COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014

Copyright © Paul Preston 2014

Paul Preston asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007558407

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558414

Version: 2014-07-16

DEDICATION

In memory of Michael Jacobs

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

Author’s Note

1 The Creation of a Revolutionary: 1915–1934

2 The Destruction of the PSOE: 1934–1939

3 A Fully Formed Stalinist: 1939–1950

4 The Elimination of the Old Guard: 1950–1960

5 The Solitary Hero: 1960–1970

6 From Public Enemy No. 1 to National Treasure: 1970–2012

Epilogue

Abbreviations

Notes

Picture Section

Illustration Credits

A Note on Primary Sources

Bibliography

Index

By the Same Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In a sense, the origins of this book date back to the 1970s when I first began to collect information about the anti-Francoist resistance. At the time and subsequently, I had long conversations with many of the protagonists of the book, including Santiago Carrillo himself. Many of those who shared their opinions and memories with me have since died. However, I would like to put on record my gratitude to them: Santiago Álvarez, Manuel Azcárate, Rafael Calvo Serer, Fernando Claudín, Tomasa Cuevas, Carlos Elvira, Irene Falcón, Ignacio Gallego, Jerónimo González Rubio, Carlos Gurméndez, Antonio Gutiérrez Díaz, K. S. Karol, Domingo Malagón, José Martinez Guerricabeitia, Miguel Núñez, Teresa Pàmies, Javier Pradera, Rossana Rossanda, Jorge Semprún, Enrique Tierno Galvan, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Francesc Vicens and Pepín Vidal Beneyto.

Over the years, I discussed the issues raised in the book with friends and colleagues who have worked on the subject, some of whom played a part in the events related therein. I am grateful for what I have learned from Beatriz Anson, Emilia Bolinches, Jordi Borja, Natalia Calamai, William Chislett, Iván Delicado, Roland Delicado, Carlos García-Alix, Dolores García Cantús, David Ginard i Féron, María Jesús González, Carmen Grimau, Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Enrique Líster López, Esther López Sobrado, Aurelio Martín Nájera, Rosa Montero, Silvia Ribelles de la Vega, Michael Richards, Ana Romero, Nicolás Sartorius, Irène Tenèze, Miguel Verdú and Ángel Viñas Martín.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the friends who helped with documentation and who read all or part of the text: Javier Alfaya, Nicolás Belmonte Martínez, Laura Díaz Herrera, Helen Graham, Susana Grau, Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Michel Lefevbre, Teresa Miguel Martínez, Gregorio Morán, Linda Palfreeman, Sandra Souto Kustrin and Boris Volodarsky. I am immensely grateful to them all.

PREFACE

This is the complex story of a man of great importance. From 1939 to 1975, the Spanish Communist Party (the Partido Comunista de España, or PCE) was the most determined opponent of the Franco regime. As its effective leader for two decades, Santiago Carrillo was arguably the dictator’s most consistent left-wing enemy. Whether Franco was concerned about the left-wing opposition is another question. However, the lack of a comparable figure in either the anarchist or Socialist movements means that the title belongs indisputably to Carrillo.

Carrillo’s was a life of markedly different and apparently contradictory phases. In the first half of his political career, in Spain and in exile, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, Santiago Carrillo was admired by many on the left as a revolutionary and a pillar of the anti-Franco struggle and hated by others as a Stalinist gravedigger of the revolution. For many on the right, he was a monster to be vilified as a mass murderer for his activities during the Civil War. He came to prominence as a hot-headed leader of the Socialist Youth whose incendiary rhetoric contributed in no small measure to the revolutionary events of October 1934. After sixteen months in prison, he abandoned, and betrayed, the Socialist Party by taking its youth movement into the Communist Party. This ‘dowry’ and his unquestioning loyalty to Moscow were rewarded during the Civil War by rapid promotion within the Communist ranks. Not yet twenty-two years old, he became public order chief in the besieged Spanish capital and acquired enduring notoriety for his alleged role in the episodes known collectively as Paracuellos, the elimination of right-wing prisoners. After the war, he was a faithful apparatchik, who by dint of skill and ruthless ambition rose to the leadership of the Communist Party.

Then, in the course of the second half of his political career, from the mid-1970s until his death in 2012, he came to be seen as a national treasure because of his contribution to the restoration of democracy. From his return to Spain in 1976 until 1981, his skills, honed in the internal power struggles of the PCE, were applied in the national political arena. During the early years of the transition, it appeared as if the interests of the PCE coincided with those of the population. He would be canonized as a crucial pillar of Spanish democracy as a result of his moderation then. He was particularly lauded for his bravery on the night of 23 February 1981 when the Spanish parliament was seized as part of a failed military coup. After that time, his role reverted to that of Party leader and he was undone by generational conflict. Between 1981 and 1985, he presided over the destruction of the Communist Party, which he had spent forty years shaping in his own image. Accordingly, in later life and on his death, he was the object of many tributes and accolades from members of the Spanish establishment ranging from the King to right-wing heavyweights.

The chequered nature of Carrillo’s political career poses the question of whether he was simply a cynical and clever chameleon. In 1974, denying the existence of a personality cult within the PCE, he proclaimed: ‘I will never permit propaganda being made about myself.’1 Then, in an interview given two years later, he announced: ‘I will never write my memoirs because a politician cannot tell the truth.’2 He had already contradicted the first of these denials by dint of speeches and internal Party reports in which he constructed the myth of a selfless fighter for democracy. Then, in his last four decades, he propagated numerous accounts of his life in countless interviews, in more than ten of the many books that he wrote himself and in two others that he dictated.3 In this regard, he shared with Franco a dedication to the constant rewriting and improving of his own life story.

Accordingly, this account of a fascinating life differs significantly from the many versions produced by the man himself which are contrasted here with copious documentation and the interpretations of friends and enemies. There can be little here about Carrillo’s personal life. From the time that he entered employment at the printing works of the Socialist Party aged thirteen until his retirement from active politics in 1991, he seems not to have had much of one. Certainly, his life was dominated by his political activity, but he surrounded accounts about his existence outside politics with a web of contradictory statements and downright untruth.4 Despite his apparent gregariousness and loquacity, this is the story of a solitary man. One by one he turned on those who helped him: Largo Caballero, his father Wenceslao Carrillo, Segundo Serrano Poncela, Francisco Antón, Fernando Claudín, Jorge Semprún, Pilar Brabo, Manuel Azcárate, Ignacio Gallego – the list is very long. In his anxiety for advancement, he was always ready to betray or denounce comrades. Such ruthlessness was another characteristic that he shared with Franco. What will become clear is that Carrillo had certain qualities in abundance – a capacity for hard work, stamina and endurance, writing and oratorical skills, intelligence and cunning. Unfortunately, what will become equally clear is that honesty and loyalty were not among them.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Although I hope the context always makes the meaning clear, I have used the word ‘guerrilla’ in its original Spanish meaning.

The Spanish word does not mean, as in English usage, ‘a guerrilla fighter’, but rather something closer to ‘campaign of guerrilla warfare’. See here: ‘On 20 September, Pasionaria herself had published a declaration hailing the guerrilla as the way to spark an uprising in Spain.’ For the guerrilla fighters themselves, I have used the singular guerrillero or the plural guerrilleros.

1
The Creation of a Revolutionary: 1915–1934

Santiago Carrillo was born on 18 January 1915 to a working-class family in Gijón on Spain’s northern coast. His grandfather, his father and his uncles all earned their living as metalworkers in the Orueta factory. Prior to her marriage, his mother, Rosalía Solares, was a seamstress. His father Wenceslao Carrillo was a prominent trade unionist and member of the Socialist Party who made every effort to help his son follow in his footsteps. As secretary of the Asturian metalworkers’ union, Wenceslao had been imprisoned after the revolutionary strike of August 1917. Indeed, Santiago claimed later that his most profound memory of his father was seeing him regularly being taken away by Civil Guards from the family home. It was there, and later in Madrid, that he grew up within a warm and affectionate extended family in an atmosphere soaked in a sense of the class struggle. Such a childhood would help account for the impregnable self-confidence that was always to underlie his career. He asserted in his memoirs that family was always tremendously important to him.1 That, however, would not account for the viciousness with which he renounced in father in 1939. Then, as throughout his life, at least until his withdrawal from the Communist Party in the mid-1980s, political loyalties and ambition would count for far more than family.

