REMEMBERING THE SPANISH REVOLUTION

...On March 9, 1939, all resistance ended in Catalonia...

...The Communists were not only the party of the Russians, they were also the party of law and order...

...The Nazis had, of course, less immediate interest in the Mediterranean than Mussolini...

...It was defeated for lack of Western support, which in turn spelled dependence on the Russians, who were determined to liquidate the revolution...

...Discipline was just not their suit...

...Then, in October 1936, Russian arms and military advisers arrived in Spain...

...Blum, despite his theoretical internationalism, betrayed it in practice...

...But it is also a fact that the Spanish popular uprising of 1808-14 against Joseph Bonaparte, whom his brother Napoleon had installed as king of Spain, was mainly sustained by local juntas and largely fought as a guerrilla war (the term comes from this Spanish insurrection...

...The fascists practiced international solidarity despite their national ideologies...

...By the end of the year, 3,000 blackshirts and 1,500 technicians had arrived in Spain...

...When Largo Caballero began to oppose the Communists and attempted to get rid of their yoke, he was dumped in the summer of 1937 and replaced by more pliable right-wing Socialists who were led by Prieto and Negrin...

...Clearly, this creative effervescence could not continue for long, else the Franco forces would overrun most of the Republican territory...

...In Barcelona, but also elsewhere, the workers soon dominated the streets...

...When Largo Caballero refused to 56 comply, he was toppled...

...I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality...

...But it seems incontrovertible that the successes of the Spanish left in rebuffing the Franco insurgency were largely owed to an almost instinctive reaction of the working class...

...The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the moneytainted air of England...

...to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all...

...Whenever the newspapers reported some dissension in the Nazi leadership or rifts between the Nazis and the army or capitalist interests, we took this as a sign that the death of the beast was in sight...

...Workers procured—often very primitive— weapons by taking over police or military armories, by disarming the police and Civil Guards, or by inciting enlisted men to disarm their officers and come over to the side of the workers...

...Above all, the Communists argued with considerable effect that the militias had to be liquidated in favor of a reconstituted regular army operating along traditional, disciplined lines...

...From Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, copyright ©1952, 1980 by Sonia Brownell Orwell...

...The Communists took over the leadership of the previously largely Socialist UGT union, skillfully exploiting the old competition between UGT and CNT...

...And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me...

...In October, the Labour party conference endorsed nonintervention by a crushing majority...

...What kindled enormous enthusiasm for the Spanish revolution within the European left was, at least initially, the fact that the Spanish workers acted spontaneously in resisting the coup of the generals...

...I HAD COME TO FRANCE in 1933 as a refugee from Nazi Germany...

...By that time the militia had been militarized, the police force rebuilt, and the revolutionary gains "legalized...

...While the democratic camp shed crocodile tears about the helplessness of the revolution but failed completely to come to its aid, the Nazis and the Italians enthusiastically supported Franco...

...Some had been shot, most hid in their apartments...

...The coup had failed...

...In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it...

...57 The Tory government did not even dream of coming to the aid of a most un-British revolution...

...On March 28, Franco's troops entered Madrid...

...Of course such a state of affairs could not last...

...He then told me in a matter-of-fact tone that the fascist mayor of his village had insulted his mother...

...It is true that after the militias were disbanded and a new army built on traditional lines took their place, the Spanish Republican forces managed to win a number of victories...

...They occupied and attempted to run the factories and commercial establishments, and they ran utilities and transport...

...The German refugees, being without roots in France, were even more demoralized in those years of fascist ascendancy than the native socialists...

...For my generation in the European left, the year 1936 was a watershed...

...Not only did Hitler and Mussolini seem strong...

...The high motivation of the soldiers, the will to prevail even against almost insurmountable odds, the heroism of the militia in the first months of the Spanish revolution compensated in considerable degree for the lack of discipline and central planning...

...The more thoughtful leaders of the left felt that a great deal depended on whether the The workers' militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the country...

...In February 1934, the Austrian workers had risen against the reactionary regime of Dollfuss's Fatherland Front, but they were quickly defeated...

...This was the stronghold of the left-socialist POUM...

