International diplomacy—British miscalculations—The events of May 1937—The war effort in danger—The political situation and military disasters

Foreign intervention in Spain’s domestic affairs is not a recent phenomenon, and it has usually come from Rome, Paris and London. Nor was 1936 the first time Germany was involved in Spain. Secret agents posing as diplomats and armed interventions have haunted us for centuries, ever since the hegemony of Spanish laws and traditions came to an end and we have been at the mercy of greed, careerism and various combinations of European powers. The French-English policy of nonintervention of 1936–1939 was a very obvious way of intervening.

Rome, with the Papacy, after the invasions of the Roman Empire, and then in the fertile alliance of Papacy and Empire; Paris with the Sun King or with the Holy Alliance, with Chateaubriand, with Thiers and Guizot; London in a thousand ways and with open or concealed methods has over the last three or four hundred years been involved in Spanish affairs, either in association with other countries or on its own.

On one occasion, Guizot confessed:

Up until very recently, the policies of France and England in Spain were unjust, as that generous country was made the victim of the rivalries and disputes of those two great powers…. But the Cabinet of Saint James and the Cabinet at the Tuileries have finally concluded an agreement concerning their conduct in Spain….

However, the fact that they reached some kind of agreement concerning the way they intervened in Spanish affairs, did not mean that they renounced intervention. How many governments have been overthrown, how many pronunciamientos have taken place, how much blood has flowed at the initiative or with the support of Paris, London and Rome!

Lord Palmerston said, during a session of the Chamber of Commons, on March 10, 1939, that he would rather see a Spanish Spain than an Austrian or French Spain. We are not aware that England has ever, during its history of involvement in our Peninsula, acted according to this principle.

The marriage of Isabel II was the culmination of a long and impassioned battle over a period of many years between Naples, Paris, Rome and London. On that occasion there was not even the slightest hint of a possible royal connection with Portugal, due to their shared fear of the possibility of the restoration of Iberian unity, which might have made the Peninsula a hotbed of prosperity and thus undermined the prospects for many festive bursts of imperialist expansion or pillage.

The France of Chateaubriand intervened in favor of absolutism in Spain and the France of Leon Blum, by declaring its policy of nonintervention with respect to the less absolutist, legitimate government of Spain, is the same France that is interested in the economic and political subjugation of Spain. From ultramontanism to socialism, the conduct of our neighbor on the other side of the Pyrenees has never changed.

To a certain extent, we were first-hand witnesses of the early stages of the Russian intervention in Spain. We were showered with praise by the Russians. The Manchester Guardian of December 22, 1936 contains an interview with Antonov Ovseyenko that is a kind of pean to our achievements, broadcast to the world. Against us, personally, he initiated a kind of persecution with banquets, promises, flattery. What did he want? We stood in the way of an intervention that went beyond what was appropriate, beyond what was implied by legitimate solidarity. He had to test our capacity for resistance. Antonov Ovseyenko and Stachevsky, together with the staff officers of the Army, Air Force and Navy, and with the industrial technicians that Russia sent us to highlight their superiority compared to the Spanish military officers and technicians, would not let us have a minute’s peace.

It was his idea to send Negrín and Prieto to Barcelona; it was at his suggestion that they contacted us. It was his idea to overthrow Largo Caballero, who once said in Catalonia that as long as he was the Head of State, the Aragon Front would not get any arms, while it turned out that the refusal to provide arms to our front was an exclusively Russian condition, as was later revealed. It was his idea that we had to give up our militias, the last major obstacle that stood in the way of his plans of intervention and of control of the war and Spanish government policy.

In an attempt to win our trust he let us have a small quantity of arms and ammunition, making sure to tell us that he had used his own personal influence to get us these weapons and that he did so because he implicitly trusted us. The weapons were inferior, antiquated and mostly inoperable. On one occasion we received a shipment of nine thousand rifles, but at his instigation we had to send them to the front along with our men.

The details of our conversations with this man are of little interest. We were alarmed to see how these men who had so recently arrived in Spain had in a very short time assumed control over Spanish affairs, and the Spanish government, as if we were merely a colony under their administration.

They were the ones who called the shots about who was to be president and what the policies of the government had to be. We had to deal with the Valencia Government to request foreign exchange and raw materials. Stachevsky cunningly told us that we could count on him to make sure that Prieto and Negrín would consent to our requests. So we had to be available to meet with him on several occasions so that he would not find our doors closed to him.

He made a proposal to us to buy the textile products of Catalonia when we were members of the autonomous government and we refused because the terms were unacceptable; he asked us to eliminate Andrés Nin and his Party and we refused to do these favors for him.

It seemed to him that we were not just putty in his hands and that we would not join the team of Russian tools like Prieto and Negrín, the first in order to get rid of Largo Caballero, the second due to his simple irresponsible adventurism, for whom Prieto had provided the ladder of his fantastic rise to power and whose hands were left free for his brilliant innovations as an economist, whose first act was to send most of the gold of the Bank of Spain to the Russians, and whose second act was to create a gigantic army of carabineros for his own private use.

We have not directly examined the forms of Italian and German intervention on the side of so-called nationalist Spain. It was quite obvious, but no more so than Russian intervention in loyalist Spain. With the difference that the other side had the justification of effective assistance, while on our side we did not get effective assistance, and the Russians controlled everything from finance to the most insignificant appointments.

The most persuasive argument for this tolerance on the part of all the parties and organizations for the annoying interference of the Russians pointed out that Russia was the only country that sent us weapons and munitions. Not for free, of course, but at astronomical prices, whether or not the materiel arrived at our ports.

Prieto himself admits[21] that he agreed to sign receipts for cargoes that never arrived in Spain and recounts, among other incidents, signing a check for $1,400,000.00 without knowing the identity of the payee, or for what purpose the check would be used. The Russian weapons were, furthermore, besides being very expensive, of poor quality, sent in small numbers, and above all distributed on the basis of a demoralizing party-based favoritism, in exchange for rendering homage to the genius of Stalin. They could not meet the needs of the war and they closed off any chance we might have had to negotiate with other countries that were hostile to Russia, and that did not look favorably on a Spain in the hands of Soviet emissaries or agents.

