The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The international commission overseeing the withdrawal of foreign volunteers was clearly shocked later to find about 400 International Brigaders in prisons in and around Barcelona, including Montjuich and the ‘Carlos Marx’ prison. Colonel Ribbing, the Swedish member of the commission reported, ‘As regards the international volunteers, they had sometimes been convicted for pure trifles, sometimes for definite and seriously undisciplined behaviour. Many stated that they were accused of espionage or sabotage; most of them protested their complete innocence.’ Even though the Negrín government had agreed to the repatriation of International Brigade prisoners as well, the commission found that there were still around 400 of them held in mid January 1939, just as the nationalists were advancing on Barcelona. This was more probably due to incompetence or bureaucratic inertia in a chaotic situation than to a deliberate attempt to leave them to the mercies of the enemy.¹⁶

The beginning of the departure of foreign communists in the second half of 1938 did not change Party policy outwardly. The Spanish communists may have been relieved that the exporters of the show-trial paranoia were returning home but this is uncertain. Spanish communist leaders later claimed that they had on several occasions argued against the orders of Moscow, not necessarily because they disliked Soviet methods, but because they considered them to be ‘premature’, as La Pasionaria put it. There is, however, little evidence of this claimed opposition in Russian files. More strikingly, there is nothing to show in the Comintern files that Dimitrov ever warned the Soviet advisers in Spain that their urge to take over the government completely was against Stalin’s policy of reassuring the bourgeois democracies.

On his return from Zurich, Negrín summoned the Cortes to a meeting in the monastery of Sant Cugat del Valle`s above Barcelona on 30 September and 1 October. The head of the government gave a speech in which he paid tribute to the soldiers who had died on the Ebro, without admitting, of course, that the plan had been disastrous. He then reviewed the governmental crisis, the relationship between the central government and the Generalitat, and re-emphasized the slogan ‘to resist is to win’. He did not mention his own secret attempts to find a negotiated solution, but proclaimed his readiness to seek an agreement with the nationalists on the basis of his Thirteen Points, even though they were clearly unacceptable to Franco.

Many of the deputies did not hide their concerns at Negrín’s designs. He had also made veiled references, which Prieto and Zugazagoitia interpreted as a threat to resign. After an adjournment in which Negrín assembled his ministers and spoke of a new governmental crisis which could be definitive, he recalled the Cortes and took up the debate again in violent terms. Faced with his hard position, opposition collapsed and the chamber gave him a vote of confidence, although this was, as Zugazagoitia later wrote: ‘without enthusiasm and out of necessity. Negrín and the parliament recognized that they were enemies.’¹⁷

The trial of the POUM leaders¹⁸ began on 11 October before the Tribunal of Espionage and High Treason, over fifteen months after the murder of Andreu Nin. Most Spanish communists realized that, although the process set in motion had to be followed through, it was unwise to be implacable. Even so, a remarkably unsubtle case was presented based on crudely forged documents linking the POUM to a nationalist spy organization in Perpignan. The communists also prepared a reserve line by adding the events of May 1937 to their charge of high treason. They claimed that the POUM had made a ‘non-aggression pact with the enemy’ so that their 29th Division could participate in the Barcelona fighting. The trials ended in something of a compromise verdict. The Republic’s reputation could not be dragged through the mud at such a moment by a show trial, so the most outrageous charges were rejected; but the POUM’s role in the events of Barcelona was used to justify imprisoning its leaders.

The onset of winter in republican Spain was bleak. Food supplies had diminished even further, industrial production was down to about one-tenth of 1936 levels as a result of raw material shortages and the lack of electricity in Barcelona. There was little fuel for heating. Cigarettes and soap had been generally unobtainable for many months. Defeatism was rife and even those who had, in desperation, convinced themselves that the struggle would eventually end in victory could not now avoid the truth. They realized that the next battle would be the last and faced the prospect with bitter resignation.