El Bienio Negro

The parliamentary elections of November 19, 1933, brought an overwhelming victory to the right and ushered in what the Spanish labor movement was to call el bienio negro—the two black years. Yet despite this harsh characterization, the period generally fell far short of the fearful prognoses advanced by the labor movement. Newly organized fascist groups such as the JONS and the Falange, the latter led by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dictator’s charismatic son, had supported the right. They supplied it with a sufficient amount of street thuggery to arouse fears that Spain was following the same path that had just brought the Nazis to power in Germany. But the Falange, even after it had absorbed the fascistic JONS, (Juntas de Ofensiva National Sindicalista), barely numbered 3,000 members. Despite the adulation the young Primo de Rivera aroused amOTg reactionary university students and aristocratic youth, his influence on larger sections of the Spanish population was negligible.

The real victors of November consisted largely of indecisive coalitions of the center as well as the right, notably Alejandro Lerroux’s opportunistic Radicals and Jose Maria Gil Robles’s CEDA (Confederation Espatiola de Derechos Autonomos, or Confederation of Autonomous Right Parties), a coalition of Catholic and Monarchist groups that mouthed the reactionary platitudes of “Religion,” “Family,” “Fatherland,” “Work,” “Order,” and “Property” against secularism, labor “disorders,” and “anarchy.” The CEDA, with 110 seats, became the largest single party in the Cortes, followed by the Radicals with 100 seats. Gil Robles’s coalition acquired its support primarily from industrialists, landowners, Carlist peasants, clerics, and devout Catholics, no small number of whom were newly enfranchised women who voted according to the dictates of their local priests. The Radical Party mustered most of its votes from anti-Socialist urban middle classes. The greatest parliamentary problem facing the CEDA and the Radicals was the need, first, to allay the fears of troubled Liberals who, while drifting to the right, were deeply mistrustful of Gil Robles’s reactionary and military connections, and second, perhaps more seriously, to reconcile the devoutly Catholic CEDA with the traditionally anticlerical Radicals.

The new regime began by trying to keep Gil Robles in the background and thrusting Lerroux forward as prime minister. Lerroux, a pure adventurer,, occupied himself by replacing one demagogic personality with another. The anticleric of yesteryear became a1 guardian of the church. In fairly rapid order the Lerroux ministry restored most of the clerical salaries which the Constituent Cortes guided by Azaña had abolished, also returning substantial church properties which that Cortes had confiscated. Church schools were reopened and any objectionable anticlerical legislation which was not directly repealed was simply ignored.

Having made its peace with the church, the new ministry began an unconscionable assault upon the meager social legislation enacted by the Constituent Cortes. Agrarian reform, limited as it was, came to a dead halt. Pro-industry chairmen replaced Largo Caballero’s prolabor (more precisely, pro-Socialist) appointees. Agricultural wage increases achieved under the Azaña coalition were rolled back 40–50 percent and, as if to warn the peasants and workers of the futility of resistance, the number of Civil Guards was increased by a thousand. The cabinet even tried to restore the death penalty, but its efforts were frustrated by the Cortes.

Despite the harshness of the Lerroux program, it failed miserably. Like the Azaña coalition, the new ministry satisfied no one on the right and served only to increase the militancy of the left. Lerroux became snarled in sharp disputes over attempts to grant amnesty to the Sanjurjo military conspirators who had risen earlier in Seville. He was replaced by another Radical, Ricardo Samper, who, in turn, found himself beleaguered by the problems of Basque and Catalan nationalism, by contraband arms that were flowing into the country and reaching the left as well as the right (even the old Socialist right-winger, Indajecio Prieto, was involved in smuggling arms into Asturias), by gunplay between Falangists, Socialists, and Anarchists, and finally by the CEDA’s threat to deny the Radical ministry its vote of confidence if it was denied posts in the cabinet.

Whether or not right and center parties on their own could have won the November elections, this much is certain: the Anarchosyndicalist anti-electoral campaign had contributed decisively to the magnitude of their victory. The abstentionist propaganda of the CNT and FAI had been conducted under the slogan: “Frente a las urnas, la revolution social”—“Before ballot boxes, social revolution.” Having advanced revolution as the alternative to parliamentary reform, the Anarchosyndicalists now had to deliver the goods. But could they do so? The January insurrections of 1932 and 1933.had taken their toll in thousands of imprisoned militants, depleted resources, and lowered morale. At a plenum of regional confederations held in October, most of the delegates probably opposed an uprising, “but not openly,” as A.M. Lehning reported. Only a few delegations, most notably the Aragonese, pressed for an uprising. The other delegations merely promised to give what aid they could. This lagging of enthusiasm was portentous. Failure was being built into the insurrection well in advance of its occurrence and, given the lack of any tactical sense of timing and resources, rhetoric was being offered as a substitute for even the most remote possibility of success. It is noteworthy that Garcia Oliver, who had been so instrumental in fomenting earlier faista uprisings, broke openly with Durruti for the first time by attacking an insurrection as absurd.

The uprising was timed for December 8, 1933, the opening day of the new Cortes. In Barcelona, it began with a spectacular prison break in which many militants who had been imprisoned for participating in the Tarassa events tunneled their way to freedom. The government, alert to the Anarchosyndicalist plans, headed off strikes by declaring a state of emergency, arresting leading cenetistas and faistas, imposing press censorship, and closing down the syndicates. Similar steps were taken in Madrid and other possible insurrectionary centers. In Valencia, where the Opposition Syndicates exercised considerable influence, the strike orders of the CNT’s National Committee were largely ignored.

Only Aragon rose on any significant scale, particularly Saragossa, where faista notables such as Durruti, Isaac Puente, and Cipriano Mera had gone to organize the insurrection. Again, the government acted decisively to forestall an uprising; on the night of the eighth, nearly a hundred militants (including Durruti, Puente, and Mera) were arrested. Deprived of their ablest people, the workers nevertheless reared barricades, attacked public buildings, and engaged in heavy street fighting. But the uprising was disorganized and quickly subdued. Following the pattern of previous insurrections, many villages declared libertarian communism and perhaps the heaviest fighting took place between the vineyard workers in Rioja and the authorities. Within four days, the entire insurrectionary movement was crushed. Perhaps the most noteworthy break in the faista pattern of ill-prepared rising, sporadic conflicts, shortlived localized victories, and swift triumphs by the army occurred in Villanueva de Serena, where a group of soldiers under a Sergeant Sopena joined the insurrection. For the rest, Anarchosyndicalist militants were arrested in the thousands, their presses stopped, and their syndicates closed down.

According to Brenan, “What was remarkable about this rising was that for the first time in Spain clear instructions were issued for a social revolution. Mills and factories were taken over by the workers, and factory committees set up. Other committees for food, transport and so on were organized on the lines set down by Kropotkin. The rising was regarded as a rehearsal for the coming revolution, if not as the actual beginning of it.” Perhaps—but I have found nothing exceptional about the December uprising as compared with its predecessors. Wherever possible, earlier insurrections had carried out industrial and agrarian takeovers and established committees for workers’ and peasants’ control, libertarian systems of logistics and distribution—in short, a miniature society “organized on the lines set.down by Kropotkin.” Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about the December uprising is the extent to which it was localized in Aragon, the palpable lack of enthusiasm for it, and the opposition it encountered from flagging militants like Garcia Oliver.

In any case, with the December uprising, the Anarchist-led “cycle of insurrections” had come to its end. Azaña himself virtually admitted that these insurrections contributed to his downfall. The electoral abstentionist campaign had also contributed to the victory of the Radicals and the CEDA. For better or worse, Anarchosyndicalism had proven itself the force most like to exacerbate polarization, labor unrest, and social disequilibrium in Spain. To condemn the Anarchists for producing “anarchy” is simply silly; for the more idealistic Anarchists not to foment unrest, revolutionary upheavals, and ultimately social revolution would have been completely out of character. One can snicker at their tactics, naivete, and recklessness but more than any other single force in Spain they had shattered the facade of liberalism and paved the way for an historic confrontation between the great contending social classes in the peninsula.

As for the December revolt, far from being “a rehearsal for the coming revolution,” it was the most destructive exercise in futility ever, undertaken by the CNT and FAI. Indeed, it significantly eroded the fighting power of the two organizations. Perhaps the example set by the uprising succeeded in fostering the militancy of the growing left factions in the Socialist Party, but apart from strike actions and terrorism, it completely exhausted the movement. Henceforth, the Spanish Anarchists were to occupy themselves primarily with recovering their forces and uniting their ranks. The initiative for revolutionary action in Spain was to pass to the Socialist left, particularly to the Asturian miners and the newly converted peasants of the south. The great October Insurrection in the mining districts of Asturias was drawing near—and with it, the real “rehearsal for the coming revolution....” But in this “rehearsal,” the institutions of neither the UGT nor the CNT played a significant role as such; rather, the workers were the principal sources of revolutionary initiative. In this respect these workers behaved as Anarchists even when they were avowedly committed to Socialism.

The CNT and FAI, to be sure, were still intact, despite the arrests, losses, and disorganization they had suffered over the previous two years. Even Saragossa, which had suffered the heaviest casualties in the December uprising, had not lost its celebrated fervor and militancy. In April the Aragonese city was paralyzed by one of the most extraordinary general strikes to occur in the stormy history of the Spanish labor movement—a strike lasting nearly five weeks whose spirit of self-sacrifice, solidarity, and tenacity reached heroic proportions. The strike was occasioned by acts of police brutality which followed the explosion of a bomb in front of the police headquarters. The two-day protest strike which followed the mistreatment of arrested workers was extended into a 36-day general strike when several bus and tram drivers who refused to return to work were deprived of their licenses. Before the week was out, industry, transportation, and nearly all services in Saragossa were at a complete standstill.

Typically, the civil governor compounded the crisis by declaring the strike illegal and calling out the troops. The workers, more determined than ever, doggedly continued to stay put despite enormous material sacrifices. The entire CNT, particularly the Catalan Regional Confederation, now rallied behind its Saragossa comrades. To lighten the burden of the Saragossa workers, the Barcelona proletariat under Durruti organized a spectacular caravan to bring the children of the strikers to Catalonia. Fleets of taxis were mobilized to convey 13,000 children to the thousands of cenetista families which had pledged to care for them. Here, as Brenan observes, the cenetistas revealed where their real strength lay: “not in their armed revolts, but in their powers of syndical resistance.... When one remembers that’ the CNT had no strike funds, one can appreciate the courage and endurance required in these contests. If the Anarcho-Syndicalists could not bring off their revolution, they at all events knew how to keep a revolutionary situation alive.”

