The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo

Nevertheless, what Largo Caballero said in his defence was completely plausible in the light of the total failure of the movement in Madrid. Shortly before he was arrested, Carrillo had asked him, ‘What shall I tell the militias?’ To the young revolutionary’s surprise, Largo Caballero had replied, ‘Tell them anything you like,’ adding, ‘If you get arrested, say that this was spontaneous and not organized by the party.’8 However, Largo Caballero’s memoirs suggest that he continued to see himself as a revolutionary leader who had merely set out to deceive the bourgeois authorities. Initially, Carrillo was deeply disappointed both by Largo Caballero’s passivity in October and by public denials being made by the man now hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’. However, in their frequent conversations walking around the exercise yard, he was flattered by the apparent pleasure with which Largo listened to his harangues about the need to bolshevize the PSOE. That and his own optimism reconciled him to his hero. At this stage, they were still extremely close. Harking back to the warm relations between the two families, Largo Caballero called him ‘Santiaguito’ and other prisoners referred to him as ‘the boss’s spoiled child’.9 Certainly, Largo Caballero’s denials played directly into the hands of the Communists, who were only too glad to assume the responsibility. The secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party, José Díaz Ramos, visited him in prison and suggested that the PCE and the PSOE jointly claim to have organized the revolution. Largo Caballero refused. His denial of any responsibility was a potentially counter-productive tactic. It gave credibility to Communist claims that the October events showed that the PSOE and Largo Caballero were incapable of making a revolution. It ensured that 1935 was the period of ‘the great harvest’ for the Communists.10 Santiago Carrillo was to be an important part of that harvest, yet at the time he seems to have taken Largo Caballero’s excuses at face value.

Carrillo and the other prisoners lived in a kind of euphoric isolation, able to discuss politics all day without the preoccupations of daily life. Carrillo’s main concern was the health of his mother, who had serious heart problems, and he missed his girlfriend, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, a beautiful nineteen-year-old Asturian brunette whom he had met earlier in the year. Otherwise, he and the other political prisoners enjoyed relatively pleasant conditions. Carrillo had a typewriter and plenty of books in his cell. He claimed later to have spent most of his time reading the classics of Marxism until the early hours of every morning. He was particularly impressed by Trotsky. Indeed, he later described this period as his ‘university’. The warders put no obstacles in the way of the sending and receiving of correspondence or the virtually unlimited visits from comrades who brought them the legal press. To his surprise, the normally dour Largo Caballero was very good humoured.11

It was not long before Carrillo and the other imprisoned revolutionaries were blaming the less radical sections of the Socialist movement for the defeat of October. From that it was a short step to trying to hound the reformists out in order to build a ‘proper’ Bolshevik party. Initially, they were not concerned about the Besteiristas since they had already been defeated within the UGT and many affiliated trade union federations in early 1934. Besteiro had opposed the revolutionary project and had stood aside in October. Nevertheless, during the October events, a group of extremists from the FJS had stoned Besteiro’s home. In consequence, he virtually withdrew from the political stage for a time.12 However, renewed calls for his expulsion from the PSOE finally provoked his followers to take up his defence against the youthful bolshevizers. That was not to be until June 1935. In the meantime, Carrillo and his allies concentrated their fire on Indalecio Prieto. The irony of that was that it had been Prieto’s followers in Asturias who had taken the most active part in the events of October.

Egged on by Carrillo, Largo Caballero began to take up ever more revolutionary positions. In part, this reflected his acute personal resentment of Prieto, who with backing from the Asturian miners and the Basque metalworkers hoped to rebuild the democratic Republic of 1931–3. In the view of both Prieto and the Republican leader and ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azaña, the vindictive policies of the Radical–CEDA coalition were provoking a great national resurgence of support for the Republic. Accordingly, Prieto argued that the immediate goal for the left had to be the recapture of state power by a broad coalition that could ensure electoral success and thus bring working-class suffering to an end. In contrast, Carrillo and Largo Caballero believed that the repressive policies of the Radical–CEDA cabinet had dramatically undermined all working-class faith in the reforming possibilities of the Republic.13

