Spain: A Unique History (33 page)

Once the war had actually begun, Azaña finally reversed course and accepted Sánchez-Román's proposal on the night of July 18-19, authorizing formation of a broader all-republican government under Diego Martínez Barrio, who led the most moderate of the Popular Front parties. The task of Martínez Barrio was to reach a new compromise and preserve law and order. Coming even a single week earlier, it might have been successful, but after the conflict began, it was too late.

It has sometimes been observed that neither the Left Republican leaders nor the revolutionary Socialists should have complained about the military revolt, since their policy was based on expecting and waiting for such a revolt, even trying to provoke it, in order to take advantage of suppressing it. Such a thesis offers a correct reading of the policy of Largo Caballero and the revolutionary Socialists, who had no program for seizing power directly but were relying on the spread of pre-revolutionary activity to provoke a revolt, which would destabilize the situation to the point where the moderate Left would have to make way for the revolutionaries to lead the government, in effect beginning the revolution. This was a correct prediction of exactly what happened, but reflects the policy only of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement.

Indalecio Prieto and the semimoderate Socialist sector had no such blithe confidence in provoking and overcoming an armed rebellion, which they preferred to avoid, realizing that such a situation could lead to a major civil war. Prieto called both for greater moderation, for law and order, and for a stronger Republican government that would purge the military. At the same time, however, the prietista Socialists themselves could not resist exploiting the weakness of the Left Republican government to violate the constitution and advance the program of the Socialists, so that in practice it was sometimes difficult to find much difference between the deeds of the followers of Prieto and of Largo Caballero.

The provocation thesis raises complex issues when applied to the government of Casares Quiroga. Certainly there is no evidence that any of the Left Republican leaders wanted a civil war, and late in June the Ministry of the Interior even sent a circular to provincial governors instructing them to avoid actions that might provoke the military.

It would seem that Casares Quiroga himself was of two minds on this issue. He was determined not to be a mere "Kerensky," a sort of puppet who would end up giving in to the revolutionaries. He was also aware that a conspiracy existed in the army, and expressed some confidence that it would never amount to more than a repetition of the "sanjurjada," that futile rebellion of August 1932. Some of those who spoke with Casares Quiroga got the idea that he even welcomed what he believed would be a feeble revolt, calculating that its suppression would not be difficult and, rather than weakening the state to the point where the moderate left would have to cede powers to the revolutionaries (as Largo Caballero calculated), would actually strengthen the government, enabling it to control the revolutionaries more easily. This may explain why no stronger measures were taken on July 13-14, after the murder of Calvo Sotelo, to conciliate the opposition or to apprehend those responsible, even though the state security forces had been involved.

The military conspiracy began in multiple strands of confusion and uncertainty soon after the electoral victory of the Popular Front. It did not achieve any focus until a significant sector of the officers supporting rebellion began to recognize Brig. Gen. Emilio Mola, commander of the garrison in Pamplona, as the overall leader at the close of April. Mola once had a reputation as a moderate liberal, and the plan that he developed for the revolt envisioned replacing the existing leftist government with an all-military directory, which would supervise the drastic reform of the Republic in a rightist direction. This envisaged a kind of "Portuguese solution," creating a corporative, more restrictive, and authoritarian republic similar to Salazar's Estado Novo in Portugal.

Developing broad support for the conspiracy was difficult, for many key sectors of the military were reluctant to commit themselves. Though the monarchists and the CEDA leaders eventually pledged support, José Antonio Primo de Rivera only finally committed the Falange at the end of June, while the Carlists refused to come on board until July 15. Just before the latter date, an embittered Mola was prepared to throw in the towel, which would mean accepting the fact that an effective revolt could not be organized and possibly having to flee abroad.

The plan for military action also accepted that a direct coup d'état in Madrid would probably not be successful. Other units would have to be concentrated against the capital, and all this would require a week or two of military operations. The plan thus conceived of a "mini"-civil war, but not a long conflict, rather similar to the thinking of the revolutionaries.

Soon after the conflict began, both sides began to develop the idea that the real cause of the conflict lay abroad. The rebel Nacionales advanced the thesis that Soviet policy and the Comintern were to blame, targeting Spain for a Soviet-style revolution by the end of August. This charge was false, and will be dealt with in chapter 11.

Since Hitler and Mussolini began to provide limited military assistance to the rebels before the end of July, the Republicans soon charged that the military revolt had been conceived in Rome and Berlin to allow the fascists to take over Spain indirectly. This charge was equally false, since Berlin had refused to have anything to do with the conspirators before the revolt. Mussolini had signed an agreement with the monarchists in May 1934 to assist a rightist overthrow of the Republic, but that plan soon fell through and became a dead letter. In the spring of 1936 the Italian leader refused to deal any further with Spanish conspirators, judging their activities to be futile. Limited military assistance for the rebels was only decided in Berlin and Rome between July 25 and 27, when Hitler and Mussolini — both initially surprised by the revolt — judged that the rebels were strong enough to be worth supporting. Stalin, in turn, only decided to provide military assistance to the Republic in mid-September.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the final opportunity to avoid civil war came after the murder of Calvo Sotelo on July 13. This magnicide had a traumatic and catalyzing effect on rightist opinion, not merely because of the identity of the victim but even more because of the identity of the murderers and the way in which it was done, which seemed to demonstrate either collusion by the authorities or state security forces completely out of control. Only then did Franco, for example, firmly commit himself to the revolt.

Had Azaña taken the action on July 13 or 14 that he took late on the night of the eighteenth, replacing the Casares Quiroga government with a more moderate and conciliatory administration, the conflict might yet have been avoided. According to the Left Republican Mariano Ansó, Mola even sent an officer to meet with the minister of the interior to learn if the government was now going to change its policy, but such a meeting was denied.

