The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo

Leaving aside the anarchists, there were effectively two processes going on within the workers’ movement in 1934. On the one hand, there were the young revolutionaries of the Socialist and Communist youth movements and the Alianza Obrera. On the other, there were the traditional trade unionists of the UGT who were trying to protect living standards against the assault of the landowners and industrialists. In a way that was damaging to both, Largo Caballero spanned the two, giving the erroneous impression that entirely economic strikes had revolutionary ends. Repression had intensified since the appointment as Minister of the Interior of Salazar Alonso. Deeming all strikes to be political, he deliberately provoked several throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. He seized the flimsiest excuses for heavy-handed action and defeated the printers, construction workers and metalworkers one after the other.

Salazar’s greatest victory, which to his great satisfaction pushed the Socialists ever nearer to having to implement their revolutionary threats, took place in June. After much agonized debate, the leaders of the landworkers’ union concluded that a general strike was the only way to halt the owners’ offensive. Under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard, the FNTT’s newly elected general secretary Ricardo Zabalza called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law. Although the strike action was economic in motivation, Salazar Alonso seized the chance to strike a blow at the most numerous section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. He undermined compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour by criminalizing the actions of the FNTT with a decree declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint on to lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Much was made by Renovación of the arrival in Madrid of hundreds of bedraggled rural workers en route to their homes in the south. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years of imprisonment. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936.81

The FJS was also subjected to various obstacles to its normal functioning. Renovación received a crippling fine at the beginning of July. The following week, Salazar Alonso issued a decree prohibiting the use of the clenched-fist salute. Inevitably, this hardened the FJS revolutionary rhetoric and pushed the organization close to the Communist Youth.82 On 26 July 1934, attracted by the incessant praise for the USSR in the pages of Renovación, the leadership of the Communist Youth proposed negotiations with the FJS with a view to a possible unification. Although the invitation was preceded by patronizing remarks which described the FJS as reformist social democrats, the conversations went ahead. The FJS was represented by Carrillo, Melchor, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla; the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas by Trifón Medrano, Segismundo Álvarez and Fernando Claudín (Claudín would later develop into the most sophisticated thinker in the Spanish Communist Party). The talks were dominated by Carrillo, who presented the FJS as the revolutionary vanguard of the Socialist movement while the UJC was merely a very junior offshoot of the tiny Communist Party.

The meetings were tense, if slightly more cordial than might have been expected given the organizations’ history of mutual criticism. No concrete plans were made for formal unification. As Carrillo made clear, the FJS was already preparing a revolutionary action and this would take place within the Alianza Obrera. Nevertheless, Carrillo also indicated that he believed that the FJS should be prepared to make compromises in order to hasten the revolution. Thereafter there was ever more united action on the ground. At a local level, militants of both organizations were already acting together, particularly in cooperation against the JAP. They held joint demonstrations such as that which followed the murder by Falangists on 10 June of the young militant Juanita Rico. Their two news-sheets, Renovación and Juventud Roja, henceforth carried news of each other’s activities. Claudín was deeply impressed by the nineteen-year-old Carrillo’s remarkable self-confidence, the powerful and lucid way in which he presented his arguments, and his profound knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution. Amaro del Rosal was every bit as impressed with the talent, energy and capacity for work of his young comrade.83

Carrillo had also been noticed by others outside the FJS. After the talks with the UJC, Trifón Medrano invited him to meet a representative of KIM – the Communist Youth International – which effectively meant with a Soviet agent. He consulted with his comrades on the FJS executive committee and they agreed that he should go ahead with the encounter. He was excited by the idea of meeting someone whom he imagined to be linked with the assault on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Indeed, such was his admiration of the Soviet Union that his office as secretary general of the FJS was dominated by a large portrait of Stalin. Forty years later, he was to tell Fernando Claudín that, in the internal conflict within the PSOE and the UGT, he associated the workers’ champion Largo Caballero with Stalin and the intellectual Besteiro with Trotsky. When he got to the park where he was to meet the Russian agent, he was bitterly disappointed to be introduced not to a hardened Bolshevik revolutionary but to ‘fat Carmen’ (‘Carmen la gorda’), the pseudonym of a portly German woman who was a Soviet agent within the Spanish KIM Bureau. This first meeting with a representative of the fortress of world communism went from bad to worse. She accused the FJS of being potential Trotskyists. Then, believing erroneously that they had been followed by the police, she suddenly proposed that they flee from the bar where they were having a cold drink. Jumping on a moving tram, she tripped and collapsed on the platform to the immense hilarity of passers-by.84