Our first encounter with the Russians involved a commercial deal, and from that point on our suspicions grew with each passing day. They wanted to buy our textiles, as we said, and at that time we were engaged in various negotiations to sell potash to France and England, always with the result that the small samples we shipped for testing were seized. We proposed to the Russians that they buy our potash, whose reserves could provide the wealth to finance part of the costs of the war. The ships that came to Spain from Odessa could return with cargoes of potash. Russia refused to buy our potash, arguing that it all belonged to the potash trust, in which German corporations held majority ownership. Russia showed more respect for the potash trust than for its emphatic declarations of solidarity with republican Spain. It preferred to buy the potash it needed from the trust rather than from us, although ours was of superior quality. France and England, by imposing their embargo on trade with Spain, and Russia, by refusing to buy our potash, whether with regard to raw materials or arms, all did more or less the same thing.

Russia, however, was wrong about Spain, if its intention really was to establish a long lasting intervention and not to merely work in conjunction with the German General Staff on behalf of German interests; if the Republic were to win the war, Russia’s predominance and interference, which were completely rejected by the Spanish people, would have been liquidated, even if there were enough traitors to buy their government jobs and their fleeting rise to power in exchange for an insincere profession of the Stalinist faith. The day after the end of the war would have been the first day of the liquidation of Muscovitism in Spain if the Republic were to have been victorious; Moscow’s power in Spain was unfortunately only liquidated by way of the victory of Franco, who had more luck with his allies than the Republic did with its allies.

It was not just Russia, however, that misplayed its hand in Spain; France and England did the wrong thing in a big way. And the new Great War of 1939 … is unfortunately the payback for their disastrous mistakes.

The far-reaching character of the Spanish civil war, due to the diametrically opposed aspirations of the combatants, had profound implications for international diplomacy from its very first moment. The defeat of Spanish military fascism would have had a major repercussion on European political and economic life. The war that we declared on the enemy, within our national borders, was a war for revolutionary aspirations and achievements, it was a war that dethroned the old privileged classes and destroyed the regime of the capitalist economy as a dominant regime.

A Spain in the hands of the workers, the peasants and the technicians would have been a major factor, an irresistible encouragement for the proletarian classes of every country, and a cause of instability in the economy of the old world, because Spain, on the basis of its abundant raw materials, would have been able to become an industrial power and a prosperous country, into whose orbit, as an additional historical and geographic region, Portugal would necessarily be attracted, after having undergone so many disasters at the hands of French and English dominance. And the major role that we played in these events increased the concern and the anxiety of the guardians and beneficiaries of absurd privileges.

We were very well aware of the meaning of our victory, the victory of the anti-fascist cause; that is why, as opposed to those who amused themselves with pursuing petty squabbles in the rearguard, in satisfying old grudges for past grievances, in bringing grist to the mills of our enemies in hiding or disguised as members of the organizations we thought were our allies, we never tired of repeating that first, the most important thing, the essential thing, was to win the war, and that the revolution was a natural consequence of this victory, the people in arms, that is, us.

We were in a hurry to overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of total victory, because we foresaw that a long war would necessarily be transformed into an international war, although its theater of operations was for the moment confined to Spain.

While international capitalism and statism, without any distinctions of political tendency, agreed in their aspiration to destroy our revolution in Spain, the workers of the world who sympathized with us were incapable of reaching any agreement concerning decisive action in defense of our right to control our own destinies. International diplomacy was given a free hand for its maneuvers, and isolated voices of protest were powerless to make it change its methods or its views in any way.

Within a few months we saw that we would be abandoned, just as Abyssinia had been abandoned, and just as China had been abandoned, despite the multiple international interests that were thus left unserved, and we understood that the desire to prevent a world war was what justified this passivity, even that of our own friends. But just as the old Balkan wars of 1912 had irremediably served as the incubator for the catastrophe of 1914–1918, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, on the one hand, and the Spanish war against fascism, on the other, along with the Sino-Japanese war, were the not-so-minor preludes to the coming worldwide hecatomb.

The schemes implemented by international diplomacy to utilize every means to destroy us encountered an echo and passionate support among a multitude of people whose misconceived material interests, or their old, long-held habits of political dominance, were threatened by our actions.

Although we could have done so, we never used the people’s forces as a springboard for obtaining privileged, executive positions of command; immediately having to deal with the problems of the war, we did not hesitate to assume all responsibilities, taking from the governmental apparatus the influence that had previously been exercised, in the name of often-nonexistent parties, by men who had turned their participation in government affairs into a lucrative profession.

The fear we instilled with our ascent that was indisputably supported by the people, a fear that was based on the fact that others would have immediately transformed their ascendancy into the iron dictatorship of their parties or organizations, found an outlet, timid at first, but becoming more bold with each passing day, in Stalinism’s old hatred for us, its truly irreconcilable enemies.

While we focused our attention on the war against the enemy, sacrificing everything to the war, the accomplices of a communist dictatorship, protected by Russia, became active, organized and conspired, and who, regardless of what they said in public, had only one goal: to use every means to remove us from the dominant position that we had attained via the high road of the greatest sacrifices.

While those on one side of the wall venerated Hitler or Mussolini as the supreme embodiment of an ideal of human enslavement, on the other side they rendered an identical worship to Stalin. And there we were between these two extremes, seeking to return to the sources of Spanish rights and Spanish traditions, without selling out to any foreign power.

This dissidence within the Republic was irreconcilable and not a day went by when it did not result in violence. Between February and May, more than eighty members of the National Confederation of Labor were assassinated in Madrid and its environs, the victims of the methods of the Chekas organized by the Russians. On January 7, 1937, the Barcelona newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera, revealed that sixty persons, men and women, who were members of the CNT, had been assassinated in Mora de Toledo, for no other crime than to have condemned the communists and their methods of terror and bloodshed.[22]

Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Eden, the leading figures of the public side of British policies during our war, were wrong. As dangerous as a revolutionary movement on our soil might appear to the world, Spain was not an aggressor country, with imperialist pretensions, and even if its industry and its agriculture were to be rehabilitated and expanded, it would still have to depend on the international economy and therefore on European and American markets. The solution did not consist in isolating it, nor was there any reason to fear that it would engage in aggressive expansion in quest of lebensraum.

