The Spanish Civil War (71 page)

Open fighting in Barcelona began to be feared between anarchists and POUM on the one hand and the government and the communists on the other.
²
The communists were said to have devised a new slogan: ‘Before we capture Saragossa, we have to take Barcelona.’ Arms began to be gathered and buildings secretly fortified, both sides fearing the other would strike first. The Voroshilov (previously Atarazanas) and Pedrera barracks were the communist citadels. The Marx barracks were the stronghold of the POUM. The CNT held out at the Chamber of Commerce. A week passed. People began to say that the murder of Roldán Cortada had been a communist provocation to justify police action in anarchist quarters of Barcelona: the rumours survive to this day, for the dead man, once a friend of Largo Caballero, was known to be against the growing spirit of ‘pogrom’ in the PSUC.
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The first of May, traditionally a day of rejoicing, was quiet, since the UGT and CNT agreed that processions would be sure to lead to trouble. On 2 May, Prieto telephoned the
Generalidad
from Valencia. The anarchist operator answered that there was no such thing as a government in Barcelona, only ‘a defence committee’. The government and the communists had believed for some time that the CNT tapped their calls, which they were in a position to do. Perhaps they just listened. Communists have never liked being eavesdropped on. On 2 May, a call from Azaña to Companys was inter
rupted by the telephonist, who said that lines should be used for more important purposes than a talk between the two presidents.
¹
So, on the afternoon of 3 May, the chief of the police in Barcelona, Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, went to the Telefónica, and visited the censor’s department on the first floor, intent on taking over the building. That seemed a provocation, since the anarchist committee’s control of the Telefónica was ‘legal’, according to the
Generalidad
’s own decree on collectivization. The anarchist workers opened fire from the second floor down the stairs to the censor’s department. Rodríguez Salas telephoned for aid. The civil guard appeared, as did two FAI police leaders, Dionisio Eroles (now head of the anarchist commissariat) and José Asens (chief of the control patrols). Eroles persuaded the CNT workers not to shoot again. They gave up their arms, but fired their spare ammunition through the windows. A crowd had by now gathered below in the Plaza de Cataluña. It was at first assumed that the anarchists had captured the police chief. The POUM, the Friends of Durruti, the Bolshevik-Leninists (a small group of real Trotskyists headed by a gifted journalist, Grandizo Munis), the anarchist youth, took up positions. Within a few hours, all the political organizations had brought out their arms and had begun to build barricades. Shop owners hastily shuttered their windows.
²

Until this moment, the communists in Barcelona had gained their ends chiefly by a mixture of intimidation and common sense. Their
political tactics had the support of both the
Generalidad
and the republican government at Valencia. Ayguadé, the Catalan councillor for public order (in effect, minister of the interior), admired Comorera and was thus close to the communists. They probably thought that the Telefónica would have been easily captured. An open clash with the CNT in Barcelona was one contest which the communists could not have been sure of winning. The communist party had embarked on the destruction of Largo Caballero, with all his prestige among the working class in Spain. That task required their undivided attention. Largo Caballero was having some success in his drive against the communists. A decree of 17 April, restricting the commissars’ powers and requiring the appointment of all commissars to be personally approved by himself, had angered them as much as the dissolution of the Madrid
junta
of defence had. The communists would have taken more trouble, and taken men from the front, if they had planned a
coup
in Barcelona. But once the shooting had begun, they might be expected to reap the fullest advantage from what was happening—in particular, to discredit the POUM, whom they certainly proposed to destroy one day. The POUM, especially the POUM youth (Juventud Comunista Ibérica—JCI), and the ‘Bolshevist-Leninists’ had meantime issued many appeals during April in favour of continuing the revolution, of the immediate dissolution of the Cortes, and of the establishment of a constituent assembly, based on collectivist committees. The anarchist youth and an extreme anarchist ‘groupuscule’ which called themselves ‘The Friends of Durruti’ found these ideas acceptable.
¹