In early 1935, those members of the PSOE executive committee not in prison were highly receptive to the arguments sent out by Prieto from his exile in Belgium in favour of a broad coalition with the Left Republicans. Their views were publicized within the Socialist movement in April by means of a circular which made an intelligent plea for the use of legal possibilities to defend the working class.14 The imprisoned Largo Caballero was informed about this initiative but did not object. Nevertheless, it infuriated Carrillo and the bolshevizers who advocated an exclusively proletarian revolutionary bloc. Prieto, thinking in terms only of a legal road to power, knew that not to ally with the Republicans would result in a disastrous three-sided contest as had happened in the elections of 1933. He was determined not to let the party fall into the hands of the extremist youth who, he believed, had to be obliged to accept party discipline.15

Prieto could count on support from the Asturian miners’ leader Ramón González Peña, who was widely considered to be the hero of October and had recently escaped a death sentence. In a letter to Prieto, González Peña called for a broad anti-fascist front for the next elections. He bitterly criticized Largo Caballero and his imprisoned comrades for denying participation in the events of October. His greatest outrage was reserved for ‘the kids of the FJS’ for their demands that the PSOE be bolshevized, that Besteiro and his followers be expelled and that Prieto and the ‘centrists’ be marginalized: ‘It would be an enormous shame if we were to suffer the misfortune of being led by the son of [Wenceslao] Carrillo and company.’ Copies of the letter, along with a similar letter from young Asturian members of the FJS imprisoned in Oviedo, were circulated throughout the Socialist Party, much to the annoyance of the imprisoned Caballeristas. Carrillo and others had sent González Peña a set of questions with the intention of getting his support for their plans. When they saw his answers in favour of electoral coalition and against the purging of the party, they refused to publish them.16 To their chagrin, Prieto had at his disposal his own newspaper, El Liberal de Bilbao, within whose pages he and Republicans could advocate an electoral alliance.17

The fact that the reformist policies of the Republican–Socialist coalition had provoked the fury of the right convinced Carrillo that Spain’s structural problems required a revolutionary solution. However, Prieto was correct that most of the Socialists’ problems derived from Largo Caballero’s tactical error before the elections of 1933. Out of government, no change, reformist or revolutionary, could be introduced. October had exposed the Socialists’ inability to organize a revolution. Thus two valid positions were possible: Prieto’s advocacy of the electoral return to power and the gradualist road to socialism; and the one principally advocated by the Trotskyists, which recognized the revolutionary incompetence of both the PSOE and the PCE and aimed at the long-term construction of a genuine Bolshevik party. This was a position that Carrillo found attractive. However, both these strategies required a prior electoral victory.18

The radical youth’s counter-attack against Prieto took the form of a long pamphlet, signed by the FJS president, Carlos Hernández Zancajo, entitled Octubre: segunda etapa. In fact, it had been written largely by Amaro del Rosal and Santiago Carrillo.19 The purpose was threefold: to cover up the FJS’s failures in the October events in Madrid, to combat Prieto’s interpretation of the Asturian rising as an attempt to defend the Republic, and to eradicate the influence of both Besteiro and Prieto from the Socialist movement as a first step to its bolshevization. The pamphlet began with a largely mendacious interpretation of the activities of the workers’ movement during 1934. Its authors pointed out correctly that the strikes of the construction workers, metalworkers and peasants had dissipated working-class energies while failing to mention that the ‘union organization’ blamed for these tactical errors was actually dominated at the time by members of the FJS. They blamed the defeat of October on Besteiro’s reformists, which was absurd. This was used to justify the ‘second stage’ announced in the pamphlet’s title, the expulsion of the reformists and the bolshevization of the PSOE, which signified the adoption of a rigidly centralized command structure and the creation of an illegal apparatus to prepare for an armed insurrection. Inhibited by Asturian backing for Prieto, the authors did not dare call for his expulsion but aggressively demanded the abandonment of his ‘centrist’ line in favour of their revolutionary one.20