Within the national framework, the private capitalist forms of economy would be eliminated, but fascism does not respect private capitalism, either; it either abolishes it in favor of State capitalism, or else it relegates the capitalists to the category of functionaries without any independence, that is, it attacks the very root of the capitalist economy. And a different kind of political regime and economic structure in Spain would not have implied any rupture in the European economy, because we were willing to tolerate any regime with which the other countries might provide themselves, as long as they also tolerated ours, and to maintain good neighborly relations with all the powers. First, however, we had to defeat fascism at home.

Against our wish and contrary to our intentions, we fought for the peace of Europe, for the dominance of the so-called democratic powers against their enemies, the fascist and communist totalitarian systems.

The democratic powers preferred to see the sacrifice of a million Spaniards rather than the loss of fifteen million European lives in a war that seemed to be inevitable. This was the English position, which was followed to the letter by all the allegedly democratic countries. It was not true that the sacrifice of a million Spaniards would prevent that of fifteen million Europeans, and it was not true that the sale of arms and munitions to loyalist Spain would mean war with Germany. The fascist powers were aggressive as long as they were not checked by any resistance, and later, when effective resistance was finally mobilized, it was too late to turn back the clock. The first easy victories over Czechoslovakia, Austria and Albania encouraged them to invade Poland and to unleash a generalized war.

If loyalist Spain had won the war, neither Austria nor Czechoslovakia, nor Albania, would have been occupied, nor would Poland have been invaded, and without these triggers the war that was supposed to claim fifteen million European lives would never have started. Chamberlain and Eden, Blum and Dadalier, are now reaping for their compatriots the harvest whose seeds they sowed with their nonintervention in Spain, which was furthermore a testing ground for the most audacious experiments in the methods and weapons of modern war.

Now there is talk of the right of small nations to self-determination, and the example of Finland is proudly invoked, with its early resistance against the Russian invasion. Because they did not want to grant this right to Spain, the new European war has broken out. We therefore have our reasons for grievances and resentment concerning the treatment of our people, who were scandalously delivered over to German and Italian aggressors, even though, as French military specialists recognized at the time, our defeat might complicate France’s future relations with its colonies.

The English financial elite calculated that Franco, once he had won the war, would sooner or later run into financial difficulties. Then would come the time for conditional loans, as was the case to a large extent with Italy. But the English financiers were playing with fire and no one thought they were right except for the English politicians and diplomats.

The tendency to seek to restore the monarchy in Spain is of English provenance, and if the current war does not end with the prostration of Franco-British power, and instead thwarts the German-Russian power alliance, perhaps they would proceed with their plans as they did in Greece. This will not prevent them from once again proclaiming their support for the principle of national self-determination, as in 1918, in order to discredit it later as they did with their League of Nations.

Naturally, everything could have happened just as it happened, also, because men who were astonishingly short-sighted or even just traitors with regard to the war held commanding positions in the Republic. With other men and another spirit, this game could have been frustrated.

Once we were convinced of the indifference and the abandonment to which we were subjected on the part of the so-called democratic powers, and once we realized that the best guarantee of our independence was to put ourselves in the hands of Russia, by delivering to Russia more than 500 tons of gold from the Bank of Spain, and upon seeing that all our resources were exhausted and noting the effective aid in terms of men, arms and munitions that our enemies enjoyed, all that remained was to play the game of international politics: a kind of ultimatum to England, France and Russia on the Spanish question. If, within a specified time frame they did not agree to provide us with effective aid in terms of food, weapons and munitions, the war would be irretrievably lost.

Then there was also the option of negotiating directly with Germany and Italy to end the war. At certain moments this seemed to be possible, by purchasing the withdrawal of these powers that were allied against us, at a price that might not have been welcomed by England and France. This option, with respect to our international policy, and our war policy, would have left us with free hands to speak openly and clearly to our people and to induce them to voluntarily and spontaneously make all kinds of sacrifices.

To concentrate all resistance in an almost non-existent, demoralized, badly-equipped and starving army was to make defeat inevitable. The people, outside of any regular military formations, could continue the struggle and wear down the enemy forces that had proven irresistible in their offensive maneuvers thanks to their high morale and repeated victories, and to their superior armaments. But such factors can only be effective in a conventional war; in a guerrilla war, like ours, the enemy’s air force, artillery, tanks, Italian staff officers and German advisers would be useless.

And there still remained the option of choosing some strategic positions, effectively fortifying them and then barricading ourselves in these positions, prepared for a long siege and for eventual death. The government of resistance, however, did not want to be too far from the border and the airfields.

With other men, of another kind, with a different morale, and a certain sense of responsibility, the end of war would have in any case been very different, even if the game was lost.

But let us move on to previous events that were also for the most part caused by foreign intervention in Spanish affairs: the events of May 1937. We shall confine our remarks to our participation in those events, which we experienced first-hand. Concerning the events that led up to this tragedy, and its chronology, much has been written by other authors.[23] Yet the fact that we worked hard to bring an end to that fierce conflict is less well known.

A large-scale military operation was being planned at the time whose goal was to cut Franco’s Spain into two zones. Most of the troops that would have to be assigned to this operation were already in position. Only a few more details remained to be worked out—the role to be played by the air force and the tanks, and the transfer of some battle-tested units on the Madrid Front and their replacement by new recruits—in order to increase the operation’s chances of success. At the same time, an uprising was supposed to take place in Morocco. Perhaps these maneuvers would not have been decisive in the outcome of the war, but they would have had enormous tactical and strategic consequences, and they would also have had major repercussions on international diplomacy and morale behind the lines.

The Russians refused to provide air support for the operation and it had to be aborted. Had the plan succeeded it would have signified an incontestable victory for Largo Caballero, and Largo Caballero had to be removed from power. Suddenly, a violent internecine conflict broke out in Barcelona, even more furious than July 19. This time the libertarian people’s forces were fighting against the communists and their allies. How did such a bloody struggle arise in the rearguard?

We remained on the sidelines of this conflict, for the most part, annoyed for various reasons; we did not participate in the assemblies, nor did we have official contacts with anyone, not even with our own organizations, some of whose attitudes we did not share. Suddenly the proletariat of Barcelona was building barricades, setting up roadblocks, bearing arms and organizing detachments for battle.

No one in the streets could tell us what was going on, but we considered the very idea of such fighting to be an outrage and we left the city for a small town nearby where we lived at the time. After what we saw that evening, it was impossible to remain calm. We returned to Barcelona the next day.

