Part 1, Chapter 3 : From Exile to Anarchism

CHAPTER III. From Exile to Anarchism

In early September, Buenaventura and his friend “El Toto” went to Gijón, which suggests that Durruti had formed lasting bonds with the Asturian miners during the events in Matallana.

He was there only briefly. By December, he was in Vals-les-Bains (Les Ardeches, France), where he mailed a reassuring postcard to his family: “I’m doing quite well, thanks to the help of a Spanish family named Martínez.” [27]

Several things occurred during Buenaventura’s short stopover in Gijón that may help explain his later activities in France. Durruti and his friend had different concerns. The police were after “El Toto” for acts of sabotage that occurred during the strike, whereas Buenaventura had his own preoccupation: he had deserted from the army.

Shortly before the strike, he had been called up in the second military draft of 1917. He was supposed to become a second gunner in the San Sebastián Artillery Regiment in late August. Commenting on the matter in a letter to his sister, he said: “I was hardly excited to serve the homeland, and what scarce enthusiasm I had was taken from me by a sergeant who commanded the conscripts like they were already in the barracks. When I left the enlistment office, I declared that Alfonso XIII would have one less soldier and one more revolutionary.” [28] It is safe to assume that the Asturian miners decided to hide him and facilitate his passage to France when they learned about his desertion.

Buenacasa was also fleeing the government at the time and it must have been around then that he met Buenaventura. “We didn’t get along very well at first,” he says. “I was studious, whereas he was more rebellious. He wasn’t friendly with me then, nor was I with him.” [29] Buenacasa did not hear of him again until they met in San Sebastián in 1920. But this time Buenacasa was impressed by “Buenaventura’s progress on the theoretical plane” and mentions that Durruti possessed a CNT membership card. When had he joined the CNT? How had he made such theoretical progress? The answer to these questions can be found in his first exile in France, which lasted from December 1917 until March 1919. [30]

When people from the Basque country and Asturias (like Durruti) crossed the Pyrenees to escape government repression, they found a large and dynamic group of exiled Catalan anarchists in the French Midi, particularly Marseilles. There was an anarchist Commission of Relations in that city that was in active contact with militants in Barcelona. The revolutionary syndicalism of the Confederation Generale du Travail also had a strong influence on the port workers there. [31]

Raising money among the Spanish immigrants was one of the group’s principle activities. They used these funds to produce propaganda and buy weapons, both of which were smuggled into Spain. All this required traveling and careful planning. Buenaventura probably took his first steps as a CNT militant moving between Marseilles and the conspiratorial center in Bordeaux.

We also know that Buenaventura maintained contact with his friends in León and that he and “El Toto,” who lived in Asturias until 1919, did not lose touch during this exile. [32]

With respect to Buenaventura’s ideological evolution—his “theoretical progress,” according to Buenacasa—Hans Erich Kaminski says that Durruti “burned through the stages, taking much less time than Bakunin to declare himself an anarchist.” [33] Kaminski wrote this in the summer of 1939, doubtlessly under the impact of Durruti’s powerful personality. However, the truth is that Buenaventura never passed from socialism to anarchism: he had always been an anarchist, at least implicitly.

Since Paul Lafargue [34] arrived in the country in 1872, Spanish Marxism was opportunistic and quickly descended into reformism. The Socialist Party forgot everything about the doctrine other than its focus on party politics and although SP leader Largo Caballero later called for the working class seizure of power, he did so with neither faith nor conviction. As a whole, in ideological terms, Spanish Marxists differed little from the German or French social democrats of the 1930s (with the exception of Andreu Nin’s group). [35]

Anarchism, by contrast, found a fertile land in Spain. Its rejection of the state resonated in a country with such deep-seated, decentralist tendencies and with a working class that felt intense disdain for all forms of parliamentary maneuvering.

When Buenaventura first encountered anarchism, he identified it with the active and revolutionary socialism that he had already articulated in León. That is why it is better to speak of his “theoretical progress,” as Buenacasa does, than a passage through “stages.”

Durruti was in the Burgos Military Hospital in March 1919. In a letter to his family, he says: “I was incorporated into my Regiment when I was getting ready to visit you. They brought me before a Court Martial, which assigned me to Morocco with penalties. However, the doctor found a hernia in me during the medical review and that’s why I’m in the hospital. In any case, I won’t be here long. And I don’t want to go to Morocco without seeing my friends. It’s very important that they visit me.” [36] This letter concealed his real intentions and his detention was related to activities that he had carried out in Spain in close contact with his friends from Bordeaux.