Prieto and others were convinced that the pamphlet had been concocted during the authors’ walks around the prison patio or courtyard with Largo Caballero. Years later, despite being the subject of rapturous praise in the pamphlet, Largo Caballero claimed that it had been published without his permission and that, deeply annoyed, he had protested to Carrillo. Carrillo himself was to admit later that his group had acted without the boss’s authorization. Later still, he categorized the view expressed in the pamphlet as puerile, deriving from ‘infantile leftism’.21 In an interview published in December 1935, however, Largo Caballero agreed with much of the pamphlet, albeit not with its demand for expulsions and for entry into the Comintern.22

In response to the insulting attacks of the FJS pamphlet, the Besteiristas were emerging from their silence.23 They founded a publication to defend their ideas. Called Democracia, it appeared weekly from 15 June to 13 December. Its lawful appearance was taken by Carrillo’s crony Segundo Serrano Poncela as proof of the Besteirista treachery to the Socialist cause.24 This point of view was given some credibility by Besteiro’s inaugural lecture, ‘Marxism and Anti-Marxism’, on being elected to the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences. In this long and tortuous lecture, given on 28 April 1935, Besteiro set out to prove that Marx had been hostile to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He infuriated the imprisoned bolshevizers with his insinuations that the violence of the Socialist left was hardly distinguishable from fascism.25 A devastating reply to Besteiro’s lecture by Largo’s most competent adviser, Luis Araquistáin, appeared in the doctrinal journal Leviatán, which had survived the repression of the Socialist media. Araquistáin’s articles were of a notably higher level of theoretical competence than Octubre: segunda etapa and their demolition of the inaugural lecture ensured Besteiro’s withdrawal from the PSOE leadership stakes.26

With Besteiro eliminated, in late May Prieto returned to the fray with a series of highly influential articles. Collectively entitled Posiciones socialistas, they were published shortly afterwards as a book. The first two restated the need to avoid the great tactical error of 1933, arguing that the right would be united at the next elections and an exclusively workers’ coalition would be the victim of anarchist indiscipline. For Prieto, only a Republican–Socialist coalition could guarantee an amnesty for political prisoners. The last three articles set out, in mild yet firm language, to expose some of the more absurd contradictions of Octubre: segunda etapa. Prieto indignantly dismissed the right of untried youngsters to call for the expulsion of militants who had dedicated their lives to the PSOE and pointed out that the accusations made against various sections of the Socialist movement by the pamphlet were most applicable to the FJS itself. Above all, he denounced the bolshevizers’ dictatorial tendencies and proposed a party congress to settle the direction that the movement was to take.27

With Carrillo’s name on the cover, Octubre was reissued with a reply to Prieto. Largo Caballero’s friend Enrique de Francisco wrote to Prieto to say that he had no right to make party policy in bourgeois newspapers. Prieto replied that the same moralistic view had not inhibited the Socialist Youth from advocating bolshevization. More stridently, the journalist Carlos de Baraibar, in consultation with Largo Caballero, prepared a book attacking the ‘false socialist positions’ of Prieto. In criticizing him for breaking party discipline by publicizing his ideas, Baraibar conveniently forgot that the FJS had not hesitated to broadcast its controversial views.28 The extremism of the FJS was seriously dividing Spanish socialism. While the repressive policies of the CEDA–Radical government and the existence of thousands of political prisoners made revolutionary propaganda attractive, they also ensured a sympathetic mass response to Prieto’s call for unity and a return to the progressive Republic of 1931–3. An indication of the bitterness being engendered was shown in the summer of 1935 when the Caballeristas produced a legal weekly newspaper called Claridad. Its pages loudly backed the FJS call for the expulsion of the Besteiristas and the marginalization of the Prietistas.29 Democracia responded by arguing that the bolshevization campaign was just a smokescreen to divert attention from the FJS’s failures in October 1934. When Saborit made the gracious gesture of visiting the prisoners in the Cárcel Modelo, Largo Caballero rudely refused to shake his hand or even speak to him.30

Everything changed after the Seventh Congress of the Comintern was held in Moscow in August 1935. The secretary general, Giorgi Dimitrov, launched a call for proletarian unity and a broad popular front of all anti-fascist forces. Already, in a speech on 2 June, the PCE secretary general, José Díaz, had openly called for union with the PSOE. On 3 November, he declared that the Seventh Congress showed the need for a Popular Front.31 Carrillo was delighted. In prison, he and Hernández Zancajo lived in close proximity to their comrades from the UJC, Trifón Medrano and Jesús Rozado. They were aware that in October 1934 there had been some collaboration on the ground between the rank-and-file militants of their respective organizations. Now their daily encounters and discussions favoured the eventual unification of their organizations.32

