Chapter 10 : The Political Decomposition of the Republic—Financial Irresponsibility—The Figure of Negrín

The political decomposition of the Republic—Financial irresponsibility—The figure of Negrín

Once the Prieto-Negrín Government was formed, in accordance with the plans of the Russian “trade” delegate, Stachevsky, after the famous crisis of May 1937, when Moscow’s policy brought about the fall of Largo Caballero by preventing him from waging his planned offensive to cut the rebel zone in two parts, and after provoking the bloody events in Barcelona—whose real significance we were unable to perceive at that time, just as we were capable of taking advantage of the ensuing situation to put the war and the revolution back on their real popular foundations—at that time, we repeat, we were not entirely alone in our opposition that we deemed vital for the interests of the Spanish people.

The CNT maintained its open and clear opposition, refusing to collaborate in the new government.

The character of Indalecio Prieto was well known, for he was more of an enemy of the revolution and of socialism than he was an enemy of the military revolt, and he was more inspired by his personal grudges than by the endangered interests of Spanish progress and justice; and we have already discussed the plans and the frivolous psychology of Dr. Negrín; and once the forces that were at work within the government against the revolution that began on July 19, 1936 were revealed in May 1937, the CNT did the right thing not to yield without guarantees. And in this position it was enthusiastically joined by the FAI. The Confederation represented the most powerful and most independent organized working class force in Spain, it was the pole of progress, of the emancipation of labor, the product of the hard work and sacrifices of several generations of heroic and unselfish combatants. By preserving its own identity it kept a great hope alive, but if it were to join a government like the Prieto-Negrín government, completely beholden to Russian diplomacy and implicated in the most scandalous affairs, it would hardly be able to avoid losing that identity.

This viewpoint, which the CNT originally maintained with such fervor, would nonetheless persist for many months. As the disasters at the Front multiplied, every one of which should have resulted in a firing squad for the political and military leaders who were responsible for them—the Brunete campaign, the loss of northern Spain, the collapse of the Aragon Front—our isolation increased. On the occasion of the fall of Aragon, which did not lead directly to the end of the war because the people were still ready to sacrifice everything yet were still incapable of freeing themselves from their accursed Government, the FAI marshaled all the opposition it could in meetings with Negrín and with the parties. This opposition was quelled by the expansion of the so-called Popular Front, and shortly after by the hand-out of a Ministry that was given to the CNT, with which our discordant voice was silenced, and the possibilities for effective joint action on the part of the whole libertarian movement were shattered for a very long time to come.

The generals were given promotions with each new defeat that took place on their watch, and the politicians who were responsible for these disasters consolidated their positions. Parties and organizations competed with each other to see who could heap more praise on the heroes of these military fiascos, who could be more servile, and who could be more obliging.

Prieto resigned from the Government after the collapse of the Aragon Front, where we clearly beheld the methods that led to victory … the victory of Franco. Prieto’s sole thought was of obtaining some ambassadorial position, some special mission in America, far from the conflict. He was therefore able to find himself at the fateful moment of defeat, which he had done so much to bring about, at a great distance from the theater of events.

All criticism and all honest reporting ceased. The most insignificant objection was labeled as defeatism. The press, the radio, the various police forces, the judiciary, everything was devoted to bolstering the authority of the government. And what could not be achieved by persuasion was obtained with terrorism, horrible persecutions and liquidations, when the victims were not amenable to the temptations of bribery and corruption. The republican legislature and the parties and organizations were domesticated with a unanimity that was both surprising and unique in our history. And the few individuals who could not be bought were quarantined like mad dogs. Unfortunately, very few socialist, anarchist and republican militants were to be found among these exceptional cases. We are referring to well-known personalities, not to the great mass of the Spanish people, the masses whose only sin was to have too much faith in their leaders.

The war could not be brought to a victorious conclusion with the procedures that were then being employed on the military terrain by the Republic’s High Command, with the leadership bestowed on the army, and with the deteriorating morale of the civilian population behind the lines. Furthermore, a movement that had arisen as a great wave of popular passion, based on spontaneous acts of economic and social transformation, was being systematically strangled by the Government, with the approval, the silence, or the acquiescence of all the so-called anti-fascist sectors. We were the only ones to oppose Negrín’s Thirteen Points, widely acclaimed as the synthesis of all the aspirations of Spain.

