose far from enterprising officials concentrated on trying to secure a favourable share when, and if, the nationalists should liberate the mercury mines in Almadén. Nevertheless, German-Spanish relations dominated the nationalist economy. For example, the British-owned Río Tinto Company, whose mines were occupied by the nationalist army in August (after months of labour disturbances), complained in mid-January that their copper was being requisitioned and sent to Germany. The Glasgow-owned Tharsis sulphur and copper mines similarly complained, as did the managers of iron and manganese mines in Morocco, in which there were substantial English interests. The British government subsequently protested to the German government, but the foreign ministry in Berlin were powerless, even ignorant, because of the influence acquired by Bernhardt and HISMA. There were some disputes between HISMA-ROWAK and the foreign ministry in January 1937, but Bernhardt came out of them, at the end, the master of Spanish trade, the Nazi party achieving one more victory over the foreign ministry.
¹

One German assistance to General Franco remains to be noted: in December 1936 a huge Lorenz radio transmission plant arrived in Vigo from Hamburg, three times larger than any other in Spain. Henceforward, the voice of Salamanca and Burgos could be clearly heard throughout not only nationalist but republican Spain as well; and to begin with the voice of Queipo de Llano could be heard in particular: ‘tonight I shall take a sherry and tomorrow I shall take Málaga’.
²

In the winter of 1936–37, the republic seemed a united state only in the pages of the foreign press. Division characterized every institution and, while every party and region seemed at loggerheads, there were also quarrels within most parties. Of the latter, the communists, the new party of law and order, seemed the most self-confident of the different elements in the republican alliance. Their air of possessing the future, their dynamism, their political attitude of no-nonsense, and the prestige of Russian arms (‘propaganda by sight’, as the Asturian socialist González Peña put it) made them the obvious party for ambitious people to join. To the heavy tanks and fast fighters and bombers, there were soon added excellent new machine-guns. Many previously neutral army officers joined the communist party or came under their influence. Thus General Pozas, commander of the Army of the Centre, was already close to the party,
¹
while Hidalgo de Cisneros, chief of the republican air force, who had never previously even thought about socialism, became a communist because he ‘thought that they would contribute best to the struggle’.
²
The weakness, continued divisions,
and ideological vagueness of the socialist party was another reason for communist success: old voters for that party joined the communists in droves. Largo Caballero might still be a socialist, but before the war, only a few months ago, had he not been the most pro-communist Spaniard of them all?

The anarchists, meantime, were falling out among themselves. Many were critical of the entry of the four leaders into the government. Others denounced the government’s move from Madrid, and accused their secretary-general, Horacio Prieto, of cowardice, for having let the ministers leave: an unjust accusation, since he had not been consulted. He resigned. That austere, proud, dry, uncompromising man was then replaced by Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez, an exuberant and athletic young building worker, with a powerful voice, the
protégé
of Garcia Oliver.
¹
Had Marx perhaps been right, some people asked, in suggesting that anarchism in practice degenerated into petty bourgeois behaviour?

Catalan socialists and communists were already almost indistinguishable in the PSUC. Elsewhere, many who did not formally join the party became in effect party members: among these were the deputies Margarita Nelken and Francisco Montiel (the treasurer of the UGT), Felipe Pretel (who also was a deputy commissar-general), and Edmundo Domínguez, the president of the Madrid
casa del pueblo
and secretary of the building workers. Many other members of the Madrid socialist party, left in the capital where the communists were, at this time, at their greatest strength, also accepted the language and style of communism, even if their loyalty to it might be only skin-deep.
²
Communist numbers formally increased to 250,000 by the end of 1936.
³
Their championship of peasant ownership and opposition to revolution everywhere gained them ground. The Catalan writer José Agustín Goytisolo later explained that his father joined the PSUC since, though a man of the Right, he wanted protection against the anarchists, who desired to take over the factory in which he worked as an engineer.
⁴
José Díaz was to tell the communist central committee in
March that no less than 76,000 (almost a third) of party members were peasant proprietors and 15,485 (6.2 per cent) members of the urban middle class. There were thus more peasant proprietors than agricultural workers: an extraordinary situation. By June, the number of communists in Spain would increase to nearly 400,000, of whom 22,000 were in Vizcaya and 64,000 in Catalonia. The united youth also increased greatly. So, too, did associates of communist front organizations, such as the ‘Union of Girls’, the ‘Militia of Culture’ and, above all, ‘International Red Aid’. Against this vast increase in communist figures, the socialist party now numbered only 160,000, the FAI much the same number, and the anarchist youth about 100,000. The POUM may have had 60,000.
¹
Both anarchists and left-wing socialists also criticized the communist support for the small farmers of Valencia, many of whom had voted in the past for the Valencian autonomy movement, and some of whom had been members of the CEDA.
²
The communists claimed that over half their members were serving in the army: if true, that would mean that 130,000 out of the republican army of 360,000, at the end of March 1937, were communists.
³