By now a new issue began to come to the fore. The Socialists, pressured by the example of Anarchist intransigence, by hundreds of thousands of newly recruited, often feverishly militant rural workers, disillusioned by their alliance with the Liberals, and fearful of what seemed like a drift toward fascism in the government, began to raise the cry for an Alianza Obrera—(or a “united front” of all the labor organizations in Spain. This Alianza, so characteristic of policies that began to prevail among leftist political groups in Europe and America during the mid-1930s, particularly after a bitterly conflicted German left had capitulated to Hitler, was to be advanced by Largo Caballero. The slogan, in fact, had been raised as early as October 1933, when Pestana, on behalf of the Treintistas, spelled out the need for an “entente,” a “coalition” of the UGT and CNT to stop fascism in Spain. Peiro, in elucidating this position, emphasized that the Alianza Obrera was not to be conceived as an electoral pact, indeed, that it implied direct action in opposition to fascism and on behalf of a “Federalist Social Republic.” A pact between factions of the Catalan left had, in fact, come into existence shortly after the December uprising of the Anarchists, but it did not include the CNT or the FAI who were wary of the new “allies.” Experience had nurtured a deep mistrust among the Anarchists toward the UGT, the Opposition Syndicates, the Socialist Party affiliates of Barcelona, Maurin’s Worker-Peasant Bloc, Nin’s Left Communists, and the union of the vineyard workers in Catalonia, the Rabassaires, who were under the control Luis Companys’s liberal nationalist party, the Esquerra. To the degree that these disparate, generally authoritarian groups formed an alliance, the Anarchists could regard it only as a mischievous one which had to be shunned.

Not unexpectedly, the Alianza received considerable support from the moderate CNT in Asturias. Largo Caballero’s drift to the left after the elections of 1933 had made a pact with the UGT more seductive than ever. Although the CNT as a whole retained its hostility toward the alliance, at a June plenum of regional confederations its opposition was modified to allow for agreements with the UGT on a local level. This qualification simply ratified an independent alliance which the Asturian CNT had made four months earlier with the local UGT, thereby setting the stage for the forthcoming October uprising of the Asturian miners. Officially, however, and to a large degree in practice, the CNT preserved its aloofness toward the Alianza. In early autumn, the CNT, apart from its Asturian confederation, responded to a spate of Alianza -inspired strikes with qualified support at best or with total indifference. The Alianza Obrera had much less magnetism than has been imputed to it in many discussions of the Spanish labor movement. Even Maurin of the Worker-Peasant Bloc failed to “recall the enthusiasm attributed to him in Brenan’s account,“observes Gabriel Jackson in a note based on an interview with Maurin. “He spoke of the Alianza as having been crippled from the start by antipathy between Caballero and the Catalans, nor does El Socialista [the organ of the Spanish Socialist Party’—M.B.] for the spring and summer of 1934 give the impression that the new movement was very important.”

The status of the Alianza Obrera, however, was to change significantly in October 1934. As autumn approached, a heightened sense of militancy, paralleling the trajectory of the Spanish labor movement, began to sweep over the right. Internal pressures on Gil Robles to stake out the CEDA’s ministerial claims on the Ricardo Semper government, which had resisted the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet, mounted steadily. With the convening of the Cortes on October 1, the CEDA, demanding seats in the cabinet, dramatically toppled the Radical government. Despite his profound hostility to Gil Robles, President Alcala Zamora had no choice but to accede to the CEDA’s demands. Shortly after the cabinet crisis, the president called upon Lerroux to form a second cabinet, this time one in which the CEDA would be granted three ministries.

Today, looking back after more than forty years, it is difficult to convey the impact this concession had on the Spanish left. The CEDA, a Catholic party supported largely by funds from rabidly reactionary Monarchist contributors, seemed to be the exact Spanish cour^erpart of the Austrian Catholics who had raised Dollfuss to power in the early 1930s. Only shortly before the CEDA had received seats in the cabinet, Dollfuss had proclaimed himself virtual dictator of Austria and his ascent to power had been marked by the harsh suppression of a Socialist uprising in Vienna after a week of severe street fighting. Artillery had been callously turned on the Karl Marx houses, a cooperative complex of workers’ dwellings in the Austrian capital. Among the Socialists the cry quickly went up, “Better Vienna than Berlin,” an unmistakable allusion to the fact that the hopeless but courageous resistance of the Austrian proletariat to fascism was better than the supine acquiescence of the German left to Hitler.

The crisis triggered by the CEDA’s entry into the cabinet was not limited to the Socialists. It also had its echo among the Catalan autonomists. Despite the large Lliga delegation in the Cortes, representing the victory of the conservative Catalan industrialists in the 1933 elections, the Catalan Generalitat which governed the province on a local level was controlled by Luis Companys’s Esquerra (the Catalan Left), an autonomist middle-class movement whose views, under Companys’s influence, were more closely wedded to Azaña’s Republicans than to the separatist tendencies within Catalan nationalism. The Esquerra had come to power in the local elections that followed the 1933 fiasco, after many Catalan cenetistas had second thoughts about the impact of their anti-electoral campaign and had voted, at least locally, for Liberal groups. Under Companys, the Esquerra had begun to abandon the unequivocally separatist policies of its founder, Colonel Macia (who died in December 1933) and was in the process of orienting itself toward autonomy within the Spanish republic. Companys, a shrewd politician, had acquired a certain status as a crypto-radical. At considerable personal risk, he had used his legal talents to defend many cenetista militants in the trials of the 1920s. Perhaps more than any republican politician in Spain, he retained important connections and undeservedly high credibility with the CNT leadership long after liberals of his breed were to be completely discredited with the Spanish working class.

In Catalonia, Companys was also a major rival of the CNT. He competed with the Anarchosyndicalists by organizing tenant farmers of the vineyards into the Union de Rabassaires, an Esquerra-controlled trade union. The Esquerra, to retain its influence in the rural areas of the province, had promoted and passed a ley ‘de cultivos in the Generalitat empowering vineyard tenants whose leases were expiring to acquire title to land they had cultivated for fifteen years or more. Completely regional in character, this law was confined exclusively to Catalonia; it had been passed by a provincial authority whose political interests were limited to local concerns. Yet in June 1933, even this circumscribed piece of legislation was so antithetical to Madrid’s conservative agrarian policies that it was overturned by the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, the Spanish equivalent of the American Supreme Court. By voting against the ley de cultivos the court upheld not only the landlords against the tenants, but the power of Madrid to curb regionalist legislation. Even the conservative, strongly Catholic Basque deputies to the Cortes protested, all the more because they had been repaid for their support of Lerroux and the CEDA with frustrating indifference toward a proposed Basque autonomy statute.

The Basques now threw their support to the Catalan Left on the Rabassaires law. Their action was a portent of the future Popular Front alignment of 1936, which was to unite Basque conservatives, the Catalan Left, the Azaña Republicans, the Socialists, and the Communists in an ill-fitting electoral bloc against reaction and the threat of fascism. The CEDA’s ministerial demands had divided even the Radicals. Samper, the out-going Radical prime minister, warned darkly on October 1: “Confronted by a period of oppression and shame, no way out remains except for a revolutionary outbreak. If Gil Robles’ forces of the Right do not evince any understanding [of the emerging situation], the road to legality will be removed.”

This verbal saber-rattling should not be taken too seriously. As events were to show, for most Radicals, indeed even for Companys, it was mere rhetoric. Companys, urged by his followers to pursue an insurrectionary course after the ley de cultivos had been overturned by the courts, was more the victim of a crisis within the Esquerra than within the Cortes. Sections of the Esquerra, itself a bloc of disparate elements, had been moving toward their own version of militancy. The escamots (or squads), a quasi-fascistic, paramilitary youth group of the Esquerra, exerted mounting pressure on Companys and his moderates to seize power and declare an independent Catalan republic. Led by Jose Dencas, a councilor of public order who detested the CNT and FAI, the escamots had begun to occupy portions of Barcelona in open defiance of the vacillating Companys. Together with other separatists, they demanded a clear-cut separation of Catalonia from Madrid.

Companys, in the meantime, was secretly making frantic telephone calls to the president of the republic in Madrid (who did not respond to them personally), warning Alcala Zamora’s secretary that he could not contain the Rabassaires on the left and the escamots on the right. Huge crowds collected before the building that housed the Generalitat, demanding decisive action; indeed, Barcelona was placarded with demands for an independent Catalonia. The situation had degenerated to opera bouffe. Companys, his back to the wall, went through the public motions of declaring a “Catalan State within the Federal Spanish Republic” (a far cry from the outright independence the crowds were clamoring for) and quickly barricaded himself inside the Generalitat building, awaiting rescue by the central government’s troops. A “surrender” with “dignity” was arranged at dawn and Companys was provided with the safety of a prison cell on charges of “rebellion.” Dencas, whether because he scented failure, as Jackson observes, or because he had been a CEDA agent provocateur, as Brenan argues, took to his heels across the frontier and finally found political asylum in Mussolini’s Italy.

It is important to stress these events because they exercised a profound influence on Anarchist policy during the October Insurrection of the Asturian miners. As a scenario of things to come, they provide a remarkable image of how the Liberals, whether in Madrid or Catalonia, were to respond to the more serious military rebellion of July 1936. Irresolution, paralyzing panic, and above all, a greater fear of the working classes than of any threat posed by reaction, had been the ingrained traits of Liberal behavior. As for the Catalan autonomists and separatists, they had hoped to achieve their goals by riding on the crest of a general strike initiated by the Socialists. This strike, called officially in the name of the Alianza Obrera, formed the UGT’s strategic response to the second Lerroux ministry with its three CEDA members.

In Catalonia, no such strike could possibly hope to succeed without CNT support. The CNT, which had been left to its own devices in the December uprising against the first Lerroux cabinet, was in no mood to respond to Socialist appeals of an ill-defined programmatic character. In Anarchist eyes the Alianza had fallen far short of a serious revolutionary force. Toward the Esquerra the CNT had good reasons to nourish the strongest feelings of antipathy: the night before the outbreak of the Alianza strike, the Generalitat’s police had arrested scores of Anarchist militants, including Durruti, and closed down Solidaridad Obrera. Attempts by cenetistas to reopen syndicate headquarters that had been closed since the December rising encountered armed resistance from the escamots, who fired directly on the workers. Dencas’ took to the radio and denounced faistas as “anarchist provocateurs in the pay of reaction,” calling upon his escamots and the police to take firm measures against them. The Generalitat, more fearful of the workers than the CEDA ministers, had even alienated the Alianza Obrera. Although Companys was quite willing to declare a “Catalan State” in complicity with the Alianza by inviting it in to his “new” government, the Esguerra-controlled Generalitat flatly refused to arm the workers. Bitterness and disillusionment infected the Catalan labor movement. The CNT, which participated half-heartedly in the Alianza strike, ordered its members back to work, dissociating itself from the entire adventure. With the surrender of the Generalitat, the autonomist movement collapsed throughout Catalonia.

Elsewhere, the general strike called by the Alianza Obrera had mixed consequences, indeed, in some areas highly dramatic and historic ones. Suprisingly, in Socialist Madrid, the strike almost assumed the comic opera forms it had acquired in Barcelona. Although the Socialists had presumably been planning the strike in the Spanish capital since the summer, almost every aspect of the plan went awry. The police were well-informed about the Socialists’ intentions and arrested the Socialist-contolled Revolutionary Government before it could be installed. The arrests netted Largo Caballero, who was in charge of the strike and the rising. A curious listlessness seemed to afflict the Madrid leadership. The writing of the Alianza’s program had been left to the right-wing Socialist Indalecio Prieto, who listed a series of demands hardly differing from those that would have been prepared by Liberal Republicans. Coordination between the striking groups in the Alianza proved to be incredibly shabby and amateurish. A massive strike in Madrid, which was supported by the entire left, foundered for want of arms and a revolutionary sense of direction.

