The Spanish Civil War (128 page)

1.
Bricall, p. 137.

2.
Surprisingly, April 1937 was the best month in the metallurgical industry for many months.

3.
29,228,088 kW in comparison with 40,265,603 in 1937 (Bricall, p. 55).

4.
I quote Jackson’s figure (
op. cit.,
p. 365).

5.
FAI minutes, published Barcelona 1937. Qu. Cattell,
Communism,
p. 110. (La Pasionaria to Azaña, in Azaña, vol. IV, p. 820.)

6.
An imaginative description appears in Castro Delgado, pp. 475–80.

7.
Díaz,
Por la unidad,
pp. 13–15.

1.
Lister, p. 106.

2.
The Spanish Revolution
(POUM newspaper), 3 February 1937.

3.
Gorkin,
El proceso de Moscú,
p. 45.

4.
Martín Blázquez, p. 320.

1.
See above, p. 562, where this idea is first discussed; and Payne,
Spanish Revolution,
pp. 271–2.

2.
Hernández (p. 66), from whom comes our knowledge of this meeting, says that it was Togliatti who proposed the destruction of Largo Caballero. Togliatti himself (
Rinascita,
December 1962) denied that he was in Spain until July 1937 and there is such general agreement that he was in Moscow until then (see Spriano,
op. cit.,
p. 215, fn. 1) that we must admit that Hernández must be wrong. The version is repeated by Spriano in his introduction to Palmiro Togliatti’s
Escritos sobre la Guerra de España
(Barcelona, 1980), p. 9. It is possible though that Togliatti could have come to Spain on a special mission, as stated before. (See p. 340 above.) See further discussion in Giorgio Bocca,
Palmiro Togliatti
(Rome, 1973), p. 285f.

1.
Peirats, vol. II, p. 172.

2.
Now the Plaza San Jaime.

1.
Ruta,
journal of JLC (Catalan anarchist youth), 25 March 1937.

2.
‘Uncontrollables’ at the CNT’s orders robbed the
Generalidad
of 18,000 pounds of flour, 5 lorry-loads of wheat, 40 of potatoes:
Solidaridad Obrera
defended them. See report in Martínez Bande,
La invasión,
p. 278.

3.
The new government consisted of Tarradellas (Premier), Sbert (culture), and Ayguadé (internal security), all of the Esquerra; Isgleas, Capdevila, Domenech and Aurelio Fernández (of the CNT, responsible for defence, economy, public services, and health); Miret, Vidiella and Comorera (of the PSUC, responsible for food, labour and justice); while Calvet (
rabassaires
) was responsible for agriculture. The appointment of a onetime
pistolero,
such as Aurelio Fernández, scarcely inspired confidence.

1.
I am grateful to Mariano Puente for his help in elucidating this obscure brawl. See also Benavides,
Guerra y revolución en Cataluña,
p. 405f., where the accusation is made that Martín and his men were attempting to extend their area of control, over the village of Bellver on the road to Seo. The collective had 170 members, with a salary of 50 pesetas per man, 35 per woman. See
La Révolution prolétarienne,
25 June 1937. Martín has his defenders.

2.
This was the impression of George Orwell, who returned to Barcelona from the front on 26 April—he had been serving with the POUM column (
Homage to Catalonia,
pp. 169ff.). His account of the following riots, marvellously written though it is, is a better book about war itself than about the Spanish war. But see Cruells,
Mayo sangriento
(Barcelona, 1970), pp. 41, 52. Auden commented in ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’ (
New English Weekly,
29 July 1937, qu. Orwell,
Collected Essays,
vol. I, p. 269) that ‘the Spanish government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan government) is more afraid of the revolution than it is of the fascists’.

3.
José Peirats,
Los anarquistas en la crisis política española
(Buenos Aires, 1964), pp. 241–3; Felix Morrow,
Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain
(New York, 1938), p. 87.