One use which the communist party made of its power was to establish itself deeply in the republican administration, to arrange that, through the agency of the experienced special agent Orlov, the NKVD’s tentacles should crowd out all private
checas,
both of the socialist-communist youth and others, and to prepare the way for the same onslaught on anti-Stalinist Marxists in Spain (such as the POUM) as was occurring in Russia.
⁴
The motives of the communists demand a little attention; for the POUM were not Trotskyists, Nin having broken with Trotsky on entering the Catalan government and Trotsky having spoken critically of the POUM. No, what upset the communists was the fact that the POUM were a serious group of revolutionary Spanish Marxists, well-led, and independent of Moscow. The POUM’s leaders were all ex-communists, so that they could be regarded as traitors. In the whole of Spain, only the POUM newspaper
La Batalla,
and the CNT’s
La Noche,
edited by members of the anarchist extreme group, the Friends of Durruti, mentioned the Purges in Moscow, for example; and the CNT eventually disavowed
La Noche
’s article. To most Spanish republicans, the purges in Russia were allowed to seem an invention of fascist propaganda.
¹

The first move in the Spanish purge was a communist campaign to manoeuvre the POUM out of the Catalan
Generalidad
on the specious ground that the government should be one of unions, not parties. Nin, whose tenureship had been anyway controversial, at the councillorship of justice, left on 16 December.
²
The Catalan government was reconstituted, with the CNT getting four places (Herrera, Domenech, Isgleas, and Abad de Santillán) to the UGT’s three (Comorera, Vidiella and Miguel Valdés—all PSUC members), the Esquerra’s three (Tarradellas, Ayguadé, and Sbert), and the
rabassaires’
one (Calvet). Of these, Ayguadé, however, as councillor for the interior, was close to the communists. The powerful figure of Comorera, secretary-general of the PSUC, came more and more to dominate this government. The anarchist Isgleas, nominally councillor for defence, did little.

The anarchists did nothing to defend the POUM, since they regarded the quarrel as just another internal Marxist squabble. Nin, though an ex-communist, was also remembered as a renegade from the CNT. The Esquerra’s lack of enthusiasm for the POUM was well-known; at the same time, the communists were by now (if only for the time being) Companys’s close friends—not only against the revolution (POUM, CNT, and FAI), but against reaction. The latter needed to be guarded against as much as the former, since in the autumn of 1936, there was an attempt at a
coup d’état
by certain Catalan nationalists. The Estat Català leaders (most of whom were in Paris) had been expecting Franco’s victory in Madrid.
³
They apparently wondered whether they might not try to negotiate an autonomous Catalonia in return for a recognition of Franco’s victory throughout the rest of Spain. The plotters also tried to gain the interest of certain disaffected anarchists. The
story leaked out, Andreu Reverter, chief of police in the
Generalidad,
was found to be involved, as was Juan Casanovas, president of the
Generalidad.
The matter was hushed up: Reverter was arrested, on grounds of corruption; and Casanovas was allowed to leave quietly if hastily for Paris. Reverter was also secretly released, and was never heard of again. He was secretly shot. He was replaced by a friend of Companys’s, Martí Rouret, who himself soon gave way to a communist, Rodríguez Salas.
¹

This crisis testified to the malaise between the central government and Barcelona. As has been seen, Catalonia had already profited from the military rising in July 1936 to carry out what had been in effect its own
coup d’état
over Madrid. An unresolved problem related to the position of Catalan industries, particularly war industries: the government of Catalonia insisted that the central republican government should deal only with them, and not directly with the industries concerned. Yet the
Generalidad
was far from efficient, and the needs of war were pressing.
²

Thus the situation in Catalonia was one of unparalleled complexity: Companys and his friends in the Esquerra saw eye-to-eye with both the central government and the communists about how to deal with the anarchists and the POUM, on the need to end the terror in the rearguard, and on the desirability of ensuring state intervention in industry, rather than workers’ control. They were opposed to the central government’s (and the communists’) ideas for centralizing the war effort. Beneath Companys’s troubled eyes, in the meantime, the anarchists and the communists carried on daily clashes in the press. For example,
Solidaridad Obrera
intoned on 19 December that ‘the scolding refrain [of the communists], “first win the war”, pains us. That is a dessicated slogan, without substance, nerve or fruit. First win the war and make the revolution at the same time, for the war and the revolution are cosubstantial, like sun and light.’