Santiago was one of seven children, two of whom died very young. His brother Roberto died during a smallpox epidemic in Gijón that Santiago managed to survive unscathed thanks to the efforts of his paternal grandmother, who slept in the same bed to stop him scratching his spots. A younger sister, Marguerita, died of meningitis only two months after being born. A brother born subsequently was also named Roberto. Coming from a left-wing family, Santiago was not short of rebellious tendencies and, perhaps inevitably, they were exacerbated when he attended Catholic primary school. By then the family had moved to Avilés, 12 miles west of Gijón. For an inadvertent blasphemy, he was obliged to spend an hour kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross while holding extremely heavy books in each hand. In reaction to the bigotry of his teachers, his parents took him out of the school. Shortly afterwards, the local workers’ centre opened, in the attic of its headquarters, a small school for the children of trade union members. A non-religious teacher was difficult to find and the task fell to a hunchbacked municipal street-sweeper who happened to be slightly more cultured than most of his comrades. Carrillo later remembered with regret the cruel mockery to which he and his fellow urchins subjected the poor man.

Not long afterwards, in early 1924, with Wenceslao now both a full-time trade union official of the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores) and writing for El Socialista, the newspaper of the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or PSOE), the family moved to Madrid. There, on the exiguous salary that the UGT could afford to pay Wenceslao, they lived in a variety of poor working-class districts. At first, they endured appalling conditions and Santiago later recalled that he witnessed suicides and crimes of passion. In the barrio of Cuatro Caminos, he had the good luck to gain entry to an excellent school, the Grupo Escolar Cervantes.2 He later attributed to its committed teachers and its twelve-hour school-day enormous influence in his development, in particular his indubitable work ethic. Whatever criticisms might be made of Carrillo, an accusation of laziness would never be one of them. He was also toughened up by the constant fist-fights with a variety of school bullies.

As a thirteen-year-old his ambition was to be an engineer. However, neither the school nor his family could afford the cost of the examination entry fee for each of the six subjects of the school-leaving certificate. Accordingly, without being able to pursue further studies, he left school with a burning sense of social injustice. Thanks to his father, he would soon embark on a meteoric rise within the Socialist movement. Wenceslao managed to get him a job at the printing works of El Socialista (la Gráfica Socialista). This required him to join the UGT and the Socialist youth movement (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas). As early as November 1929, the ambitious young Santiago, not yet fifteen years of age, published his first articles in Aurora Social of Oviedo, calling for the creation of a student section of the FJS. Helped by the position of his father, he enjoyed a remarkably rapid rise within the FJS, almost immediately being voted on to its executive committee. Of key importance in this respect was the patronage that derived from Wenceslao Carrillo’s close friendship with the hugely influential union leader Francisco Largo Caballero. An austere figure in public life, Largo Caballero was affectionately known as ‘Don Paco’ in the Carrillo household.

The two families used to meet socially for weekly picnics in Dehesa de la Villa, a park outside Madrid. Along with the food and wine, they used to bring a small barrel-organ (organillo). It was used to accompany Don Paco and his wife Concha as they showed off their skill in the typical Madrid dance, the chotis. This family connection was to constitute a massive boost to Santiago’s career within the PSOE. Indeed, the veteran leader had often given the baby Santiago his bottle and felt a paternalistic affection for him that would persist until the Civil War. Later, when he was old enough to understand, Santiago would avidly listen to the conversations of his father and Largo Caballero about the internal disputes within both the UGT and PSOE. There can be little doubt that the utterly pragmatic, and hardly ideological, stances of these two hardened union bureaucrats were to be a deep influence on Santiago’s own political development. Their tendency to personalize union conflicts would also be reflected in his own later conduct of polemics in both the Socialist and Communist parties.3

Santiago was soon publishing regularly in Renovación, the weekly news-sheet of the FJS. This brought him into frequent contact with his almost exact contemporary, the famous intellectual prodigy Hildegart Rodríguez, who as a teenager was already giving lectures and writing articles on sexual politics and eugenics. She spoke six languages by the age of eight and would have a law degree at the age of seventeen. Just as she was rising to prominence within the Socialist Youth, she was shot dead by her mother, Aurora, jealous of Hildegart’s growing independence.

In early 1930, the editor of El Socialista, Andrés Saborit, offered Santiago the chance to leave the machinery of the printing works and work full time in the paper’s editorial offices. It was a promotion that suggested the hands of his father and Don Paco. He started off modestly enough, cutting and pasting agency items and then writing headlines for them. However, he was soon a cub journalist and given the town-hall beat.4

The end of January 1930 saw the departure of the military dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Between then and the establishment of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931, there was intense ferment within the Socialist movement. Certainly, there were as yet few signs of the radicalization that would develop after 1933 and catapult Santiago Carrillo into prominence on the left. The issues in those early days of the Republic revolved around the validity and value of Socialist collaboration with government. In the late 1920s, just as Santiago Carrillo was becoming involved in the Socialist Youth, there were basically three factions within both the Unión General de Trabajadores and the Socialist Party. The most moderate of the three was the group led by the academic Julián Besteiro, president since 1926 of both the party and the union and Professor of Logic at the University of Madrid.5 In the centre, at this stage the most realistic although paradoxically, in the context of the time, the most radical, was the group associated with Indalecio Prieto, the owner of the influential Bilbao newspaper El Liberal.6 The third, and the one to which Carrillo’s father Wenceslao was linked, was that of Largo Caballero, who was vice-president of the PSOE and secretary general of the UGT.7 Given his junior position on the editorial staff of El Socialista, which brought him into daily contact with Besteiro’s closest collaborator, Andrés Saborit, and given his links to Largo Caballero via his father, Santiago Carrillo found it easy to follow the internal polemics even if, to protect his job, he did not yet publicly take sides.

Although extremely conservative, Besteiro seemed to be the most extremist of the three leaders because of his rigid adherence to Marxist theory. The Spanish Socialist movement was essentially reformist and had, with the exception of Besteiro, little tradition of theoretical Marxism. In that sense, it was true to its late nineteenth-century origins among the working-class aristocracy of Madrid printers. Its founder, the austere Pablo Iglesias Posse, was always more concerned with cleaning up politics than with the class struggle. Julián Besteiro, his eventual successor as party leader, also felt that a highly moral political isolationism was the only viable option in the corrupt political system of the constitutional monarchy. In contrast, and altogether more realistically, Indalecio Prieto, who was unusual in that he did not have a trade union behind him, believed that the Socialist movement should do whatever was necessary to defend workers’ interests. His experiences in Bilbao politics had convinced him of the prior need for the establishment of liberal democracy. His early electoral alliances with local middle-class Republicans there led to him advocating a Republican–Socialist coalition as a step to gaining power.8 This had brought him into conflict with Largo Caballero, who distrusted bourgeois politics and believed that the proper role of the workers’ movement was strike action. The lifelong hostility of Largo Caballero towards Prieto would eventually be assumed by Santiago Carrillo and, from 1934, become part of his political make-up.

In fact, the underlying conflict between Prieto and Largo Caballero had been of little consequence before 1914. That was largely because in the two decades before the boom prompted by the Great War, prices and wages remained relatively stable in Spain – albeit they were among the highest prices and lowest wages in Europe. As a result, there was little meaningful debate in the Socialist Party over whether to attain power by electoral means or by revolutionary strike action. In 1914, those circumstances began to change. As a non-belligerent, Spain was able to supply food, uniforms, military equipment and shipping to both sides. A frenetic and vertiginous industrial boom accompanied by a fierce inflation reached its peak in 1916. In response to a dramatic deterioration of social conditions, the PSOE and the UGT took part in a national general strike in mid-August 1917. Even then, the maximum ambitions of the Socialists were anything but revolutionary, concerned rather to put an end to political corruption and government inability to deal with inflation. The strike was aimed at supporting a broad-based movement for the establishment of a provisional government that would hold elections for a constituent Cortes to decide on the future form of state. Despite its pacific character, the strike that broke out on 10 August 1917 was easily crushed by savage military repression in Asturias and the Basque Country, two of the Socialists’ three major strongholds – the third being Madrid. In Asturias, the home province of the Carrillo family, the Military Governor General Ricardo Burguete y Lana declared martial law on 13 August. He accused the strike organizers of being the paid agents of foreign powers. Announcing that he would hunt down the strikers ‘like wild beasts’, he sent columns of regular troops and Civil Guards into the mining valleys where they unleashed an orgy of rape, looting, beatings and torture. With 80 dead, 150 wounded and 2,000 arrested, the failure of the strike was guaranteed.9 Manuel Llaneza, the moderate leader of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, referring to the brutality of the Spanish colonial army in Morocco, wrote at the time of the ‘African hatred’ during an action in which one of Burguete’s columns was under the command of the young Major Francisco Franco.10 As a senior trade unionist who took part in the strike and had experienced the severity of the consequent repression in Asturias, Wenceslao Carrillo was notable thereafter for his caution in any decision that could lead the Socialist movement into perilous conflict with the state apparatus.