As usual, the Socialists emerged as unreliable allies of the Anarchists. A revolutionary committee, established by the CNT and FAI to coordinate their own operations, was denied direly needed weapons by the UGT. The arms, as it turned out, had been conveniently intercepted by government troops. But even if they had been available, it is almost certain that the Socialists would-not have shared them with the Anarchists. Indeed, relationships between the two major sectors of the labor movement had already been poisoned by the failure of the Socialist Youth and the UGT to keep the CNT adequately informed of their plans or to confer with Anarchosyndicalist delegates. Despite heavy fighting in Madrid, the CNT and FAI were obliged to function largely on their own. When, at length, a UGT delegate informed the revolutionary committee that Largo Caballero was not interested in common action with the CNT, the committee disbanded. Later, Abad de Santillan was to observe with ample justification that Socialist attempts to blame the failure of the October Insurrection on Anarchist abstention was a shabby falsehood:

Can there be talk of abstention of the CNT and censure of it by those who go on strike without warning our organization about it, who refuse to meet with the delegates of the National Committee [of the CNT], who consent to let the Lerroux-Gil Robles Government take possession of the army deposits and let them go unused before handing them over to the Confederation and the FAI?

Alvarez del Vayo, one of Largo Caballero’s most trusted colleagues, gives us a remarkably candid insight into Socialist policy during the opening days of the uprising. Nearly all the adverse circumstances that ensnarled the insurrection “could have been partly offset if there had not been too much delay about the order to start,” he observes.

The twenty-four hours during which the government was being formed [by Lerroux and Alcala Zamora] were decisive. To the very last, Caballero, to say nothing of Prieto, nursed the hope that President Alcala Zamora would not take into the cabinet known enemies of the Republic. When the news came that the coalition government had been completed, Caballero was with Prieto and a couple of other leaders of the movement. Caballero’s comment revealed his stubborn desire to trust Alcala Zamora: “Until I see it in the Official Gazette, I won’t believe it.” Caballero’s closest associates, including myself, earnestly insisted that the rising should begin that same night, October 4. In the end Caballero gave in, but by then it was too late. It had to be postponed until the next night. During those twenty-four hours martial law was declared, and this meant the collapse by its own weight of the plan for military cooperation. Under martial law all officers, pro and anti-republican, were confined to barracks. Thus, when the rising finally got under way, its chances were much diminished. We found ourselves lacking the military support on which we had counted; the Socialist militias were in the street but were unable by themselves to carry out the crucial missions assigned to them.

What is absent in Alvarez del Vayo’s account is that, military support or not, the considerable Anarchist forces in the capital were coldly rebuffed.

Almost unknown to Madrid, indeed to the rest of Spain, a major rising was launched,in the mining districts ‘of Asturias—one which was to add a haunting sense of tragedy and grandeur to the October events.[43] The miners, irrespective of their political affiliation, took the call for a general strike very seriously. As S.J. Brademas observes, the Asturian miners of all unions regarded the Alianza Obrera as “more than pious revolutionary jargon.” On the night of October 4, to the sound of sirens in the valley towns along the Aller and Nalon rivers, the miners began their strike with attacks on Civil Guard and Assault Guard barracks. The great majority of the Asturian miners belonged to the UGT, although the CNT enjoyed a considerable influence of its own. In recent years, the Communists had assumed control of several union locals and presumably it was in the Communist-controlled town of Mieres that the most dramatic initiatives were reported.[44] There, some 200 militants besieged the police barracks and town hall with about 30 rifles, firing the same rifles from different positions to create an exaggerated impression of their stength. Following the surrender of the Civil and Assault Guards, they proceeded to occupy towns along the route to Oviedo, the provincial capital of Asturias, until on October 6 they attacked the city itself. In fact at this time a miners’ column of 8,000, a force well beyond the numbers the Communists could have mobilized, began to occupy all of Oviedo with the exception of the Pelago and Santa Clara barracks, where sizable government troops continued to hold out. For the first time, the famous Asturian dinamiteros appeared in force: the recklessly bold miners who were to compensate for their lack of guns and artillery with sticks of dynamite. The Asturians had learned to do more than mine coal; they were also skilled blasters who were to gain an awesome reputation in October 1934 and later in the Civil War for their skill with explosives and their unsurpassable courage.

Within a matter of days, the miners had occupied most of the Aller and Nalon valley towns, nearly all of Oviedo, and the industrial city of La Felguera. Attempts were also being made to seize the strategic seaports of Gijon and Aviles, and it was here that the insurrection came up against its gravest political obstacles. The workers of Aviles and Gijon were largely under Anarchist influence. They too had joined the uprising under the local Alianza slogan of “Union, Hermanos Proletarias” (“Unity, Proletarian Brothers”), the famous “UHP” which was to be initialed on walls, vehicles, factories, and troop trains throughout the Civil War. So far as the Aviles and Gijon Anarchists were concerned, however, their Socialist and Communist “brothers” were to honor the slogan only in the breach. When Anarchist delegates from the seaports arrived in Oviedo on October 7, pleading for arms to resist the imminent landings of government troops, their requests were totally ignored by Socialists and Communists who, as Jackson notes, “clearly mistrusted them....” The Oviedo Committee was to pay a bitter price for its refusal. The next day, when Anarchist resistance, hampered by the pitiful supply of weapons, failed to prevent the government from landing its troops, the way into Asturias lay open. The two seaports became the principal military bases for launching the savage repression of the Asturian insurrection that occupied so much of October and claimed thousands of lives.

The Asturian insurrection lasted some two weeks, roughly from October 5 to October 18. During this brief period, the miners had behaved with exemplary dignity and moral rectitude. “For the best of the militant elements,” observes Jackson, “the revolutionary regime was to be a demonstration of proletarian morality. Bourgeois received the same food rations as did workers. In the hospital, doctors were instructed to treat equally the government wounded and the revolutionary wounded. Nonpolitical middle-class and professional people were to be protected, even at the risk of life, by the revolutionary militia.” Anarchists, far from running “amok” (as so often predicted by their opponents on the left as well as the right), were perhaps even more exemplary in their behavior than the dour Communists and many Socialists, whose authoritarian tendencies fostered a repressive atmosphere in the areas under their control. Peirats, in fact, regarded the Asturian Anarchists as excessively naive owing to the feelings of reconciliation and good-naturedness that marked their behavior toward erstwhile social enemies. In any case, when military repression by the government replaced proletarian dignity, “many a surviving soldier and priest testified to the efforts of the [revolutionary] committee leaders to prevent the assassination of priests and prisoners, intervention which had saved dozen of lives.”

Notwithstanding the propaganda of the period—a propaganda inspired as much by the Communists as by the government—the Asturian insurrection made no attempt to establish soviets, much less a “soviet republic.” Structurally, the insurrection was managed by hundreds of small revolutionary committees whose delegates were drawn from unions, parties, the FAI, and even anti-Stalinist Communist groups. Rarely, if at all, were there large councils (or “soviets”) composed of delegates from factories. Indeed, the notion of councils, on the Russian models of 1905 and 1917, was alien to the Spanish labor movement. The Socialists generally functioned through tightly knit committees, commonly highly centralized and with strong bureaucratic proclivities. In Asturias, the UGT tried to perpetuate this form wherever possible, at most admitting Communists and moderate cenetistas into their “revolutionary committees.” But the mountainous terrain of Asturias made such committees difficult to coordinate, so that each one became an isolated miniature central committee of its own, often retaining its traditional authoritarian character. The Anarchists, on the other hand, favored looser structures, often quasi-councils composed of factory workers and assemblies composed of peasants. The ambiance of these fairly decentralized structures, their improvisatory character and libertarian spirit, fostered an almost festive atmosphere in Anarchist-held areas.

This difference is vividly conveyed by Avelino Gonzalez Mellada, who compares Anarchist-controlled La Felguera with Marxist-controlled Sama. Both towns, he observes, were of equal size and were separated from each other only by the Nalon river. They were linked to each other by two bridges. The October Insurrection,

triumphed immediately in the metallurgical and in the mining town.... Sama was organized along military lines. Dictatorship of the proletariat, red army, Central Committee, discipline, authority.... La Felguera opted for comunismo libertario: the people in arms, liberty to come and go, respect for the technicians of the Duro-Felguera metallurgical plant, public deliberations of all issues, abolition of money, the rational distribution of food and clothing. Enthusiasm and gaiety in La Felguera; the sullenness of the barracks in Sama. The bridges [of Sama] were held by a corp of guards complete with officers and all. No one could enter or leave Sama without a safe-conduct pass, or walk through the streets without passwords. All of this was ridiculously useless, because the government troops were far away and the Sama bourgeoisie was disarmed and neutralized.... The workers of Sama who did not adhere to the Marxist religion preferred to go to La Felguera, where at least they could breathe. Side by side there were two concepts of socialism: the authoritarian and the libertarian; on each bank of the Nalon, two populations of brothers began a new life; with a dictatorship in Sam a; with liberty in La Felgeura....

In contrast to the severely delimited Marxist committee in Sama, La Felguera workers met in popular assembly, where they socialized the industrial city’s economy. The population was divided into wards, each of which elected delegates to supply and distribution committees. The committees determined the consumption needs of the wards, managed transport facilities, and assumed responsibility for the medical and sanitary needs of the city. The La Felguera commune, so rarely mentioned in most accounts of the Spanish labor movement, proved to be so successful, indeed so admirable, that surrounding communities invited the La Felguera Anarchists to advise them on reorganizing their own social order. Rarely were comparable institutions created by the Socialists and, where they did emerge, it was on the insistence of the rank-and-file workers. At Mieres, by contrast, the Communists established a crassly authoritarian comite de guerra, which even preempted the rights of the town’s revolutionary committee. So preoccupied were the Socialists and Communists with asserting their sectarian control over Asturian towns that Marxist militias which should have been fighting in desperately beleaguered Oviedo were kept at home for strictly political purposes.

Every one of these situations was to reappear in the Civil War two years later, and on a larger, more terrifying scale. Anarchist militias were to be denied arms and support in desperate military situations while the choicest weapons were to be reserved for Communist and Republican police detachments behind the front lines. These detachments were to serve more as forces to subvert social revolution than to ferret out Franco supporters. The CNT and FAI were to experience the full gamut of treachery at the hands of every group in the Popular Front—from the Caballero “left” Socialists to the openly counterrevolutionary Communists. Almost alone, the Anarchists were to create viable revolutionary institutions structured around workers’ control of industry and peasants’ control of the land. That these institutions were to be duplicated by Socialist workers and peasants was to be due in no small measure to Anarchist example rather than Socialist precept. To the degree that the Asturian miners and industrial workers in various communities established direct control over the local economy and structured their committees along libertarian lines, these achievements were due to Anarchist precedents and long years of propaganda and education.