The communist plan was first to restore the power of the
Generalidad
against the anarchists and POUM, then to help the central govern
ment take over the
Generalidad.
Thus, in the winter of 1936, they agitated for the dissolution of the revolutionary committees, so as to place all executive organs of government under the
Generalidad
—in particular the control patrols under which innocent name anarchist leaders such as Dionisio Eroles, José Asens and Aurelio Fernández still terrorized Barcelona. Suspicion between the anarchists and the communists became acute in Barcelona at the start of January, after the latter persuaded Companys to appoint their secretary-general, Comorera, as food minister. Comorera abolished the bread committees, led by the anarchists, which had hitherto supervised the food supply of Barcelona. For a time, there was no state intervention in the food supply in Catalonia. Even rationing was delayed. This brought much hardship, since the price of bread had gone up far more than wages. There followed a bread shortage, partly caused by the inadequate harvest of the previous year, but attributed by the anarchists to Comorera’s inefficiency. Comorera, however, gave out that his CNT predecessor, Domenech, had been far more incapable.
¹
(The general price-index had gone up 40 per cent since June, and was increasing every month: 1937 would be a year of severe inflation.)
²
A poster war ensued, the anarchist posters demanding Comorera’s resignation, while PSUC posters called for ‘Less talk! Fewer committees! More bread!’ and even ‘All power to the
Generalidad
’. Meantime, bread queues, of 300 or 400 persons, outside closed bakeries became a daily sight. Sometimes, when no bread could be sold, assault guards had to disperse the queues with rifle butts.
³
All anarchist leaders, including the ministers in both the central government and the Catalan government, were disgusted by the communists’ acceptance of the economy of controlled capitalism, but acquiesced.
⁴

The ‘normalization’ of life in Barcelona (backed by both communists and Companys) was a relief to many even of the working class. The sub-secretary of justice, Quero Morales, recaptured the Palace of Justice from the revolutionary tribunal headed by the bloodthirsty lawyer Samblancat, which had been there since July. Sbert, councillor for education in the
Generalidad,
began to reorganize primary schools
on a conventional basis. Further change was similarly avoided in secondary and higher education due to the efforts of Professor Bosch Gimpera, at the University of Barcelona. There was also a slow reestablishment of municipal life, councils being named in place of the revolutionary committees, with an approximate ratio of three delegates for the anarchists, three for the non-revolutionary Left, and two for the PSUC (communists), with occasionally a place for the POUM.
¹

At the same time, on the national level, Largo Caballero persuaded the new anarchist minister of industries, Peiró, to cease pressing for the further collectivization of industries—on the ground that that would frighten foreign capital, though, of course, by the winter of 1936–7 most of the Catalan economy was collectivized, with factories working under the councils set up in October.
²
Many small shops had also been abolished in the interests of rationalization. Nevertheless, the system did not work as the Decree of October had provided. Illegal collectivizations continued and many agreements for compensation were unpaid. Many small undertakings demanded state help to get them out of economic difficulties. It was not altogether surprising that industrial output had dropped a third since June, and was continuing to drop.
³
The explanation of this was not primarily bad, or inexperienced, management: it was shortage of raw materials and of markets too. Anarchists were willing also to admit that the revolution had brought problems they had not dreamt of: the FAI leader, Abad de Santillán (economic councillor in the
Generalidad
) wrote candidly:

We had seen in the private ownership of the means of production, of factories, of means of transport, in the capitalist apparatus of distribution, the main cause of misery and injustice. We wished the socialization of all wealth so that not a single individual would be left out of the banquet of life. We have now done something, but we have not done it well. In place of the old owner, we have substituted a half-dozen new
ones who consider the factory, the means of transport which they control, as their own property, with the inconvenience that they do not always know how to organize … as well as the old.
¹