We proclaimed by every means at our disposal, and these means were not abundant, because we could not count on the press, due to both the official censorship as well as the depths to which it had descended, that if we had to return to the conditions that prevailed before July 19, or even to worse conditions, because the alleged government of the anti-fascists had forced us to duly acknowledge the extremely liberal significance of a Primo de Rivera; if the end of the war had to be our destruction, that is, the destruction of the aspirations that had given rise to the war, the victory of Negrín had to be compared to the victory of Franco from the point of view of the authentic interests of Spain, of the Spanish workers. The works that were reprinted or first published by our publishing house, and widely distributed in print runs of 5,000 copies that were immediately sold out, explained Russian affairs, the Russian myth, the Russian and Italian and German methods, and pointed to the similarity and the close parallels between a fascist Spain and a communist Spain of the Moscow type.

In these a posteriori considerations we have said nothing that we have not already said, written or expressed in one way or another during the war itself. We therefore feel that we have every right to say in exile what we said before our exile, in the midst of the empire of negrinista euphoria, without ever succeeding, unfortunately for so many hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who were deceived and betrayed, in getting anyone to listen to us or to apply the remedies we recommeded.

The Negrín government and its motley team thought that the counterrevolution could facilitate victory in the war against fascism. It therefore alienated the people of the factories and the fields from their vital interest in the war, when we maintained exactly the contrary, that the war against fascism, deprived of its social content, was certainly doomed to end in defeat.

We did not confer any absolute value on laws and decrees as criteria for judging reality. The history of a country that is written based on its legislation would undoubtedly be a very incomplete history. However, just as the Generalitat of Catalonia was forced to legally recognize and channel the new economic reality, although it later availed itself of this same legality to do its part on behalf of the counterrevolution, the Government of the Republic remained absolutely unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of anything that was not in conformance with the laws that were on the books before July 19, as if to say that nothing had happened since then.

Here are some fragments of a letter from the General Directorate of Industry of the Ministry of Finance, responding to some clarifications we had requested:

1. Only the Government has the authority to carry out confiscations; therefore, all the expropriations carried out without its previous agreement are rendered null and void, and the industries must be returned to their former owners, except in cases where these former owners are rebels, in which case they are to be taken over by the Department of Reparations (Decrees of March 17, 1938).

2. All transfers of property from one Spanish citizen to another are prohibited, as they require, in order to be valid, the authorization of the Ministry of Finance (Decree of August 14, 1936). Therefore, no official institution may recognize the validity of commercial agreements, legal notices, contracts of purchase and sale or grants, etc., referring to goods owned by Spaniards, if they are not accompanied by the corresponding Ministerial authorization.

3. The first act of any industrial intervention, is to cite the legitimate owner of the enterprise. If the latter or his legal representative presents himself, the Comptroller of Mines, Industry, Commerce, Agriculture, Food Production and Distribution, etc., has no other recourse than to recognize his rights of ownership….
   … in no case, up until now, has any document or any ownership claim that diverges from the status of the property or documentation in question before July 1936 been recognized as valid. If the property or documentation in question is owned by a rebel, it becomes the property of the Department of Reparations. (The Director General of Industry, Barcelona, October 26, 1938)

It is incomprehensible that, despite such indisputable evidence, the parties and organizations that arose from the struggle for a social and economic organization like the one that began to develop with the crushing of the military revolt in Catalonia, Levante and in the Center, had no objections in supporting a government that did not recognize any of the proletarian conquests and that refused to consider that July 19 had opened a new chapter in the history of Spain. Nor were any plausible explanations forthcoming for their complete amnesia concerning their fundamental goals on the part of our own organizations, which also appeared to be yoked to the chariot of Dr. Negrín, the Cesar of the Second Republic.

In a draft report of the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, arguing that it was of imperative importance that a National Plenum of the Regional organizations of the libertarian movement must be convoked, we said (Barcelona, August 4, 1938):

We have spoken out, and we had the right—and the duty—to do so, against participation in the government. We are living in extraordinary times and we cannot always apply the frame of reference of normal periods to such exceptionally tragic times as these. But there are different ways to participate in a government:

To affirm a policy, an existing social identity;

To become accomplices of the policies of others.

At the present time we must examine some points relating to our governmental participation:

1. Has our participation in the Government led to any kind of change of direction and of methods with respect to the military, economic, or diplomatic domains, and in every aspect that is essential for the successful prosecution of the war?

2. Should we measure the usefulness of our participation in the Government by the criterion of the new paid positions this participation brings with it, or should we apply a social criterion, and pay heed to the views of those who work for a living and those who are doing the fighting?