...Marx's belief that the working class was the universal class whose action would end the dominance of the bourgeoisie had been largely undermined by a series of crushing defeats...

...Each revolutionary organization had its own newspaper and radio station...

...The first acted by omission, the second by commission, but both policies spelled defeat...

...Barely a month after the occupation of the factories in France, the Spanish workers arose spontaneously to resist the army that had revolted against Republican Spain...

...Nowhere else was there even token resistance to totalitarian or authoritarian power...

...THE REVOLUTIONARY GAINS and the revolutionary spirit lasted longest in Barcelona...

...With no arms forthcoming from the Western democracies and the Russians being the sole supplier, the fate of the Spanish revolution was sealed...

...They accordingly sent only some 10,000 men, but many of them were highly trained technicians...

...Many of them, after having taken over factories or lands, had not the vaguest idea of what to do with them...

...THE COMMUNISTS TURNED OUT TO BE the major counterrevolutionary force in Republican Spain...

...However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable...

...Where they were unsuccessful, they tried to deprive the committees of all but symbolic power...

...They feared that their overtures to the Western powers on behalf of an anti-Nazi alliance might suffer if the West were scared by a revolutionary policy in Spain...

...The trade unions—the Anarchist CNT (Confederacien Nacional del Trabajo) and the UGT (Union General de los Trabajadores) that was largely led by Socialist and some Communist militants who most often took the lead...

...Being too weak to accomplish this by themselves, they "bored from within" the UGT unions, the Socialist party, and the unified Socialist youth movement...

...It may be that the Spanish revolution would have been defeated in any case, but I firmly believe that the nonintervention policy, to which America also subscribed, led to its death...

...Probably only a general strike a week later saved the French Republic...

...But the CP saw the POUM as its prime enemy, since the POUM stood for an ideology close to the doctrines of Lenin and Trotsky and showed up the Communists' departure from revolutionary Marxism...

...The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the "mystique" of Socialism, is the idea of equality...

...These strikes led to a mass occupation by 53 insurgent workers of factories and sometimes even shops and department stores all over France...

...He stressed that it had now become clear to him that acts of individual terrorism, such as the Anarchists had favored, were counterproductive...

...The Anarchists of the CNT were usually the most heroic fighters, first in the inner cities, and later at the front...

...Yet it happened too often that militiamen simply went home when they got bored with the business at hand...

...Workers' committees sprang up spontaneously...

...The Republican cabinet— led by a colorless figure, Jose Giral—was unable to exercise power beyond the confines of metropolitan Madrid...

...I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites...

...They ingratiated themselves with all those who were frightened by the turmoil and disorder on the front and behind it...

...Some burned churches and killed priests...

...As a result, they moved to liquidate the dual power that had originally characterized revolutionary Spain...

...Many of the normal motives of civilized life— snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist...

...In the 1933 elections, the CP managed to elect only one deputy...

...When the CNT militia refused to budge, barricades went up all over Barcelona...

...Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963...

...Much of Spain in the first weeks of the Civil War was a cauldron of energies, of heroism, of creative innovation—but also just plain chaos...

...The POUM was relatively small and suffered from the fact that it was largely a Catalonian, not a national, party...

...Before the outbreak of the revolution, the Spanish Communist party had been exceedingly weak...

...They liquidated the committees that had been the mainstays of revolutionary dual power, and they helped to reconstruct the authority of the Madrid central government...

...They joined the Caballero government that 54 succeeded Giral and included Socialists as well as Communists, and hence participated in the restoration of the Republican state, which they had earlier condemned and ridiculed...

...They did not relish the idea of having to put up with a new revolutionary center that might compete with the Kremlin...

...This government liquidated the popular militias and generally restored the authority of the state...

...But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it...

...One had breathed the air of equality...

...It inflicted on the French their first defeat in many years...

...At first, they supported the left-wing Socialist leader Largo Caballero, who formed a Popular Front government in September 1936...

...All in all, the fascist nations proved to be dependable allies of Franco...

...The Russians had decided that a radical Spanish revolution would not suit their political aims...

...Whether their subsequent defeat could have been avoided had the army still been composed of a highly motivated militia is a moot question...

