The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo

In the wake of the Russian revolution, continuing inflation and the rising unemployment of the post-1918 depression fostered a revolutionary group within the Socialist movement, particularly in Asturias and the Basque Country. Anguiano and others saw the events in Russia and the failure of the 1917 strike as evidence that it was pointless to work towards a bourgeois democratic stage on the road to socialism. Between 1919 and 1921, the Socialist movement was to be divided by a bitter three-year debate on the PSOE’s relationship with the Communist International (Comintern) recently founded in Moscow. The fundamental issue being worked out was whether the Spanish Socialist movement was to be legalist and reformist or violent and revolutionary. The pro-Bolshevik tendency was defeated in a series of three party congresses held in December 1919, June 1920 and April 1921. In a closely fought struggle, the PSOE leadership won by relying on the votes of the strong UGT bureaucracy of paid permanent officials. The pro-Russian elements left to form the Spanish Communist Party.11 Numerically, this was not a serious loss but, at a time of grave economic and social crisis, it consolidated the fundamental moderation of the Socialist movement and left it without a clear sense of direction.

Indalecio Prieto had become a member of the PSOE’s executive committee in 1918.12 He represented a significant section of the movement committed to seeking reform through the electoral victory of a broad front of democratic forces. He was appalled when the paralysis within the Socialist movement was exposed by the coming of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera on 13 September 1923. The army’s seizure of power was essentially a response to the urban and rural unrest of the previous six years. Yet the Socialist leadership neither foresaw the coup nor showed great concern when the new regime began to persecute other workers’ organizations. A joint PSOE–UGT note simply instructed their members to undertake no strikes or other ‘sterile’ acts of resistance without instructions from their two executive committees lest they provoke repression. This reflected the determination of both Besteiro and Largo Caballero never again to risk the existence of the UGT in direct confrontation with the state, especially if doing so merely benefited the cause of bourgeois liberalism.13

It soon became apparent that it would be a short step from avoidance of risky confrontation with the dictatorship to active collaboration. In view of the Socialist passivity during his coup, the dictator was confident of a sympathetic response when he proposed that the movement cooperate with his regime. In a manifesto of 29 September 1923, Primo thanked the working class for its attitude during his seizure of power. This was clearly directed at the Socialists. It both suggested that the regime would foster the social legislation longed for by Largo Caballero and the reformists of the UGT and called upon workers to leave those organizations which led them ‘along paths of ruin’. This unmistakable reference to the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and the Spanish Communist Party was a cunning and scarcely veiled suggestion to the UGT that it could become Spain’s only working-class organization. In return for collaborating with the regime, the UGT would have a monopoly of trade union activities and be in a position to attract the rank and file of its anarchist and Communist rivals. Largo Caballero was delighted, given his hostility to any enterprise, such as the revolutionary activities of Communists and anarchists, that might endanger the material conditions of the UGT members. He believed that under the dictatorship, although the political struggle might be suspended, the defence of workers’ rights should go on by all possible means. Thus he was entirely open to Primo’s suggestion.14 In early October, a joint meeting of the PSOE and UGT executive committees agreed to collaborate with the regime. There were only three votes against the resolution, among them those of Fernando de los Ríos, a distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Granada, and Indalecio Prieto, who argued that the PSOE should join the democratic opposition against the dictatorship.15

Besteiro, like Largo Caballero, supported collaboration, albeit for somewhat different reasons. His logic was crudely Marxist. From the erroneous premise that Spain was still a semi-feudal country awaiting a bourgeois revolution, he reasoned that it was not the job of the Spanish working class to do the job of the bourgeoisie. In the meantime, however, until the bourgeoisie completed its historic task, the UGT should seize the opportunity offered by the dictatorship to have a monopoly of state labour affairs. His argument was built on shaky foundations. Although Spain had not experienced a political democratic revolution comparable to those in England and in France, the remnants of feudalism had been whittled away throughout the nineteenth century as the country underwent a profound legal and economic revolution. Besteiro’s contention that the working class should stand aside and leave the task of building democracy to the bourgeoisie was thus entirely unrealistic since the landowning and financial bourgeoisie had already achieved its goals without a democratic revolution. His error would lead to his ideological annihilation at the hands of extreme leftist Socialists, including Santiago Carrillo, in the 1930s.