The FJS delegate at the Comintern congress, José Laín Entralgo, reported back enthusiastically that the Communist union, the Confederación General de Trabajo Unitaria (CGTU), would amalgamate with the UGT. He also claimed that the switch of tactics meant that Moscow had returned sovereignty to the various national parties and that there was therefore no longer any reason why the FJS should not join the Comintern.33 Carrillo was already trying to secure the incorporation of the Trotskyist Bloc Obrer i Camperol and the Communist Youth into the PSOE as part of the process of bolshevizing the party. Writing in Leviatán, Araquistáin rightly suggested that Moscow’s fundamental objective with the Popular Front tactic was to ensure that liberal and left-wing anti-fascist governments would be in power in the West to ensure favourable alliances should Germany declare war on the USSR. Far from breaking with the old Comintern habit of dictating the same policy for each country, as the FJS fondly thought, the new tactic confirmed the dictatorial customs of the Third International. Araquistáin accepted the need for proletarian unity but rejected the notion of alliance with the bourgeois left.34

Largo Caballero was keen on working-class unity as long as it meant the absorption of the Communist working-class rank and file into the UGT. However, he remained hostile to an electoral coalition with the Left Republicans and, like Araquistáin, he opposed the idea of the PSOE joining the Comintern.35 For this reason, Carrillo had to be circumspect in all the negotiations with the imprisoned UJC members and crucially with the most senior Comintern representative in Spain, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila, codenamed ‘Medina’. The director of the Cárcel Modelo turned a blind eye as Codovila was smuggled into the prison as part of a family party visiting Carrillo. Codovila was surprised by Carrillo’s readiness to accept all of the conditions requested by the Communists. All he wanted in return was for the name of the new organization to be the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. His reasoning was that if the FJS lost the word ‘Socialista’ from its title, it would lose its seat on the PSOE executive and be less able to continue the struggle to purge Prieto and bolshevize the party.36

On the first anniversary of the October insurrection, the FJS had issued a circular signed by Santiago Carrillo authorizing its local sections to draft joint manifestos with the UJC but not to organize joint commemorations since the PSOE had decreed that the FJS could hold joint events only with other Socialist organizations. The circular noted regretfully that the PSOE had in fact made no arrangements to celebrate the anniversary. However, it recommended that local FJS sections organize their own publicity for the anniversary and to do so stressing that ‘October had been a proletarian movement to conquer power’, that the Socialist Party had been its only leader (something that the PSOE leadership never acknowledged) and that October had halted ‘the rise of fascism’.37

In mid-November, Carrillo received a letter from the left-wing Socialist and feminist Margarita Nelken, who was exiled in Russia. She enclosed some Soviet pamphlets including a Spanish translation of Dimitrov’s speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. He thought the speech ‘magnificent’, although he still had doubts about the Comintern leader’s readiness to make an alliance with the bourgeoisie without first securing the broad unity of the working class. In the package was a copy of a photograph of Largo Caballero that had been distributed among the crowd during an event in Moscow’s Red Square. When Carrillo showed him the photo, Largo Caballero was suitably flattered. Carrillo reported back that ‘the boss is in magnificent form, without any hesitation going further every day in the same direction as the Juventudes’.38