We maintain that there has been no change of direction or of methods in the military policy of the Negrín Government since we became implicated in its management, and we say that it is those who labor and those who are serving at the front who should tell us just how useful the CNT’s participation in government power has been for them. The numerous anti-fascist prisoners will tell you whether they are happier today than they were before, when we were not in the Government. And the thousands of comrades enrolled in the Army will tell you whether they have benefited from the presence of the CNT in the Government. The agrarian Collectives and the Trade Unions will tell you whether their managerial prerogatives have been increased….

In this same report we also declared that “Dr. Negrín’s policy is not the policy of victory … the Negrín Government is not the Government that the war requires….”

As a quid pro quo for the participation of the libertarian movement in the Government, we demanded the following conditions:

Equitable distribution of food and other necessities, control over financial operations, accountability of purchasing agents and their representatives, suppression of the monopolist policy of a certain party in the military and political domains, a change in the orientation of the country’s foreign policy so that it is in accord with the needs and interests of the people of Spain, etc. We also demanded the complete cessation of the one-man, absolutist rule that characterized the Negrín government, where the boss either did what he wanted, or let other people do what they wanted, obeying only his own sovereign caprice, without listening to any reasons, without giving any explanations about anything important, not even to his own Ministers, much less to the people who reluctantly endured his rule because they were betrayed by their leaders.

We were asking the leopard to change his spots! In May 1937, the leaders of the CNT had characterized the Negrín Government, in common accord with the entire libertarian movement, as a “government of the counterrevolution”. A few months later, when the counterrevolution was no longer just a tendency but a generalized reality, only a very few of us remained faithful to our convictions. And I only mention this in passing as as a possible mitigating factor to excuse our failure; by this time there were so few people actively involved in the opposition that the government could almost treat it as if it did not exist. The masses only listened to the official directives and they had been so skillfully disciplined and regimented by their responsible leaders that the latter could lie to them with impunity.

During the world war of 1914–1918 we witnessed the downfall of working class internationalism, the absolute surrender of the major working class parties and trade unions to their respective governments and to the interests of those governments in the capitalist and imperialist war.

The Russian Bolsheviks skillfully capitalized on this defeat and established an iron dictatorship in the former Empire of the Czars. We believed that our organizations, inspired by other ideals and other tactics, would never fall prey to such a deviation. Their traditional methods of struggle and the higher moral standards and revolutionary faith of their militants create a barrier to any degeneration of this kind. It was our misfortune, however, to have witnessed this spectacle: that of our beloved organizations competing in governmental zeal with the other parties and organizations, and willingly consenting to serve as mere passive tools at the disposal of that incomparable wonder-worker, Dr. Negrín.

It would seem to be a decree of fate that only restricted minorities are capable of remaining faithful to their principles and their ideals. When a select, self-sacrificing, militant minority is transformed into a mass organization of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of members, it necessarily falls into the hands of its own bureaucracy due to the demands imposed by its mere administration, and the bureaucracy gradually acts more and more in accordance with its own exclusive interest, and it no longer has even the faintest resemblance to the organization’s founders, the champions of the organization during its early days.

Is there no way to escape this vicious circle? We spent years, even generations, to instill life into a powerful instrument for progressive social struggle. When we thought it was possible, we redoubled its power by way of endless sacrifices, when the enemy did not thwart us by means of persecutions, blood and terror, but now this instrument is in the hands of the bureaucracy that had emerged from its own ranks and had become almost an enemy of its former ideals, or at least an obstacle to the realization of the very same goals to which its members owe their very livelihood.

Examine the course of development of the major working class organizations of any country, any revolutionary party or movement, and you will always note the moral and ideological distance that separates the founders from the functionaries who take advantage of the previous efforts and sacrifices of others.

The fact that we must acknowledge our isolation during the revolution and the war in Spain is not something we are proud of; to the contrary, it makes us feel a profound sense of personal tragedy. If we underestimate the number of people who shared our views about putting the interests of the Spanish people ahead of the particular interests of parties and organizations and, most importantly, above those of a gang of unscrupulous adventurers, it is only to try to get the magnificent ordinary people who compose the foundation and the basis of our revolutionary movement to come to their senses and affirm, on the basis of the terrible experiences they have endured, their will to survive.

There can be no doubt about the fact that one of the first steps of this affirmation would be to repudiate the course that had been passively followed, because they had been deceived, by the masses of the membership, and actively pursued by their bureaucracy, which had regardless of their intentions become the lackeys of Fortune’s favorite, Dr. Negrín. Then you also have to seriously rethink the question of whether a democratic regime of administration and planning for a large collectivity is applicable to large working class organizations in times of war as well as of peace, or whether this is mere sophistry, a concept that is illogical and inapplicable during periods that experience a certain degree of turbulence. This is not the place for a digression on these matters. If, however, the democratic mechanism of planning and administration is forced to stop functioning, then there is always a risk that we could lose in a few years what took us decades, of labor, of effort and struggle to achieve when we were not at war.

