THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR REVISITED
Martin, Benjamin
We received a number of communications in response to the exchange on Spain between Irving Howe and Ronald Radosh in our Fall 1986 issue. Unfortunately, limitations of space make it impossible to...
...What Maurin clearly intended, as his preceding remarks make clear, is that the PCE was merely an artificial creation of Moscow agents and, once it had removed from power the authentic representatives of the working class, the UGT and CNT, the Republic was doomed...
...However, the reality was that though the Cortes played no role nor were elections held, the possibility of dissent was notably greater than in the other zone...
...When he goes beyond that and describes the Spanish Republic as a "People's Democracy" (East-European style), he is on exceedingly thin ice...
...Neither the facts nor the considered judgments of serious scholars support such a claim...
...Had he read Maurin's RevoluciOn y contrarrevoluciOn en Espana, from which this quote is taken, he would have learned that the author was not posing such a stark alternative...
...The bloody events were re-examined and scrutinized, but one would have had to look far and wide to encounter anything even remotely comparable to Ronald Radosh's recent exercise in trivializing one of this century's most searing social cataclysms...
...In the preface to his The Spanish Tragedy, Raymond Carr offers a similar diagnosis: I have always regarded the defeat of the Republic and the vengeance of the right after 1939 as a tragedy and I find writing on the Civil War a painful exercise, since it entails, if one is to tell what seems to one to be the truth, a severe and sometimes savage criticism of the errors of one's own side both before and after July 1936...
...Moreover, an additional 200,000 "red" prisoners were vindictively executed or died from disease from 1939 'to 1945...
...But to the end Madrid remained Socialist and Barcelona Cenetista in spite of Stalinist repression and political manipulations...
...But between the initial chaos and loss of control in the Republican zone and the methodical mass slaughter conducted by the Nationalists, there was a world of difference...
...After having claimed for itself the principal effort in the war, this had an adverse effect and communism experienced the inevitable consequences...
...What excited the passions and imagination of so many outside Spain in "the last crusade" was as much the grossly overdrawn image of an embattled democratic David confronting the fascist Goliath as the inspiring display of Spanish courage and determination...
...Despite savage Communist persecutions, it never occurred to Poumist and anarcho-syndicalist militants to abandon the Republican cause...
...All too aware of the opprobrium attached to the PCE's political role in the civil war, Santiago Carrillo, (then the all-powerful PCE general secretary) sought, at the commencement of the post-Franco era, to make amends by taking the most provocatively revisionist stand among the Eurocommunist parties in Western Europe...
...The Republic was defeated not only because of the failure of the democratic nations to supply it with arms, but because of the military and political failures, the factionalism, of the Popular Front...
...The defeat of Nazi Germany and the subsequent branding of the pro-axis Caudillo as an international pariah forced him to curry favor with the U.S., as the cold war got under way, by halting the mass executions and toning down the regime's fascist character...
...The powerful German left had proved utterly incapable of preventing Hilter's rise to power...
...Economic boom and industrialization in the 1960s led Franco to again seek admittance to the European Community by moderating his authoritarianism...
...Historical memory could not be lobotomized...
...his exchanges with Irving Howe in Dissent, Winter 1987, and Brian Morton in the Nation of November 29, 1986 and December 27/January 3, 1987...
...With Russian and Comintern help the party excelled in organization, discipline, and in invigorating the military effort...
...that was also the outset of a social revolutionary process...
...Particularly disturbing is Radosh's bestowal of equal responsibility on both sides for the killings and other atrocities...
...One can find in Gabriel Jackson's notable The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939 a scrupulous comparative examination of the revolutionary violence and terror in the two war zones...
...375 Yet it is a tragedy that, after five decades, has a happy ending...
...In the early months following the July 1936 military rebellion, anarchist extremists, Socialist youth, and criminal elements among others engaged in a murderous rampage against priests and 374 other opponents of the Republican government...
...He estimates that some 20,000 persons perished in the Republican zone from the paseos and political reprisals, compared to 200,000 in the Nationalist zone...
...Czechoslovakia became a sacrifice to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy, which through its nonintervention doctrine, also made the embattled Spanish Republican government an easy prey to Stalin's designs...
...Moreover, the Communist party as a consequence emerged extremely discredited, accused of sectarianism and of having used the government apparatus to eliminate its enemies (such as Nin of the POUM...