Prieto and a number of others within the Socialist Party, if not the UGT, were shocked by the opportunism shown by the leadership of the movement. They accepted that strike action against the army would have been self-destructive, sentimental heroics that would have risked the workers’ movement merely to save the degenerate political system that sustained the monarchy re-established in 1876 after the collapse of the First Republic. However, they could not admit that this justified close collaboration with it. They went largely unheard and the integration of the national leadership with the dictatorship was considerable, the UGT having representatives on several state committees. Wenceslao Carrillo was the Socialist representative on one of the most important, the State Finances Auditing Commission (Consejo Interventor de Cuentas del Estado).16 Most UGT sections were allowed to continue functioning and the UGT was well represented on a new Labour Council. In contrast, anarchists and Communists suffered a total clampdown on their activities. In return for refraining from strikes and public protest demonstrations, the UGT was offered a major prize. On 13 September 1924, the first anniversary of the military coup, a royal decree allowed for one workers’ and one employers’ representative from the Labour Council to join the Council of State. The UGT members of the Labour Council chose Largo Caballero. Within the UGT itself this had no unfavourable repercussions – Besteiro was vice-president and Largo himself secretary general. The president, the now ageing and infirm Pablo Iglesias, did not object. However, there was a certain degree of outrage within the PSOE.

Prieto was appalled, rightly fearing that Largo Caballero’s opportunism would be exploited by the dictator for its propaganda value. In fact, on 25 April 1925, Primo did cite Largo Caballero’s presence on the Council of State as a reason for ruling without a parliament, asking rhetorically, ‘why do we need elected representatives?’17 When Prieto and De los Ríos wrote to the PSOE executive committee urging the need for distance between party leaders and the military directorate, they were told that Largo Caballero’s nomination was a UGT matter. This was utterly disingenuous since the same individuals made up the executive committees of both bodies which usually held joint deliberations on important national issues. In the face of this dishonesty, Prieto resigned from the committee.18 Inevitably, given Largo Caballero’s egoism, his already festering personal resentment of Prieto was cast in stone.19 It would continue throughout the years of the Republic and into the Civil War and would later influence Santiago Carrillo. When his own political positions came to be opposed to those of Prieto from late 1933 onwards, Carrillo would adopt an aggressive hostility towards him that fed off that of his mentor. This was to be seriously damaging to the Republic at the time and to the anti-Francoist cause after the Civil War.

Within four years of the establishment of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, the economic boom that had facilitated Socialist collaboration was coming to an end. By the beginning of 1928, significant increases in unemployment were accompanied by growing evidence of worker unrest. The social democratic positions of Prieto and De los Ríos were gaining support. They constituted just one of the three tendencies within the Socialist movement whose divisions had been exacerbated by the dictatorship. The deteriorating economic situation confirmed both Prieto and the deeply reformist and rigidly orthodox Marxist Besteiro and Saborit in their respective positions. However, as the recession changed the mood of the Socialist working masses, it inevitably affected the views of the pragmatic trade unionists under Largo Caballero. That necessarily included his lieutenant Wenceslao Carrillo. They had gambled on securing for the UGT a virtual monopoly within the state industrial arbitration machinery, but it had done little to improve recruitment. Indeed, the small overall increase in membership was disappointing relative to the UGT’s privileged position. Moreover, there was a drop in the number of union members paying their dues in two of the UGT’s strongest sections, the Asturian miners and the rural labourers.20 Always sensitive to shifts in rank-and-file feeling, Largo Caballero began to rethink his position and reconsider the advantages of a rhetorical radicalism. Since Wenceslao Carrillo spoke freely with his thirteen-year-old son, it is to be supposed that the beginnings of Santiago’s own extremism in the period between 1933 and 1935 may be traced to this period. The difference would be that he believed in revolutionary solutions whereas Largo Caballero merely used revolutionary language in the hope of frightening the bourgeoisie.