The four-man national strike committee was arrested in Madrid. It consisted of the PSOE vice-president, Besteiro, the UGT vice-president, Largo Caballero, Andrés Saborit, leader of the printers’ union and already editor of El Socialista, and Daniel Anguiano, secretary general of the Railway Workers’ Union (Sindicato Ferroviario Nacional). Very nearly condemned to summary execution, all four were finally sentenced to life imprisonment and spent several months in jail. After a nationwide amnesty campaign, they were freed as a result of being elected to the Cortes in the general elections of 24 February 1918. The entire experience was to have a dramatic effect on the subsequent trajectories of all four. In general, the Socialist leadership, particularly the UGT bureaucracy, was traumatized, seeing the movement’s role in 1917 as senseless adventurism. Largo Caballero, like Wenceslao Carrillo, was more concerned with the immediate material welfare of the UGT than with possible future revolutionary goals. He was determined never again to risk existing legislative gains and the movement’s property in a direct confrontation with the state. Both Besteiro and Saborit also became progressively less radical. In different ways, all three perceived the futility of Spain’s weak Socialist movement undertaking a frontal assault on the state. Anguiano, in contrast, moved to more radical positions and was eventually to be one of the founders of the Communist Party.

In the wake of the Russian revolution, continuing inflation and the rising unemployment of the post-1918 depression fostered a revolutionary group within the Socialist movement, particularly in Asturias and the Basque Country. Anguiano and others saw the events in Russia and the failure of the 1917 strike as evidence that it was pointless to work towards a bourgeois democratic stage on the road to socialism. Between 1919 and 1921, the Socialist movement was to be divided by a bitter three-year debate on the PSOE’s relationship with the Communist International (Comintern) recently founded in Moscow. The fundamental issue being worked out was whether the Spanish Socialist movement was to be legalist and reformist or violent and revolutionary. The pro-Bolshevik tendency was defeated in a series of three party congresses held in December 1919, June 1920 and April 1921. In a closely fought struggle, the PSOE leadership won by relying on the votes of the strong UGT bureaucracy of paid permanent officials. The pro-Russian elements left to form the Spanish Communist Party.11 Numerically, this was not a serious loss but, at a time of grave economic and social crisis, it consolidated the fundamental moderation of the Socialist movement and left it without a clear sense of direction.

Indalecio Prieto had become a member of the PSOE’s executive committee in 1918.12 He represented a significant section of the movement committed to seeking reform through the electoral victory of a broad front of democratic forces. He was appalled when the paralysis within the Socialist movement was exposed by the coming of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera on 13 September 1923. The army’s seizure of power was essentially a response to the urban and rural unrest of the previous six years. Yet the Socialist leadership neither foresaw the coup nor showed great concern when the new regime began to persecute other workers’ organizations. A joint PSOE–UGT note simply instructed their members to undertake no strikes or other ‘sterile’ acts of resistance without instructions from their two executive committees lest they provoke repression. This reflected the determination of both Besteiro and Largo Caballero never again to risk the existence of the UGT in direct confrontation with the state, especially if doing so merely benefited the cause of bourgeois liberalism.13

It soon became apparent that it would be a short step from avoidance of risky confrontation with the dictatorship to active collaboration. In view of the Socialist passivity during his coup, the dictator was confident of a sympathetic response when he proposed that the movement cooperate with his regime. In a manifesto of 29 September 1923, Primo thanked the working class for its attitude during his seizure of power. This was clearly directed at the Socialists. It both suggested that the regime would foster the social legislation longed for by Largo Caballero and the reformists of the UGT and called upon workers to leave those organizations which led them ‘along paths of ruin’. This unmistakable reference to the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and the Spanish Communist Party was a cunning and scarcely veiled suggestion to the UGT that it could become Spain’s only working-class organization. In return for collaborating with the regime, the UGT would have a monopoly of trade union activities and be in a position to attract the rank and file of its anarchist and Communist rivals. Largo Caballero was delighted, given his hostility to any enterprise, such as the revolutionary activities of Communists and anarchists, that might endanger the material conditions of the UGT members. He believed that under the dictatorship, although the political struggle might be suspended, the defence of workers’ rights should go on by all possible means. Thus he was entirely open to Primo’s suggestion.14 In early October, a joint meeting of the PSOE and UGT executive committees agreed to collaborate with the regime. There were only three votes against the resolution, among them those of Fernando de los Ríos, a distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Granada, and Indalecio Prieto, who argued that the PSOE should join the democratic opposition against the dictatorship.15

Besteiro, like Largo Caballero, supported collaboration, albeit for somewhat different reasons. His logic was crudely Marxist. From the erroneous premise that Spain was still a semi-feudal country awaiting a bourgeois revolution, he reasoned that it was not the job of the Spanish working class to do the job of the bourgeoisie. In the meantime, however, until the bourgeoisie completed its historic task, the UGT should seize the opportunity offered by the dictatorship to have a monopoly of state labour affairs. His argument was built on shaky foundations. Although Spain had not experienced a political democratic revolution comparable to those in England and in France, the remnants of feudalism had been whittled away throughout the nineteenth century as the country underwent a profound legal and economic revolution. Besteiro’s contention that the working class should stand aside and leave the task of building democracy to the bourgeoisie was thus entirely unrealistic since the landowning and financial bourgeoisie had already achieved its goals without a democratic revolution. His error would lead to his ideological annihilation at the hands of extreme leftist Socialists, including Santiago Carrillo, in the 1930s.

Prieto and a number of others within the Socialist Party, if not the UGT, were shocked by the opportunism shown by the leadership of the movement. They accepted that strike action against the army would have been self-destructive, sentimental heroics that would have risked the workers’ movement merely to save the degenerate political system that sustained the monarchy re-established in 1876 after the collapse of the First Republic. However, they could not admit that this justified close collaboration with it. They went largely unheard and the integration of the national leadership with the dictatorship was considerable, the UGT having representatives on several state committees. Wenceslao Carrillo was the Socialist representative on one of the most important, the State Finances Auditing Commission (Consejo Interventor de Cuentas del Estado).16 Most UGT sections were allowed to continue functioning and the UGT was well represented on a new Labour Council. In contrast, anarchists and Communists suffered a total clampdown on their activities. In return for refraining from strikes and public protest demonstrations, the UGT was offered a major prize. On 13 September 1924, the first anniversary of the military coup, a royal decree allowed for one workers’ and one employers’ representative from the Labour Council to join the Council of State. The UGT members of the Labour Council chose Largo Caballero. Within the UGT itself this had no unfavourable repercussions – Besteiro was vice-president and Largo himself secretary general. The president, the now ageing and infirm Pablo Iglesias, did not object. However, there was a certain degree of outrage within the PSOE.

Prieto was appalled, rightly fearing that Largo Caballero’s opportunism would be exploited by the dictator for its propaganda value. In fact, on 25 April 1925, Primo did cite Largo Caballero’s presence on the Council of State as a reason for ruling without a parliament, asking rhetorically, ‘why do we need elected representatives?’17 When Prieto and De los Ríos wrote to the PSOE executive committee urging the need for distance between party leaders and the military directorate, they were told that Largo Caballero’s nomination was a UGT matter. This was utterly disingenuous since the same individuals made up the executive committees of both bodies which usually held joint deliberations on important national issues. In the face of this dishonesty, Prieto resigned from the committee.18 Inevitably, given Largo Caballero’s egoism, his already festering personal resentment of Prieto was cast in stone.19 It would continue throughout the years of the Republic and into the Civil War and would later influence Santiago Carrillo. When his own political positions came to be opposed to those of Prieto from late 1933 onwards, Carrillo would adopt an aggressive hostility towards him that fed off that of his mentor. This was to be seriously damaging to the Republic at the time and to the anti-Francoist cause after the Civil War.