Hellish gunfire made it hard to travel through the city. We got in touch with the Minister of Internal Affairs for the Generalitat, Artemio Aiguadé. All we heard from him was excuses, on the one hand, and accusations directed against those who were alleged to be responsible for the fighting. We were told that there were no reasons for it. It was simply a matter of the fact that forces from the General Directorate of Security had attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange Building, in order to seize it and place it under Government control, rather than under the control of the workers and employes, who eavesdropped on compromising conversations and messages and kept their ears open to detect those who conspired against the rights of the people.

At the Telephone Exchange Building, the police units had established an improvised occupation of the ground floor, but on the upper floors the workers and employes had remained at their posts, ready to defend their positions with hand grenades and machine guns.

During our travels through the city we noted that all the parties and organizations had taken up arms. The massacre had to be stopped, at any price! We proposed that a state of emergency should be declared and that the militias should occupy the streets to restore order.

No faction would have dared to open fire on the militias, due to the consequences that such an action would have entailed. We were told that the Minister of Defense had abandoned his post and that he did not have the respect and confidence of the various political and trade union sectors, anyway. We once again drove through the city, amid incessant gunfire; our first stop was the Headquarters of the Regional Committee of the CNT and the FAI, and there we were apprized of the real reasons for the fighting and the conditions that would have to be met to stop it. In our discussions with the comrades of the CNT and the FAI, we were told that as a precondition for a ceasefire, the communist Rodríguez Salas must be removed from his position as the Director General of Security of Catalonia, and Aiguadé, of the Republican Left, must be removed from his position as the Minister of the Interior for Catalonia.

With these conditions we went to the Generalitat, only a few hundred meters away. We have never been exposed to such intense gunfire as we were that day during that short drive. But we reached the Palace of the Government of Catalonia safe and sound. We were also joined by García Oliver, the Minister of Justice, representing the Central Government, and Mariano R. Vázquez and Hernández Zancajo, representing the CNT and the UGT, respectively, who had arrived in a plane from Valencia.

We presented the conditions demanded by the libertarian organizations of Catalonia to impose a ceasefire. Companys replied that our efforts were futile, since the Government had ceased to exist, that the representatives of the CNT had forced it to disperse, and that the situation had no solution. We nonetheless obtained the agreement of the members of the Government who were assembled there to cooperate with us in our attempt to bring an end to this appalling internecine conflict. Companys was accompanied on this occasion by Comorera, one of the leading figures and masterminds of the campaign against the anarchists in Catalonia. We got the impression that he did not think that it was possible to defeat the masses in the streets and that was why he did not hesitate to abide by our suggestions.

The libertarian people’s forces dominated the outer neighborhoods, and the focal points of communist and Republican Left resistance had been reduced to a few blocks around Claris and Diagonal Streets, a few buildings on the Paseo de Gracia and on the Plaza de Cataluña, the Puerta del Angel and the building housing the offices of the Catalonian Government.

While some people spoke over the radio to the population, calling unanimously for a ceasefire, we got in touch with the Neighborhood Committees and with elements that we knew had some influence over the armed masses. Within a few hours, our intervention began to have some effect. We were determined not to abandon our posts until everyone had put their guns down. And at the Generalitat, constantly on the telephone, we stayed two days and two nights in succession, until a new Government was formed and the ceasefire had taken effect.

We admit that we were the main cause of the suspension of the fighting. Not with pride, but with regret, because as we were bringing about a ceasefire on the part of our comrades, we saw the provocations of the small centers of resistance of the communists and Catalonian republicans increase exponentially. Who had an interest in prolonging the massacre? It might have been the effect of the nervous tension that affected all of us and the shame that we all felt for the tragic incident, but we had the impression, from time to time, that the events had been skillfully provoked, and that certain sectors, and certain men, were displeased with the fact that we exercised such control over our mass following.

Was Companys working with the communists because he was afraid, or because he agreed with their policies? He had enough influence among his people, maybe even more than we had among ours, that he could have used to persuade them to cease fire and to stop the provocations. We tried to get the trolleys running again in the city, but the cars had to return to their depots or else were abandoned in the streets under a hail of gunfire from the communist strongholds and from those of the Republican Left and the Estat Catalá.

During the course of the conflict several thousand people had been detained by the various factions. The neighborhood of Sans had arrested and disarmed 600 Assault Guards and Civil Guards, and in all the districts where fighting took place, prisoners were taken into custody by the belligerent forces. Among these prisoners, our people in the downtown district had captured eight mozos de escuadra of the Generalitat.

The Generalitat, however, had also taken hundreds of prisoners, most of them from our organizations, and its representatives told us via telephone that the lives of these detainees were worth just as much as the lives of the communist or Catalonian nationalist detainees that were being held in our various strongholds. Companys presented us with a message from the Generalitat’s mozos de escuadra; this message said, more or less, that they could not be responsible for the discipline of their forces and that they would hold us responsible for whatever might happen to their eight comrades held by the people of the Downtown district. It was a threat! We already had enough reasons to be angry. We were in no mood to be threatened, especially now that we were beginning to feel regret for what we had done. With disciplined restraint, we responded to a telephone call from the coastal batteries:

“Don’t shoot; we are here. But call every ten minutes. If we don’t answer, then open fire.”

We requested an urgent meeting with Companys, Comorera, Vidiella, Tarradellas and Calvet, all of them former Ministers of the Generalitat, to decide what to do. We must have emanated a diabolical satisfaction. It was our response to the threat that Companys had just transmitted to us. We explained that the coastal batteries had their guns trained on the Generalitat, and that just one salvo would be enough to bury us all under the rubble of the building and that we were all condemned to the same fate. No one could leave, not us, or anyone else, until the fighting in the streets ends, fighting that was now the sole responsibility of the communists and sympathizers of the Ezquerra de Cataluña.

Finally, we were tired of playing a part that did not suit us, for while everyone else was avoiding taking any action at all, we had not slept for two days, marshaling all our prestige and risking it to bring about a ceasefire. A Government had to be formed that would take responsibility for resolving the situation.