At the Twelfth Congress of the PSOE, held in Madrid from 9 June to 4 July 1928, Prieto and others advocated resistance against the dictatorship, and a special committee created to examine the party’s tactics rejected collaboration by six votes to four. Nevertheless, the wider Congress majority continued to support collaboration. This was reflected in the elections for party offices at the Congress and for those in the UGT at its Sixteenth Congress, held from 10 to 15 September. Pablo Iglesias had died on 9 December 1925. Having already replaced him on an interim basis, Besteiro was now formally elected to succeed him as president of both the PSOE and the UGT. All senior offices went to followers either of Besteiro or of Largo Caballero. In the PSOE, Largo Caballero was elected vice-president, Saborit treasurer, Lucio Martínez Gil of the land workers secretary general and Wenceslao Carrillo minutes secretary. In the UGT, Saborit was elected vice-president, Largo Caballero secretary general and Wenceslao Carrillo treasurer.21 Despite a growth in unemployment towards the end of the decade and increasing numbers of strikes, as late as January 1929 Largo Caballero was still arguing against such direct action and in favour of government legislation.22 However, with the situation deteriorating, it can have been with little conviction. Opposition to the regime was growing in the universities and within the army. Intellectuals, Republicans and even monarchist politicians protested against abuses of the law. The peseta was falling and, as 1929 advanced, the first effect of the world depression began to be felt in Spain. The Socialists were gradually being isolated as the dictator’s only supporters outside his own single party, the Unión Patriótica.

Matters reached a head in the summer when General Primo de Rivera offered the UGT the chance to choose five representatives for a proposed non-elected parliament to be known as the National Assembly. When the National Committees of the PSOE and the UGT held a joint meeting to discuss the offer on 11 August, Largo Caballero called for rejection of the offer while Besteiro, with support from Wenceslao Carrillo, was in favour of acceptance. Largo Caballero won, having changed his mind about collaboration with the dictatorship for the purely pragmatic reason that the tactic was now discredited in the eyes of the rank and file.23 Since Besteiro regarded the dictatorship as a transitional stage in the decomposition of the monarchical regime, he thought it logical to accept the privileges offered by the dictator. According to his simplistically orthodox Marxist analysis, the monarchy had to be overthrown by a bourgeois revolution, and therefore the job of the UGT and PSOE leadership was to keep their organizations intact until they would be ready to work for socialism within a bourgeois regime.24

Largo Caballero made a number of speeches in late 1929 and early 1930 which indicated a move towards the stance of Prieto and De los Ríos in favour of Socialist cooperation with middle-class Republicans against the monarchy.25 Pragmatic and opportunist, concerned always with the material interests of the Socialist movement and the maintenance of the union bureaucracy’s control over the rank and file, he was prone to sudden and inconsistent shifts of position. Primo de Rivera resigned on 28 January 1930 to be replaced for three weeks by General Dámaso Berenguer. Just at the moment that the young Santiago Carrillo was being promoted from the printing works of El Socialista to the editorial staff, the Socialists seemed to be in a strong position despite the failures of collaboration. Other left-wing groups had been persecuted. Right-wing parties had put their faith in the military regime and allowed their organizations, and more importantly their networks of electoral falsification, to fall into decay. Inevitably, the growing opposition to the monarchy looked to the Socialists for support. With the Socialist rank and file increasingly militant, especially as they followed the examples set by the resurgent anarcho-syndicalist CNT and, to a much lesser extent, by the minuscule Communist Party, Largo Caballero moved ever more quickly towards Prieto’s position. The Director General of Security, General Emilio Mola, was convinced that what he called the CNT’s ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ were forcing the UGT leadership to follow suit for fear of losing members.26