On August 11, 1938, Negrín resubmitted some of his proposed decrees for the approval of his Ministers, decrees that had already been rejected for various reasons. One of them concerned the Justice System, and another involved the war industries. Both of them were intended to undermine regional autonomy, without any benefits for the war, and their only purpose was to increase the authority of the central State and to reinforce the rule of the agents of Russia. Two Ministers, Jaime Aiguadé and Manuel Irujo, the former Catalonian, the latter Basque, submitted their resignations. President Azaña most adamantly refused to sign the decree concerning the Justice System.

As soon as we were informed about the contents of these decrees, we drafted the following statement, and sent a copy to all the political sectors, to the press and to the members of the Cabinet:

The position of the Peninsular Committee of the FAI with regard to the current political situation.

The war for independence that we have been waging for more than two years against the allied powers of international fascism cannot be used as a reason or an alibi for constant retreats on the political front, and this is all the more true insofar as Spanish history itself shows us how, during the most turbulent periods with regard to both domestic and international affairs, we attained the most admirable levels of political, moral and intellectual progress. Our first war of independence against the previously invincible armies of Napoleon featured the awakening of the people and of the forces of progress to the consciousness of their destinies. The entire 19^thcentury, with civil wars almost from beginning to end, also entailed the destruction of absolutism and the consolidation of the constitutional system and the revolutionary workers movement. And it was precisely during the periods of the greatest domestic peace when the sinister forces of reaction ruled in the most arbitrary manner.

This war was no exception, after we amazed the world with the constructive genius of our people and with their admirable and unique preparedness to make every sacrifice at the front and behind the lines in defense of their rights and liberties.

At the Cabinet meeting held on that day, August 11, 1938, three decrees were approved, decrees that were very important because of their detrimental impact on the liberties of the people, and because they constitute an attack against democratic institutions and structures created by the people themselves which formed a minimal defense against certain all-too-obvious trends toward a party dictatorship….

Later in the text we referred to the content of the decrees, or at least as much of their content as had come to our attention, and we said, with respect to one of them:

The decree authorizes the central state to confiscate all war industries, with special reference to the war industries of Catalonia, which were the unprecedented and unparalleled creations of the people themselves, and which are largely responsible for the fact that our militiamen and our soldiers can continue to resist the fascists at the front. Besides the fact that this decree might very well entail an unjustified injury to legitimate feelings, as workers and as revolutionaries we emphasize the fact that it constitutes an assault on certain industries, industries that can be exhibited with pride by libertarian workers, without any assurances that in the new administration they would operate more effectively than other industries that are now under the control of the State, which do not offer very encouraging examples.

Having examined the situation, the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, the exponent of an idea and a movement that are deeply rooted in the history of Spain, an organization which, without assuming any responsibility in the government, has up until now proven that it knows how to sacrifice what can be sacrificed to the supreme objective of winning the war, declares that:

1. The decrees approved by the Cabinet on August 11 constitute an attack on the liberties and the rights of the Spanish people.

2. We call upon all the parties and organizations for whom the general interest is more important than their own individual ambitions, to express their repudiation of the policy embodied in these decrees.

Shortly after the announcement of the Cabinet crisis, an alarming notice from the Military Investigation Service [Servicio de Investigación Militar] was sent to the parties and organizations of the Popular Front, warning them of an impending rebel uprising in loyalist Spain. We immediately denounced this clumsy political subterfuge, which in a different, more dignified environment would have produced an effect that was the opposite of what its perpetrators would have hoped for, but in the prevailing technical environment of the cowardice of parties and organizations, it had the effect of a powerful sedative.

This alarming notice was immediately followed by an unusual display of force, with armored assault vehicles being driven through the streets of Barcelona, the deployment of strong contingents of carabineros, air force planes flying over the city, military occupation of streets and highways, etc. While these things were taking place in Barcelona, the Prime Minister took advantage of the situation to leave for one of his numerous vacations in foreign countries.

The efforts we undertook during the days of the crisis to influence the superior committees of the libertarian movement, which had insisted on having a powerless Minister in the Negrín Cabinet, a Minister who was chosen by Negrín himself and who was neither consulted nor even informed about matters of vital interest, are indescribable.

The avalanche of reasons, reports, and data that we generated in an attempt to make them understand just how harmful to our interests our collaboration in such a government really was and just how entirely unfit that government was for the purpose of bringing the war to an honorable conclusion, should have made even those who were disinclined to thinking reflect a little more. We achieved nothing, however. We were told right from the start that, regardless of our reasons, no changes would be made in their position.