As the summer wore on, Carrillo continued to push the insurrectionary line in Renovación, whose pages, when the entire issue was not seized by the police, carried more and more sections blacked out by the censor.85 In contrast, Largo Caballero was moving in the opposite direction. The UGT’s National Committee met on 31 July to hold an inquest into the failure of the peasant strike. The representative of the schoolteachers’ union criticized the UGT executive for its failure to go to the aid of the peasants and virtually accused Largo Caballero of being a reformist. He responded by condemning such rhetoric as frivolous extremism and by declaring that the Socialist movement must abandon its dangerous verbal revolutionism. He had apparently forgotten his own rhetoric of four months previously and the existence of the joint revolutionary committee. When the schoolteachers’ leader read out texts by Lenin, Largo Caballero replied that the UGT was not going to act in accordance with Lenin or any other theorist. Reminding his young comrade that Spain in 1934 was not Russia in 1917, he stated rightly that there was no armed proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was strong. It was exactly the opposite of his own recent speeches and of the line being peddled by Carrillo and the young hotheads of the FJS. In fact, Largo Caballero seems to have become increasingly annoyed by their facile extremism, complaining that ‘they did just what they felt like without consulting anyone’. Nevertheless, Carrillo was later to write that, as far as he knew at the time, Largo Caballero was forging ahead with detailed revolutionary preparations, for some of which he was using the FJS.86

In fact, Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS revolutionary liaison committee had not done much beyond compiling a large collection of file-cards with details of potential local revolutionary committees and militias. That filing system was the only place where there existed an infrastructure of revolution. Each UGT, PSOE or FJS section made its own arrangements for creating militias, which usually went no further than drawing up lists of names of those who might be prepared to take to the streets. Whatever Carrillo fondly believed, there was no central coordination. Largo Caballero himself admitted that the majority of local party and union leaders thought that ‘the revolution was inevitable but feared it and just hoped that some initiative or incident might see it avoided and so they invested only the minimum effort in its preparation, not wanting to appear to be hostile to it in order to keep the loyalty of their members’. He thus perfectly summed up his own attitude. For the bulk of the Socialist leadership, if not for the bolshevizing youth, there was never any real intention of making a revolution. Largo Caballero was convinced that President Alcalá Zamora would never invite the CEDA to join the government because its leaders had never declared their loyalty to the Republic.87

The loud revolutionary rhetoric of the FJS was followed with relish by both Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. They were aware that the revolutionary committee had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. They also knew – as did Largo Caballero but apparently not Carrillo – that the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Thorough police activity throughout the spring and summer of 1934 had undermined most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee. Most of the few weapons acquired by the left had been seized. Gil Robles admitted later that he was anxious to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the violent reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’88 Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.89

In similar terms, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was simply to begin a counter-revolutionary offensive to establish a government determined to put an end to the evil.’ It was not just a question of smashing the immediate revolutionary bid but of making sure that the left did not raise its head again.90

The moment of truth was coming nearer, but the reality would be very different from the Leninist dreams of armed insurrection nurtured by Carrillo and the other young bolshevizers. They had little or no idea of how to convert their threats into action. Largo Caballero and his hardened trade union followers were now using revolutionary phrases less frequently and with decreasing conviction. Their outrage in the wake of the November 1933 elections had given way to alarm at the way in which Salazar Alonso had managed to decimate the organized labour movement during the strikes of the spring and early summer of 1934. Throughout September, there were numerous minor strikes and waves of police activity. On 8 September, in response to a twenty-four-hour strike in Madrid, Salazar Alonso had ordered the Casa del Pueblo to be closed. It was searched, to no avail, by the police. When it was reopened six days later, the police went in again and allegedly found a substantial cache of bombs and firearms. This unlikely discovery was the excuse needed for the Socialist headquarters to be closed again.