The Asturian insurrection revealed not only the deep-seated divisions that permeated the left but the capacity for savage repression that was to mark the right in later years. Lerroux, distrustful of Spanish troops on the peninsula, dispatched the Foreign Legion (Tercio) and mercenary Moorish troops (Regulates) to Aviles and Gijon, mercilessly unleashing them on the Asturian insurrectionists. The job of commanding the campaign was assigned to a General Francisco Franco, who had earned a reputation for molding the Tercio into the most effective fighting force in the Spanish army. This use of the Regulates and Tercio was without precedent in the history of Spain. The irony of using the Foreign Legion and the Muslim Regulares on the sacred Christian soil of Asturias is conveyed with telling effect by Brenan:

In 1931, just before the fall of the monarchy, a regiment of the Terdo had been brought over from Africa on the King’s express wish to put down the expected republican rising. They had broken out and committed their usual depredations and Major [Ramon] Franco, the famous cross-Atlantic flier, had protested over the barbarity of their being used on Spanish soil. Now it was Major Franco’s brother, General Francisco Franco, who had ordered their dispatch and employment.... But if the dispatch of the Foreign Legion to fight the miners shocked public opinion, what is one to say of that of the Moors? For eight hundred years the Crusade against the Moors had been the central theme of Spanish history: they still continued to be the hereditary enemy—the only enemy, in fact, against which the Spanish armies had ever fought. Their savagery in war was well known—only a dozen years before these same tribesmen had surrounded a Spanish army and massacred every man of them except the officers, whom they held for ransom. Yet they were now being brought to fight in Asturias, that one sacred corner of Spain where the Crescent had never flown. By this single act the Spanish Right had shown that neither tradition nor religion—the two things for which they professed to stand—rhad any meaning for them. In the terror produced in them by the rebellion of 40,000 miners, they showed that they were re^dy to sacrifice all their principles.

The repression of the miners was marked by wanton carnage in battle; later, by the torturing and horrible mutilation of captured miners, many of whom were shot in batches without trial or owing to the slightest whim and provocation. Estimates of these executions numbered in the thousands. After the executions came the torture squads, which by every disinterested account matched the savagery of the Nazi torturers in Germany’s concentration camps. In all, apart from the thousands of dead, 30–40,000 prisoners filled Spanish jails. Despite attempts by the right to depict the Asturian miners as killers of priests, nuns, and members of the possessing classes, the very extravagance of the charges, coupled with acknowledgments by the alleged victims that the miners had behaved with remarkable moral probity, proved to be self-defeating. One investigating group after another revealed that most of the government’s charges were false; that it was the Tercio, Regulates, and police which engaged in unspeakable acts of barbarity. As the facts slowly filtered out, the country was overwhelmed with shock and revulsion: the right was to pay dearly for its savagery.

The crises which had been shaking Spain for years came to a head when the right overreached itself by seeking not only to undermine the left and the Republicans, but also to subvert its centrist allies. Vengeful to the point of blindness, Gil Robles had sought to convict several leading Asturian Socialists—one of them a moderate who had opposed the rising. Although Alcala Zamora and Lerroux had accepted with equanimity the executions of proven Asturian militants, they balked at the victimization of innocent or harmless Socialists who scarcely deserved the death penalty even by rightist standards. Their sentences were commuted, whereupon the CEDA at the end of March withdrew from the government, provoking another ministerial crisis. But no government could be formed without the CEDA. Gil Robles, feeling, power within his grasp, pressed his advantage unrelentingly. A new cabinet was formed in which most of the seats were occupied either by the CEDA or by CEDA-controlled ministers of the Agrarian Party, the organization of Spain’s major landowners. But it was not stability under the egis of a center-right coalition that Gil Robles was seeking. Exuberant over the influx of reactionaries into the CEDA, Gil Robles had overtly begun to fulfill the bleakest predictions of the left. It .required no politcal astuteness.to see that he envisaged himself as Spain’s Dollfuss. Abandoning virtually all prospects of economic and social reform, Gil Robles began to direct his energies toward constitutional changes that would have ultimately replaced Spanish republican institutions by quasi-fascistic corporative forms. At the same time, as minister of war, he began to reorganize the army, removing officers whom he suspected of leftist or Republican sympathies. Despite the odium that surrounded the Tercio, he appointed Franco as Chief of Staff of the Spanish army.

The center-right coalition, limping through 1935, began to lose its support among the inchoate middle-classes of Spain. It had rejected land reform, restored Jesuit properties, and starved lay education. Its tax policies brazenly favored the wealthy over other classes in the country. It had shaken what little popular confidence the army enjoyed as a protector of the republic by advancing fascistic-minded officers to key positions at almost every echelon. Finally, the CEDA completely abandoned its alliance with the Radicals when Lerroux and his associates became involved in several shady scandals around gambling licenses and army supply contracts. By December, Lerroux was forced to step down; indeed, the entire Radical Party had become a useless and discredited anarchronism. “The only party in Republican Spain to have no political ideals,” observes Brenan, “all [the Radicals] wanted was that the country should jog along quietly. “But Spain was polarizing sharply. Neither the left nor right appeared willing to give quarter, least of all to an archaic party whose leaders seemed to be lining their own pockets. Ironically, what finally finished Lerroux’s ministerial career were not the scandals that gathered around him but his efforts to tax the landowners by raising inheritance taxes from 1 to 3.5 percent. Consistent with its intransigent reactionism, the CEDA withdrew from the cabinet over this issue, finally terminating the two-years of center-right rule.

Clearly, Gil Robles was convinced that, with the Radicals discredited, the time had arrived for the CEDA to take full control of the government. The way, it appeared, was now open for an authoritarian regime. But the rightist leader had totally misjudged the integrity of the president. Alcala Zamora’s ministerial aim was to restore the power of the center, not to deliver Spain into the hands of a quasi-fascist right. Despite his own conservative outlook, he was a defender of parliamentary government. On December 14, to the utter astonishment of the right, Alcala, Zamora turned the government over to a caretaker prime minister, Manuel Portela Yalladares, formerly Lerroux’s minister of interior and an opponent of Gil Robles’s attempts to transfer the Civil Guards to the Ministry of War. Within three weeks, Portela lifted the press censorship which had existed since the Asturian uprising and had virtually stifled any discussion in Spain for over a year. At the same time, he dissolved the Cortes and announced national elections for February 16, 1936. El brenio negro, the two black years of reactionary rule, repression, and the drift toward a corporative state, had come to an end.

From February to July

We may ignore any account of Gil Robles’s fury at this course of events. His plan to use republican institutions to undo the republic had reached an historic impasse. Throughout 1935, the left and the Republicans had also undergone their own series of crises. In trying to involve Azaña in the Esquerra debacle of October, the right had totally alienated the Republicans and driven them toward the left. Azaña, who had gone to Barcelona solely to prevent the Esquerra from rising against Madrid, had been placed in the dock by the right and accused of engineering the entire October revolt. The charges were too preposterous to be taken seriously and served only to discredit the right. Indeed, to the Spanish Republicans of almost every variety, the vindictivness of the CEDA meant that all its verbal commitments to a stable Republican order were meaningless. Uniting around Azaña, the Liberals formed a new coalition, the Izquierda Republicana or “Left Republicans,” using a political nomenclature that would have been difficult to conceive three years earlier. The conditions were fully ripe for a coalition between the Liberals and the leftist parties—a coalition that would shortly take the historic form of the “Popular Front.”

The Socialists too had responded to the CEDA’s vindictiveness by veering further to the left. Right-wing Socialists like Besteiro, who had opposed the October rising, or Prieto, who had fled to France after its failure, had lost virtually all prestige with the party except for its hardened bureaucracy. Caballero, at least, had remained behind. By merely sitting in prison (where he read Marx for the first time), he had become the idol of the Socialist Youth and the party’s growing left wing. No matter that he had shrewdly ensconced himself in his apartment after the start of the October events to guard himself against legal accusations; the “Spanish Lenin,” as he was soon to be called, became intoxicated by a messianic sense of his historic mission. If Spain was to move toward revolution, he had been chosen by history to lead it—or, as events were to show, to subvert it. For the present, as Jackson notes, he found himself in prison “in the company of ardgnt young intellectuals who regretted their own bourgeois background and who idolized him doubly, as an authentic proletarian, and as the spiritual successor ‘el abuelo’—the equally proletarian, equally austere, equally honorable Pablo Iglesias.” Soon to be released from prison, he became the indubitable leader of the Socialist left and another architect of the “Popular Front” coalition that was to take power in February 1936.

The Anarchists, despite their comparative inactivity during the October events, had suffered no less heavily than the Socialists. Unjustly accused of abstentionism by Socialists and Communists alike, the CNT had lost a measure of its revolutionary prestige while its most able militants had been packed off to prison by the thousands. In proportion to their strength in Asturias, perhaps as many Anarchosyndicalists had perished in the uprising as Socialists, yet they received little credit for their sacrifices. What was even more galling, the treachery they had suffered at the hands of the Socialists and Communists had gone virtually unnoticed. The coming elections in Febmary offered them no consolation. The Socialists had shown that they were no more capable of honorable or comradely behavior in 1934 than they had been in 1932, when Caballero had tried to smash the CNT syndicates. Could the Anarchists expect any better from Azaña’s Liberals who, in 1932, had favored the UGT over the CNT, censored the libertarian press, and imprisoned them by the thousands? With this grim record, the CNT had no cause to be elated over a Liberal or Socialist victory in the forthcoming elections. But it had more reason to be alarnied over a rightist one. Caught in the old dilemma of “lesser evils,” the CNT began to seek a regroupment of its own, perhaps a new entente of all libertarian forces, however disparate their tactical and strategic viewpoints. The days of the faista insurrections were now over for good. The dire prospects opened by a rightist victory in the February elections made it difficult to fall back on traditional methods of Anarchosyndicalist action; such a victory would almost certainly lead to a Dollfuss-type of reaction, followed by the brutal suppression of the left. It is not surprising, then, that despite its militant rhetoric between December and February, the CNT began to turn to its own version of realpolitik.

The CNT’s first steps toward a libertarian regroupment were taken by establishing cordial relations with the Sindkatos de Oposicion, the once-detested Treintistas led by Pestana, Peiro Lopez, and the so-called ‘ simple syndicalists” who favored pragmatic trade unionism. This was no mere organizational maneuver to infuse the Con federation with additional forces; it was a significant poltical act which led toward collaboration first with the UGT, eventually with the Socialists, and finally with the Popular Front. The basis for unity between the CNT and the Opposition Syndicates had been cleared in grea part when Pestana, striking out on his own, broke with the people of his own faction and moved toward direct political activity, forming his own Syndicalist Party. The new party soon joined the Popular Front and acquired two seats in the Cortes after the February elections. Despite Catalan opposition, the movement for uniting the CNT with the Opposition Syndicates grew steadily. As early as May 1935, a national plenum of Regional Confederations had invited the Opposition Syndicates to participate in the next national congress of the CNT, albeit with a voice and not a vote.