The CNT, or the ostensible representatives of the CNT, upheld their commitment to their Thirteen Points, despite all the humiliations that they had to undergo even as the crisis was unfolding, and while the other parties and organizations were paralyzed with fear by the repressive apparatus mobilized to repress … a fictional rebel revolt in loyalist Spain. As on so many other occasions, we stood entirely alone. The crisis was resolved with the entry of two new communist or communist fellow-traveler Ministers into the Cabinet to replace the regionalist Ministers Aiguadé and Irujo, who had resigned.

Long before this crisis erupted we had attempted on various occasions to expose the nature of the Popular Front’s support for the Government. We spoke of administrative irregularities, serious financial scandals, and of the need to carefully scrutinize the tax system.

Each of these attempts was greeted with total denial on the part of all the national parties and organizations that were members of that strange Front that was formed without our participation. We nonetheless sought to temper our language, and to look for arguments that were not our own arguments, to play the role of a simple liberal party amid the total breakdown of all liberalism and of all democratic spirit. The mere idea of appearing to be connected with a government like the one that claimed to represent the people of Spain in the so-called republican zone filled us with nausea and shame. And it is not as if we were too demanding. The Negrín Government was a gang of thieves, and as this gang was becoming increasingly more submissive towards the Russians, we only became even more aware of our sense of what it means to be Spanish, and of our national pride.

I shall now provide the text of a proposal that I submitted to the National Popular Front in the name of the FAI, concerning the preservation of the democratic institutions of inspection and control over the operations of the Government.

What impudence! The job of the Popular Front was to keep its mouth shut and obey, to support the work of the government, rather than to examine and criticize it.

That was the theory of those self-proclaimed believers in parliamentarism. And was it for this that we suppressed the military revolt on July 19, was it for this that we fought against Primo de Rivera, whose dictatorship had never been even one-fourth as absolutist as Negrín’s, and whose financial probity could never even be compared with the irresponsible and secret profligacy of Mister Negrín and his team?

Our proposal, which was rejected with a categorical “this is not open to discussion”, was based on a sound principle that was endorsed by the political and trade union representatives of Spain, to the extent that Spain can be represented by parties and organizations.

Reaffirming the ultimate goals of the Popular Front to carry out the democratic revolution within the legal framework of the Constitution of the Republic, we shall allow ourselves to submit the following observations:

1. Because the Spanish Republic is, by definition, a democratic Republic, it must never be deprived of the institutions that characterize democracy, and which are determined by the Constitution, organized in accordance with the circumstances.
   In a democratic regime the control, inspection and criticism of the operations of the Government are indispensable. These rights of control, inspection and criticism were the great conquests of social, economic and political progress of the 19^thcentury in the battle against the all-encompassing claims of absolutism. And it was precisely Spain that offered magnificent examples of these conquests. The famous Constitution of 1812, unique among its kind, was born in the middle of the war for independence and one can even say that it was born under fire from Napoleon’s troops. During the most turbulent years of our civil wars, not only did the Cortes thrive, but elections were held and Constituent Assemblies were formed like that of 1837. In short, our people’s war for independence, first, and our civil wars of the 19^thcentury, second, were the seeds, not of political regression, but of indisputable democratic and liberal advances.
   Inspection, control and criticism of the operations of the government, during the periods when Spain had a constitutional regime, were always expressed by way of public opinion, the press, the right of assembly and association, and in parliamentary institutions.
   A democratic republic cannot exist without these constitutional democratic institutions. Even if the government were to be the most authentic representative of the people, democracy also calls for the inspection and control of its operations, an examination of its conduct, and the application of sanctions.
   The temporary reduction and, depending on circumstances, the suppression of individual rights and liberties, is constitutional; freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press can be restricted, although these procedures have always been resorted to, as stopgap measures and expedient resorts, by governments that were not confident of their strength and feared the expression of public opinion; but the renunciation of control, inspection and criticism of the operations of the government is equivalent to the renunciation of the democratic Republic.