The next day, 14 September, there took place an event which symbolized the naive hopes of the bolshevizers. Eighty thousand people attended a spectacular joint rally of the FJS and the Communist Youth at the Madrid Metropolitan Stadium. It was in response to a decree by Salazar Alonso, prohibiting those under the age of twenty-one from joining political organizations without written permission from their parents. Although there were speeches by members of the PSOE and the Communist Party, the main speakers were Carrillo for the FJS and Trifón Medrano for the UJC. All spoke of the imminent seizure of power. Greeted by a sea of raised fists, Carrillo declared that ‘if this government at the service of the right does not withdraw the decree, these youth movements will assault the citadels of power and establish a class dictatorship’. He spoke of the identification of the FJS with ‘the chief of the Spanish revolution’, an obvious reference to Largo Caballero. Intoxicated by the moment, he closed his intervention with cries of ‘Death to the Government! Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live the Revolution! Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!’ The event ended with the militants marching out ‘military style’ while waving a profusion of red flags. El Socialista rather ingenuously described the event as ‘a show of strength by the proletariat of Madrid’.91

The crunch came on 26 September, when the CEDA sparked off the crisis by announcing that it could no longer support a minority government. The only solution was either the calling of new elections or the entry into the government of the CEDA. Lerroux’s new cabinet, announced in the early hours of the morning of 4 October, included three CEDA ministers. The arrival in power of the CEDA had been denominated the first step towards the imposition of fascism in Spain. It was the moment for the much threatened revolutionary insurrection. In the event, the efficacy of the threatened revolution was to be in inverse proportion to the scale of the bolshevizers’ bombast. Much of the Socialist movement was paralysed with doubt. The executives of the PSOE and the UGT met and agreed that, if indeed the President did what they were sure he would not do – invite the CEDA to join the government – then the revolution must be launched. Coded telegrams – with messages like ‘I arrive tomorrow’, ‘Angela is better’, ‘Pepe’s operation went well’ – were sent to local committees in every province.

However, having hoped that threats of revolution would suffice to make Alcalá Zamora call new elections, Largo Caballero simply could not believe that he had failed. The revolutionary committee thus did nothing about making the final preparations for the threatened seizure of power. Instead, they spent the next three days in Prieto’s apartment ‘anxiously awaiting’ news of the composition of the cabinet. Largo still believed that Alcalá Zamora would never hand over power to the CEDA. Similarly, the FJS’s revolutionary militias were also lacking leadership and organization. At 11 p.m. on 3 October, two Socialist journalists, Carlos de Baraibar and José María Aguirre, arrived with the unofficial news that a government had been formed with CEDA participation. Several members of the revolutionary committee declared that the time had come to start the movement. Largo, however, stated flatly that ‘until I see it in the Gaceta, I won’t believe it’. He was finally convinced only by the arrival of some soldiers who brought news that the new cabinet had declared martial law. Even then, it was with reluctance that the Socialists prepared for action. They felt that they had no choice. ‘The die was cast,’ wrote Largo.92

Now the extent of his revolutionary intentions was revealed when the UGT gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a pacific general strike. He hoped that the President would change his mind, but he succeeded merely in giving the police time to arrest working-class leaders. In most parts of Spain, the strike was a failure largely because of the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and bringing in the army to run essential services.

The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet revealed the emptiness of the revolutionary bombast of the previous months. It was followed by the creation of an independent Catalan Republic, though it lasted only for ten hours; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. Indeed, the scale of failure was in direct proportion to the scale of the optimistic rhetoric that had preceded it. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.93 Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions, and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests was the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.94

Carrillo was arrested late at night on 7 October. He and several other prominent members of the UGT and the FJS were hiding in the Madrid studio belonging to the artist Luis Quintanilla, who was a friend of most of the PSOE top brass. According to Quintanilla, while awaiting the instructions that never came they had idled away the day by making and consuming an enormous paella. According to Carrillo, they had merely shared a French omelette. Quintanilla went to bed around 10.00 p.m. but was awakened shortly afterwards by the arrival of the police. They had been betrayed because Carrillo and other FJS comrades had gone out to enjoy the warm October evening on the studio’s wide terrace. Quintanilla had warned them not to do so because he had a neighbour whom he described as ‘a witch who spent all day snooping’. They sat heatedly discussing the bad news that they were hearing, whether it was about the failure to materialize of the promised military participation or the arrest of sections of the FJS. As expected, the neighbour overheard them and reported them to the police. The officers who arrived were extremely nervous and pointed rifles at the would-be revolutionaries as they were handcuffed and led away. Each one was put in a car with two policemen, one of whom kept a revolver pressed against their side. After a cursory interrogation, Carrillo was transferred the next morning to the Cárcel Modelo and locked in a malodorous cell.95 His dreams of revolutionary glory were shattered. Over the next seventeen months in prison, his reflections on the reasons for that failure would profoundly change the direction of his political life.