Within four years of the establishment of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, the economic boom that had facilitated Socialist collaboration was coming to an end. By the beginning of 1928, significant increases in unemployment were accompanied by growing evidence of worker unrest. The social democratic positions of Prieto and De los Ríos were gaining support. They constituted just one of the three tendencies within the Socialist movement whose divisions had been exacerbated by the dictatorship. The deteriorating economic situation confirmed both Prieto and the deeply reformist and rigidly orthodox Marxist Besteiro and Saborit in their respective positions. However, as the recession changed the mood of the Socialist working masses, it inevitably affected the views of the pragmatic trade unionists under Largo Caballero. That necessarily included his lieutenant Wenceslao Carrillo. They had gambled on securing for the UGT a virtual monopoly within the state industrial arbitration machinery, but it had done little to improve recruitment. Indeed, the small overall increase in membership was disappointing relative to the UGT’s privileged position. Moreover, there was a drop in the number of union members paying their dues in two of the UGT’s strongest sections, the Asturian miners and the rural labourers.20 Always sensitive to shifts in rank-and-file feeling, Largo Caballero began to rethink his position and reconsider the advantages of a rhetorical radicalism. Since Wenceslao Carrillo spoke freely with his thirteen-year-old son, it is to be supposed that the beginnings of Santiago’s own extremism in the period between 1933 and 1935 may be traced to this period. The difference would be that he believed in revolutionary solutions whereas Largo Caballero merely used revolutionary language in the hope of frightening the bourgeoisie.

At the Twelfth Congress of the PSOE, held in Madrid from 9 June to 4 July 1928, Prieto and others advocated resistance against the dictatorship, and a special committee created to examine the party’s tactics rejected collaboration by six votes to four. Nevertheless, the wider Congress majority continued to support collaboration. This was reflected in the elections for party offices at the Congress and for those in the UGT at its Sixteenth Congress, held from 10 to 15 September. Pablo Iglesias had died on 9 December 1925. Having already replaced him on an interim basis, Besteiro was now formally elected to succeed him as president of both the PSOE and the UGT. All senior offices went to followers either of Besteiro or of Largo Caballero. In the PSOE, Largo Caballero was elected vice-president, Saborit treasurer, Lucio Martínez Gil of the land workers secretary general and Wenceslao Carrillo minutes secretary. In the UGT, Saborit was elected vice-president, Largo Caballero secretary general and Wenceslao Carrillo treasurer.21 Despite a growth in unemployment towards the end of the decade and increasing numbers of strikes, as late as January 1929 Largo Caballero was still arguing against such direct action and in favour of government legislation.22 However, with the situation deteriorating, it can have been with little conviction. Opposition to the regime was growing in the universities and within the army. Intellectuals, Republicans and even monarchist politicians protested against abuses of the law. The peseta was falling and, as 1929 advanced, the first effect of the world depression began to be felt in Spain. The Socialists were gradually being isolated as the dictator’s only supporters outside his own single party, the Unión Patriótica.

Matters reached a head in the summer when General Primo de Rivera offered the UGT the chance to choose five representatives for a proposed non-elected parliament to be known as the National Assembly. When the National Committees of the PSOE and the UGT held a joint meeting to discuss the offer on 11 August, Largo Caballero called for rejection of the offer while Besteiro, with support from Wenceslao Carrillo, was in favour of acceptance. Largo Caballero won, having changed his mind about collaboration with the dictatorship for the purely pragmatic reason that the tactic was now discredited in the eyes of the rank and file.23 Since Besteiro regarded the dictatorship as a transitional stage in the decomposition of the monarchical regime, he thought it logical to accept the privileges offered by the dictator. According to his simplistically orthodox Marxist analysis, the monarchy had to be overthrown by a bourgeois revolution, and therefore the job of the UGT and PSOE leadership was to keep their organizations intact until they would be ready to work for socialism within a bourgeois regime.24

Largo Caballero made a number of speeches in late 1929 and early 1930 which indicated a move towards the stance of Prieto and De los Ríos in favour of Socialist cooperation with middle-class Republicans against the monarchy.25 Pragmatic and opportunist, concerned always with the material interests of the Socialist movement and the maintenance of the union bureaucracy’s control over the rank and file, he was prone to sudden and inconsistent shifts of position. Primo de Rivera resigned on 28 January 1930 to be replaced for three weeks by General Dámaso Berenguer. Just at the moment that the young Santiago Carrillo was being promoted from the printing works of El Socialista to the editorial staff, the Socialists seemed to be in a strong position despite the failures of collaboration. Other left-wing groups had been persecuted. Right-wing parties had put their faith in the military regime and allowed their organizations, and more importantly their networks of electoral falsification, to fall into decay. Inevitably, the growing opposition to the monarchy looked to the Socialists for support. With the Socialist rank and file increasingly militant, especially as they followed the examples set by the resurgent anarcho-syndicalist CNT and, to a much lesser extent, by the minuscule Communist Party, Largo Caballero moved ever more quickly towards Prieto’s position. The Director General of Security, General Emilio Mola, was convinced that what he called the CNT’s ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ were forcing the UGT leadership to follow suit for fear of losing members.26

Prieto and De los Ríos attended a meeting of Republican leaders in San Sebastián on 17 August. From this meeting emerged the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, the Republican revolutionary committee and the future Republican–Socialist provisional government. The National Committees of the UGT and the PSOE met on 16 and 18 October (respectively) to discuss the offer of two ministries in the provisional government in return for Socialist support, with a general strike, for a coup d’état. The Besteiristas were opposed but the balance was swung by Largo Caballero. His change of mind reflected that same opportunistic pragmatism that had inspired his early collaboration with, and later opposition to, the dictatorship. He said himself at the time, ‘this is a question not of principles but of tactics’.27 In return for UGT support for a military insurrection against the monarchy, the Republicans’ original offer was increased to three ministries. When the executive committee of the PSOE met to examine the offer, it was accepted by eight votes to six. The three Socialist ministers in the provisional government were designated as Largo Caballero in the Ministry of Labour, and, to the latter’s barely concealed resentment, Prieto in the Ministry of Public Works and De los Ríos in Education.28

All of these issues were discussed by Santiago and his father as they walked home each day from Socialist headquarters in Madrid, housed in the members’ meeting place, the Casa del Pueblo. Inevitably, Wenceslao propounded a version that entirely justified the positions of Largo Caballero. There can be little doubt that, at least from this time onwards, if not before, the young Santiago Carrillo began to venerate Largo Caballero and to take his pronouncements at face value.29 It would not be until the early months of the Civil War that he would come to realize the irresponsible opportunism that underlay his hero’s rhetoric. Now, however, in his early teens and on the threshold of his political career, he absorbed the views of these two mentors, his father and Largo Caballero. These close friends were both practical union men whose central preoccupation was always to foster the material welfare of the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. They put its finances and its legal position, its recruitment and the collection of its members’ dues and subscriptions ahead of all theoretical considerations. In long conversations with his father and at gatherings of both families, the young Santiago learned key lessons that were to be apparent in his later career. He learned about pragmatism and opportunism, about how an organization works, about how to set up and pack meetings and congresses to ensure victory. He learned that, while theoretical polemics might rage, these organizational lessons were the immutable truths that mattered. They were to be of inestimable value to him in his rise to power within the Communist Party, within the internal struggles that divided the Party throughout the 1960s and in the transition to, and the early years of, democracy in Spain. Parallels might be drawn between the collaboration of Largo Caballero’s UGT with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s and Santiago’s own moderation during the transition to democracy symbolized by his adoption of the monarchist flag in 1977.

Apart from sporadic strike action, the Socialist movement had taken no official part in the varied resistance movements to the dictatorship, at least until its later stages. The Pact of San Sebastián changed things dramatically. The undertaking to help with the revolutionary action would further divide both the UGT and the PSOE. Strike action in support of a military coup was opposed by Besteiro, Saborit and their reformist supporters within the UGT, Trifón Gómez of the Railway Workers’ Union and Manuel Muiño, president of the Casa del Pueblo, where Socialist Party and union members would gather. Largo Caballero and Wenceslao Carrillo were firmly in favour. Santiago was an enthusiastic supporter of revolutionary action, having just read his first work by Lenin, the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which outlined the theoretical foundation for the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik Party and criticized the role of the Mensheviks during the 1905 revolution. He equated the position of Besteiro with that of the Mensheviks. He was also influenced by both his father and Largo Caballero. Inevitably, he faced an uncomfortable time in the office that he shared with Saborit at the Gráfica Socialista.30

