Building Utopia : The Spanish Revolution 1936–1937

Notes
Federico Escofet, De una derrota a una victoria: 6 octobre de 1934 — 19 de julio 1936, Barcelona 1984. B. Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution, N.C., 1979. Diego Abad de Santillán (quoted in Durruti: The People Armed, Abel Paz, Canada, 1976). Juan Gómez Casas, Historia de la FAI, p.217. Ibid. García Oliver, Solidaridad Obrera, 19 July 1936. It is unlikely that García Oliver would have required much convincing, even by the least artful of flatterers. Peirats mentions that García Oliver speaking of ‘taking power’ at a public meeting in the Barcelona Woodworkers Union in ‘January or February 1936’. He had also pressed this case during a restricted meeting of ‘notables’ held just before the CNT regional conference to discuss the February 1936 ele... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 34 : The POUM: Trotsky and the POUM
The POUM: Trotsky and the POUM The POUM was formed in 1935 by an amalgamation of the Communist Left, a Trotskyist organization led by Nin and Andrade, and the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC — Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc). In January 1936, the POUM’s decision to sign the Popular Front agreement promoted Trotsky to denounce the POUM in an article on 22 January entitled The Treason of the Workers′ Party for Marxist Unification (POUM). Trotsky’s anathema led to a cooling of relations between the POUM and the supporters of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International and severely damaged the credibility of Spanish Trotskyists. Unable to understand Spanish and with his relationship with Nin broken off, Trotsky had no reliable source of information on what was happening inside Spain. When the revolution came he was one of the few who failed to greet it with the joy felt by the masses of people ev... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 33 : June: Anarchist Intelligence and Security Services
June: Anarchist Intelligence and Security Services The document outlining the proposed anarchist intelligence service, the Servicio de Información y Coordinación (SIC), is a masterpiece of Leninist demagogery: “Every revolutionary party or organization has, unfailingly, to wage bitter struggles, sometimes against visible enemies, sometimes against others working in the shadows. Thus the triumph of its precepts and the full implementation of its hegemony (these being the aspirations which motivate it and give it meaning) should be the result of the solid and continuing task of annihilating the opposition.” The document explores the need for “disciplined organization” and ‘consistent, steely political conduct’ and “jettisoning archaic norms” so as to face up to “modern methods of political contention”. The draft was approved... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 32 : Pierre Besnard’s Reply to ‘Catastrophic Revolution′
Pierre Besnard’s reply to ‘Catastrophic Revolution′ “We have never been unaware of the difficult tasks that confronted our CNT comrades. But we do not agree with comrade Brandt concerning the character of the armed force charged with the defense of the revolution. Basing ourselves on the lessons offered by history, we stated long before the outbreak, of the Spanish revolution that a government force is essentially a counter-revolutionary force which will strangle the revolution the instant the masters of the State deem it favorable, even if the revolution is in its descending phase. We never ceased telling our Spanish comrades that a confederal militia, on the contrary, constitutes the essential instrument of defense of the revolution. Brandt claims that in order to win it was necessary to accept the militarization of the popular militia columns. We do not agree w... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 31 : “Catastrophic Revolution” by Brandt
“Catastrophic Revolution” by Brandt “I want to refresh the memory of those who are preaching 100 percent revolution regardless of any consideration, by pointing out to them the Bilbao catastrophe, which opens the way to a complete fascist conquest of Spain. To be sure, comrade Besnard, very nice to place the revolution above the war; but it is the war that is imposing itself upon us in taking precedence over the revolution. The war got hold of us and we have to fight it out whether we like it or not. We can temporarily suspend the struggle against our Spanish capitalism, but we cannot, for a single instant, stop the fight against fascism. The revolution depends on our volition, but the war is imposed upon us. We cannot devote ourselves to the revolution if we have not first liquidated the war … Whether we like it or not, we are forced to remain tied to this coalition of anti-anarchist ‘friends&rsquo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

March 1937
March 1937 By the beginning of March the state apparatus was ready, almost fully recovered from the double blow it had received the previous July from the reactionary military and the revolutionary industrial and agrarian working class. With a Cabinet, including the anarchist ministers, fully committed to implementing militarization, Largo Caballero announced that from 1 April all forces on the Teruel front would come under the control of the Ministry of War. José Benedito, commander of the anarcho-syndicalist Torres Benedito Column was assigned to the Organizational Bureau of the General Staff with special responsibility for re-organizing the militia columns. At the same time the Iron Column, the most refractory of the militia colum... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

July 1937
July 1937 Until the middle of 1937 the war had been primarily defensive. The failure of the first major offensive at Brunete, in July 1937, was one of the first in a continuing series of military disasters. The Brunete campaign was the brainchild of the senior communist officers and their Soviet military advisers who, for international propaganda purposes, wanted a major offensive in the western sector of Madrid. The decision led to escalating dissatisfaction among the officers and men of the Popular Army and the International Brigades. The ‘May Days’ and other Soviet-inspired machinations had seriously eroded their morale and a number of units of the International Brigades openly mutinied in protest against their manipulation f... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

January 1937
January 1937 From January 1937 onwards the CNT Information and Propaganda Bureau organized a regular series of lectures in the Coliseum cinema in Barcelona. The first lecture, delivered by Federica Montseny on 3 January 1937, on militant anarchy and Spanish reality, was a prime example of chauvinistic political demagogery with nothing to commend it from an anarchist perspective. It does, however, provide a fascinating insight into the thinking of the CNT and FAI leaders in relation to the war, government and revolution from the vantage point of power. She explained to her audience that the anarchists had entered the government to prevent the anarchist movement from being ‘ousted from the leadership of the revolution’ in order to... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Statement by Vivaldo Fagundes
Statement by Vivaldo Fagundes The militians’ distrust of the motives for imposing militarization was not unfounded. Vivaldo Fagundes, a Portuguese anarchist who participated in the Spanish Revolution has this to say: “I have an extract from a letter of Indalecio Prieto, a minister, to Fernando de los Rios, then ambassador in Washington, in which Prieto gives an account of the work he was doing to finish anarchism off. He told him that already he had managed to win over its finest militants by interesting them in governmental politics and that the most stubborn ones, “the uncontrollables”, would be annihilated by militarization — an anti-revolutionary ploy clearly anti-libertarian in its objectives — by me... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

June 1937
June 1937 The first priority of the Negrín administration was the elimination of the POUM. All POUM leaders who could be found were arrested, many of them horribly tortured. Some, like Andrés Nin, arrested on 18 June along with many of his comrades, were never seen again. Although the arrests were carried out by the police, the general belief was that the arrests had been masterminded by Alexander Orlov, head of the Soviet GPU in Spain. Manuel Irujo, the new Minister of Justice, a Basque catholic, who had set up the special tribunals to try case of espionage and high treason in camera, confirmed that Nin had been taken to the penitentiary of Alcalá de Henares from which he had disappeared. Some POUM members managed to s... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)