...Once Stalin decided to seek a Nazi-Soviet pact and to abandon his use of Spain as a pawn in his efforts at rapprochement with France and Great Britain, the weakness of PCE support soon became apparent...
...See his "But Today the Struggle: Spain and the Intellectuals," in the New Criterion, October 1986...
...Spaniards, in contrast, were doggedly fighting and dying for a better world...
...Spain last year commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War...
...Radosh's use of ex-Communist Jorge Semprun's assertion that "under Franco the working class in Spain had more freedom than their counterpart in any country 'improperly called socialist' " is equally misleading...
...It is also worth recalling that Communist political ascendancy was not rooted in Spanish history and tradition but to a large extent was a circumstantial creation of Comintern agents and Russian political blackmail as a condition for supplying war materiel...
...The innumerable shortcomings afflicting the Republic greatly reduced its capacity to survive a prolonged and bloody civil war on the eve of the Second World War...
...Political parties possessed their own militias and secret police with which they sought to settle old political scores...
...Whatever hopes the PCE entertained of playing a major role in post-Franco national political affairs were completely dashed by the presence of a vigorous, chastened, now anticommunist Socialist party...
...Unfortunately, limitations of space make it impossible to print more than the one that appears below.—Eds...
...The Civil War had been preceded by a rising climate of violence and political murders (paseos) by young hotheads from both sides...
...The vengeful executions of several hundred thousand, the imprisonment and forced labor of thousands of others, the severe privations and repression of the general population made it a cruel, oppressive police state...
...No longer does one find within the Spanish Socialist party (PSOE), which has served as the ruling party since 1982, those, like the Caballerists of the 1930s, who advocate close collaboration and even merger of the two parties...
...To cite but one instance, Javier Tussel, one of Spain's most distinguished historians and a centerright Christian Democrat, tells us that Numerous protagonists and historians have indeed adjudged the Republican regime to have been converted into a popular democracy similar to those in Europe after the Second World War whose domination by the Communist party was camouflaged by a democratic appearance...
...The occasion elicited a massive outpouring of articles, memoirs, books, conferences...
...As General Rojo bitterly conceded, "In the political field General Franco triumphed...
...Communists towards the end of the war controlled the sub-secretariats of aviation and agriculture, the headquarters command of the air force, the staff headquarters of the Navy, and the general directorates of security and the Carabineros...
...Then comes the non sequitur that had the Republic emerged victorious it would have been a Soviet People's Democracy, thus adversely affecting the allied war effort against Hitler...
...Julian Besteiro, a noble and decent moderate, withdrew from active participation in the Socialist leadership horrified by the inane "bolshevization" sponsored by Largo Caballero and his followers, convinced that the democratic republic had come a generation too soon "before a liberal, tolerant cultural attitude had taken root in the Spanish masses...
...To sustain his allegation he quotes POUM leader Joaquin Maurin: "From the moment in which the alternative was posed, beginning in June 1937, between the Communist party, at the orders of Moscow, and the opposing military regime, reactionary but Spanish, the conclusion of the Civil War was determined...
...To be sure, there is little to quarrel with in Radosh's assertions concerning Stalin's sinister grab for power...
...Horrified government authorities, political leaders, and trade unionists denounced the killings and valiantly strove to halt the carnage...
...Some of them provided refuge and protection for likely victims...
...This had come as a desperately awaited reprieve for dispirited progressives and left-wingers everywhere...
...If the Communists attained great but not decisive influence, it was, as El Campesino said, because "the others did not rise to the occasion...
...To no avail...
...It is to this period that Semprun refers...
...the Austrian Socialist movement, after a pathetic rearguard resistance in Vienna, had similarly displayed its impotence...
...The Spanish Communist party (PCE) even at the height of its power and influence was unable to win the support of the great mass of proletarian Spain, which remained loyal to the Socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT even though both movements were in internal disarray...
...Today Spanish Communism is a factious, spent, shattered force, fragmented into four fiercely antagonistic factions...
...Life in Francoist Spain from the end of the war in 1939 to the early 1950s was brutish and often nightmarish...
...Did Maurin mean, as Radosh infers, that Spanish Republican supporters preferred a Francoist Spain to a Moscow satellite...
...376...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