2. No one doubts that the government has the right to plan its military operations in secret; but criticism of military operations that have already taken place has been an extremely important factor in every war. A French military critic states: “war is too important to leave it exclusively in the hands of the military”. A lost battle has always been followed by a more or less sweeping replacement of commanding officers, and even a change in the government for reasons of a practical nature and also for psychological reasons.
   A democratic republic cannot silence the voice of criticism without ceasing to be a democratic republic, even if during exceptional periods this criticism is only allowed to be expressed by the appropriate party and organizational institutions.
   Impunity in military affairs, or the imposition of rigorous standards only on ordinary troops, is an aberration, a new development in our war, one that has no precedent in any war or in any country throughout the 19^thand 20^thcentury up to this point.
   Military action, or a lack thereof, without the spur and the stimulus of observation, of attentive vigilance, of direct popular control or popular control exercised by way of the people’s representative institutions, cannot lead to victory, nor is it admissible in a republic like the Spanish republic that is fighting against fascism precisely because it is opposed to political totalitarianism and is seeking to reaffirm democracy, which, besides entailing an anti-fascist and anti-dictatorial mentality, is also a political regime in which the people participate in various ways in the resolution of all matters that affect their lives.

3. With regard to government finances, nothing at all is known for certain about the real situation. Operations as delicate as the purchase of arms and other supplies, the root of all abuses and of all the horrors of unbridled speculation, are now beyond the reach of any control or inspection, and the kind of criticism to which they are subjected circulates in the form of rumor, without any attribution, without knowing where it comes from or what purposes it serves.
   It is not our intention to completely root out the abuses and excesses to which these operations have given rise in every war, but we maintain that they can be mitigated. A dictatorship of the Ministry of Finance is neither constitutional nor democratic, no more so than any other kind of dictatorship; furthermore, it does nothing at all to help the war effort.
   The auditing of the regular budget and the fund for extraordinary expenditures, the assets of the Bank of Spain, the Bank of Spain’s foreign branches and also of Campsa-Gentibus (a de facto monopoly over our foreign trade) must be in the hands of all the parties and organizations that support the war. The control and inspection of the financial status of the Republic cannot be delayed without harming and discrediting all of them.
   In every war, even in the war of 1914–1918, this inspection and control were in effect. Clemenceau and Poincaré governed France during the war while being constantly assailed by their opponents. Wilhelm II had to obtain the Reichstag’s approval for war credits, and even the Russian Czar convoked a session of the Duma where, even facing every imaginable restriction, someone like Karl Liebknecht could refuse to vote for the policy of the emperor, and some of the representatives in the Duma, such as Milyukov, for example, dared to express their dissent.
   The recent Paris Peace Congress[30] has in principle approved a resolution to grant a loan to the Spanish Republic. This loan that, according to the President of the Cortes, could amount to five million pounds sterling, is in fact guaranteed by the Spanish Popular Front, along with all the Popular Fronts of all the other countries, and this obliges us to exercise control and inspection over its use.

For all these reasons, which we could multiply with precedents from every country, but which in any event are superfluous because the national Popular Front has declared its support for a democratic government, we propose the following resolution:

1. Inform the Prime Minister of the Republic, the President of the Government and the President of the Cortes, that the Popular Front, in order to more effectively render its support for the government, desires that the democratic principle of inspection and control of the government with regard to financial matters, the conduct of the war, and foreign and domestic policy should be reestablished.

2. That the Popular Front should be structured in such a way as to be able to perform this task.

We failed! The very idea of controlling government affairs, of discovering how its money is spent, of shedding light on things that so many interests wanted to conceal, produced real or feigned indignation. Once again, we stood alone against a one-hundred-percent solid bloc.

But we were speaking the language of every old-fashioned conservative senator. And even that was not enough!

We had more than enough reports to prove that it was impossible to obtain any rendering of accounts concerning government finances, and that if the Negrín Government were to have to answer for its political, economic and financial management, it would end up in front of a firing squad.

Hence, that same Government’s interest in fighting the war right up to the final disaster. We were not surprised by such an attitude on the part of those who were primarily responsible for the biggest financial collapse in the history of Spain; but was it true that all the parties and organizations were equally afraid of a little light being shed on their activities? Perhaps with the passage of time, some of the things that we could not explain back then, or now, for that matter, will be made clear.[31]

This proposal coincided with another proposal made by the Spanish Ambassador in Washington, Fernando de los Ríos, who called for the appointment of an Investigatory Committee to audit the Republic’s finances.

Araquistain explains in his letter to Martínez Barrios, the President of the Cortes, how his proposal was received. Negrín could still count on the support of the parties and organizations, the Cortes and its standing committee, from which, along with Araquistain, only Álvaro de Albornoz resigned. Either the responsibility for all of those missing billions is shared by all of them, or it is too easy for the men of our generation to allow themselves to be corrupted and bought with the money of Spain, and to sell their country at a bargain price.

If, when faced with the crimes, abuses, thefts, errors and idiocies of the Government of the Republic, we had accepted them for even a single instant and remained silent, then today we would not have the courage to make these accusations.