1.
Miravitlles, p. 141.

2.
Some still think that the plot was carefully worked out; suggestions supporting this conspiracy theory are contained in Krivitsky (p. 128), who wrote that, on 2 May, he met (presumably in Holland) an important Spanish communist, one ‘García’, head of ‘the loyalist secret service’, who had been sent to Moscow for a holiday by Orlov, who wanted him ‘out of the way’. But who is this ‘García’? Victor Serge (
op. cit.,
p. 335) speaks of a discussion in March in Brussels with someone who had been told by a ‘prominent Spanish communist’ that in Barcelona ‘they’re getting ready to liquidate thousands of anarchists and POUM militants’. The matter is intelligently discussed by Radosh et al., 173–74. The authors quote from a report by a Comintern representative that the crisis had to be hastened and if necessary provoked. Abad de Santillán talks of a prediction, also in Brussels, by the Spanish ambassador, Ossorio y Gallardo, that the CNT and FAI would soon be finally dealt with. Gorkin (
The Review
of the Imre Nagy Institute for Political Research, October 1959) claims that the Comintern’s man in Catalonia, Ernö Gerö, ‘provoked in 1937 the famous May Days in Barcelona … the great provocator of Budapest in 1956 [thus] held his dress rehearsal’. Azaña censured Ayguadé for ‘giving battle without having prepared for it’ (vol. IV, p. 577), and, in his
La insurrección libertaria y el ‘eje’ Barcelona-Bilbao
(vol. III, p. 514), pointed out that ‘all the elements were present for a conflagration in Barcelona, without the “novelesque” explanation of a “foreign power” being involved’.

1.
Who were the ‘Friends of Durruti’? Young
FAIistas,
such as Pablo Ruiz, Careño, Eleuterio Roig and, above all, Jaime Balius, who had disliked the collaborationist politics of the CNT since November. The real old friends of Durruti, the
solidarios
and the men around the journal
Nosotros,
were, however, not friendly to the ‘Friends of Durruti’. The ideas of the latter were to be seen in the journal
El Amigo del Pueblo.
They were, as Lorenzo says (p. 269), bolshevik anarchists, in the sense that they wanted to capture power, not the dissolution of the state. They were Leninists, perhaps, without being Marxists, if that is possible. Another dissident group had been formed around the journal
Acracia,
edited in Lérida by José Peirats.

1
A minor attack which had no consequences.

2.
GD,
p. 286. Cruells, p. 47, argues that Franco’s agents did little beyond supply information to the nationalists.

3.
Richard Bennett (with Barcelona Radio) described to me how at this time his door in Barcelona was opened by two men carrying bombs who bluntly asked him: ‘Whose side are you on?’ ‘Yours,’ he wisely answered. Another witness of these events was Willy Brandt, representing Norwegian newspapers in Spain from February to May 1937. Sympathetic to the POUM though critical of their excesses, Brandt returned to Norway hating the communists (see Terence Prittie,
Willy Brandt,
London, 1974, p. 34).

1.
There was some possibility of some sectors of the CNT, especially the FIJL, going over to the POUM. See Wildebaldo Solano,
The Spanish Revolution: The Life of Andrés Nin
(London, no date), p. 18. Wildebaldo Solano was secretary-general of the POUM youth movement.

2.
Julián Gorkin,
Caníbales políticos,
p. 69.

3.
Peirats,
La CNT,
vol. II, p. 274.

4.
Ibarruri, p. 377. This story is also told by Hidalgo de Cisneros, vol. II, p. 210, who says that anarchists and
POUMistas
had already left the front.

1.
Semprún Maura, p. 219.

2.
Members were Sesé (UGT), Valerio Mas (CNT), J. Pons (
rabassaires
), and Martín Faced (Esquerra).

3
Who by? The two Italians were arrested, by presumably PSUC or
Generalidad
police, on 5 May, as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. They were never seen again. Berneri was working on a dossier listing relations between Italian fascism and Catalan nationalism (Peirats,
La CNT,
vol. II, p. 198). He had become a kind of intellectual centre for the backers of ‘revolution without delay’ and, as Semprún Maura puts it, was an ‘obvious target for the Russian-directed secret police’. Italian anarchists had been active in Barcelona for a generation. Spriano (p. 209) assumes that the murder of Berneri was an example of ‘Stalinist methods introduced into Spain’. Berneri had only two days before publicly regretted, on Barcelona Radio, the death of Antonio Gramsci, in magnanimous terms (
op. cit.,
p. 154). See the testimony of Giovanna Berneri, widow of Camillo, in
Lezioni sull’antifascismo
(Bari, 1962), p. 190f.

4.
Orwell, with a POUM firing-post, shared this fear.

5.
CAB,
20(37) of 5 May.

1.
Solidaridad Obrera,
14 May 1937. Some thirty or forty anarchists were killed in Tarragona, more in Tortosa. In both places, the fighting began, as at Barcelona, with a would-be police takeover of the telephone exchanges (Peirats,
La CNT,
vol. II, p. 342). In Gerona, and Lérida, where the CNT or the POUM had complete control, there were no incidents; everywhere else in Catalonia, where the PSUC or the Esquerra had influence, there was fighting.