Despite many vacillations on both sides in the ensuing months, contacts between Anarchists and syndicalists became increasingly cordial. Both libertarian tendencies had suffered heavily from the bienio negro repression and each had tended to support the other at the level of practical activity in periods of acute crisis. The problem of confederal unity came to a head in March 1936, when the National Committee of the CNT invited former Treintistas to attend the forthcoming congress of the Confederation at Saragossa on May 1^st. It was here that the Opposition Syndicates were officially readmitted to the CNT. Fusion meetings held in all localities where duplicate syndicates existed integrated the two organizations completely. Some 70,000 oppositionists rejoined the parent organization. The unification had brought Peiro, Lopez, and other syndicalist right winger back to positions of confederal power, a situation that was to reinforce the growing orientation of the CNT’s leadership toward political action. Despite its militant rhetoric after the February elections, the organization was to become more syndicalist than Anarchist, while towing the Anarchist tendencies behind it. As many Anarchist leaders were later to complain, it was not the FAI that changed the CNT but rather the CNT that began to change the FAI.

But most of these changes still lay in the future. Between December 1935 and February 1936, Anarchosyndicalist policies seemed to move at curious cross-purposes to each other. The CNT, although bitterly hostile to the “political” Socialist Party, seemed rather naively to be highly receptive to common action with the UGT, as though the leadership of the UGT were not staffed by Socialists. Having initiated the concept of an Alianza Obrera, the Socialists and the UGT, in turn, seemed receptive only to local alliances and resisted attempts to raise the Alianza to the dimensions of a national movement. The “UHP” slogan had yet to extend itself beyond Asturias. By December, in fact, the Socialist Party had moved toward an electoral bloc with Azaña’s Republicans, largely ignoring the CNT’s efforts to foster trade-union collaboration on a more radical basis.

In mid-January 1936, a pact to form a Popular Front was finally established by the Socialist Party, the UGT, the Left Republicans and their allies of-the Republican Union, the Socialist Youth, Pestana’s Syndicalist Party, the Communist Party, and suprisingly, the newly formed POUM (composed largely of Nin’s Left Communists, formerly a Trotskyist organization, and Mamin’s Worker-Peasant Bloc). The pact was limited almost exclusively to practical collaboration in the coming elections. Its program was strictly middle-class—designed, in Portela’s words, not to frighten its moderate constituency. It threatened no nationalization of property, no workers’ control of industry, not even unemployment compensation. To the left, it merely offered the promise of amnesty for its thousands of jailed workers and a liberal parliamentary shield against authoritarian reaction. Although the Popular Front pact reinforced demands within the CNT to press the UGT for an alliance based on a revolutionary program, presumably in order to rescue the Spanish working class from reformism, these demands, whether sincere or not, were essentially meaningless. The “Spanish Lenin,” Largo Caballero, had committed the UGT to political collaboration with the Republicans; the CNT promptly denounced this as class collaboration. Any unity between the two major labor organizations in Spain was thus almost indefinitely precluded.

Which is not to say that the CNT was entirely hostile to the Popular Front. As the elections drew near, the CNT began to reveal a disconcerting loosening of its former antipolitical stance. On January 25, 1936, at a conference of the Catalan Regional Committee, angry delegates bluntly charged the Regional Committee with a temporizing attitude toward the forthcoming elections. The CNT, in contrast to its vigorous abstentionist campaign of 1933, refused to urge its members to stay home. While reiterating its traditional opposition to electoral policies, the organization maintained a discreet silence in the face of demands to boycott the polls. Indeed, the prominent Anarchist dynast Urales had already admitted quite bluntly “I would consider it a great error on the part of the anarchists if, as a consequence of their action during the electoral period, the rightists triumphed over the leftists.”

This statement by perhaps the most venerated Anarchist of his day, the founder of a distinguished family that included the best-known woman faista, Federica Montseney, unquestionably affected the strategy of the CNT and FAI for the February elections. A peninsular plenum of the FAI, held in Barcelona on January 30 and February 1, ratified the electoral position of the Catalan regional conference. “Para salvar las apariencias” (to save appearances), the FAI reaffirmed its “complete abstention from all direct and indirect collaboration with the policy of the State,” but this almost legalistic verbiage was far removed in spirit and emphasis from an active policy of abstention.

Brademas gives a devastating description of the CNT-FAI policy toward the elections.

During these last days of January and the first two weeks of February 1933 the CNT boomed to the surface all over Spain with meetings protesting against fascism, against the death penalty (restored in October 1934) and ... in favor of the revolutionary union of the UGT and the CNT and—of course—amnesty for the prisoners. But there were no anti-electoral campaigns. The words “Don’t vote!” and “Abstention!” were not to be found in pre-election manifestos. “Durruti,” said Santillan, “was not given to subtleties and he, as did some others, began openly to advise attendance at the polls.”

The CNT’s and FAI’s attitude toward the Popular Front was no mere issue of episodic abstention or participation in a specific electoral campaign (as some Anarchists were to claim), nor was the Popular Front an indigenous product of Spanish political conditions. The strategy, formulated by the Communist International after the signing of the Franco-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1934, was a barely disguised diplomatic response to the threat Hitler seemed to pose to Stalinist Russia. From a policy of mindless insurrectionary rhetoric, in which the entire Social Democratic movement had been designated as “social fascists—indeed, as greater enemies than the fascists themselves—the Communist parties of the world veered over to a policy of outright class collaboration. So completely was the cry of “social revolution” subordinated to one of defending bourgeois democracy at all costs against “fascism,” that even mild conservative opponents provided an excuse for Communist parties to foster blocs with the most venal and discredited liberal parties of Europe. By 1936 the Spanish Socialist left with considerable justification could mock the Communists with the cry: “To save Spain from Marxism, vote Communist!”

The Popular Front, in effect, was no tentative act of collaboration between the growing left and the declining center to obstruct the CEDA and its allies. It reflected a far-reaching shift in policy which Stalinist Russia imposed on the Communist parties of the worlds so that joint nonaggression or defense pacts against Nazi Germany might be signed with the western democracies. The policy had its origin in strictly Russian national interests and, perhaps more significantly, in the identification of these interests not with the world labor movement and cause of Socialism, but with the liberal bourgeoisie and the perpetuation of liberal capitalism. Stalinist Russia had dropped any pretense that the word “socialism” had any viable meaning in international policy or, for that matter, in the execution of internal policy. Even the memory of the October Revolution, for all its limitations, was to be drowned in the blood of the Old Bolsheviks, nearly all of whom were to be purged secretly or, in show trials, during the Popular Front years.

The Communist parties, in turn, were to try to foist the Popular Front policy on the left in the most shamelessly deceptive and manipulative manner with the goal of strengthening their control over the international working class. As in the case of Russian diplomatic policy, to the extent that this control was achieved, the Communist parties were concerned not to advance social revolution but to prevent it. Indeed, the Popular Front was consciously designed to demonstrate to the full satisfaction of the liberal bourgeoisie that the Communist parties, like Stalinist Russia, could be counted upon to promote class collaboration, to neutralize any revolutionary tendencies within the labor movement, and if necessary, to assassinate revolutionary spokesmen and suppress revolutionary movements. Knowingly or not, the CNT and FAI were riding the back of a tiger. From a policy of “nonabstention” in February, they were to be led into a policy of participation in September, and ultimately, in the later years of the Civil War, into a policy of collaboration with their most dangerous opponents. These opponents were not simply the right-wing Socialists, who at least had some sense of responsibility to the Spanish working class, but the Communists, a small group whose growth and influence depended upon the impact of Stalinist Russia on Spanish events. Apart from the mythology of the Bolshevik Revolution, which seemed to validate the Spanish Communist Party as a “revolutionary” organization, the conditional military aid which Russia spoon-fed to Spain during the Civil War was to give the Communists immense control over the course of events.

The elections of February 1936 brought the Popular Front parties to power by a margin of some 700,000 votes. Of 271 seats acquired by the coalition, a number which constituted an absolute majority in the Cortes, the Republicans (including Martinez Barrio’s Republican Union as well as Azaña’s Izquierda) were given 117 seats, the Socialists 90, and the Communists 16.[45] The electoral victory of the Popular Front had been much narrower than the 700,000 received out of the million votes cast. “In the first round of voting,” observes Stanley G. Payne, referring to February 16,

the left [that is, the left-liberal colaition of the Popular Front—M.B.] won altogether slightly more than 200 seats out of the total of 473 that made up the Cortes. The plurality was not due to an equivalent lead in the popular vote, for in the total balloting for the first round the popular vote for left and right was approximately equal. Under the complicated list-voting system, however, the decisive factor was not proportionate cumulative vote, but the concentration of ballots province by province. Popular Front votes were combined much more effectively for majority lists in the larger districts. The second runoff contests were held at the end of the month under leftist supervision and considerable pressure from the leftist street mob. In the runoffs the Popular Front increased its plurality further, though constitutional legality of the administration of the vote was’ dubious.

Payne neglects to tell us, that the same “complicated list voting system” had assured the right its own sweeping victory in 1933. What had favored the right three years earlier now favored the left. Nor does Payne give sufficient attention to the rightist “street mob,” notably the hired pistoleros of the Falange who created so much bloody disorder during the first five months of the Popular Front regime, the reactionary students and senoritos who broke up meetings of the leftist groups, the rightist thugs who fired point-blank into crowds of workers’ barrios from speeding motor vehicles, the police of Granada who kept workers and peasants from the polling places, the caciques who threatened punitive action against entire villages that failed to return rightist candidates, and the landlords’ agents who threatened to discharge agricultural workers and tenents who failed to vote the reactionary ticket. These qualifications aside, Payne’s factual conclusions are correct. What really emerges from the 700,000-vote plurality of the Popular Front was not so much the fact that the runoffs were conducted under “leftist supervision” or that the “leftist street mob” played any larger role in influencing the vote than the rightist thugs and senoritos, but that the Popular Front would not have come to power without Anarchosyndicalist electoral support.

Far from concealing this major departure from Anarchist precept, the leadingfaista Abad de Santillan was to emphasize it. In February, he observes, “participation in the elections was advisable. We gave power to the leftists, convinced under the circumstances they were the lesser evil.” This could be construed as a reasonable and honest statement if action based on the “lesser evil” was seen for what it really was—a distinct departure from principle/openly admitted to be such, a bitter pill to be swallowed to deal with an acute illness. Given highly critical circumstances, the Bolsheviks had boycotted elections without becoming Anarchists and one could envision a situation where Anarchists would have voted in elections without becoming Bolsheviks. From hindsight, Vernon Richards’s observation that a conservative victory in the February elections would have been far less of a setback for the Spanish labor movement than the slaughter that followed the generals’ rebellion is a tempting conclusion which would have preserved Anarchist purism. But Gil Robles seemed definitely intent on becoming Spain’s Dollfuss (his public speeches had acquired an unprecedentedly violent character) and the CEDA’s electoral posters had a distinctly fasdstic flavor, appealing for the “Ministry of War and all the power,” “All power to the Leader,” and the like.