Santiago saw his first violent action in mid-November 1930. On 12 November, the collapse of a building under construction in the Calle Alonso Cano of Madrid killed four workers and badly injured seven others. The large funeral procession for the victims was attacked by the police, and in consequence the UGT, seconded by the CNT, called a general strike for 15 November. Santiago was involved in the subsequent clashes with youths who were selling the Catholic newspaper El Debate, the only one that had ignored the strike call.31 He was also involved peripherally when the UGT participated, in a small way, in the revolutionary movement agreed upon in October. It finally took place in mid-December. The Republican ‘revolutionary committee’ had been assured that the UGT would support a military coup with a strike. Things were complicated somewhat when, in the hope of sparking off a pro-Republican movement in the garrisons of Huesca, Zaragoza and Lérida, Captains Fermín Galán, Angel García Hernández and Salvador Sediles rose in Jaca (Huesca) on 12 December, three days before the agreed date. Galán and García Hernández were shot after summary courts martial on 14 December which led to the artillery withdrawing from the plot. And, although forces under General Queipo de Llano and aviators from the airbase at Cuatro Vientos went ahead, they realized that they were in a hopeless situation when the expected general strike did not take place in Madrid.32

This was largely the consequence of the scarcely veiled opposition of the Besteirista leadership. Madrid, the stronghold of the Besteiro faction of the UGT bureaucracy, was the only important city where there was no strike. That failure was later the object of bitter discussion at the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE, in October 1932, where the Besteiristas in the leadership were accused of dragging their feet, if not actually sabotaging the strike. When, on 10 December 1930, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, one of the Socialists involved in the conspiracy, tried to have the revolutionary manifesto for the day of the proposed strike printed at the Gráfica Socialista, Saborit refused point-blank. General Mola, apparently on the basis of assurances from Manuel Muiño, was confident on the night of the 14th that the UGT would not join in the strike on the following day. Despite being given the strike orders by Largo Caballero, Muiño did nothing. This was inadvertently confirmed by Besteiro when he told the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE that he had finally told Muiño to go ahead only after having been pressed by members of the Socialist Youth Federation to take action. One of those FJS members was Santiago Carrillo, whose later account casts doubt on that of Besteiro. The fact is that none of the powerful unions controlled by the Besteirista syndical bureaucracy stopped work. The group from the FJS, including Santiago Carrillo (who had been given a pistol which he had no clue how to use), had gone to the Conde Duque military garrison on the night of 14 December in the hope of joining the rising that never materialized. After being dispersed by the police, but seeing planes dropping revolutionary propaganda over Madrid, this group of teenage Socialists went to the Casa del Pueblo at Calle Carranza 20 to demand to know why there was no strike. They got no explanation but only a severe dressing-down from Besteiro himself.33

Not long afterwards, the barely sixteen-year-old Santiago was elected on to the executive committee of the FJS. In the wake of the failed uprising in December, the government held municipal elections on 12 April 1931 in what it hoped would be the first stage of a controlled return to constitutional normality. However, Socialists and liberal middle-class Republicans swept the board in the main towns while monarchists won only in the rural areas where the social domination of the local bosses, or caciques, remained intact. On the evening of polling day, as the results began to be known, people started to drift on to the streets of the cities of Spain and, with the crowds growing, Republican slogans were shouted with increasing excitement. Santiago Carrillo and his comrades of the FJS took part in demonstrations in favour of the Republic which were fired on by Civil Guards on the evening of 12 April and dispersed by a cavalry charge the following day.34 Nevertheless, General José Sanjurjo, the commander of the Civil Guard, made it clear that he was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of the King, Alfonso XIII. General Dámaso Berenguer had been replaced as head of the government by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar. Berenguer, now Minister of War, was equally pessimistic about army morale but was constrained by his loyalty to the King. Despite his misgivings, on the morning of 14 April Berenguer told Alfonso that the army would fight to overturn the result of the elections. Unwilling to sanction bloodshed, the King refused, believing that he should leave Spain gracefully and thereby keep open the possibility of an eventual return.35 As news of his departure spread, a euphoric multitude, including Santiago Carrillo, gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to greet the Republican–Socialist provisional government.

Despite the optimism of the crowds that danced in the streets, the new government faced a daunting task. It consisted of three Socialists and an ideologically disparate group of petty-bourgeois Republicans, some of whom were conservatives, some idealists and several merely cynics. That was the first weakness of the coalition. They had shared the desire to rid Spain of Alfonso XIII, but each then had a different agenda for the future. The conservative elements wanted to go no further than the removal of a corrupt monarchy. Then there was the Radical Party of Alejandro Lerroux whose principal ambition was merely to enjoy the benefits of power. The only real urge for change came from the more left-leaning of the Republicans and the Socialists, whose reforming objectives were ambitious but different. They both hoped to use state power to create a new Spain. However, that required a vast programme of reform which would involve weakening the influence of the Catholic Church and the army, establishing more equitable industrial relations, breaking the near-feudal powers of the owners of the latifundios, the great estates, and satisfying the autonomy demands of Basque and Catalan regionalists.

Although political power had passed from the oligarchy to the moderate left, economic power (ownership of the banks, industry and the land) and social power (control of the press, the radio and much of the education system) were unchanged. Even if the coalition had not been hobbled by its less progressive members, this huge programme faced near-insuperable obstacles. The three Socialist ministers realized that the overthrow of capitalism was a distant dream and limited their aspirations to improving the living conditions of the southern landless labourers (braceros), the Asturian miners and other sections of the industrial working class. However, in a shrinking economy, bankers, industrialists and landowners saw any attempts at reform in the areas of property, religion or national unity as an aggressive challenge to the existing balance of social and economic power. Moreover, the Catholic Church and the army were equally determined to oppose change. Yet the Socialists felt that they had to meet the expectations of those who had rejoiced at what they thought would be a new world. They also had another enemy – the anarchist movement.

The leadership of the anarchist movement expected little or nothing from the Republic, seeing it as merely another bourgeois state system, little better than the monarchy. At best, their trade union wing wanted to pursue its bitter rivalry with the Union General de Trabajadores, which they saw as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. They thirsted for revenge for the dictatorship’s suppression of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo throughout the 1920s. The hard-line activist wing of the anarchist movement, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, aspired to greater liberty with which to propagate its revolutionary objectives. The situation could not have been more explosive. Mass unemployment was swollen by the unskilled construction workers left without work by the collapse of the ambitious public works projects of the dictatorship. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order. It was the trigger for an anarchist declaration of war against the Republic and the beginning of a wave of strikes and minor insurrections over the next two years.36

Needless to say, anarchist activities against the Republic were eagerly portrayed by the right-wing media, and from church pulpits, as proof that the new regime was itself a fount of godless anarchy.37 Despite these appalling difficulties, the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas shared the optimism of the Republican–Socialist coalition. When the Republic was proclaimed on 14 April, FJS militants had guarded buildings in Madrid associated with the right, including the royal palace. On 10 May, when churches were burned in response to monarchist agitation, the FJS also tried to protect them.38 However, as the obstacles to progress mounted, frustration soon set in within the Socialist movement as a whole.

The first priority of the Socialist Ministers of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, and of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, was to ameliorate the appalling situation in rural Spain. Rural unemployment had soared thanks to a drought during the winter of 1930–1 and thousands of emigrants were forced to return to Spain as the world depression affected the richer economies. De los Ríos established legal obstacles to prevent big landlords raising rents and evicting smallholders. Largo Caballero introduced four dramatic measures to protect landless labourers. The first of these was the so-called ‘decree of municipal boundaries’ which made it illegal for outside labour to be hired while there were local unemployed workers in a given municipality. It neutralized the landowners’ most potent weapon, the import of cheap blackleg labour to break strikes and depress wages. He also introduced arbitration committees (jurados mixtos) with union representation to adjudicate rural wages and working conditions which had previously been decided at the whim of the owners. Resented even more bitterly by the landlords was the introduction of the eight-hour day. Hitherto, the braceros had worked from sun-up to sun-down. Now, in theory at least, the owners would either have to pay overtime or else employ more men to do the same work. A decree of obligatory cultivation prevented the owners sabotaging these measures by taking their land out of operation to impose a lock-out. Although these measures were difficult to implement and were often sidestepped, together with the preparations being set in train for a sweeping law of agrarian reform, they infuriated the landowners, who claimed that the Republic was destroying agriculture.