...My close friend and political mentor Kurt Landau, the Austrian left Socialist, was likewise assassinated by the GPU, as were several Italian Anarchist theorists and other left militants...

...One hesitates to speak of "dual power" in this respect since in Catalonia, and in some other parts of the country though not everywhere, the governmental apparatus had collapsed, so that the militia committees were now in total command...

...The Communist party, which had been next to nothing at the outbreak of the Civil War, became "everything" a year later...

...A counteroffensive by hastily created workers' militias and some loyalist army troops soon dislodged the insurgents from key areas...

...His expectations proved illusory...

...There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism...

...AntonovOvseenko, like many of his coworkers, was killed by the GPU soon after coming home from Spain...

...Luxury restaurants were converted into popular eating places...

...Even on the eve of the Civil War, and after a period of intense political activity, the CP had no more than 30,000 members...

...Why then did they suddenly gain ascendancy after the early period of the Civil War...

...The armed militia forces performed miracles of valor and sacrifice...

...When he reappeared, I asked where he had been...

...Suffice it to say that they were in many ways the most appealing political grouping, with the exception of the left-wing socialist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacien Marxista...

...The workers' militia and other hastily created committees dominated the political scene...

...everywhere there were men and women carrying the flags and emblems of the workers' organizations...

...The June events heartened those of us who, usually only in private, had begun to despair of the workers' capacity to become autonomous political actors...

...And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me...

...They could play this role because the Western democratic powers refused to help the revolution...

...The Civil War began...

...World War II had begun...

...Everybody was for collectivization, but some understood this to mean that the workers in particular factories and on confiscated lands would now work for themselves, whereas others warned that they had the responsibility to work for the benefit of the population at large...

...The POUM leader Andres Nin was assassinated, most probably by the GPU...

...Franco envisaged only a short resistance on the part of the Republic and expected to be installed in power within a few days...

...After some fighting in the streets, the central government—largely under the control of the Communists—as well as the Catalonian Generalitat (the regional government) succeeded in reestablishing "order...

...It would require more space than I have available to analyze the politics of the Anarchists...

...They cultivated the support of the middle-class and lower-middle-class elements who, while opposed to Franco, were horrified by the "excesses" of the Anarchists...

...Militiamen with rifles over their backs and revolvers in their belts dominated the street...

...but when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, neither the Western powers nor the Soviets even mobilized...

...But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this...

...But no such support was forthcoming in its first months...

...Only after having created a disciplined structure was the Red Army under Trotsky able to defeat its White adversary in the years of the Russian Civil War...

...The Italians and the Nazis provided most of the aircraft on the Franco side, and both delivered sophisticated weaponry that the Franco troops lacked at the beginning...

...They combined some of the best features of the earlier militia units with an iron discipline imposed by their Communist political commissars...

...Further Readings (a) Eyewitness Accounts: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952...

...In some cases, the same old Bolsheviks, men such as Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who in 1917 had helped build up dual power in Russia to overthrow the Kerensky regime, now helped engineer the official governmental apparatus...

...most of its leaders were political unknowns...

...What seemed much more important to us than this parliamentary victory was a spontaneous outbreak of major strikes all over France in June...

...For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society...

...After these events, the backbone of the revolutionary forces in Barcelona was broken...

...But they had all the faults of their great virtues...

...The pronunciamento had been crushed in the most important areas of the country: in Madrid and Barcelona, in the Asturias and the Basque province—indeed, in all the major industrial and commercial centers of the nation...

...They supported, and helped to implement, the transformation of the militia into a regular army, largely recruited through conscription...

...In England, on a motion by Sir Walter Citrine, secretary general of the British Trades Union Congress, and Ernest Bevin, secretary of the Transport Workers Union, the British trade-union movement came out against intervention in September 1936...

...CNT workers, supported by the POUM, had occupied the telephone exchange for a number of months and the Communists now attempted to take it from them with the help of several trucksful of guards...

...When he heard of this, he returned to the village through the fascist lines, killed the mayor, and then managed to regain Paris and his customary cafe...