In such ominous situations, who controls the state, with its arms and monopoly of violence, is not a matter of complete indifference. Boxed into an isolated land mass behind the Pyrenees and (as events were to show) lacking in significant support from the international proletariat, the Spanish Anarchists in 1936 did not have the revolutionary advantages enjoyed by the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917, notably international opponents bitterly divided by a world war, scattered domestic opponents also in conflict with each other, vast spaces into which to retreat, active aid from the international proletariat, and perhaps above all, the support of the Russian army, which not only failed to oppose the takeover of the Bolsheviks but which provided them with an enormous armamentarium of weapons inherited from the Czarist war effort and a reservoir of highly trained military manpower. If Gil Robles today seems like a mild figure beside Franco, much the same could have been said in comparing Dollfuss to Hitler. But all appearances aside, Dollfuss effectively smashed the Austrian labor movement long before the German army crossed his frontiers. That history never tested Gil Robles’s capacity to do the same in Spain is due, ironically, to the fact that Liberals controlled the Spanish state throughout 1936, not the CEDA. This was no trifling factor in the sweeping libertarian revolution that occurred in July 1936, however much Anarchists prefer to deny the importance of who controls the state and under what circumstances they control it. It took considerable courage for a moderate Anarchosyndicalist such as Juan Peiro to write in September 1935: “I have said, and I repeat it here, that if an electoral class front should appear against the fascists who now govern us, I, for the first time in my life, would vote....”

But after this has been said, one must emphasize that it would have been preposterous to expect a “lesser evil” to behave with noble virtue. Having voted in a bourgeois election, it was necessary to acknowledge the limitations of the act and to recognize that political maneuvering on the part of libertarians could develop into a bad habit. In fact, the gravest obstacle to social revolution in Spain was not the generals alone but forces within the Popular Front itself, notably an increasingly powerful Communist Party which employed duplicity and finally open violence to suppress revolutionary tendencies. The best the CNT and FAI could have hoped for from the newly elected state would have been neutrality; to base one iota of their policy on active state support was not only absurd, but marked the initial steps toward the “politicization” of the Spanish Anarchist movement and its-eventual conversion into a political party. Yet so oblivious were many of the Anarchist leaders to this possibility that when the newly elected Generalitat, overwhelmingly Esquerra in character, failed to act decisively enough in resolving two CNT strikes in Barcelona, Durruti could peevishly complain: “We didn’t come here to celebrate the arrival of a group of men. We came to tell the Left ffiat we were the ones who decided your triumph and we are the ones who are maintaining two conflicts [the strikes in question—M.B.] which must be solved immediately. It was our generosity that ^ decided the reconquest of February 16^th.”

The statement was remarkable as evidence of the trend it seemed to reveal. The Anarchists, even militants such as Durruti, were slowly becoming clients of the creature they most professed to oppose: the state power itself. Twq bitter years of repression and, by contrast, the obvious power they felt (and enjoyed) in tipping the Popular Front to the side of victory, served not to render their thinking more guarded, subtle, and flexible, but rather more naive, crude, and complacently rigid. Having taken to the vote, they began to take to politics. This tendency, which the FAI had originally been created to block, was reinforced by the increasing bureaucratization of the CNT. As Richards notes,

there can be no doubt that whilst paying lip-service to the principle of abstention in the February elections, the leadership of the CNT was working behind the scenes, offering the Left politicians the potential vote of the Confederation represented in return perhaps for guarantees that the political prisoners would be released in the event of a Popular Front victory. These are far from being wild speculations. What is certain is that within the CNT there have always been strong personalities who, as is always the case with those who would ride roughshod over basic principles, declared themselves to be the practical men, the realists of the movement.

The union with the Opposition Syndicates which later was to occur increased the number of these “strong personalities” in the leadership of the Anarchosyndicalist movement. The problem of how to deal with them had not been adequately worked out in the Spanish libertarian movement, any more than it has in movements for human freedom generally, a failure for which all have paid dearly.

But February 1936 and the following spring did not seem like a time for deep reflection and critical self-analysis, but an occasion for exaltation, hope, and direct action. Within a week after Azaña formed the first Popular Front cabinet, crowds of workers opened the jails and released their comrades; in the case of Burgos, the prisoners literally took over the jail themselves. General strikes were declared by the UGT and CNT demanding a broad and immediate amnesty, a demand which Azaña was obliged to satisfy if he hoped to preserve any penal system at all. In the five-month period that followed, Spain was to be convulsed by strikes, massive demonstrations, street battles between contending crowds, repeated shoot-outs between pistolero groups, land seizures, factional maneuvers within and between Popular Front parties, accusations of conspiracy, and finally, assassinations and near-rebellions that were to exceed the unrest that marked the Azaña coalition of the early 1930s. Polarizing almost savagely to the extremes of right and left, the peninsula had entered into a prerevolutionary crisis that could be resolved only by armed confrontation between the two sides.

To unravel this complex skein of events, in which years of social unrest seemed to be compressed into a few months, would require a work of its own. Only the broadest trends and most significant occurrences can be cited here. The first trend that requires consideration is the unabated strike wave that exploded across Spain shortly after the Popular Front victory. Although both the UGT and CNT launched so-called “lightning” strike actions throughout the spring, it is generally agreed that the CNT established the pace and remained almost continually in the forefront of the movement. Hardly a week passed without syndicates in one of the two unions calling out workers, at times in general strikes that paralyzed major cities. In late March, both UGT and CNT steel workers left their foundries; in mid-April the CNT initiated a general strike in Madrid that gained the support of the UGT workers, to be followed in early June by still another strike, this time of construction and elevator workers. Salvos of strikes swept the country, involving nearly every sector of the Spanish working class. According to data gathered by Gil Robles and accepted as fact by Peirats, there were about 113 strikes involving an entire branch of an industry, and nearly 230 partial strikes. The movement, mainly CNT-inspired, reached such acuity that Largo Caballero’s newly established left Socialist periodical, Claridad, joined El Socialista in counseling moderation and restraint. But the CNT, or at least its rank and file, continued the pressure right up to the military rebellion in July.

In the countryside the popular movement was perhaps less sensational but no less significant. The rural poor of western and southern Spain were now largely organized in the Socialist-controlled Federation of Land Workers (Federation Espanola de Trabajadores de la Tierra or FETT), but the Federation’s leadership had been so leftist politically from the very start of the FETT in 1931 and it was so oriented toward direct action as to be virtually indistinguishable from the CNT, which still retained its traditional strongholds in the south and east. After the victory of the Popular Front, both organizations began to encourage the outright occupancy of the land. In March, some 250,000 hectares were taken over by squatters, about 150,000 in April, and more than 90,000 in May and June together. Despite this decline in figures, possibly reflecting both government measures to accelerate the passage of land reform legislation and the restraining hand of diehard Socialists in Madrid, the countryside was seething with peasant revolt. Thousands of peasant families had taken to roads and were looking for work; others, under Anarchist influence, seized the land and claimed it as their own irrespective of any pending or existing legislation. In most cases, when Civil Guards reoccupied expropriated land, the peasants left temporarily, only to return when the Guardia had departed. The landlords were in a panic. Recalling the uprisings and bam-bumings of earlier times, they and their families fled to the safety of the cities, leaving entire plantations deserted. The peasant seizures were no longer the episodic flare-ups of the past, rising and subsiding from village to village, nor could they be contained by sending a division or two into the countryside to pacify a string of isolated pufflos. Spain was in the throes of a full-scale revolution in the countryside, comparable in every way to the great land revolts of Mexico and Russia.

The Popular Front government flailed out helplessly in all directions and failed miserably wherever it struck. To the largely CNT-inspired strike wave, it responded with severely repressive measures while it tried to placate the left’s anger over rightist terrorism by arresting the Falangist leadership, including Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Solidaridad Obrera was censored so systematically and stringently that many Anarchosyndicalists could claim with some justice that their press had enjoyed more freedom under the bienio negro than the Popular Front. The government closed down syndicate headquarters and arrested Anarchist militants in sizable numbers, even detaining the National Committee of the CNT in Saragossa. But the inefficacy of these measures soon became obvious. Madrid had plainly lost control over events and the syndicates, in flagrant disregard of official authority, reopened their headquarters almost as rapidly as they had been closed. The struggle was passing from the Cortes and the bureaucratic offices of the state into the streets where massive demonstrations, clashes between crowds, and shootings of political opponents seemed to reveal even more dramatically than the strikes and land seizures the breakdown of traditional authority.

Everyone sensed the impending explosion. The Socialist Youth and the Falange had formed their own paramilitary forces and were training almost within sight of each other in Madrid. Falangist terrorism began to reach menacing proportions almost directly after the Popular Front victory, when a group of Falangist students tried to assassinate the Socialist deputy Jimenez de Asda.[46] The “leftist street mob” responded by partially burning two churches and the printing plant of La Nacion, a particularly reactionary periodical. Scarcely four days later, shots were fired at Largo Caballero’s home. The period of assassinations by both sides now began in earnest. Within a week after the attack on Caballero’s home, the rightist deputy Alfredo Martinez was killed in Oviedo; in April, a bomb was found in the home of the Liberal deputy Ortega y Gasset, followed by further assassination attempts against Republican dvil governors, mayors from all parts of the political spectrum, journalists, and the murder of Judge Manuel Pedregal, who had sentenced a Falangist thug to a long prison term for killing a newsboy who sold leftist papers. Armed clashes broke out between Falangists and leftists, police and peasants; even CNT and UGT workers disputed union rivalries and strike issues gun in hand.

The rivalries within the left were paralleled by rivalries within the right. Falangists were now attacking leaders and supporters of the CEDA for temporizing and behaving too moderately by fasdstic standards. Gil Robles may not have been wrong when he listed nearly 270 deaths and more than 1,200 wounded as a result of street fighting and assassinations in the months following the Popular Front victory. In most of these cases the initiative probably came from the right, but they invariably called forth violent reactions from the left. “Ideologically speaking,” observes Jackson, “heroic violence belonged more to the fasdst spirit than to the Left, but the Sodalist Youth, meditating the fate of the German Socialists.in 1933 and the Austrians in 1934, chose to fight fire with fire.” Certainly the Anarchists were as sensitive to the fate of the German and Austrian labor movements as the Sodalists, although they seemed to engage in less violence during that spring than other groups on the left and right.

In fact the Socialists were undergoing the most tumultuous changes in their history since the period following the Russian Revolution. Largo Caballero’s Conversion to revolution had produced—and revealed—a crisis within the party. With the victory of the Popular front, an unavoidable question emerged: should the Socialists form another coalition with the Republicans? Four years earlier this question would have raised no serious factional disputes within the party; indeed, Caballero had occupied the post of minister of labor with telling effect upon the CNT. Now the reformist of yesteryear who had willingly collaborated with the Primo de Rivera dictatorship had become the “Spanish Lenin.” He had a highly influential paper of his own, Claridad; he was the adored Achilles of the Socialist Youth and spokesman for growing leftist tendencies within the Socialist Party and the UGT. As the “Spanish Lenin,” he opposed the entry of any Socialists into the Popular Front cabinet. Indalecio Prieto, on the other hand, had emerged as the spokeman for the party bureaucracy, which preached the verities of moderation, and for many Asturian miners who had paid dearly for the revolutionary adventures of 1934. Prieto charted a distictly reformist path for the party and favored ministerial collaboration with the Republicans. Although nominally in control of the party, his influence with the rank and file seemed to be dwindling rapidly. The struggle between the Caballerists and Prietists reached acute form in mid-Spring when both sides did not hesitate to use physical violence against each other at party meetings.