While the powerful press and radio networks of the right presented the Republic as the fount of mob violence, political instruments were being developed to block the progressive project of the newly elected coalition. First into action were the so-called ‘catastrophists’ whose objective was to provoke the outright destruction of the new regime by violence. The three principal catastrophist organizations were the monarchist supporters of Alfonso XIII who would be the General Staff and the paymasters of the extreme right; the ultra-reactionary Traditionalist Communion or Carlists (so called in honour of a nineteenth-century pretender to the throne); and lastly a number of minuscule openly fascist groups, which eventually united between 1933 and 1934 under the leadership of the dictator’s son, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as Falange Española. Within hours of the Republic being declared, the ‘Alfonsine’ monarchists had met to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic particularly within the army and to establish a political party merely as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would peddle the idea that the Republican–Socialist coalition was the puppet of a sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. In the course of one month, its founders had collected substantial funds for a military coup. Their first effort would take place on 10 August 1932 and its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.39

In contrast, the other principal right-wing response to the Republic was to be legal obstruction of its objectives. Believing that forms of government, republican or monarchical, were ‘accidental’ as opposed to fundamental and that only the social content of a regime mattered, they were prepared to work within the Republic. The mastermind of these ‘accidentalists’ was Ángel Herrera, head of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP), an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about 500 prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions. They controlled the most modern press network in Spain whose flagship daily was El Debate. A clever and dynamic member of the ACNP, the lawyer José María Gil Robles, began the process of creating of a mass right-wing party. Initially called Acción Popular, its few elected deputies used every possible device to block reform in the parliament or Cortes. A huge propaganda campaign succeeded in persuading the conservative Catholic smallholding farmers of northern and central Spain that the Republic was a rabble-rousing instrument of Soviet communism determined to steal their lands and submit their wives and daughters to an orgy of obligatory free love. With their votes thereby assured, by 1933 the legalist right would be able to wrest political power back from the left.40

The efforts of Gil Robles in the Cortes to block reform and provoke the Socialists was witnessed, on behalf of El Socialista, by Santiago Carrillo, who had been promoted from the town-hall beat to the arduous task of the verbatim recording of parliamentary debates. This could be done only by dint of frantic scribbling. The job did, however, bring him into contact with the passionate feminist Margarita Nelken, who wrote the parliamentary commentary for El Socialista. Herself a keen follower of Largo Caballero at this time, she would encourage Santiago in his process of radicalization and indeed in his path towards Soviet communism.41

In the first months of the Republic, Santiago won his spurs as an orator, speaking at several meetings of the FJS around the province of Madrid. This culminated at a meeting in the temple of the PSOE, the Casa del Pueblo. Opening a bill that included the party president, Julián Besteiro, he was at first tongue-tied. However, he recovered his nerve and made a speech whose confident delivery contrasted with his baby-faced appearance. In it, he betrayed signs of the radicalism that would soon distinguish members of the FJS from their older comrades. He declared that the Socialists should not be held back by their Republican allies and that, in a recent assembly, the FJS had resolved that Spain should dispense with its army. His rise within the FJS was meteoric. He would become deeply frustrated as he closely followed the fate of Largo Caballero’s decrees and even liaised with strikers in villages where the legislation was being flouted. At the FJS’s Fourth Congress, held in February 1932 when he had just turned seventeen, he was elected minutes secretary of its largely Besteirista executive committee. This was rather puzzling since his adherence to the view of Largo Caballero about the importance of Socialist participation in government set him in opposition to the president of the FJS, José Castro, and its secretary general, Mariano Rojo.

Carrillo’s election was probably the result of two things – the fact that he was able to reflect the frustrations of many rank-and-file members and, of course, the known fact of his father’s links to Largo Caballero. Not long afterwards, he became editor of the FJS weekly newspaper, Renovación, which had considerable autonomy from the executive committee. From its pages he promoted an ever more radical line with a number of like-minded collaborators. The most senior were Carlos Hernández Zancajo, one of the leaders of the transport union, and Amaro del Rosal, president of the bankworkers’ union. Among the young ones was a group – Manuel Tagüeña, José Cazorla Maure, José Laín Entralgo, Segundo Serrano Poncela (his closest comrade at this time) and Federico Melchor (later a lifelong friend and collaborator) – all of whom would attain prominence in the Communist Party during the Civil War. Greatly influenced by their superficial and rather romantic understanding of the Russian revolution, they argued strongly for the PSOE to take more power. Their principal targets were Besteiro and his followers, who still advocated that the Socialists abstain from government and leave the bourgeoisie to make its democratic revolution.42

Carrillo’s intensifying, and at this stage foolhardy, radicalism saw him risk his life during General Sanjurjo’s attempted military coup of 10 August 1932. When the news reached Madrid that there was a rising in Seville, Carrillo – according to his memoirs – abandoned his position as the chronicler of the Cortes debates and joined a busload of Republican officers who had decided to go and combat the rebels. In this account of this youthful recklessness, he says that he left his duties spontaneously without seeking permission from the editor. However, El Socialista published a more plausible and less heroic version at the time. The paper reported that he had been sent to Seville as its correspondent and had actually gone there on the train carrying troops sent officially to repress the rising. Whatever the truth of his mission and its method of transport, by the time he reached Seville Sanjurjo and his fellow conspirators had already given up and fled to Portugal. The fact that Carrillo stayed on in Seville collecting material for four articles on the rising that were published in El Socialista suggests that he was there with his editor’s blessing.43

A close reading of the lucid prose that characterized the articles suggests that the visit to Seville was an important turning point in the process of his radicalization. In the first, he recounted the involvement of an alarming number of the officers in the Seville garrison. In the second, he described the indecision, not to say collusion, of the Republican Civil Governor, Eduardo Valera Valverde. He went on to comment on the role of the local aristocracy in the failed coup. In the third, after some sarcastic comments on the inactivity of the police, he praised the workers of the city. As far as he was concerned, the coup had been defeated because the Communist and anarchist workers who dominated the labour movement in the city had unanimously joined in the general strike called by the minority UGT. In the fourth, he reiterated his conviction that it was the workers who had saved the day, whether they were the strikers in the provincial capital or the landless labourers from surrounding villages who had readied themselves to intercept any column of rebel troops that Sanjurjo might have sent against Madrid.44

The entire experience consolidated Carrillo’s growing conviction that the gradualism of the Republic, particularly as personified by its ineffectual provincial governors, could never overcome the entrenched social and economic power of the right. His belief that what was needed was an outright social revolution was shared by an increasing number of his comrades in the Socialist Youth but not by its executive committee. Around this time, he undertook a propaganda tour of the provinces of Albacete and Alicante. He later believed that the itinerary chosen for him by the Besteirista executive was a dirty trick designed to cause him considerable discomfort. While some of the villages selected were Socialist-dominated, most were controlled by the CNT. In Elda and Novelda, heavily armed anarchists prevented his meetings going ahead. In Alcoy, he started but the meeting was disrupted and he had to flee by hitchhiking to Alicante. Such experiences were part of the toughening up of a militant.45

Yet another stage in the process took place when he was imprisoned after falling foul of the Law for the Defence of the Republic. Ironically, his mentor Largo Caballero had enthusiastically supported the introduction of the law on 22 October 1931 because he perceived it as directed against the CNT. Its application saw Carrillo and Serrano Poncela arrested in January 1933, and then tried for subversion because of inflammatory articles published in Renovación during the state of emergency that had been decreed in response to an anarchist insurrection. This was the uprising in the course of which there took place the notorious massacre of Casas Viejas in Cádiz. While Carrillo and Serrano Poncela were in the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid, anarchist prisoners were brought in. They aggressively rebuffed the attempts at communication made by the two young Socialists. Carrillo later regarded that first short stay in prison as a kind of baptism for a nascent revolutionary.46

Carrillo might have been in the vanguard of radicalism, but he was not alone. Given that the purpose of his reforms had been humanitarian rather than revolutionary, Largo Caballero was profoundly embittered by the ferocity and efficacy of right-wing obstacles to the implementation of his measures. The hatred of capitalism so powerful in his youth was reignited. Largo Caballero’s closest theoretical adviser was Luis Araquistáin, who, as his under-secretary at the Ministry of Labour, had shared his frustration at rightist obstruction. Greatly influenced by Araquistáin, Largo Caballero began to doubt the efficacy of democratic reformism in a period in which economic depression rendered capitalism inflexible. It was inevitably those Socialist leaders who were nearest to the problems of the workers – Largo Caballero himself, Carlos de Baraibar, his Director General of Labour, and Araquistáin – who were eventually to reject reformism as worse than useless. Writing in 1935, Araquistáin commented on the Socialist error of thinking that, just because a law was entered on the statute book, it would be obeyed. He recalled, ‘I used to see Largo Caballero in the Ministry of Labour feverishly working day and night in the preparation of far-reaching social laws to dismantle the traditional clientalist networks [caciquismo].’ It was useless. While the Minister drafted these new laws, Araquistáin had to deal with ‘delegations of workers who came from the rural areas of Castille, Andalusia, Extremadura to report that existing laws were being flouted, that the bosses [caciques] still ruled and the authorities did nothing to stop them.’ The consequent fury and frustration inevitably fed into a belief that the Socialists needed more power.47