Our reference to the coastal batteries had a marvelously sobering effect. While we were explaining the situation to Companys and his cohorts, we received another phone call from the commanders of the artillery of the coastal batteries, and we repeated our orders. Everyone from the big shots to the small fry imagined the rubble crashing around them. A new government was formed, with the Secretaries of the two Regional Federations of the CNT and the UGT, with the peasants and the Ezquerra. We excluded Comorera. They had no other recourse than to consent to our proposals, because otherwise they would in effect have to yield to the decisive ruling of the guns of Montjuich.

Unfortunately, as the Secretary of the Catalonian UGT, Antonio Sesé, was on his way to the Generalitat to assume his position in the government, he was shot and killed. A serious setback; but we could not consent to allow this event to nullify the agreements we had concluded. We agreed to accept Rafael Vidiella as a replacement for Sesé. And that is what happened. We thus formed the Government; so it would work as if it knew what it was doing and was capable of doing it and that it would from now on accept the concomitant responsibility.

We ordered that the eight mozos de escuadra who had been detained should be brought to the Generalitat, as a gesture of good faith. Our work at the Palace of the Government was done. But in the meantime a decree issued from Valencia transferred all authority for the maintenance of public order in Catalonia to the Central Government and appointed colonel Escobar to enforce the decree. This colonel Escobar was a man whom we thought we could trust, but he was a career military officer and he had to follow orders.

On his way to carry out his orders, however, Escobar was mortally wounded. Then a temporary substitute was appointed, lieutenant colonel Arrando; at that time, we were still trying to quell the last remnants of street fighting.

And while we were doing that, several columns of Assault Guards and carabineros were on their way to Catalonia in full battle array; their commander, colonel Emilio Torres, was a friend of ours, but not only had he been entrusted by the Valencia Government to impose order in Catalonia, but the same decree also transferred the command of the militias in Aragon to the central government, appointing general Pozas to carry out this order. When the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Defense, Juan Manuel Molina, the only cabinet-level figure to retain his position after the May events, who was working frantically to stop the militias that wanted to intervene in the fighting in Barcelona, halted a large motorized column that had been assembled on the Huesca Front to return to Barcelona, under the command of Máximo Franco, he asked for our advice about what he should do, we suddenly foresaw the total loss of Catalonian autonomy and the loss of the war as a result. There was still time to try to stop this from happening and to obtain a more favorable outcome.

It is not as if we lacked the material force. We could have sent general Pozas and his escort back to Valencia with our refusal to recognize his appointment, and we had enough time to stop the columns of Assault Guards and carabineros under the command of colonel Torres. But we lacked confidence in those who had become the representatives of our movement; we did not have a solid core group of determined, respected men to lend us a hand and back us up in an emergency. So we advised Juan Manuel Molina that he should yield possession to general Pozas of the Military Headquarters and of the command of our militias.

What a disaster! Then, after already having agreed to the ceasefire, we were told that one of the local offices of the Libertarian Youth—an art gallery—had been occupied by communists and they refused to leave. We spoke to the representatives of the Catalonian UGT. We discovered that the commander of the Carlos Marx column, José del Barrio, had been appointed general secretary of the Regional Federation of the UGT; when we called, he had already gone to bed, but we were told that we could speak to the acting general secretary in his absence, lieutenant colonel Sacanel, the Chief of Staff of the Carlos Marx column.

We therefore confirmed certain allegations that had been brought to our attention, to the effect that the Carlos Marx column, almost in its entirety, had returned to Barcelona before the May Events along with its commanders and officers, and it was when he discovered this that Máximo Franco mobilized the strong column that Molina was able to stop, after enormous efforts, in Binefar.

An Argentinian writer, González Pacheco, who had just arrived in Barcelona during the May Events, told us that when he was staying at the Spanish Embassy in Brussels he overheard a conversation of the ambassador Ossorio y Gallardo in which the latter took pleasure in assuring his interlocutor that the threat of FAI domination in Madrid had been checked and that at any time now the battlefield would shift to Barcelona itself. This information, together with the presence of various French and English warships in the vicinity of the port of Barcelona on the very same day that the fighting began, May 3, made us consider the possibility of a provocation of foreign origin. And the fact that the communists were mixed up in this provocation we were able to infer from the presence of their forces from the Aragon Front in Barcelona.

We had to react, we had to recover our lost positions. We still had the forces to do so, and, if instead of a spasmodic, disorganized uprising, we were to try to do something by directly mobilizing our forces and seizing the initiative in the struggle, as we did on July 19, any forces that the Valencia Government might send, and any maneuvers on the part of its allies, would be of little avail.

A few days later the famous May crisis of the Central Government took place. The representatives of the CNT resigned from the Government and Largo Caballero was forced to resign from his office as Prime Minister. The Negrín-Prieto Government was formed.

No matter how angry we were at the sight of the conduct of our own comrades who were serving as leaders, it was not possible for us to just stand there with our hands in our pockets. We met for an initial exchange of impressions with the general secretary of the CNT, Mariano R. Vázquez, and García Oliver. It was on the basis of these first impressions, after the recent events, that we would decide what to do. We explained our opinion about the May events; we said that we thought that the whole affair was a foreign provocation and our people were miserably dragged into the fight; once they were in the streets, however, our mistake was to have brought about a ceasefire without first having solved the problems that caused the fighting in the first place. For our part, we regretted the part that we had played and we thought that there was still time to recover our lost positions. It was impossible for us to reach an agreement, however. We were told that we had done precisely the right thing by calling for a ceasefire and that there was nothing we could do now but await further developments and adapt as well as possible to the new situation.

Then we withdrew, doubly defeated. We did not want to initiate a public campaign of opposition and we concentrated on private discussions to express our dissenting views.

A wave of police and judicial repression was then unleashed against a non-Stalinist communist party, the POUM, and against thousands of our own comrades. Despicable assassinations were committed, and we saw with our own eyes sixteen mutilated corpses of members of the Libertarian Youth of San Andrés and other districts, brought one night to the cemetery of Sardañola by an ambulance. The fact that they had been mutilated and tortured was quite evident. Their bodies bore the trademark signs of the assassins. The May events claimed no fewer than a thousand dead and several thousand wounded in Barcelona. The situation that ensued afterwards was simply intolerable. One could always count on the masses of the FAI and the CNT, but one could no longer count on their so-called responsible committees.

We met with the Russian General Consul; we had no doubt whatsoever that the whole affair had been cooked up in Moscow.