It is only natural that now that they are in exile, and now that the gang of thieves who preyed on the public purse have lost their privileged positions, opponents and critics of the Negrín Government are popping up everywhere, speaking in the name of every organization and party. Now the farcical and tragic policy of the Government will be condemned as it deserves … and this Government, the Government of victory, will be attributed with the well-justified merit of having liquidated the Republic in an uninterrupted orgy of the most vulgar passions.

We spoke out when everyone else kept their mouths shut, and we tried to save Spain from the shame and the indignity to which it had been led by its latest shepherds. We were unable to bring any of our proposals to fruition, because corruption had polluted everything. But we were not accomplices of the Negrín Government, nor did we remain silent about its infamies. And today we can enjoy the satisfaction of republishing material from the period when this Government was in power and took advantage of every means to silence the voices of its opponents.

On the occasion of a National Plenum of the libertarian movement, we presented a biographical sketch of Dr. Negrín, in the hope that his real personality would be revealed to the delegates and to bring him down from his pedestal of blood and filth. Wrong again! Just as someone who is in love overlooks the defects of the person who is the object of their illusions and passions, even those sectors with a real revolutionary pedigree wanted to close their eyes to the moral and political personality of Dr. Negrín.

This is how we depicted him:[32]

The fate of Spain has been placed in the hands of Dr. Negrín, and our CNT does not want to be an exception. Does this man have the kind of qualities that would merit the confidence that we have consistently refused to give to other politicians whose moral standards were so much higher and who were much more intelligent?

Negrín comes from a reactionary family. One of his brothers is a monk and one of his sisters is a nun.

That is not a crime, of course; but the truth is that his background is far from having persuaded us of his anti-fascist political credentials. Does anyone know what Negrín is thinking, what ideas he has, what goals he is pursuing?

The only thing that is public about this man is his private life, and the latter, without any doubt at all, falls far short of being exemplary or of expressing a category of higher personality. A sumptuous and abundant table, no lack of wines and liquors, and a harem as abundant as his table, complete his system.

He was awarded a Professorial Chair in Physiology on the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid, a Chair that he occupied for a few years. Was he the recipient of this award because of his knowledge or for his well-attested merits? Rumor has it that he knew how to dazzle the department’s examining committee and confuse it with his plausible eloquence. He had studied in Germany and it is possible that he was exposed to some ideas from books that were not very well known at the time in Spain. This simple fact, which in and of itself is not indicative of any particular knowledge of physiology, seems to be the key that opened the doors to an academic career. He wrote nothing, either about topics relating to his alleged profession, or about anything else. Very often he would arrive in his classroom without any idea of the lesson that he was supposed to teach, and knowing even less about it than his students. The medical students of San Carlos know that he was one of those professors who was ridiculed in class by his students because of his incompetence and his lack of interest in teaching.

He always made his way in the world with flattery, studied amiability, and personal charisma. When he joined the Faculty of Medicine, his clinical eye fell upon Dr. Recasens, an old authority figure at the university. He was so slick and ingratiating that poor Recasens fell into the net, and gradually made Negrín his personal favorite. Negrín took advantage of his status by maneuvering in the shadow of this department head in order to become a kind of master of the Faculty, engaging in intrigues, favoritism and corruption, a domain in which his true mastery must be acknowledged.

He employed the same methods at the Ciudad Universitaria. There he became the lackey of Floristan Aguilar, and in his shadow Negrín’s influence grew and he secured his position amid the affairs of this extravagant enterprise of the Primo de Rivera era.

He had no political inclinations whatsoever. He insinuated himself into the circle of a man of intellectual prestige like Araquistain, thinking that perhaps, under his wing and without any effort at all, he could acquire the culture that he lacked. He served as a kind of unpaid lackey for that writer. When Araquistain rejoined the Socialist Party around 1930, Negrín also applied for admission into the Party, not because of any socialist convictions, but in order to follow the man for whom he seemed to nourish a kind of servile worship. If Araquistain were to have joined the Patriotic Union, Negrín would have also joined the Patriotic Union.

When the Republic was proclaimed, the Socialist Party did not have enough qualified candidates for the numerous electoral slates and Negrín was listed among its candidates for Madrid Deputies. No one knew who he was except for the students of San Carlos who used to make fun of him, and, as a socialist, the future jailer of Largo Caballero was also an illustrious nobody. He entered the Cortes as a member of the Party’s contingent. And in the elections of 1936, as a Deputy for the Canary Islands, he was Vice-Chairman of the Budget Committee.