Azaña was urged by some advisors to dismiss Casares Quiroga, but he refused, alleging that any such action would be tantamount to an admission of the government's guilt. But that was the point exactly at issue. Though the government had not authorized the murder, it was responsible for tolerating and even encouraging the climate in the security forces that made so subversive an action possible, and its officials had indeed connived in illegal activities on the night of July 12-13 (as they had many times before), but not in the murder itself. If this culpability could not be recognized and rectified, then it was unlikely that civil war could be avoided.

The government promised an investigation and punishment of the authors of the crime, but that was soon short-circuited. Instead, the government immediately resumed its customary policy of "blaming the victim," the only action taken being to close various rightist centers and carry out arbitrary arrests of some two hundred more rightists, as though they had been responsible for the killing. The government's totally counterproductive response — one of the worst imaginable — only intensified polarization and convinced halfhearted conspirators like Franco that armed revolt was the only alternative. The time had come when it seemed more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel.

After the war began, one of the Left's most bitter criticisms of Casares Quiroga concerned his failure to purge the military and eliminate the danger of revolt. Both Azaña and Casares, however, were following a high-risk strategy of trying to maintain the unity of all the Left (except the anarchists) without falling prey to the revolutionaries. To make this work, it seemed important not to weaken the security forces or the military, who in a crisis might be needed to counterbalance the revolutionaries. Casares was convinced that any military rebellion would be comparatively weak and isolated, and could be crushed by the government. Similarly, he issued strict orders not to "arm the people," even after the military revolt began, for that probably meant handing power to the revolutionaries, something that he was determined to avoid.

Azaña at first agreed. Once it became clear by the night of July 18 that the rebellion was stronger and more widespread than had been anticipated, he did not turn to the revolutionaries but authorized the moderate Left Republican leader Martínez Barrio to form a broader and more moderate Left-center government and also try to conciliate the military, even at the cost of certain concessions to them.

This was the best available solution, but was tried several days too late. The rebel leaders had pledged not to retreat once the revolt began, and rejected the compromise. They believed that Azaña and his colleagues could not be trusted and that the Martínez Barrio government would be too weak to cope with the revolutionaries. Indeed, by the early morning of July 19 there was a vehement demonstration against the compromise government led by the Socialists and also by some of the more radical Left Republicans. Martínez Barrio resigned and almost immediately Azaña appointed a new Left Republican government that began to "arm the people." The final responsibilities thus were those of Azaña for not changing policy immediately after July 13, the determination of the rebels to accept no compromise once the rebellion had begun, and finally the Republican authorities' decision to "arm the people," guaranteeing full-scale civil war.
⁶

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Franco's brother-in-law and foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Súñer, delivered a dramatic speech from the balcony of the Falangist headquarters in Madrid: "Russia is guilty! Guilty of having caused our Civil War! Guilty of the death of José Antonio, our founder, and of the deaths of so many comrades and soldiers fallen in that war provoked by Russian Communist aggression! ... The extermination of Russia is a necessity of history and for the future of Europe!"
¹
This expressed graphically the stance of the Movimiento Nacional and the Franco regime, whose official position was that the Soviet Union and its Comintern had instigated the Civil War, and had engaged in military aggression against Spain. The truth, however, was different and much more complex.

In fact, the Communist International, or Comintern, bore comparatively little responsibility for instigating the Civil War. In the final weeks before the conflict its leaders had sought to discipline and in certain ways to moderate the revolutionary Left in order to avoid a cataclysm, even though they encouraged an aggressive Communist policy in parliament. More broadly, Communism had a certain indirect responsibility only to the extent that the era of the Russian Revolution had opened a generation of "European civil war," launching the menace of revolution and counterrevolution that would last through the 1940s.

The Partido Comunista de España (PCE — Communist Party of Spain) was founded by two agents of the Comintern in 1920, with the assistance of young radicals who had broken away from the Socialist Party. For the next sixteen years it was distinguished primarily by its insignificance, failing to establish a significant base. Until 1935 the policy of the Comintern was nonetheless to foment immediate revolution in almost every country in which there was a Communist Party, and to move immediately to "form Soviets." In Spain the Second Republic was rejected as "bourgeois reaction," but the emphasis on immediate revolution proved entirely fruitless.
²

The policy of the Comintern, and therefore of its underling the PCE, changed drastically in August 1935 with adoption of the tactic of the Popular Front. Communist insistence on immediate violent revolution had isolated the movement and led to a variety of disasters, above all the triumph of Hitler in Germany. Comintern leaders defined the Popular Front as a change in tactics rather than a change in strategy, abandoning the isolationist insistence on immediate revolution in favor of forming electoral alliances with other leftist and even liberal democratic parties, not to install Communism but rather first to "defeat fascism." They declared that the new tactics would ultimately hasten rather than delay revolution.
³

In Spain this coincided with the new priority of the Left Republicans and the semimoderate sector of the Socialists for an all-Left alliance to win the next elections. Azaña had little desire to include the small revolutionary parties, however, and it was only at the insistence of Largo Caballero and the revolutionary Socialists that the Communists, with their small numbers, were brought in, although the alliance did eventually adopt the Comintern terminology of "Popular Front," somewhat to the distaste of Azaña and the Left Republicans. It was thanks primarily to the assistance of these new allies that the Communists gained seventeen seats in the Cortes elections of 1936. By this time the PCE was growing rapidly for the first time, while the revolutionary sector of the Socialists declared their own goal to be what they called "bolshevization," though their aim was to absorb the Communists rather than vice versa.