He congratulated us on our efforts during the May events. And that was just what we wanted to speak to him about. Everyone knew that without our intervention the May events would have led to very different results than expected. For our part, we were ashamed of the fact that we intervened to stop the fighting, now that we had seen the spectacle that followed. We did not need to emphasize our sincerity. Antonov Ovseyenko was fully aware of it. However, there were still thirty thousand rifles in the hands of the libertarians, hand grenades in unlimited quantities, machine guns and even artillery. And those of us who had risked our lives to bring about a ceasefire were tempted to risk them again to resume the struggle, but this time to fight to the end.

It was impossible to bear what was happening for even a minute longer! It was not yet time for the counterrevolution!

We really were angry and there was no way we could have dissimulated our state of mind. Under other circumstances we would have earnestly set about planning the offensive and defensive aspects of a military campaign. We said this to Antonov Ovseyenko, because we knew that it was in his office rather than in the offices of the alleged Republican authorities that our protests would have to be made. And we did so individually, without the backing of any organization. Antonov Ovseyenko showed signs that he understood. In fact, the anarchists could not be exterminated, due to their numbers, because of their role in the war and also due to the threat they still posed. Two or three days later, certain directives were issued from Moscow that led to the suspension of the repression, at least in the extremely provocative form that it had first assumed. Was this the result of our threats or of similar impressions?

According to all the press reports, Ovseyenko was shot in Russia because of his relations with the anarchists and the Catalonian nationalists. It seemed to us that, basically, Ovseyenko sympathized with us, that he liked us, even though, on the other hand, he was a fanatical servant of Stalin’s directives. The Spanish communists accused him of favoring our cause in their reports to the Kremlin.

Publicly, there were still no signs of internal dissent. And in order not to give aid and comfort to the enemy, we withdrew from all activity, in silence. During the Government crisis of May 1937, the CNT upheld, at least in its public declarations, a dignified and worthy position. It declared, at that time, that it could not exist side by side in equality with the communist party in any Government, because:

• The communist party had provoked the crisis;

• The communist party had not faithfully collaborated in the work of the Government like the CNT;

• The communist party did not even remotely represent the Spanish people or the Spanish proletariat to the degree that the CNT did.

A report to the membership presented by the National Committee of the CNT, discussing the meaning of the May crisis, included the following passages from the CNT’s declaration of the reasons why its Ministers resigned from the government during their meeting with the President of the Republic:

1. The CNT states clearly that it is not responsible for the current situation, and considers it, from every perspective, unacceptable and inappropriate with respect to the interests of the war and of the anti-fascist front, and disavows all responsibility for any consequences that may result from said situation.

2. That it will not offer its collaboration to any Government in which comrade Francisco Largo Caballero does not figure as Prime Minister and Minister of War.

3. That this Government must be based on representatives of the working class, in close collaboration with the anti-fascist sectors.

In the note referring to the maneuvers of Dr. Negrín in his attempt to obtain the CNT’s support for his candidacy for the office of Prime Minister, one may read such clear and forceful statements as the following:

The CNT will not collaborate, either directly or indirectly, with any Government that might be formed by comrade Negrín. Otherwise we have no quarrel with the former Minister of Finance.

It is the line of conduct he has followed since then. We did not provoke the crisis, which was so deleterious, inopportune and prejudicial for the war effort and the anti-fascist bloc. Satisfied with the loyal activity of the Prime Minister and Minister of War in the Largo Caballero cabinet, we cannot lend our support to partisan positions that demonstrate a lack of nobility and a lack of collaboration. The CNT, confident and disciplined, trusts that reflection will prevent more mistakes that would aggravate this difficult situation that was brought about by stupidity.

And the CNT’s public position was emblazoned on the cover of its manifesto: Against the Counterrevolution. The CNT to the Conscience of Spain.

The militants of the FAI had nothing to object to in this position that was so forcefully and clearly expressed. And that was the position that we expected the CNT to take. Only those of us who had withdrawn from the public life of the organization interpreted it differently, and we doubted that these words, which for the masses of the confederation comprised the only acceptable political line, would have the same value for the improvised leaders of the great organization. These leaders, in conflict with the spirit, the interests and the aspirations of the masses of workers and militiamen, after having publicly pledged their support for the policy of Largo Caballero, would subsequently enter into private negotiations with Prieto and told him that they would support him and when, despite their support, the Prieto Government also fell, they formed an alliance with Negrín that would endure until, and even after, the final defeat.

The war had entered its stage of decline and defeat. It was not possible to remain blind to the facts. When Bilbao fell into the hands of the enemy, Juventud Libre, the newspaper of the Libertarian Youth, published an article entitled, “The Fall of Bilbao Signals the Failure of the Negrín Government”. This article was reproduced in thousands of copies and distributed throughout loyalist Spain. In one of its sections, fearless in its sincerity and its truth, we read:

All over loyalist Spain we hear only one exclamation, only one shouted demand, in city and countryside: Down with the Negrín Government! Down with the Communist Party, cause of all defeats! We demand a Government based on the representation of all the anti-fascist forces that pursue a real war policy!

But the Negrín Government, despite the simmering crisis it is now facing, is trying to retain its hold on power.

The same methods used by the Republic of April 14 are now being implemented. The press is censored, radio stations are closed down, every means is used to try to prevent the free expression of the working class organizations, meetings are suspended, the Government is refusing to pay attention to the voice of the people calling for a radical change in policy that will lead us to military victory and the triumph of the revolution.

The messages sent on August 10, 1937 from the National Committee of the CNT to the Prime Minister, were worthy exemplars of the tradition of May. Perhaps they erred by being too prudent, too tolerant, and for systematically avoiding the response that was deserved by the provocateurs who were trying to erase our achievements and exterminate our men. But these documents are still, right down to the smallest details, expressive of dignity.

The National Committee of the CNT protested against the censorship imposed at the behest of the Communist Party, a censorship that allowed the publication of slanders and defamation against us, but did not allow us to respond to our accusers. It protested against the proliferation of trials of persons accused of participating in actions against the fascists in July 1936.