But Caballero’s influence was tentative at best and turned out to be largely illusory so far as the party’s diehards were concerned. At the party elections of June 30, Prieto’s supporters received a larger proportion of the votes than Caballero’s. The fact is that the stalwarts within the Socialist Party were really moderates after all; to the degree that Caballero continued to beat the drums of revolution, the membership gradually backed off. Perhaps even more significantly, Caballero had lost his hard-core support when he permitted the Socialist Youth to combine organically with the Communist Youth in a single organization. Grossly ill-advised by his close friend Julio Alvarez del Vayo, who had just returned from a dazzling trip to Stalinist Russia, he had been led to believe that a fusion between the 200,000 young Socialists and some 50,000 Communist Youth would permit the assimilation of the Communists by the Socialists, thereby strengthening his hand in the struggle with Prieto. A similar ploy was later planned for Catalonia, where the Socialists and Communists fuzed under Juan Comorera to found the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC). But this strategy backfired, producing the very reverse of what had been intended. By 1936 it required exceptional political myopia not to see that the Communists had become masters at swallowing up independent organizations under the cry of “unity.” For the Spanish Communist Party, as for Communist parties everywhere, “unity” had become the talisman for cannibalizing the entire left and making it over into a merchandisable instrument for Russian foreign policy in general and local Stalinist movements in particular. Accordingly, it was the Communists who acquired control over the Socialist Youth and the Catalan Socialists, depriving Caballero of his most important supporters. Neither the Caballerist policy of “revolution” nor the Prietist policy of collaboration won out. The Socialist Party merely stumbled through the spring of 1936, lacking a policy that would have unified either the forces for revolution or those for moderation.

The trajectory of the CNT and the FAI seemed to follow a diametrically opposite course. While the Socialist Party was torn by divisions, the CNT was uniting with the Opposition Syndicates. Theoretically, the CNT favored unity with the UGT but on terms so revolutionary that they made collaboration on a national scale virtually impossible. Caballero had counted heavily on gaining wide support not only from the left of his own party, but from the Anarchosydicalists as well. The latter, however, mistrusted him completely. His appeals for UGT-CNT unity failed to evoke a positive reaction within Anarchosyndicalist ranks, which had stored up gnawing recollections of treachery and betrayal at his hands. His appearance at the CNT’s national congress in May at Saragossa yielded no decisive results. The test of Caballero’s intentions came in June 1936, when 40,000 construction workers and 30,000 electricians and elevator repairmen, both groups drawn from the CNT and UGT, went out on strike in Madrid. The strike unnerved the Socialists completely. Even many Caballerists proved reluctant to match their revolutionary rhetoric with revolutionary action. The Socialists wanted to conclude the strike as quickly as possible, hopefully by arbitration and conventional negotiating methods. The CNT, on the other hand, openly pressured the workers for a revolutionary type of conflict. When their funds ran out cenetista strikers were encouraged to live according to the principles of comunismo libertario: they simply took their meals at restaurants and collected their groceries without paying for them. Embarrassed by such tactics, the UGT leaders vacillated over the question of a continuation of the strike. Finally, they withdrew. The CNT, however, carried it forward, and clashes between returning ugetistas and striking cenetistas resulted in several deaths.

Caballero was totally discredited. His policy of UGT-CNT collaboration had been reduced to a shambles. The militancy of the CNT had not only frightened off many of his left-wing supporters but had corroborated the worst suspicions of the Anarchosyndicalists about the sincerity of his new revolutionary stance. No less significantly, the strike itself, with its revolutionary connotations, thoroughly alarmed the middle class throughout Spain. If the strike was in any way a harbinger of the “Spanish Lenin’s” policies and his declamations in favor of a proletarian dictatorship, the middle class plainly wanted no part of them.

Perhaps the alarm was greatest within the Popular Front government itself. If Prieto’s policy was to strengthen the Republicans with a Socialist coalition, Caballero’s was to weaken that coalition by abstaining from any ministerial support. The Caballerists, in effect, were waiting for Azaña to discredit himself, after which the Socialist left would take over the government completely. The description of Caballero as the “Spanish Lenin” carried the unmistakable implication that Azaña was the “Spanish Kerensky.” This was a position Azaña would have never permitted himself to occupy. By 1936, both men had to come to detest each other, but personal considerations aside, Azaña was in an excellent position to block the left Socialist strategy. Although his popularity was waning rapidly among every sector of the Spanish population, in May he had changed the robes of prime minister of a Popular Front cabinet for that of president of the republic, thereby freeing himself from the vicissitudes of an uneasy ministerial alliance and parliamentary votes of confidence. He was now in a position to select the appropriate prime minister for the coalition and he had chosen as his substitute one of his closest friends and collaborators, Casares Quiroga, a consumptive who, in Brenan’s words, “reacted to the danger of the situation by an optimism that would have been considered insane if it were not a symptom of his disease.” Azaña himself had grown listless, almost indifferent; his dream of a stable republic seemed to be turning into a nightmare whose course he could no longer control and whose destiny imbued him with the darkest pessimism. But if he was certain of anything, it was that Caballero would not play “Lenin” to his “Kerensky.” Thus on the eve of the most fateful military pronunciamiento in Spanish history, Republican policy, however much it vacillated, was consistent in at least one respect: the Socialist Party, especially its Caballerist faction, would not be permitted to acquire power. Stated in broader social terms, the Popular Front cabinet was committed above all else to preventing the working class from taking over Spain. The very class that had contributed most materially to the Popular Front victory was viewed by the leaders of that government as its most formidable and dangerous enemy.

While Spain drifted toward civil war, the Anarchosyndicalists were occupied with cementing their own ranks at the famous national congress of the CNT in May 1936 at Saragossa. On the first day of the month, nearly 650 delegates, representing 982 syndicates with a membership of 550,000, convened at the Iris Park. This congress, lasting ten days, was to become known as one of the most memorable meetings in the history of the CNT. It not only brought the Opposition Syndicates back to their parent organization but opened the most important discussion on the nature of a libertarian communist society to ever occupy a major working-class organization.

Virtually all the speakers at the congress seemed to feel that Spain was entering into a revolutionary situation. Their seemingly utopian discussions of how the future society that followed that revolution would be organized thus had practical, indeed, immediate significance. Amid the welter of petty squabbles over delegate credentials, personalities, and the fate of the Opposition Syndicates, the congress found time to discuss problems as far-ranging as sexual rights and communal organization. Perhaps the most fascinating of the Saragossa congress’s resolutions dealt with “The Confederal Conception of Libertarian Communism.” Although this resolution received far less conventional newspaper coverage (the bourgeois press liked to titillate its readers with reports of discussions of “free love”), it became one of the most important statements of libertarian principles by the CNT.

The resolution was careful to deny that it sought “to predict the structure of the future society ... since there is often a great chasm between theory and practice.” Nor was the revolution which ushered in that future society to be regarded as a sudden act of violence, for much depended upon revolutionary action as “a psychological phenomenon in opposition to the state of things that oppresses the aspirations and needs of the individual.” Violence was not the totality of the revolution but merely the first step which abolishes “private property, the State, the principle of authority, and consequently, the class division of men into exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed.” Its emphasis on revolution as a psychological phenomenon and its abhorrence of authority marks the resolution as a strictly Anarchist document. Indeed, such an orientation would have seemed out of place amid the “scientific,” “objective,” depersonalized rhetoric of a Marxist document.

The resolution went on to describe the structural details of communal organizations and their federation. Economic planning had’its base in “the producer, the individual as the cell, as the cornerstone of all social, economic and moral creation,” who functions through the work place, the syndicate, and the geographic commune. No contradiction need exist between the individual and free communal entities. “In accordance with the fundamental principles of libertarian communism, as we have stated above, all men will hasten to fulfill the voluntary duty—which will be converted into a true right when men work freely—of giving his assistance to the collective, according to his strength and capabilities, and the commune will accept the obligation of satisfying his needs.” The famous Communist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was to guide the commune in its allocation of resources and its claims on human labor.

The resolution did not try to argue “that the early days of the revolution” would be easy ones. “Any constructive period calls for sacrifice and individual problems and of not creating difficulties for the work of social reconstruction which we will all be realizing in agreement.” But the National Confederation of Communes which the new society would establish would allow for many variegated forms. “Naturists and nudists” (naturistas-desnudistas) or opponents of industrial technology, as well as traditional Anarchosyndicalists, would be free to create their own communal organizations. Amusing as this might have seemed to bourgeois journalists more than forty years ago, today, when our puritanical distance from the natural world may well lie at the root of the modern ecological crisis, the liberatory spirit of these lines seems almost prophetic. In time, “the new society should assure each commune of all the agricultural and industrial elements necessary for its autonomy, in accordance with the biological principle which affirms that the man, and in this case, the commune, is most free, who has least need of others.”

The resolution exuded a liberty-loving generosity toward the capacity of people to manage society freely and directly. “All of these functions will have no bureaucratic or executive character. Apart from those who work as technicians or simply statisticians, the rest will simply be carrying out their job as producers, gathered together at the end of the working day to discuss questions of detail which do not call for reference to a general assembly.” No systems of hierarchy here; no representatives invested with the power to make policy decisions; no organization of the division of labor into a system of authority. Indeed, according to the resolution, even the social enemies of today would be won over eventually to the Anarchist ideals of love, liberty, and education. “Libertarian communism is incompatible with any punitive regime, which implies the disappearance of the present system of punitive justice and all its instruments, such as prisons.” For “man is not bad by nature, and that deliquency is the logical result of the state of social injustice in which we live.” Clearly, “when his needs are satisfied and he is given rational and humane education, [the causes of social injustice] will disappear.”

The revolution would not try to destroy the family, which, at its best, had played a solidarizing role in society. Libertarian communism, however, “proclaims free love, with no more regulation than the the free will of the men and women concerned, guaranteeing the children with the security of the community.” This resolution was carried unanimously by the delegates of the congress. It was written, discussed, and adopted not in the “enlightened” 1960s and 1970s, but in the severely patriarchal Catholic Spain of 1936. Today, it is impossible for an urbane and modernistic generation to realize how far these Anarchosyndicalist workingmen and workingwomen were in advance of their time. The tragedy of the movement they represented is that their dream was to be drowned in blood and washed away into the most remote corridors of history. Other people, living in another age, would be obliged to rediscover it without any knowledge that it had articulated the dreams and hopes of innumerable workers and peasants.