Meanwhile, on 14 November, Manuel Azaña, writing on behalf of the various Left Republican groups, formally proposed an electoral alliance to the PSOE executive. Faced with a dramatic choice, Largo Caballero quickly convoked a joint session of the PSOE, UGT and FJS executives for 16 November. Azaña’s proposal was accepted after Largo Caballero had acknowledged the absurdity of repeating the error of 1933. Carrillo and Amaro del Rosal followed the Comintern line and also spoke strongly in favour of the electoral alliance. Carlos Hernández Zancajo, however, opposed it. He thereby anticipated divisions inside Caballerista ranks that would seriously damage the Socialist movement during the Civil War, between those unswervingly committed to the Soviet Union and those, like Hernández Zancajo, for whom revolutionary politics were not understood as synonymous with Soviet interests. Determined that dealings with the bourgeois Republicans should not strengthen the Prietista wing of the Socialist movement, Largo Caballero insisted that any coalition should extend to other working-class organizations including the Communist Party. Carrillo was delighted. The UGT executive decided to open negotiations with the PCE for the incorporation of the Communist CGTU into the UGT. Moreover, Largo Caballero insisted that the Popular Front electoral programme should be approved by the PCE and the CGTU as well as by the FJS, the PSOE and the UGT.39 In contrast, Prieto feared that the disproportionate weight to be given to the Communist Party would damage the interests of the PSOE. He was also opposed to the idea that the programme required FJS approval since he was adamant that to consider it as an autonomous organization was entirely contrary to the PSOE’s statutes.40

Two weeks later, Carrillo published a typically triumphalist article that crowed over the defeat of reformist elements in the Socialist movement. He stated that the changes of strategy effected by the Comintern placed the FJS on ‘a similar political plane to the Communists’. His statement that ‘prior negotiations’ were moving ahead made it clear that the FJS was drawing ever nearer to the UJC. He dismissed as groundless any suspicion that unification would effectively mean a take-over of the Socialist Youth by the Communists. He argued that, if there was unity of purpose of the revolutionary elements on both sides, only the reformists could have any grounds for concern. He ended with the resounding declaration that ‘the knots that tie us to the affiliates of the Moscow International will end up untying those that still link us to certain “socialists”’.41

He crowed too soon. On 16 December, there was a meeting of the PSOE National Committee, at which Largo Caballero reiterated his view that any electoral coalition should be dominated by the workers’ organizations. Before a full-scale discussion could take place, Prieto criticized the activities of Carrillo and the FJS leadership. More importantly, he raised a procedural issue about the relationship of the parliamentary group to the PSOE executive. In immensely complicated circumstances, Largo Caballero resigned as president of the PSOE. After Largo Caballero had stormed out of the meeting, Prieto was able successfully to propound his moderate vision of the Republican–Socialist electoral coalition. The Caballerista desire that negotiations with the Republicans be carried out by a workers’ bloc including the FJS, the PCE and the CGTU was stymied. The resignations of Largo Caballero and three of his closest lieutenants, Enrique de Francisco, Wenceslao Carrillo and Pascual Tomás, meant that there would have to be a party congress in the spring to elect a new National Committee. This was clearly conceived as the first step to clearing out the centrists from the party and securing the bolshevizing objective of a centralized party hierarchy. However, it was a gamble that, in immediate terms, broke the control of both the party and the union established by the Caballeristas after the defeat of Besteiro in January 1934. Now the movement was divided, with the UGT in the hands of the Caballeristas and the PSOE in the hands of the Prietistas. In his formal letter of resignation, Largo Caballero revealed his motives. It was a step to securing a unanimous executive, as the ‘homogeneous organ of an iron leadership’: ‘We have resolved to keep on the October road.’ The gamble failed because, for a variety of complex reasons related to the tense political situation, that congress never materialized.42

This development in the higher echelons of the Socialist movement may have pushed an impatient Carrillo nearer to thinking that his revolutionary ambitions would be better fulfilled within the Communist Party. In the meantime, at the end of December 1935, in the first issue of the newly legalized Renovación, the FJS justified its acceptance of the Popular Front in terms of securing an electoral victory to put an end to ‘this painful situation’. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, Carrillo did not renounce the maximalist objectives of revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, calling for proletarian organizations to prepare their cadres for the coming struggle and urging them to intensify the work of purging the PSOE of reformist elements.43 During the Socialist election campaign, Largo Caballero harped on the need for proletarian unity and for the transformation of capitalist society. His superficially revolutionary rhetoric delighted his working-class audiences all over Spain. At one point, on 11 February 1936, with José Díaz he addressed a joint PSOE–PCE meeting on the subject of unity, by which both orators meant the take-over of the entire working-class movement by their own organizations.44