Prieto and De los Ríos attended a meeting of Republican leaders in San Sebastián on 17 August. From this meeting emerged the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, the Republican revolutionary committee and the future Republican–Socialist provisional government. The National Committees of the UGT and the PSOE met on 16 and 18 October (respectively) to discuss the offer of two ministries in the provisional government in return for Socialist support, with a general strike, for a coup d’état. The Besteiristas were opposed but the balance was swung by Largo Caballero. His change of mind reflected that same opportunistic pragmatism that had inspired his early collaboration with, and later opposition to, the dictatorship. He said himself at the time, ‘this is a question not of principles but of tactics’.27 In return for UGT support for a military insurrection against the monarchy, the Republicans’ original offer was increased to three ministries. When the executive committee of the PSOE met to examine the offer, it was accepted by eight votes to six. The three Socialist ministers in the provisional government were designated as Largo Caballero in the Ministry of Labour, and, to the latter’s barely concealed resentment, Prieto in the Ministry of Public Works and De los Ríos in Education.28

All of these issues were discussed by Santiago and his father as they walked home each day from Socialist headquarters in Madrid, housed in the members’ meeting place, the Casa del Pueblo. Inevitably, Wenceslao propounded a version that entirely justified the positions of Largo Caballero. There can be little doubt that, at least from this time onwards, if not before, the young Santiago Carrillo began to venerate Largo Caballero and to take his pronouncements at face value.29 It would not be until the early months of the Civil War that he would come to realize the irresponsible opportunism that underlay his hero’s rhetoric. Now, however, in his early teens and on the threshold of his political career, he absorbed the views of these two mentors, his father and Largo Caballero. These close friends were both practical union men whose central preoccupation was always to foster the material welfare of the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. They put its finances and its legal position, its recruitment and the collection of its members’ dues and subscriptions ahead of all theoretical considerations. In long conversations with his father and at gatherings of both families, the young Santiago learned key lessons that were to be apparent in his later career. He learned about pragmatism and opportunism, about how an organization works, about how to set up and pack meetings and congresses to ensure victory. He learned that, while theoretical polemics might rage, these organizational lessons were the immutable truths that mattered. They were to be of inestimable value to him in his rise to power within the Communist Party, within the internal struggles that divided the Party throughout the 1960s and in the transition to, and the early years of, democracy in Spain. Parallels might be drawn between the collaboration of Largo Caballero’s UGT with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s and Santiago’s own moderation during the transition to democracy symbolized by his adoption of the monarchist flag in 1977.

Apart from sporadic strike action, the Socialist movement had taken no official part in the varied resistance movements to the dictatorship, at least until its later stages. The Pact of San Sebastián changed things dramatically. The undertaking to help with the revolutionary action would further divide both the UGT and the PSOE. Strike action in support of a military coup was opposed by Besteiro, Saborit and their reformist supporters within the UGT, Trifón Gómez of the Railway Workers’ Union and Manuel Muiño, president of the Casa del Pueblo, where Socialist Party and union members would gather. Largo Caballero and Wenceslao Carrillo were firmly in favour. Santiago was an enthusiastic supporter of revolutionary action, having just read his first work by Lenin, the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which outlined the theoretical foundation for the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik Party and criticized the role of the Mensheviks during the 1905 revolution. He equated the position of Besteiro with that of the Mensheviks. He was also influenced by both his father and Largo Caballero. Inevitably, he faced an uncomfortable time in the office that he shared with Saborit at the Gráfica Socialista.30

Santiago saw his first violent action in mid-November 1930. On 12 November, the collapse of a building under construction in the Calle Alonso Cano of Madrid killed four workers and badly injured seven others. The large funeral procession for the victims was attacked by the police, and in consequence the UGT, seconded by the CNT, called a general strike for 15 November. Santiago was involved in the subsequent clashes with youths who were selling the Catholic newspaper El Debate, the only one that had ignored the strike call.31 He was also involved peripherally when the UGT participated, in a small way, in the revolutionary movement agreed upon in October. It finally took place in mid-December. The Republican ‘revolutionary committee’ had been assured that the UGT would support a military coup with a strike. Things were complicated somewhat when, in the hope of sparking off a pro-Republican movement in the garrisons of Huesca, Zaragoza and Lérida, Captains Fermín Galán, Angel García Hernández and Salvador Sediles rose in Jaca (Huesca) on 12 December, three days before the agreed date. Galán and García Hernández were shot after summary courts martial on 14 December which led to the artillery withdrawing from the plot. And, although forces under General Queipo de Llano and aviators from the airbase at Cuatro Vientos went ahead, they realized that they were in a hopeless situation when the expected general strike did not take place in Madrid.32