The communist party later alleged that the crisis had been caused by the agents of Franco in the CNT and, above all, the POUM. Documents were said to have been found in hotels in Barcelona proving it. It has admittedly since become known that Franco told Faupel, the German ambassador at Salamanca, on 7 May, that he had thirteen
agents in Barcelona. One of them had reported that ‘the tension between the communists and anarchists was so great that he could guarantee to cause fighting to break out there’. Franco said that ‘he had intended not to use this plan until he began an offensive in Catalonia but, since the republicans had attacked at Teruel
¹
to relieve the Basques, he had judged the present moment right for the outbreak of disorders in Barcelona. The agent had succeeded, within some days of receiving such instructions, in having street-fighting started by three or four persons.’
²
But spies are boastful, and that one may have attributed the spontaneous outbreak of the fighting to his own intrigues. Franco must also have been anxious to suggest the efficacy of his intelligence service to the Germans.

In the meantime, CNT representatives visited Tarradellas, and Ayguadé. The two councillors promised that the police would leave the Telefónica. The anarchists went on to demand the resignations of both Rodríguez Salas and Ayguadé. That was refused. By nightfall, therefore, Barcelona was a city at war. The PSUC and the government controlled Barcelona to the east of the Rambla. The anarchists controlled the area to the west. The suburbs were all with the CNT. In the centre of the city, where union and political headquarters were near to one another in requisitioned buildings and hotels, machine-guns were placed on roofs, and firing began along the housetops. All cars were shot at by both sides. Yet at the Telefónica, a truce had been agreed, and the telephone exchange itself, the nerve of the civil war from first to last, was working. The police on the first floor even sent sandwiches up to the CNT above. Several police cars, however, were blown up by grenades dropped from roofs. Any journey by car was dangerous.
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What worsened the situation was that the CNT and FAI were no longer coherent; the revolutionary torch had been seized by their ex
tremist followers, or by the anarchist youth.
¹
In the evening, the POUM leaders proposed to the anarchist leaders in Barcelona an alliance against communism and the government; the anarchists refused.
²

On 4 May, Barcelona was silent, save for machine-gun and rifle fire. Shops and houses were barricaded. Bands of armed anarchists attacked assault guard, republican guard, or government buildings. These were followed by communist or government counter-attacks. The atmosphere was that of 19 July 1936. The angles of fire were almost the same as they had been on that epic day. Once again, the police fired against their late comrades in arms, in July the soldiers, now the anarchists. In the meantime, the political leaders of the anarchists, García Oliver and Federica Montseny, broadcast an appeal to their followers to lay down arms and return to work. Jacinto Toryho, editor of
Solidaridad Obrera,
did the same. The two anarchist ministers then travelled to Barcelona, with Mariano Vázquez, secretary of the national committee of the CNT, together with Pascual Tomás and Carlos Hernández Zancajo, of the UGT executive committee. All wished to avoid a fight against the communists. Federica Montseny explained later that the news of the riots had caught her and the other anarchist ministers completely by surprise.
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Nor had Largo Caballero any wish to use force against the anarchists. Units of the anarchists’ 26th Division (previously the Durruti Column), under Gregorio Jover, had assembled at Barbastro to march on Barcelona. On hearing García Oliver’s speech, they stayed where they were. The nearby 28th Division, the old Ascaso Column, however, and perhaps also the POUM Division under Rovira, were only restrained from marching on Madrid by the action of the head of the air force on the Aragon front, the communist Major Alfonso Reyes, who threatened to bomb the column if it marched on.
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The spirit of
Romance lived on, however, in Barcelona: ‘Before renouncing the struggle against fascism, we will die in the trenches; before renouncing the revolution, we will die on the barricades.’
¹
Thus the anarchist youth.