2.
Angel Ossorio y Gallardo,
Vida y sacrificio de Companys
(Buenos Aires, 1943), p. 210.

3.
Sanz,
Los que fuimos,
p. 145.

4.
Peirats, vol. II, p. 206. Abad de Santillán (p. 138) speaks of 1,000 dead, and several thousand wounded. The anarchist leaders regretted afterwards that they had secured this cease-fire, since it led to their final surrender before the communists (Abad de Santillán, p. 140f.).

1.
Peirats, vol. II, p. 346. Mas had been secretary of the CNT in Catalonia. He was succeeded in that post by Dionisio Eroles, and he, soon afterwards, by Juan Domenech.

2.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 575. Of the government that he formed in February 1936, only two people (Giral and Casares), as he noted bitterly, were in Spain: the rest had gone into exile or were, safely, ambassadors.

3.
Zugazagoitia, p. 213. Martínez Bande,
La invasión,
p. 282, prints the text of Azaña’s telephone conversations with the ministry of war and subsequently with Prieto.

1.
The Estremadura plan (drawn up by Colonel Alvarez Coque) is printed by Martinez Bande in
La ofensiva sobre Segovía,
pp. 237–40, and discussed there on p. 53f.

2.
See Radosh et al., 261, 274, 285.

3.
Hernández, pp. 80–81.

4.
Casado, pp. 71–3.

1.
Ibid.
A state department memorandum (sent from Valencia) estimated that at this moment the republic possessed 460 aircraft. Of these, 200 were said to be Russian fighters, 150 Russian bombers (bimotor Martin type), and 70 Russian observation planes (Cattell,
Communism,
p. 228). See also Jackson, p. 372 fn., where the views of Rudolfo Llopis, Largo’s cabinet secretary, and Julio Just, minister of public works, are compared with those of Prieto as to the practicality of the scheme.

2.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 594. Baráibar subsequently gave a report on this project to Azaña (
op. cit.,
p. 613) in which he assured the President that the rising was a ‘matter of days—when the religious fiestas come to an end’. Azaña believed rightly that similar sums were being spent in Morocco by the nationalists. There was also a plan for Moorish women to be paid to go to Spain to persuade their husbands in Franco’s army to throw down their arms: ‘We make a Moroccan adaptation of Lysistrata,’ said Azaña grimly!

3.
Largo Caballero says that the communists wanted to be rid of Galarza since he was, at that time, investigating the loyalty of General Miaja and Colonel Rojo, found to have been members of the UME before the war (
op. cit.,
p. 218). Whether they were or were not members has not been fully disclosed. They certainly had no record of left-wing opinions before 1936.

1.
For this crisis see Peirats, vol. II, pp. 238ff.; Cattell,
Communism,
pp. 153ff.; Largo Caballero; Alvarez del Vayo,
Freedom’s Battle,
p. 212; Gorkin,
Caníbales políticos;
Araquistain; and Hernández. I consulted Señor de Irujo, Señor Alvarez del Vayo and Señorita Montseny, present at this cabinet. See also Azaña, vol. IV, p. 595, for Largo’s contemporary report.

2.
Hernández, pp. 86–8. Krivitsky says that, as early as November 1936, Negrín had been ‘picked’ by Stashevsky as the next Premier (
op. cit.,
p. 119).

3.
No evidence exists that Prieto had reached a formal agreement with the communists prior to this meeting, though allegations to that effect are put forward by Bolloten (
op. cit.,
pp. 311–12).

1.
Lamoneda’s letter of refusal to back Largo Caballero is printed in Peirats, vol. II, p. 246. See also Largo Caballero, pp. 217–18. Lamoneda had been temporarily a communist in 1920.

1.
Zugazagoitia, p. 138. Cf. an exchange with Azaña on this in 1938 in Azaña, vol. IV, p. 875.

2.
Álvarez del Vayo,
The Last Optimist,
p. 228. Prieto’s own description of him can be seen in
Convulsiones,
vol. II, p. 219f.

1.
Statement to me by Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Geneva, 1960.

1.
Largo Caballero, p. 204.

2.
Prieto,
Convulsiones,
vol. III, p. 220.

3.
Azaña, vol. IV, p. 867.

4.
Ibid.,
p. 603. On the other hand, by 16 June, he was criticizing Negrín’s ‘juvenile optimism’ (
op. cit.,
p. 620).