CHAPTER IV. Durruti’s second death, or his political assassination

There is no legitimate hypothesis about Durruti’s death that could diminish him or the organization to which he gave the best years of his life. The controversy over his death is not a consequence of his death per se, but rather the nature of the struggle in which the Spanish working people were engaged at the time and Durruti’s revolutionary role within it: specifically, the battle between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces that began in late September of 1936.

In the context of a revolution in retreat, Durruti evoked the possibility of a return to and renewal of the journey initiated on July 19, 1936. He was a beacon of hope whose presence suggested that not everything was lost and that peasants and workers, if they continued to fight, could truly re-conquer Spain. His death was a terrible blow to the revolutionaries. Indeed, there were already ominous signs on the horizon by autumn of that year. The moral disarmament of the militias began with the militarization decree in October. Also, the war was beginning to lose its social content and become a nationalist war. The counterrevolutionaries, led by the Communist Party, had stepped onto the stage. For Durruti to die in those circumstances would necessarily open the door to every possible conspiracy.

Durruti’s political and moral assassination began immediately after his physical death. We noted previously that Durruti, a leader despite himself, embodied the people’s revolutionary desires. The counterrevolutionary offensive initiated after his demise made it seem as though Durruti had been killed because he was an obstacle to that offensive. At least that is how the popular soul experienced it. Whatever the circumstances of his death, it was a significant victory for the counterrevolution.

The Communist Party and the PSUC’s actions left no doubt that his absence benefited them. The CP, which won the struggle for power among anti-fascists, can be considered his moral assassin. And the ordinary man, who simply wants to end the suffering imposed by capitalism once and for all, does not distinguish between the moral and the physical. The Communists, manipulated by Moscow, tried to appropriate Durruti’s memory while simultaneously discounting his libertarian ideas and, even worse, insinuating that his killers were among the anarchists in the Column. Framing the debate in this way ensured that Durruti’s death would never be clarified. But, for revolutionaries, Durruti’s death is no mystery: he died as an anarchist fighting for the social revolution and as a victim of the counterrevolution, like Nestor Makhno was of the Bolsheviks or Gustav Landauer was of Noske in Germany.

Juan Negrín, Spanish Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense, consummated Durruti’s political assassination on April 25 1938 when he posthumously made him a Lieutenant Colonel in the Popular Republican Army:

In agreement with the Cabinet and in light of the brilliant military services that citizen Buenaventura Durruti y Domínguez rendered to the Republic, who died gloriously at the head of his Column on November 20, 1936 in Madrid, I have decided to name him Major of Militias, effective July 19, 1936. Likewise, taking into account his distinguished conduct in war operations, I have the pleasure of granting him the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, effective on the day of his death, November 20, 1936. Barcelona, April 25, 1938. Signed: Juan Negrín, Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense.[779]

The reader has seen Durruti’s resistance to militarization throughout the pages of this book. In October, he renounced the rank of Major of Militias that Francisco Largo Caballero had conceded to him and was simply the “general leader of the Durruti Column” when he died. Naming him Lieutenant Colonel for services “rendered to the Republic” was the greatest affront to his and the militias’ revolutionary legacy.

As we said, his political assassination began immediately after his death. “Durruti, the hero,” “Durruti, the leader of the people”... These slogans were a way to empty Durruti of his anarchist content. It was a way to obscure his struggle and manipulate his memory in order to conceal the advances of the counterrevolution.

Prior to April 1938, military regulations indicated that leaders of the Militia Columns could not aspire to any rank higher than Major of Militias, although this did not prevent them from commanding army divisions and even corps. But the Communist Party wanted absolute control of the army and was seeding it with its militants. How could the Communists overcome existing military regulations without starting a war with the other sectors of the “anti-fascist block”? Durruti had been an “exemplary leader” and so presumably no one would be troubled if he received an award for his “exemplarity.” However, by making him Lieutenant Colonel, they not only paid ”homage” to the militias but also covered the CP’s massive appointment of Lieutenant Colonels. They killed two birds with one stone: the Communists executed Durruti politically and consolidated their power in the army. It was Machiavellianism at its best.

Durruti’s name became a watchword in the propaganda released by all the governmental parties. They cited his name to justify any counterrevolutionary measure and always followed it with the famous phrase ascribed to him: “We renounce everything except victory.” This sentence became the war’s motto. Even in the Cabinet, when a CNT minister resisted some policy that was antagonistic to the proletariat, his enemies shut him up by reminding him of the lapidary maxim attributed to Durruti, “the leader of the people.” “Victory is what’s important. We’ll make the revolution later. Wasn’t that what our great Durruti wanted?”

The manipulation of his memory reached such extremes that Emilienne Morin felt obliged to refuse the “high honor” granted to her when the government tried to make her a “Lieutenant Colonel:”

I am not betraying Durruti’s legacy when I say that he remained the intrepid anarchist of his early years up to the last moment of his life. It’s not superfluous to invoke this, since it’s no secret that various political groups have tried to appropriate the undeniable prestige of the hero of Aragón and Madrid for their own purposes.

They’ve tried to make him into a great soldier, who was convinced of the need for an iron discipline and even welcomed the militarization of the militias, which was already being talked about in November 1936. His final words—“we renounce everything except victory”—have become the fighters’ mantra, but each one interprets them according to the needs of his organization or party.

I don’t want to begin a debate, because these aren’t times for polemics, but in the midst of the contradictions and confusion borne of war, allow me, as a witness, to say what I think. When Durruti spoke of victory, he meant, without any possible doubt, the victory of the Popular Militias over the fascist hordes, since he rejected the idea of a military victory of a bourgeois republic that didn’t lead to social transformation.

I heard him say so many times: “It wouldn’t be worth dressing up like soldiers to be governed by the Republicans of 1931 again. We accept concessions, but we won’t forget that we have to carry out the war and the revolution simultaneously.”

Durruti never forgot his years as a hunted militant. The dramatic persecutions suffered by the CNT and FAI were etched in letters of blood in his memory. He didn’t trust the Republican politicians in the slightest and refused to describe men like Azaña as anti-fascists.

In a word, he believed that the Spanish bourgeoisie that supported the Republican cause would not miss the opportunity to unscrupulously undermine, even in the middle of war, the proletariat’s revolutionary conquests.

Regrettably, events show that he was right...

Durruti was disgusted and horrified by the growing bureaucratism. In the famous speech that he gave in Barcelona before leaving for Madrid, he shouted the alarm about the corruption beginning to appear in the rearguard and denounced that bureaucratic parasitism. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough... and the bureaucratism of the conformists spread shamelessly...

But Durruti’s thought, his soul, if you’ll permit me the expression, still lives in the heart of the Spanish proletariat, which has not, despite his martyrdom, forgotten his message. And that is why we have faith in the revolutionary potential of the Iberian workers, who will one day free themselves from their so-called “leaders.” Let the disorder of the French Popular Front make our Spanish brothers reflect: they should not have high hopes for help from Europe’s “great democracies.” The prevailing affection for the combatants of liberty is nothing more than a passive and teary sentimentalism.

We can’t achieve the victory to which Durruti alluded—our victory— without help from the French proletariat, freed from the tutelage of its parties and beyond all nationalist considerations. We haven’t lost the hope that French workers will understand their class duty and break the “truce” that their “leaders” have preached to them for so long.[780]