By the autumn of 1932, verbally at least, Largo Caballero was apparently catching up with the radicalism of his young disciple. The scale of his rhetorical radicalization was revealed by his struggle against the moderate wing of the Socialist movement led by Julián Besteiro. At the Thirteenth Congress of the PSOE, which opened on 6 October, Besteiro’s abstentionist positions were defeated by the combined efforts of Prieto and Largo Caballero, and Largo Caballero was elected party president.48 In fact, the Thirteenth PSOE Congress represented the last major Socialist vote of confidence in the efficacy of governmental collaboration. It closed on 13 October. The following day, the Seventeenth Congress of the UGT began. It would be dominated by the block votes of those unions whose bureaucracy was in the hands of Besteiro’s followers, the printers (Andrés Saborit), the railway workers (Trifón Gómez) and the landworkers’ Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Lucio Martínez Gil). Accordingly, and despite the growing militancy of the rank and file of those unions, the Seventeenth Congress elected an executive committee with Besteiro as president, and all his senior followers in key positions. Largo Caballero was in fact elected secretary general, but he immediately sent a letter of resignation on the grounds that the congress’s vindication of the role of Besteiro and Muiño in the December 1930 strike constituted a criticism of his own stance. He was convinced that the mood of the rank and file demanded a more determined policy.49

Largo Caballero’s position was influenced by events abroad as well as by those within Spain. He and indeed many others in the party, the union and particularly the youth movement were convinced that the Republic was seriously threatened by fascism. Aware of the failure of German and Italian Socialists to oppose fascism in time, they advocated a seizing of the initiative. Throughout the first half of 1933 the Socialist press had fully registered both its interest in events in Germany and its belief that Gil Robles and his followers intended to follow in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini. Largo Caballero received frequent letters from Araquistáin, now Spanish Ambassador in Berlin, describing with horror the rise of Nazism.50

In the summer of 1933, Largo Caballero and his advisers came to believe that the Republican–Socialist coalition was impotent to resist the united assault by both industrial and agricultural employers on their social legislation. In consequence, Largo Caballero set about trying to regain his close contact with the rank and file, which had faded somewhat during his tenure of a ministry. The first public revelation of his newly acquired radical views began with a speech, in the Cine Pardiñas in Madrid on 23 July, as part of a fund-raising event for Renovación. In fact, the first part of the speech was essentially moderate and primarily concerned with defending ministerial collaboration against the criticisms of Besteiro. However, a hardening of attitude was apparent as he spoke of the increasing aggression of the right. Declaring that fascism was the bourgeoisie’s last resort at a time of capitalist crisis, he accepted that the PSOE and the UGT had a duty to prevent the establishment of fascism in Spain. Forgetting that, in the wake of the defeat in 1917, he had resolved never to risk conflict with the apparatus of the state, he now announced that if the defeat of fascism meant seizing power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the Socialists, albeit reluctantly, should be prepared to do so. Enthusiastic cheers greeted the more extremist portions of his speech, which confirmed his belief in the validity of his approach towards a revolutionary line. Serrano Poncela and Carrillo and others regarded Largo Caballero as their champion and themselves as the ‘pioneers’ of his new line. ‘The emblematic figure of Largo Caballero’ was described, in terms that recalled the sycophancy of the Stalinist Bolshevik Party, as ‘the highest representative of a state of consciousness of the masses in the democratic republic, as the life force of a class party’.51

With the FJS experiencing a growth in numbers, many of them poorly educated, it was decided in 1932 to hold an annual summer school to train cadres. The sessions were to take place at Torrelodones to the north-west of Madrid. The second school was held in the first half of August 1933 with appearances by the major barons of the PSOE. Besteiro spoke first on 5 August with a speech entitled ‘Roads to Socialism’. It was obvious that his aim was to discredit the new extremist line propounded by Largo Caballero in the Cine Pardiñas. Insinuating that it was merely a ploy to gain cheap popularity with the masses, he condemned the idea of a Socialist dictatorship to defeat fascism as ‘an absurdity and a vain infantile illusion’. Without naming Largo Caballero, he spoke eloquently about the dangers of a cult of personality – which was precisely what Carrillo and the radical group within the FJS were creating around their champion. This might have been the fruit of genuine wide-eyed admiration on Carrillo’s part, but it also served his ambition. Moreover, this approach would later be repeated in his relationship with Dolores Ibárruri, better known as ‘Pasionaria’. Besteiro’s speech was received with booing and jeers. El Socialista refused to publish it. This was a reflection of the fact that the paper was now edited by Julián Zugazagoitia, a follower of Prieto who was sympathetic to the FJS and, for the moment, loyally followed the line of the PSOE’s president, Largo Caballero.52

The following day, 6 August, Prieto spoke. His language was neither as patronizing nor as confrontational as that of Besteiro, although he too warned against the dangers of easy radicalism. While defending, as Largo Caballero had done, the achievements of the Republic so far, he also spoke of the savage determination of the economic establishment to destroy the Republic’s social legislation. Nevertheless, he called upon the 200 young Socialists in his audience who dreamed of a Bolshevik revolution to consider that the weakness of the ruling classes and of the state and military institutions in the war-torn Russia of 1917 was simply not present in the Spain of 1933. He also warned that, even if a Socialist seizure of power were possible, capitalists in other parts of Europe were unlikely to stand idly by. It was a skilful speech, acknowledging that the FJS was morally justified in hankering after a more radical line, but rejecting such radicalism as practical PSOE policy. This was not what the assembled would-be cadres wanted to hear. Prieto was received with less outright hostility than Besteiro but the response was nonetheless cool, and his speech was also ignored by El Socialista.53

Largo Caballero was not at first scheduled to speak at the summer school. However, Carrillo informed him that the speeches by Besteiro and Prieto had caused great dissatisfaction and invited him to remedy the situation. Largo Caballero accepted readily, convinced that he had a unique rapport with the rank and file. In a somewhat embittered speech, he revealed his dismay at the virulence of rightist attacks on Socialist legislation and suggested that the reforms to which he aspired were impossible within the confines of bourgeois democracy. He claimed to have been radicalized by the intransigence of the bourgeoisie during his twenty-four months in government: ‘I now realize that it is impossible to carry out a Socialist project within bourgeois democracy.’ Although he affirmed a continuing commitment to legality, he asserted that ‘in Spain, a revolutionary situation that is being created both because of the growth of political feeling among the working masses and of the incomprehension of the capitalist class will explode one day. We must be prepared.’ Just as it alarmed the right, the speech delighted the young Socialists and shouts could be heard of ‘¡Viva el Lenin Español!’ The coining of the nickname has been attributed variously to the Kremlin, to Araquistáin and to Carrillo.54

Less than a month after the summer school, on 11 September, the Republican–Socialist coalition had fallen. Largo Caballero was interviewed by Carrillo for Renovación. Among other incendiary statements, he declared that ‘we are at the gates of an action that will lead the proletariat to social revolution … Socialism will have to resort to the maximum violence to displace capitalism … It is the task of the youth movement to firm up those who are indecisive and to push aside the passive elements who are of no use for the revolution.’55 A new government was formed by the leader of the corrupt Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux. Lacking adequate parliamentary support, Lerroux was rapidly obliged to resign. He was replaced at the beginning of October by his deputy, Diego Martínez Barrio, who governed with the Cortes closed. Elections were called for 19 November.

In the run-up to the November 1933 elections, Carrillo’s editorial line in Renovación increasingly adopted an extremist rhetoric of violence intermingled with frequent quotations from Lenin. Carrillo himself wrote on 7 October that a general strike would not be sufficient for a revolution and that other ‘techniques’ were required, a veiled reference to his desire to see the workers armed.56 A voracious reader at this period of his life, he was starting to devour the more accessible works of Marx, Engels and, above all, Lenin, as well as the few works by Stalin that had been translated into Spanish. He read novels and personal accounts of the Russian revolution and was an enthusiast of Soviet cinema. In later life, he would recall his romantic view of what it meant to be an heroic Bolshevik revolutionary.57

Embittered by the frustrations of the previous two years, Largo Caballero ensured that the electoral coalition with the Republicans was not renewed and the Socialists went into the elections alone – a fatal tactical error. Intoxicated by the adulation of the FJS and influenced by the distress of the landless labourers, Largo Caballero irresponsibly blamed the Left Republicans for all the deficiencies of the Republic while confidently assuming that all the votes cast in 1931 for the victorious Republican–Socialist coalition would stay with the PSOE. There was little basis for such a belief. To make matters worse, during the campaign he alienated many of the liberal middle-class progressives who had previously voted for the coalition. His refrain that only the dictatorship of the proletariat could carry out the necessary economic disarmament of the bourgeoisie might have delighted his youthful supporters and the rural sectors of the UGT, but it frightened many potential voters.

