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

The electoral pact, first urged by socialists and left republicans, had been born in the Asturias rising. It coincided with the new policy of the Comintern which called on communists to ally with non-revolutionary left-wing groups to fight the new threat of fascism in Europe. This was a two-stage plan, moderate at first, then revolutionary in the longer term.¹¹ In June 1936 the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov stated that given the present situation in Spain, ‘the fundamental and urgent task of the Communist Party in Spain and the Spanish proletariat’ was to ensure victory over fascism by completing ‘the democratic revolution’ and isolating ‘the fascists from the mass of peasants and urban petit bourgeoisie’.¹²

The Comintern controllers were hardly interested in preserving the middle class. The Popular Front strategy was simply a means to power. This was confirmed later at the Comintern’s meeting on 23 July to discuss the right-wing rising. Dimitrov warned that the Spanish communists should not attempt to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ‘at the present stage’. ‘That would be a fatal mistake. Therefore we must say: act under the banner of defending the Republic…In other words, comrades, we believe that in the present international situation it is advantageous and necessary for us to carry out a policy that would preserve our opportunity to organize, educate, unify the masses and to strengthen our own positions in a number of countries–in Spain, France, Belgium and so forth–where there are governments dependent on the Popular Front and where the Communist Party has extensive opportunities. When our positions have been strengthened, then we can go further.’¹³

Going further also meant that the elimination of political rivals was a high priority right from the start. On 17 July, just as the anarchists were preparing to defeat the generals’ rising in Barcelona, the Comintern ‘advised’ the Spanish communist politburo: ‘It is necessary to take preventative measures with the greatest urgency against the putschist attempts of the anarchists, behind which the hand of the fascists is hidden.’¹⁴

The Spanish Communist Party, as the French Comintern representative André Marty reported later to Moscow, was run almost entirely by Vittorio Codovilla (who had the cover-name ‘Medina’) and the PSUC in Catalonia by Erno Gerö (alias ‘Singer’ or ‘Pedro’), another Comintern envoy. Marty later dismissed the work of the Spanish Communist Party’s politburo as ‘terribly primitive’.¹⁵ José Díaz was the only competent member, but he was too ill with liver problems to be effective.

The largest party of the Popular Front was the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Francisco Largo Caballero, now 66 years old, had become its most radical and bolshevized leader. He distrusted the broad alliance with the Left Republicans of Manuel Azaña and allowed himself to be courted by Jacques Duclos, another Comintern representative in Spain, who had identified Largo Caballero as the most suitable leader of the Spanish working class. Not only Claridad, the newspaper of the caballeristas, but the communist press of Europe began to hail this old trade union leader as the ‘Spanish Lenin’. Yet Largo Caballero, carried away by his own rhetoric, began to alarm his new communist friends. His inflammatory and revolutionary speeches at mass meetings around Spain calling for the elimination of the middle class was contrary to Dimitrov’s policy. (Some wit at the time coined the slogan ‘Vote communist and save Spain from Marxism’.) But whether or not his speeches were the product of revolutionary intoxication or revealed his own intentions at that time, it was hardly surprising that the right, threatened with extinction by the left, should have prepared to strike back.

The influence of the Spanish Communist Party was considerable for an organization which when founded in 1921 had numbered just a few dozen militants. A decade later, at the time of the fall of the monarchy, it mustered a few thousand members. In the elections of November 1933 it received 170,000 votes and its first seat in the Cortes. But in the first half of 1936 it went from 30,000 members to nearly 100,000.¹⁶ The left needed the anarchists to vote if it was to win such a closely fought election. This time the anarchists were prepared to vote, even though it was against their principles. The only hope of getting their comrades out of prison lay with the Popular Front.