Every family that lost one of its members to the people’s rage submitted its denunciations and these denunciations were allowed to form the bases of criminal proceedings, without any consideration of the question of whether or not the deceased was involved with the military revolt. It was understood, however, that by bringing those who participated in the July events to trial, the revolution was also put on trial, which amounted to carrying out the work that Franco would accomplish after his victory, and after some juridical atrocities, they had to back off, for among the other discoveries that were made, the following is most striking: the punishment for irresponsible murders would have had to be imposed first of all against those who were promoting the wave of persecution, rather than against the members of any other sector.

In another letter, also dated August 10, 1937, the National Committee addressed the question of the war, and includes a document of serene and well-intentioned criticism. We shall quote a few paragraphs from it:

Ever since the current Government was formed, numerous military operations have taken place that have been characterized by constant blunders. We have not conquered even one position; instead, thousands and thousands of militiamen have fallen; enormous quantities of materiel have been lost and all of this is due to the ineffectiveness and incompetence of those who are responsible for the conduct of the war….

Referring to the Brunete campaign, the following observation is made:

This was not a military operation, but a political operation, and in war it is not possible to carry out political operations, since everyone must attend to a technique and a reality of rifles and positions that stand above all political interests….

The letter denounces extreme partisan politics, as well as the persecution of individuals in noncommunist units. Attempted assassinations, like the failed attempt to kill Cipriano Mera, and extrajudicial executions, are also mentioned, and the partisan machinations of the commissariat are condemned. In short, all the criticisms that we had been making and that we continued to make, are summarized in this letter, because none of the evils that it denounces were suppressed except with regard to their degree.

The situation was so serious that the National Committee of the CNT asked, with more than enough justification:

All of these things that are happening force us to ask certain questions. Where are we heading? Are we fighting and persevering only and exclusively to lose the war? Are all these things indicative of an attempt to sow discouragement at the front and behind the lines, to arouse misgivings among the people and to create a situation that will ultimately lead to a time when everyone only thinks about ending the war, and thus facilitating the proposals for mediation that are being pursued by certain foreign powers? (…)

Isn’t it about time to put an end to the partisan conduct of a disastrous phase, and for us to immediately prepare ourselves, all of us, to examine the situation with honor and loyalty, and reach the conclusion of drawing a line, with respect to the war, whose results would not be the disasters that have been repeated up until now, and prevent certain demanding activities from thriving, and to prevent the moment from arriving when they will have to be violently cut out, by those who cannot continue to tolerate certain people who want Spain to be turned into a country of submissive puppets of a dictatorship? (…) </quoet>

Although we did not use the same prose style, we shared these same anxieties at the time and we continued to share them, with even greater justification, after the loss of all of Northern Spain, after the splitting of loyalist Spain into two zones, and after the defeats on the Eastern Fronts, in Levante and Estremadura, seeing how all the defects and all the evils that were denounced shortly after the May events only multiplied.

With regard to military affairs, the National Committee of the CNT, in collaboration with the FAI, presented the Government with a review of the conduct of the war by the successors of the Largo Caballero cabinet. This report criticizes the campaign against Segovia, which cost us three thousand casualties out of a total of 10,000 combatants. The operations that were carried out on the Eastern Front, which were exceedingly disastrous, were subjected to a detailed analysis. The Brunete campaign, a political operation rather than a military one, which cost us 23,000 casualties and in which there were brigades that lost 70% of their fighting strength, was subjected to the criticism it deserved. The same severe, correct and well-deserved judgment was leveled against the operations on the Teruel Front, with their failures of a technical and political order. The following are some of the conclusions of this report:

1. At the time of the formation of the Negrín Government, there were 550,000 men in the duly-structured regular army, with a strike force ready to attack the enemy’s forces at their weakest points, strategically speaking.

The Estremadura campaign “was aborted because the Russian elements who were in command of the air force refused to allow the use of the latter in the campaign, in order to discredit and overthrow the Caballero Government, and this was also the cause of the fall of Bilbao”.

1. Once the attempt to attain the international objective, which was the reason for the provocation of the crisis, failed, all efforts with respect to the orientation of the war were undertaken in such a way as to give the false impression of victories that, due to their minor scope, should have been easy, but which, because of their leadership, were just so many more fiascos. Of this kind were the campaigns against Segovia and Aragon.

2. The operation on the Center Front that recently failed was yet another stupid idea, considered strategically.

1. An absence of all coordination between the operations of land and air forces.

2. Indiscipline among the commanders.

3. The Brunete campaign was an exclusively political operation that did not serve the interests of victory over fascism, but was intended to serve the interests of the Communist Party at the expense of the other organizations.

1. We must impose a radical change of course in military policy that will prevent the disaster towards which we are heading if we continue to follow this same road.

In vain do we look for any rectification of military policy, while Prieto was Minister of National Defense, or when Negrín succeeded him, that would have satisfied the doubts, observations and critical judgments of the ruling bureaucracy of the CNT.

It is true, however, that when the CNT ceased to engage in any criticism, Negrín gave the CNT, after many attempts and many humiliations, a Ministry, chosen by him, and only our voice, as an individual, and that of the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, stood firm in warning against the collapse almost throughout the entire year of 1938.

After having committed the grave error of calling for a ceasefire in May 1937, without achieving anything except consolidating the position of the Russians and their allies in Spain, I attempted to rectify my mistake by means of energetic defensive action, which was rejected as a crime in the intimate circles of the most well-known militants; and after we had once again committed the error of not responding in kind to the provocations that followed the pacification project of May, the Government should have been overthrown when Northern Spain was lost or when the bizarre campaign of Brunete was initiated and when the methods of the assassins of those who did not follow the Moscow line at the front and behind the lines were revealed.[24] There was no shortage of reasons for a rebellion of Spanish dignity against a Government that was leading us to disaster. But the complete surrender of the bureaucracy of the CNT to the Negrín Government and to the directives of the communists created a situation in which this rebellion broke out, not when there was still time to obtain some results, but only later, in the Center and in Levante, when the war was basically over. Because we understood that what took place in March 1939 in Madrid and in Levante should have taken place in Catalonia, at least in March 1938, if not in May or June 1937, we separated ourselves from all responsibility in the management of confederal affairs; but the FAI alone, without taking its fundamental dissent into the streets, was no longer capable of channeling the rebellion against the Government, which would have been extremely easy in alliance with the CNT.