...But by early 1936 it was clear, except to the self-deluded, that the Nazis were there to stay...

...In any case, most military observers agreed at the time that the International Brigades, largely made up of ideologically inspired members, were by far the best units on the loyalist, government side...

...But the Anarchists were also the most inexperienced, vacillating, and disoriented among the groups on the left...

...By September 1, 1939, the Nazis had invaded Poland and two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany...

...The Nazis had come to power in Germany in early 1933 without any resistance from the working class or its parties...

...At first, some of us nurtured the illusion that the Nazi reign would soon collapse...

...Along with Russian arms and cadres came the Russian "advisers" who infiltrated the various committees and government offices...

...The various parties and unions took over the luxury hotels and made them into their headquarters...

...The bonne bourgeoisie disappeared...

...The character of the city soon changed...

...In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy "proving" that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact...

...For a few weeks after this conversation he did not come to his customary cafe table...

...Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...

...The general strike and occupation of the factories came to an end mainly because the government made major concessions, but also because the Communists, who feared that prolonged disorder might weaken the French army as an ally of the Soviet Union, helped stop the strike wave...

...It would require a dialectician more subtle than I am to decide who carried the greater responsibility for the defeat of the Spanish Revolution—the West and its labor movement or the Russians...

...The CP, which had slanderously accused the POUM members of being traitors in the pay of Franco, now asked for the suppression of POUM...

...A major shift in Soviet foreign policy favoring an alliance with the Western powers finally led to a Popular Front aligning the French Socialists, the Communists, and the centrist Radical Socialists...

...In May 1936, the Popular Front won the parliamentary elections and installed the first Leon Blum government...

...the decent, lovable man that was Leon Blum, or the bloodthirsty monster that was Stalin...

...Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality...

...others were capable of an almost childlike magnanimity...

...In May 1937, the CP moved against the POUM, which then was closely allied with a wing of the Anarchists...

...For those of us who had almost despaired of the creative powers of the workers, the Spanish events had a heady effect...

...By the middle of January 1937, another 4,000 men had landed...

...By the end of February 1937, four Italian divisions with roughly 40,000 men moved into the front lines...

...YET THE EUPHORIA Of the first days soon dissipated...

...The Western powers had refused to intervene in the Spanish Civil War because they felt that intervention might bring a general European war...

...It seemed "a joy to be alive...

...Some hoped for a military overthrow of the Nazis by the Western powers or the Russians...

...But the French also had reason to worry...

...Leon Blum seems initially to have had some inclination to help the Spaniards, but when he realized that the British would oppose any kind of pro-Republican intervention, he caved in...

...COMMON SENSE WOULD SUGGEST that to fight a modern war against disciplined adversaries requires a disciplined and well-organized military structure...

...there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master...

...The occupation of the factories by millions of French workers in June 1936 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War a month later seemed once and for all to break the despair that had settled on those of us who considered themselves Marxists...

...fascist or authoritarian regimes also dominated in most of the Balkan countries and in Poland...

...In the 1920s, it never had more than a few hundred members...

...In Paris, on February 6 and 7, 1934, the right-wing leagues instigated major riots that came near to toppling the government...

...The Civil Guards and the police were no longer seen on the streets...

...In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like...

...During the next few years, things improved somewhat...

...Italian soldiers began reaching Spain in large numbers in November 1936...

...q 55 revolution would get support from the outside...

...In fact, one of the key army leaders, General Mola, concluded by July 20 that the rebels' cause was lost...

...They probably saved the day in the first few weeks of the revolution but later failed to oppose the liquidation of many of the major achievements...

...One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word "comrade" stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug...

...It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth...

...A digression to illustrate the political style of the Anarchists: After the defeat of the revolution, I happened to talk with an Anarchist friend in a Parisian cafe...

...b) Historical Account from a Left-Socialist Perspective: Pierre Broue and Emile Temine, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, London: Faber & Faber, 1972...

...Order reigned in Barcelona until it fell to Franco, who then imposed his order...

...This much seems fairly well established: they were seen as the party of the Russians, the only power that helped by sending arms—even though for good money—as well as skilled military advisers...

...The Communists pursued a highly consistent course...