This was largely the consequence of the scarcely veiled opposition of the Besteirista leadership. Madrid, the stronghold of the Besteiro faction of the UGT bureaucracy, was the only important city where there was no strike. That failure was later the object of bitter discussion at the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE, in October 1932, where the Besteiristas in the leadership were accused of dragging their feet, if not actually sabotaging the strike. When, on 10 December 1930, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, one of the Socialists involved in the conspiracy, tried to have the revolutionary manifesto for the day of the proposed strike printed at the Gráfica Socialista, Saborit refused point-blank. General Mola, apparently on the basis of assurances from Manuel Muiño, was confident on the night of the 14th that the UGT would not join in the strike on the following day. Despite being given the strike orders by Largo Caballero, Muiño did nothing. This was inadvertently confirmed by Besteiro when he told the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE that he had finally told Muiño to go ahead only after having been pressed by members of the Socialist Youth Federation to take action. One of those FJS members was Santiago Carrillo, whose later account casts doubt on that of Besteiro. The fact is that none of the powerful unions controlled by the Besteirista syndical bureaucracy stopped work. The group from the FJS, including Santiago Carrillo (who had been given a pistol which he had no clue how to use), had gone to the Conde Duque military garrison on the night of 14 December in the hope of joining the rising that never materialized. After being dispersed by the police, but seeing planes dropping revolutionary propaganda over Madrid, this group of teenage Socialists went to the Casa del Pueblo at Calle Carranza 20 to demand to know why there was no strike. They got no explanation but only a severe dressing-down from Besteiro himself.33

Not long afterwards, the barely sixteen-year-old Santiago was elected on to the executive committee of the FJS. In the wake of the failed uprising in December, the government held municipal elections on 12 April 1931 in what it hoped would be the first stage of a controlled return to constitutional normality. However, Socialists and liberal middle-class Republicans swept the board in the main towns while monarchists won only in the rural areas where the social domination of the local bosses, or caciques, remained intact. On the evening of polling day, as the results began to be known, people started to drift on to the streets of the cities of Spain and, with the crowds growing, Republican slogans were shouted with increasing excitement. Santiago Carrillo and his comrades of the FJS took part in demonstrations in favour of the Republic which were fired on by Civil Guards on the evening of 12 April and dispersed by a cavalry charge the following day.34 Nevertheless, General José Sanjurjo, the commander of the Civil Guard, made it clear that he was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of the King, Alfonso XIII. General Dámaso Berenguer had been replaced as head of the government by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar. Berenguer, now Minister of War, was equally pessimistic about army morale but was constrained by his loyalty to the King. Despite his misgivings, on the morning of 14 April Berenguer told Alfonso that the army would fight to overturn the result of the elections. Unwilling to sanction bloodshed, the King refused, believing that he should leave Spain gracefully and thereby keep open the possibility of an eventual return.35 As news of his departure spread, a euphoric multitude, including Santiago Carrillo, gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to greet the Republican–Socialist provisional government.

Despite the optimism of the crowds that danced in the streets, the new government faced a daunting task. It consisted of three Socialists and an ideologically disparate group of petty-bourgeois Republicans, some of whom were conservatives, some idealists and several merely cynics. That was the first weakness of the coalition. They had shared the desire to rid Spain of Alfonso XIII, but each then had a different agenda for the future. The conservative elements wanted to go no further than the removal of a corrupt monarchy. Then there was the Radical Party of Alejandro Lerroux whose principal ambition was merely to enjoy the benefits of power. The only real urge for change came from the more left-leaning of the Republicans and the Socialists, whose reforming objectives were ambitious but different. They both hoped to use state power to create a new Spain. However, that required a vast programme of reform which would involve weakening the influence of the Catholic Church and the army, establishing more equitable industrial relations, breaking the near-feudal powers of the owners of the latifundios, the great estates, and satisfying the autonomy demands of Basque and Catalan regionalists.