We will have to answer to history for our passivity and complicity in the loss of the war, and that is why we have revealed such unsavory details as these, which cause us great pain, but which must be exposed, because the masses of the CNT do not share any responsibility for the deception of which they were the victims in the Spanish war. Their deceivers were able to bring their fateful schemes to fruition thanks to the Spanish Ministers, the Spanish political parties, the Spanish military commanders, the Spanish police, and the Spanish writers who followed their orders. The Spanish people are free of any responsibility for the disaster, but the same cannot be said for Prieto. He did not possess the audacity of Largo Caballero—who rejected the Kremlin’s interference in Spanish politics—either when he was in office, or after he had been ousted from the government.

One of the first steps taken in subjecting the country to a minority of generals, colonels, admirals, consuls, trade representatives, ambassadors, cops, etc.—who invaded republican Spain under orders from Stalin, and who, as we did not yet know at the time, were working hand in glove with Hitler—was the introduction of the international brigades.

Their creation and their admission to Spain provided the perfect argument to the Italians and the Germans to intervene on behalf of our enemies; however, while on the side of the republic the international brigades were only effective as an instrument of communist domination, on Franco’s side, Italian and German aid had the objective of military victory, and was, due to its quantity and quality, a decisive factor in that victory.

As far as we are concerned, the men who made up the famous brigades involuntarily contributed to our defeat, since they facilitated the anti-popular machinations of the Russians and of the Government that was taking orders from the Russians.

There was one fact that the Spanish revolutionaries could not ignore: we could count on the active support of many workers and rebels from every country who wanted to come to Spain and fight at our side, for our cause, which was a universal cause of freedom against tyranny. We could not deny them the satisfaction of fighting and dying with us. Many Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, etc., fought on our Aragon Front from the very beginning of the war.

However, this kind of support was one thing, and the political intentions of those who created the international brigades with recruits from many different countries, were another thing entirely. Among these recruits who came to Spain to join the international brigades, there were some who earned our respect, and many of them were simple unemployed workers who were deceived by the attractive promises disseminated by sophisticated propaganda. They had come to Spain, not to die in the war, but to make a living from it, like the mercenaries of old. As for the higher level officers and those who invented the international brigades, however, they had other things in mind.

The truth is that the Government of the Republic, in Catalonia as well as in the Center, in Levante as in Estremadura, did not have the sympathy of the people. The Russians cleverly understood that the Government could only govern by serving the people, responding to the demands and aspirations of the people. They decided that they had to hold the Spanish masses in check, discipline them and subject them to an iron central power, and change the Spanish temperament and soul. The people had fought heroically against the military revolt, but they were not a docile instrument in the hands of the Government and of the bureaucracy of the Ministry of War.

The Central Government needed a first-class instrument to impose its will. Following the advice of Russian diplomats, it allowed the entry into Spain of the so-called international brigades, under the contemptible pretext that the militias did not know how to fight or follow orders. They did not obey those whom they were supposed to obey!

The militias knew how to fight and how to follow orders just as well as the international brigades. There was one difference between them, however: the international brigades were equipped with effective modern weapons, while the people’s militias often went barefoot, were armed with primitive weapons, usually without ammunition, and they were persecuted by the constant sabotage of the centralist bureaucracy of the Republic.

We were opposed to the creation of these international brigades and we issued the order to the delegates at the border posts to deny entry to these volunteers. We were then visited by people who wasted no time coming to Spain under the sponsorship of the Russians, such as André Marty, who were trying to convince us to allow the entry into Spain of these men who wanted to fight at our side. We said that we had plenty of men, and that instead of bringing these brigades to Spain, what really needed to be done was to help us with arms and munitions; we thought that it was an injustice and a crime to stand by and watch our militiamen, whose bravery and spirit are beyond compare, left defenseless, while at the same time large units of foreign soldiers were being formed, equipped with everything they needed and given preferential treatment. We stopped more than a thousand of these volunteers at the border with France; when they were turned away from the border, they were transported by ships from French ports to Spanish ports controlled by the Government of the Republic.

On one such occasion, one of our coast guard vessels, the “Francisco”, intercepted a shipment of arms intended for these international brigades. We ordered that the ship dock in Barcelona, and when it was unloaded, we saw that its cargo was composed exclusively of inoperable and useless weapons from before the war of 1914–1918, paid for without any questions about price by the Central Government.

All of that stuff was of such poor quality that we had no objection to returning it to its owners, when they demanded that we do so. The French adventurers who served as the front for the organization of the international brigades made a killing, as we have since discovered, in their business dealings with the Government of the Republic.

We had to relinquish our control over the Catalonian militias because of incidents of that kind, skillfully distorted by the Russians, and then the so-called volunteers were allowed free passage over the territory of Catalonia.

We did not yet have a clear idea of the danger represented by these brigades that were at the disposal of the central government, and we were sure that many of their soldiers—the ones who were not mere adventurers—would not have agreed to perform the role they were to play if they had been aware of the fact that it was not the needs of the war that led to the creation of the international brigades, but a treasonous, party-centered policy and the need, on the part of those who aspired to be dictators, to have the use of an obedient strike force, since the Spanish people were insistently declaring their adulthood.

Later, when the mission they had been called upon to perform was accomplished, we expressed our opinion to many of the soldiers serving in the international brigades, and they agreed with us; but it was too late to undo the horrible damage they had unintentionally caused.

We would rather not talk about the secret prisons, and the assassinations so casually carried out against the volunteers who were not Stalinists. It would seem that the Machiavellianism of the Russians had come to the conclusion that, by taking advantage of the sympathies aroused by the Spanish revolution, they could get rid of their Trotstkyist, libertarian, and independent socialist enemies by way of the international brigades, which they would have to join to fight in Spain. To a certain degree, their conclusion would be supported by the subsequent events.[25]

We do not know how many men came to Spain to join these brigades. There might have been twenty- or twenty-five thousand. But the fact is that within a few months, and even while Indalecio Prieto was still Minister of War, most of the soldiers in the international brigades were Spaniards compelled to serve in their ranks, under the command of Russian or other foreign officers. The ranks of these brigades, which were thinned out more by desertions than by enemy fire, were filled with Spanish conscripts.

In our opinion, neither these international brigades, nor, afterwards, the creation of the formidable army of carabineros, were more vehemently opposed by any sector than by the Spanish people themselves, which no longer had any say in military policy. In official spheres, our direct action had remained without an echo and without any sequel.