When the delegates finally dispersed—many to die a few months later in the Civil War—the vision of this society seemed to override many practical problems. If there was anything “utopian” about the Saragossa congress, it was not its resolution on a libertarian communist society but (as Vernon Richards points out) “the lack of any discussion of the problems that might face the organization during the revolutionary period.” More specifically,

what was to be the attitude of the organization on the morrow of the defeat of the military putsch when it found itself suddenly at the head of the revolutionary movement. Such a possibility could easily be envisaged in Catalonia, if not in the provinces under the Central Government. Perhaps for the rank and file the answer was a simple one: the social revolution. But in the light of subsequent actions, for the leadership of the CNT it was not as simple as all that. Yet these problems and doubts were not faced at the Congress, and for these serious omissions of foresight, or perhaps of revolutionary democracy in the organization, the revolutionary workers paid dearly in the months that followed.

As early as March, scarcely more than a few weeks after the Popular Front had come to power, the generals and politicans who were to stage the military uprising of July 17 met secretly in Madrid to formulate their plans. The natural leader for the revolt seemed to be General Jose Sanjurjo, organizer of the aborted pronunciamiento of August 1932, who lived in Portugal but kept himself intimately informed of events across the frontier. A military conspiracy alone, however, hardly seemed tenable. Political support was needed. Sanjurjo was a Monarchist and so too were “an appreciable number of officers involved in the conspiracy. No one seemed more suitable to advance their cause among civilian Monarchists than Jose Calvo Sotelo, the former minister of finance in Primo de Rivera’s government, who enjoyed a reputation as a formidable orator and a shrewd politician. Calvo Sotelo had traveled widely through Europe, where he became enamored of corporative and fascist ideologies. In the Cortes he was the avowed spokeman of the Monarchists, perhaps of the entire militant right. By June, his speeches had virtually disrupted parliamentary debates: he avowed fascistic beliefs, attacked the “antimilitary” policies of the government, and freely delivered himself of insulting personal remarks to Republican officials. The left saw him as a continual provocation and viewed him as the very incarnation of fascism in Spain.

More symbolic than real at these conspiratorial meetings was the figure of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. While in prison the son of the former dictator had become the hero of the extreme right. From the welter of Carlist, conservative, and clerical groups, the Falange was to eventually emerge as the political backbone of what was later to be called the “Nationalist” cause and Jose Antonio was to become its martyr after his execution during the Civil War. Behind the parties and generals stood the entrenched wealth and power of Spain’s great land magnates, industrialists, aristocrats, clergy, and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.

But the real responsibility for the revolt rested in the hands of the generals and their success required careful planning. Colonel Valentin Galarza represented Sanjurjo. He was joined by the presumably liberal General Mola, Colonel Yague of the Foreign Legion, the moderate Republican General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who had abandoned his slender loyalties to the government with the victory of the Popular Front, Generals Villegas and Fanjul, who had the misfortune of being stationed in Madrid, General Goded, and only later, by General Francisco Franco. The government was not unmindful of the potential for a military pronunciamiento. It had been quietly shifting reactionary officers to remote posts—Franco had been packed off to the Canary Islands, Goded to the Balearics. The minister of war, authorized to ignore rules of seniority in appointing commands, filled key vacancies with officers known to be sympathetic to the republic. Unluckily, Mola, who held the main threads of the conspiracy in his hands, had been assigned to the Pamplona military district in the heart of Navarre, where he could count on Carlist support.

The rising was scheduled to occur between July 10 and 20, at which time Sanjurjo was to return to Spain by airplane and take over command of the rebel forces. Mola was to lead the garrisons of Pamplona and Burgos; Villegas, the Madrid garrison. Cabanellas was to seize Anarchist Saragossa; Goded, Barcelona; and Queipo de Llano, Seville.Trusted junior officers were to lead out their garrisons in other cities. Franco was to fly to Spanish Morocco, where he would take command of the army of Africa. It was generally agreed that the leading military conspirators would form a Directory with the power to issue laws, later to be ratified by a Constituent Assembly elected irfider an implicitly restricted suffrage. The pronunciamiento seemed, as yet, to be inspired more by the precendent of Primo de Rivera than by Hitler’s, although it was slowly to acquire many fascistic features. The bloody Civil War, the Falange, and perhaps the vindictive personality of Franco, who was destined to replace Sanjurjo after the latter was accidently killed in the flight to Spain, would give the movement the most vicious thrust of any modern civil war in western Europe.

The uprising of the generals had been predicted by left-wing spokesmen months before it occurred. As early as February 14, the CNT had issued a prophetic manifesto warning that day by day, “the suspicion grows that right-wing elements are ready to provoke a military coup. Morocco appears to be the focal point of the conspiracy. The insurrection is subject to the outcome of the elections. The plan will be put into effect if the Left wins. We do not support the Republic, but we will contribute all our efforts to an all-out fight against fascism in order to defeat the traditional oppressors of the proletariat.” This, of course, was mere guesswork. It tells us more about the course the CNT was to follow in the Civil War and its inability to formulate a policy to deal with the consequences of its electoral support of the Popular Front than it does about the actual behavior of the right on the eve of the elections. Republican officers with more substantial facts had informed the government in April that military conspiracies were underway. On May 1^st, Prieto with uncanny prescience not only had warned of a military revolt but had singled out Franco as the most likely candidate for the dictator of Spain. The government was well aware of Fanjul’s operations in Madrid. Even conservative deputies whom Calvo Sotelo had tried to enlist in the conspiracy reported his efforts to the cabinet.

As the evidence increased, so did the government’s paralyzes in the face of the impending crisis. Indeed, shortly before the rebellion, Azaña publicly assured journalists and political colleagues that the current unrest was temporary and would soon be followed by a more tranquil atmosphere. But tension continued to mount. On July 11, a group of Falangists briefly seized the radio station of Valencia and broadcast the following message: “Radio Valencia. The Spanish Falange has taken possession of the transmitter by force of arms. Tomorrow the same thing will happen at all the radio stations in Spain.” This event followed by only a few hours a confidential warning to Casares Quiroga that a military uprising was imminent, to which the prime minister flippantly replied: “So you are assuring me that the officers are going to rise! Very well, gentlemen, let them rise. I, in contrast, am going to lie down.” The next day, on July 12, a Socialist lieutenant of the Assault Guards was shot to death by a group of Falangist gunmen. Within hours of the assassination, the victim’s angry comrades had decided upon a dramatic act of revenge. Arriving at Calvo Sotelo’s home in a police car, they “arrested” the right-wing parliamentary leader, drove off with him in their vehicle, and shot him, dumping his body in the Madrid cemetery. The generals had found their martyr. The day of the uprising was pushed forward to July 17 to take advantage of the sensation produced by the assassinations arid the commanders were placed in a state of readiness.

In Madrid the leftist parties, headed by Caballero requested arms but the government coldly refused. Up to the very point of rebellion, when transmitters seized by the army in Morocco were broadcasting the news of the pronunciamiento, the government of Liberal Republicans was to speak out “again to confirm the absolute tranquility of the whole Peninsula” and inform the workers’ organizations that they should “guarantee the normality of daily life, in order to set a high example of serenity and of confidence in the means of the military strength of the government”—a “military strength” the Popular Front government no longer, enjoyed. While the government enjoined the workers’ parties to passivity and “serenity,” the National Committees of the Socialist and Communist parties in Madrid obligingly issued a joint declaration of their own opining that the “moment is a difficult one but by no means desperate.” The declaration concluded with the stirring injunction: “The Government commands and the Popular Front obeys.” The workers of Madrid were assured that the “Government is certain that it has sufficient resources to overcome the criminal attempt.” In response to Calvo Sotelo’s assassination, the government in fact had closed down not only the Monarchist and Carlist headquarters in the capital (presumably to prevent disorders) but also the Anarchist centers. This attempt to neutralize the most militant elements in the labor movement all but assured that Madrid would remain “serene.” A confused situation emerged in the capital: the CNT, “on war footing ever since the building strike,” observe Pierre Broue and Emile Temime in their perceptive account of the Spanish Revolution’ and Civil War, “decided to use force to reopen its offices closed by the police and began to. requisition cars and search for arms. David Antona, secretary of its National Committee, was freed [from prison] on the morning of 19 July; he went to the Ministry of the Interior and threatened to send his men to attack the prisons and release the militants who were still imprisoned there.” The left Socialists unearthed and distributed the arms they had concealed since the October events of 1934. Workers’ patrols began to appear on the streets. Yet Madrid, on the whole, was strangely guarded in its actions. No assaults were made on the barracks; indeed, one rebel regiment made its way out of the capital, apparently without opposition, to join forces with Mola in the north. UGT construction workers, dutifully obeying the Ministry of Labor’s strike awards, returned to their jobs. The CNT cdntinued its strike, although by now both unions had given orders for a general strike. No decisive fighting occurred on either side in Madrid until two days after the pronundamiento when loudspeakers in the streets broadcast the news that the Barcelona proletariat had been victorious in an open struggle with Goded’s troops.

It was in Anarchosyndicalist Barcelona—and virtually in that city alone—that serious preparations and the most effective efforts were undertaken to cope with the military rebellion. Instead of issuing reassuring statements after the fashion of the Socialist and Communist parties in Madrid, the CNT and FAI placed the entire working class of the city on the alert. Cenetista workers filled their syndicate halls clamoring for arms. Although the CNT and FAI had formed a liason committee with the Generalitat to cope with the military uprising in a united manner, Companys responded to these demands by declaring that no weapons were available. But this was Barcelona, not Madrid, where “The Government commands and the Popular Front obeys.” With characteristic independence, a group of Anarchosyndicalist dock workers led by Juan Yague secretly boarded ships in the harbor, stripped them of weapons, and deposited the arms in a syndicate headquarters. The headquarters was soon surrounded by police and after delicate negotiations some of the weapons were returned to avoid a conflict with the police, many of whom were sympathetic to the workers’ cause and were later to aid them in fighting the rebel troops. During the afternoon of the 18^th, cenetistas raided sporting goods stores and whatever arms depots they could find; they also seized dynamite from the dockyards. Sympathetic Assault Guards distributed arms from their barracks. From the building syndicate, which had now become a sort of “war” headquarters for the CNT, plans were drawn up for resistance. Private cars, splashed with the letters “CNT-FAI,” prowled the streets as a warning that the Anarchosyndicalists were prepared for battle in the event of any uprising. Workers, often acting largely on their own, began to arrest known Falangists and rightists, stopping all suspicious passersby near government buildings and barracks. CNT workers mounted a 24-hour guard on their headquarters while all over town their comrades, armed with makeshift weapons, lay in wait for any suspicious action by the troops.

On July 18, the generals declared their pronundamiento and, in the morning hours of the next day, solidiers of the Barcelona garrison, perhaps the largest in Spain, began to leave their quarters to occupy strategic centers of the city. Almost everywhere they encountered workers massed behind barricades, snipers from rooftops, and immense crowds walking toward them with their few weapons raised over their heads, pleading with the soldiers not to shoot their proletarian brother and sisters. Where these pleas were disregarded, the troops encountered furious resistance by armed workers or, to their utter amazement, were simply overwhelmed by crowds that surged forward in total disregard of the military’s superior fire-power. The generals’ uprising had begun—but so too had the libertarian social revolution.