In early January 1919, he had crossed the border on a mission to inform the comrades in Gijón about the efforts in France. He completed the task and, after seeing the activist prospects in Asturias, decided to stay in Spain for a bit. “El Toto” told him about the progress in León. The young people expelled by the union had started an anarchist group and also a CNT Sindicato de Oficios Varios [union of various trades], which could already boast of a significant number of members. The CNT was also expanding throughout the country, particularly in Barcelona, where the movement frightened the bourgeoisie. One of every two workers was affiliated with the Confederation, giving the organization a total of 375,000 adherents at the time. Durruti got a job as a mechanic in La Felguera, a metalworkers’ center in which anarcho-syndicalism was very influential. He acquired his first CNT membership card there. He was only in La Felguera briefly: Durruti soon went to the mining coalfield in the León province, when a bitter conflict with the Anglo-Spanish mining company exploded in La Robla. During that period, the Asturian miners’ union was involved in numerous strikes and was thus unable to send militants to La Robla. “El Toto,” who had been handling the contacts with León, had already been in Valladolid for three months. He thought of Durruti, who was unknown in the area, while planning an act of sabotage in the mines. Durruti and two activists from La Coruña took off for La Robla. As expected, the mine’s management came to an agreement with the workers after the sabotage.

Buenaventura, now close to León, wanted to see his old friends. They planned a meeting in Santiago de Compostela, but the Civil Guard arrested him en route. Authorities sent Durruti to La Coruña, where they discovered his desertion from the Army. He was then brought to San Sebastián and went before a Court Martial. He cited his hernia during the hearing in order to gain time and plan an escape. Indeed, his friends from León had been informed about his travails, thanks to a letter he had sent his sister Rosa, and he managed to abscond with their help. He hid in the mountains for several days and was back in France by June.

This time he went to Paris and worked at the Renault Company. While he maintained little correspondence during this second exile, he did describe his circumstances in a postcard (surely aware that strangers would read it). He says that he is: “living alone, isolated from the world, and working as a mechanic.” But photographs from the period offer a different image, showing him surrounded by numerous friends. We do not know what he did during this interval, although he was in active contact with Tejerina, the secretary of the León anarchist group. [37]

In a short biography of Durruti, Alejandro Gilabert says that his “comrades assiduously kept him up-to-date on the Spanish social and political situation” and the “anarchist movement’s progress in the country.” They also informed him about the decision that anarchists made at a national conference to actively participate in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.” [38] He adds that “they made this decision, above all, because the police were setting up an organization of pistoleros in order to kill militant labor activists.” [39] Thanks to his friends, Gilabert says, Durruti also knew the details of the “great CNT Congress held in Madrid in December 1919, at which nearly one million workers were represented. They also told him of the CNT’s decision to join the Third International and send Angel Pestaña as its representative to the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow (1920).” [40]

All these exciting developments, Gilabert claims, prompted Buenaventura to return to Spain in the spring of 1920.

News of the Russian people’s victory over Czarism in 1917 had a powerful impact in Spain and increased the combativity of the general strike in August that year. Its influence is also evident in the CNT’s decision to join the Third International. For the anarchists, the Russian Revolution was an authentic dictatorship of the proletariat that had fully destroyed the bourgeoisie and Czarism. [41]

Buenaventura responded to that influence as well and it is likely that his decision to return to Spain reflected the pervasive excitement in postwar Europe. Indeed, Russian events captivated many young people like Durruti, although they knew that the Spanish revolution would have to follow its own path and would not replicate the Bolshevik experience. In time—after the authoritarianism of the Russian dictatorship was unmasked—they would reproach the Bolsheviks for trying to impose the Bolshevik way on Spain and for not appreciating the Peninsula’s unique socio-historical circumstances. Nonetheless, all these ideas and emotions were confused at the time.

The Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta described the confusion well in a letter to his friend Luigi Fabbri: “With the expression dictatorship of the proletariat, our Bolshevizing friends intend to describe the revolutionary event in which the workers seize the land and the means of production and try to create a society in which there is no place for a class that exploits and oppresses the producers. In that case, the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a dictatorship of all and it would not be a dictatorship in the same sense that a government of all isn’t a government in the authoritarian, historical, and practical meaning of the word.” But the nature of the Bolshevik dictatorship was also clear to him: “In reality, it’s the dictatorship of a party, or rather, the leaders of a party. Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades are doubtlessly sincere revolutionaries and won’t betray the revolution, given their understanding of it, but they are training government cadres that will serve those who later come to exploit and kill the revolution. This is a history that repeats itself; with the respective differences having been considered, it’s the dictatorship of Robespierre that brings it to the guillotine and prepares the way for Napoleon.” Even so, Malatesta—who was also swept up by the excitement of the era—retreats from his critique when he states: “It could also be that many things that seem bad to us are a product of the situation and that it wasn’t possible to operate differently, given Russia’s special circumstances. It’s better to wait, especially when what we say cannot have any influence on events there and would be poorly interpreted in Italy, making it seem like we’re echoing the reactionaries’ biased slanders.” Although Malatesta did not release this letter until 1922—for the reasons he indicated—his perspective does not lend itself to distortions. The anarchist posture was unambiguous: “We respect the Bolsheviks’ commitment and admire their energy, but we’ve never agreed with them in theory and never will in practice.” [42]

Nothing happening in Russia was known with precision in the spring of 1920. The only thing clear that was that the bourgeoisie was pouring a flood of aspersions on the Russian revolutionaries in the press. That is why their class brothers from all nations defended them. But of course the best way to help the Russians was to make other revolutions in other parts of the world. That was on Durruti’s mind when he decided to return to Spain.