2

The Destruction of the PSOE: 1934–1939

The performance of the revolutionary committee and the Socialist Youth in Madrid can best be described as pathetic. Once it was clear that revolutionary threats had not diverted Alcalá Zamora from bringing the CEDA into the cabinet, the Socialist leaders went to ground. No arms were distributed and the masses were left without instructions. No serious plans for a rising had been made. The only militia group with arms, led by Manuel Tagüeña of the FJS, clashed with Assault Guards in the La Guindalera district of Madrid. After a skirmish, they were quickly disarmed and arrested.1 Amaro del Rosal, one of Carrillo’s more extremist comrades on the revolutionary committee, denied participation. In a sense, he was telling the truth. When Manuel Fernández Grandizo of the Izquierda Comunista met Del Rosal in a Madrid street on 5 October, he asked him what the revolutionary committee planned. Del Rosal allegedly replied, ‘if the masses want arms, they had better go and look for them, then do what they like’. In his own account, he complained that the crisis had come too soon, that the CNT had failed to collaborate and that the authorities had blocked any military assistance by confining troops to their barracks.2

The October issues of Renovación were confiscated by the police and the paper was shut down until 1936. After the failure of the ‘revolution’, Amaro del Rosal escaped to Portugal but was repatriated by Salazar’s police. Carrillo was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid along with his father and most of the leadership of the revolutionary committee, including Largo Caballero. The editor of El Socialista, Julián Zugazagoitia, was also imprisoned and the entire Socialist press was silenced. The clandestine life of the movement was, in fact, directed from the prison.3 Tens of thousands of workers were imprisoned. Many more lost their jobs. In Asturias, torture was used in interrogations, and military courts passed out many death sentences against miners’ leaders. All over Spain, Socialist local councils (ayuntamientos) were replaced by government nominees. The Casas del Pueblo were closed and the unions were unable to function.4

Many Socialist trade unionists, including the Asturian miners’ leaders, believed that the lesson of October and the subsequent repression was the same as that of the events of 1917. The movement would always lose in direct confrontation with the apparatus of the state. The members of the revolutionary committee, however, did not view the 1934 events as a defeat. Whether this was merely self-deception or a cynical ploy to cover their own ineptitude is not clear. Carrillo in particular, showing a capacity for unrealistic optimism that would characterize his entire political life, was convinced that the overall balance had been positive. His logic was that Gil Robles had been shown that the peaceful establishment of fascism would not be permitted by the working class. The brief success of the Alianza Obrera in Asturias profoundly strengthened his conviction that eventual revolution required a united working class. This view briefly brought him closer to the Trotskyists and inevitably fed the suspicions of ‘fat Carmen’, the KIM representative who was watching him closely. The Spanish Communist Party, the Partido Comunista de España, was also calling for proletarian unity. Hitherto, as part of its ‘class against class’ line, it had denounced Socialists as ‘social fascists’ because, so the logic went, reformism perpetuated bourgeois society. In the aftermath of the triumph of Nazism which had been facilitated by the reformism of the German Socialists, the line was softened and the PCE had entered the Alianza Obrera. Now the PCE sought to derive – largely undeserved – credit for Asturias and, with it, ownership of the most powerful symbol of working-class unity. The Communist fabrication of its own revolutionary legend would increase its attractiveness to the FJS.5

After his arrest on 14 October, Largo Caballero assured the military judge investigating his case that he had taken no part in the organization of the rising. Later, on 7 November, he told the Cortes committee that had to decide whether his parliamentary immunity could be waived for him to be prosecuted: ‘I was in my house … and I issued an instruction that anyone who came looking for me should be told that I was not there. I gave that order, as I had done in the past, because I was playing no part in what was going on, I was having nothing to do with anything that might happen; I did not want to have any contact with anyone, with anyone at all.’6 The scale of the repression provided some justification. Araquistáin later claimed that ‘only a madman or an agent provocateur’ would have admitted participation in the preparation of the rising because such an admission of guilt would have been used by the CEDA to justify carrying through its determination to smash both the PSOE and the UGT.7