Inside the
Generalidad,
Tarradellas, backed by Companys, continued to refuse the anarchists’ demands for the resignation of Rodríguez Salas and Ayguadé. But, on 5 May, a solution was reached. The Catalan government resigned, being replaced by a ‘provisional council’, in which Ayguadé did not figure.
²
The anarchists, the Esquerra, the PSUC and the
rabassaires
would each be represented. But confused firing, nevertheless, continued, raking along the empty broad streets, and bringing death to those who ventured out of their refuges. Two leading Italian anarchist intellectuals, Camillo Berneri and his collaborator, Barbieri, were mysteriously murdered.
³
The Friends of Durruti issued a pamphlet announcing that a revolutionary
junta
had been formed. All responsible for the attack on the Telefónica would be shot. The national guard had to be disarmed while the POUM, having ‘established itself beside the workers’, had to be given back a place in the government.
La Batalla
republished this manifesto without comment. The atmosphere of alarm was heightened by the arrival of British destroyers in the port which the POUM feared, for no reason, might begin a bombardment.
⁴
Actually, the British feared that the anarchists were ‘getting the upper hand … and evacuation of foreigners was being considered’.
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On this day, there was also fighting in Tarragona and other cities along the
coast.
¹
During the night, Companys and Largo Caballero had a telephone conversation, in the course of which Companys accepted the Prime Minister’s offer of help to establish order.
²

On 6 May, a truce proclaimed by the anarchists was observed all morning. But appeals to return to work were disregarded, out of fear, not from obtuseness. In the afternoon, fighting began again. Police and Esquerra volunteers attacked anarchist buildings. A number of civil guards were blown up in a cinema by 75-millimetre artillery, brought by members of the libertarian youth from the coast. Antonio Sesé, the communist general-secretary of the Catalan UGT, and a member of the new provisional council of the
Generalidad,
was killed on his way to take up his appointment (perhaps accidentally, since all moving cars were shot at, though possibly as a reprisal for the death of the anarchist Domingo Ascaso). In the evening, two republican destroyers, followed by the battleship
Jaime I,
arrived with armed men from Valencia. The reluctance of Largo Caballero to act in the crisis had been overcome by Prieto. Four thousand assault guards, led by Colonel Emilio Torres, an anarchist sympathizer (and sometime military adviser to the Tierra y Libertad Column), also arrived from Valencia by road, having overcome risings at Tarragona and Reus on the way, with some bloodshed: local anarchists had blown up road and railway bridges to prevent the passage of the column.
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On 7 May, the CNT appealed for a return to ‘normality’. The presence of assault guards from Valencia in the streets ensured that this occurred. On 8 May, the CNT broadcast: ‘Away with the barricades! Every citizen his paving stone! Back to normality!’ The Barcelona riots were over. A contemporary press estimate of the casualties was 500 killed and 1,000 wounded.
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The
Generalidad
was again reconstituted, on the basis of just one representative each
from the UGT (the communist Vidiella), the CNT (Valerio Mas), and the Esquerra (once again Tarradellas). Some responsible for deaths were later tried—but only those in Tarragona, and they did not receive death sentences, only terms of imprisonment.
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Throughout these anxious days, President Azaña had remained in his palace in Barcelona, undisturbed by the fighting though apprehensive. For months, he wrote in his diary, he had done nothing save count the minutes until his (invariably gloomy) predictions were fulfilled. He summed up these days in Barcelona as

revolutionary hysteria passing from words to deeds, in order to murder and steal; ineptitude of the rulers, immorality, cowardice, calumnies, shooting by one trade unionist or another, presumption by foreigners, insolence of separatists, disloyalty, pretence, empty talk by those who had failed, exploitation of the war to make money, negative approach to those desiring to organize an army, paralysis of the war operations, little puppet states [
gobiernitos
] of petty bosses in Puigcerdá, La Seo, Lérida and so on. Companys talks idiocies about giving battle to the anarchists, but he has not the means.
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Prieto—the only minister who tried to do anything to protect Azaña—often telephoned, offering escort to a warship in the harbour. But that would have demanded vigorous physical action on Azaña’s part, even a risky journey out of doors. ‘Don Manuel’, wrote Zugazagoitia uncharitably, ‘prefers four days of intermittent fears and uncertainty to four minutes of resolution.’ During these four days, he nevertheless finished
La Velada de Benicarló
(The Soirée at Benicarló), a brilliant but pessimistic dialogue on the reasons for, and character of, the civil war, which he had begun to write two weeks before the rising.
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