Just as he did at the Faculty of Medicine with Recasens and at the Ciudad Universitaria with Floristan Aguilar, and just as he did with Araquistain during the first few years of his intellectual and public life, so he sheltered under the wing of Indalecio Prieto and entangled the latter in his net of flattery, servile cringing and personal devotion.

When Largo Caballero asked the Socialist Party to name three men to form a government in September 1936, Prieto responded by submitting his own name, that of Negrín for Minister of Finance, and that of Anastasio de Gracia. Thus, Negrín became a Minister of State. How easy it was for a man with so few merits to rise so high in such a short time!

He is neither intelligent nor hard-working. He could not pass for being street-smart, not even in the Canarian sense, which is the worst kind.

His association with Prieto covered him like a suit of armor, and a series of incidents in which he was complicit and certain business deals with which he was associated gave him carte blanche to proceed in the Ministry of Finance. It must be admitted that he wasted no time in doing so. He had the keys to the bank and the first thing that occurred to him with regard to finance was to create a kind of executive bodyguard of one hundred thousand carabineros. We had never had so many as 15,000 carabineros, even when we had many thousands of miles of coastlines and borders, and Dr. Negrín, without any coastlines and without any borders, thought it was necessary—to enforce his tax policy?—to have an army of one hundred thousand men. The crime of those who consented to this embezzlement from the public treasury deserves the most severe punishment. And those who have, without any complaints at all, tolerated this special executive bodyguard of a social climber without morality or scruples, should also be held responsible, for their negligence or their cowardice, for this crime against the treasury and against the revolutionary conquests of the people, which was the ultimate purpose of this organized and well armed counterrevolutionary force.

His sycophants have spoken on more than one occasion of Dr. Negrín’s dynamism. Negrín is, to the contrary, a lazy do-nothing. His dynamism is exhausted in senseless hustle and bustle, in Pantagruelesque banquets and indulgence in the pleasures of harems paid for by the finances of the poor Republic to serve the recreational needs of the latest savior of Spain. This man never worked a day in his life, and his useless life is there to prove it, he is not even capable of devoting two straight hours to thinking about anything whatsoever. Furthermore, this universal and dynamic Minister needs the help of injections to pursue his lifestyle of waste and debauchery.

Intellectually, he is a nullity; morally, he is a nouveau riche who spends money on dissolute pleasures and abuses of every kind; politically, we do not know any more about him than what he has told us and what we have experienced.

Concerning every aspect of his administration one must rely absolutely on the opinion of the people around him. And he tries to surround himself with men who do not cast a shadow on him. That is how things are going in this poor loyalist Spain. Loyal to what?

This figure of calamity, and this is his real title, has implemented a policy of systematic secrecy. We repeat that his private life is the only thing about him that is public. His public life is a mystery, not just for the people who are fighting against fascism, who work for a living and pay their taxes, but even for those who serve at the highest levels of the government itself.

He is a master of the Machiavellian art of corrupting people, and it is this corruption that implicates everyone around him in power that makes possible the secret of the policy that he practices, a policy that, due to the immorality and the wasteful spending upon which it is based, can only be secret, like the art of robbing a bank. Secrecy in financial affairs, however, has no precedent in any country. Mussolini himself, Negrín’s idol, must get the Italian parliament to approve his budget proposals and vote for credits to finance his exploits. Negrín’s dictatorship is in this respect more absolute than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s, since it is neither compelled nor does it consider it necessary to render accounts to anyone, not even to its own Cabinet, for the billions of pesetas that have disappeared.

This generous policy of corrupting individuals from every political tendency made operations like the transfer of most of the gold in the Bank of Spain to Russia possible, without any conditions, and the opening of numerous bank accounts in foreign countries containing hundreds of millions of pesetas, allegedly to help future émigrés from Republican Spain.

Not even the Government itself knows all the details about these transactions. In this sense, Negrín is an innovator, since he has accomplished under the cover of the war what no governing power, not even the absolutist monarchy, was ever able to do in Spain….

When Negrín was the master of Republican Spain, and when everyone was bowing down at his feet, we said these things to induce our friends to renounce their active support, as evidenced by their presence in his Government, for a man who brought ruin and discredit upon us. There is nothing that we would subtract from our little biography. He is still living his ostentatious life on the money that he stole from Spain, and he spent a half million francs on just one trip to the United States, while half a million men, women and children are starving, abandoned in concentration camps offered by French hospitality.

Such was the representative figure of Republican Spain.

Could the war have ended differently? Isn’t all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were ruined, to be deplored, as we have pointed out?