In the course of the election campaign, the openly fascist Falange Española was launched on Sunday 29 October at the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid. Recruits were issued with truncheons (porras). In his inaugural speech, the leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, made much of his commitment to violence: ‘if our aims have to be achieved by violence, let us not hold back before violence … The dialectic is all very well as a first instrument of communication. But the only dialectic admissible when justice or the Fatherland is offended is the dialectic of fists and pistols.’58

Since the existing electoral law favoured coalitions, Gil Robles eagerly sought allies across the right-wing spectrum, particularly with the Radical Party. The election results brought bitter disappointment to the Socialists, who won only fifty-eight seats. After local deals designed to exploit the electoral law, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas – or Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups) won 115 seats and the Radicals 104. The right had regained control of the apparatus of the state and was determined to use it to dismantle the reforms of the previous two years. The President, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, did not invite Gil Robles to form a government despite the fact that the CEDA had most seats in the Cortes although not an overall majority. Alcalá Zamora feared that the Catholic leader harboured more or less fascist ambitions to establish an authoritarian, corporative state. So Alejandro Lerroux, as leader of the second-largest party, became Prime Minister. Dependent on CEDA votes, the Radicals were to be Gil Robles’s puppets. In return for dismantling social legislation and pursuing harsh anti-labour policies in the interests of the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals would be permitted to enjoy the spoils of office. Once in government, they set up an office to organize the sale of state favours, monopolies, government procurement orders, licences and so on. The PSOE view was that the Radicals were hardly the appropriate defenders of the basic principles of the Republic against rightist assaults.

Thus the November 1933 elections put power in the hands of a right wing determined to overturn what little reforming legislation had been achieved by the Republican–Socialist coalition. Given that many industrial workers and rural labourers had been driven to desperation by the inadequacy of those reforms, a government set on destroying these reforms could only force them into violence. At the end of 1933, in a country with no welfare safety-net, 12 per cent of Spain’s workforce was unemployed, and in the south the figure was nearer 20 per cent. Now employers and landowners celebrated the victory by cutting wages, sacking workers, evicting tenants and raising rents. Even before a new government had taken office, labour legislation was being blatantly ignored.

Outrage across the Socialist movement knew no bounds but nowhere more vehemently than in the FJS. Carrillo’s response in Renovación took the form of a banner headline ‘ALL POWER FOR THE SOCIALISTS’. His editorial came under the sub-heading ‘They stole our election victory’. The tactical error of Largo Caballero in rejecting a coalition with the Republicans was a key element in the PSOE’s electoral defeat, but that did not prevent Carrillo from laying the blame at the door of the Republicans. He trumpeted the general view within the party that the elections had been fraudulent.59 In the south, it is certainly true that the Socialists had been swindled out of seats by the power over the starving braceros of the local bosses, the caciques. In rural areas where hunger, insecurity and unemployment were endemic, it had been easy to get votes by the promise of jobs or the threat of dismissal. Armed thugs employed by the caciques frequently prevented Socialist campaigners reaching meetings and disrupted others. They were a threatening presence standing next to the glass voting urns on election day.

In Spain as a whole, the PSOE’s 1,627,472 votes had won it 58 seats in the Cortes, while the Radicals’ 806,340 votes had been rewarded with 104 seats. The united parties of the right had together got 3,345,504 votes and 212 seats at 15,780 votes per seat, while the disunited left had received 3,375,432 votes and only 99 seats at 34,095 votes per seat.60 In some southern provinces, such as Badajoz, Córdoba and Málaga, the margin of right-wing victory was small enough for electoral fraud to have swung the result. The bitterness of the Socialist rank and file at losing the elections unfairly was compounded by dismay at the subsequent untrammelled offensive of the employers. Popular outrage was all the greater because of the restraint and self-sacrifice that had characterized Socialist policy between 1931 and 1933. According to Largo Caballero, delegations of workers’ representatives from the provinces came to Madrid to beg the PSOE executive committee to organize a counter-offensive. Efforts were made by the Caballerista party executive to reach an agreement with the Besteirista executive of the UGT on action to block any attempt to establish fascism, to restore the monarchy or to establish a dictatorship. At a joint meeting of the PSOE and UGT executives on 25 November, Besteiro, Saborit and Trifón Gómez made it clear that the UGT executive was hostile to any kind of adventurism. A furious Largo Caballero declared that ‘the workers themselves were calling for rapid and energetic action’. Even Prieto finally agreed with Largo on the need for ‘defensive action’. Eventually, a joint committee of the PSOE and the UGT would be set up to elaborate this ‘defensive action’.61

Needless to say, the FJS was not slow with a radical rhetoric in response to the changed situation. Pushing the logic of Largo Caballero’s declarations to their logical extremes, Carrillo declared in that first editorial after the elections: ‘the proletariat knows where it stands and has understood that it must take the road of insurrection’. By the following week, the main headline in Renovación was ‘LONG LIVE SOCIAL REVOLUTION’, and Largo Caballero was quoted as saying that a social revolution was necessary to secure all power for the Socialists. Such overt militancy broadcast in Renovación and also in El Socialista led to a police raid on the Gráfica Socialista printing works and the temporary banning of both papers.62

The accentuation of revolutionary rhetoric was a response to the growing wave of militancy and, in Largo Caballero’s case, a merely verbal extremism intended to calm rank-and-file desperation. Largo Caballero’s vain hope was that his threats could both scare the right into limiting its belligerency and persuade the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, to call new elections. In Carrillo’s case, it was more genuinely revolutionary. The following – and equally provocative – issue of Renovación had to be submitted to government censorship, as a result of which it was not permitted to appear and both Carrillo and his closest ally Segundo Serrano Poncela were arrested and imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo. After a few days, they were tried for subversion but found not guilty by an emergency court. When Renovación reappeared, Carrillo’s editorial line was slightly more restrained. Under the headline ‘Another Fascist Shriek’, he responded to a speech made in the Cortes on 19 December in which Gil Robles had laid out the policies that the new Radical government would have to implement in order to stay in power with CEDA votes. His demands revealed the narrow interests defended by the CEDA. They included amnesty for those imprisoned for the military rising of August 1932, a revision of the religious legislation of the Constituent Cortes and a sweeping attack on social reforms. All the decrees that had been most welcomed by the landless peasantry – the law of municipal boundaries, that of obligatory cultivation and the introduction of mixed juries – were to be revised. He also called for a reduction of the area of land subject to expropriation under the agrarian reform bill. Carrillo’s editorial ended with a perspicacious comparison of Gil Robles’s tactics with those of the authoritarian Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss, a call for an energetic response and a threat that the FJS would not go down without a fight.63

On 13 December 1933, the UGT’s National Committee discussed the PSOE’s calls for action in response to the deteriorating position of the working class in both rural and urban Spain. Against the calls for calm from Saborit and Trifón Gómez, Carrillo’s ally Amaro del Rosal, the hot-headed president of the Federation of Bank and Stock Exchange Workers, proposed that the UGT join the PSOE in organizing a revolutionary movement to seize power and establish socialism. He was supported by, among others, Carlos Hernández Zancajo, leader of the transport workers. Del Rosal’s proposal was defeated, but further acrimonious debate led to a decision to call an extraordinary congress of the UGT to resolve the bitter divisions between the moderate Besteiristas and the young revolutionary supporters of Largo Caballero.64 When that meeting took place on 31 December, one after another the leaders of the major federations of the UGT – the mineworkers, the textile workers, the bakery workers, the hotel workers, the metalworkers, the bank workers and the transport workers – rose to declare that they supported the line of the PSOE executive and not that of the UGT. They were opposed only by the representatives of the Besteirista strongholds, the printers, the landworkers’ Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT) and the railwaymen. Amaro del Rosal proposed that the UGT join with the PSOE in organizing ‘a national revolutionary movement to seize power and establish socialism’. When he and Carlos Hernández Zancajo talked of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proposal was defeated by twenty-eight votes to seventeen.65

As their mouthpiece Renovación was in constant difficulties with the authorities, receiving fines and, on some days, the entire print-run being seized, Carrillo understandably saw this as a deliberate attempt to destroy the paper economically. As a result, under the headline ‘They are pushing us into clandestinity’, he wrote that, as a revolutionary group, the FJS might have to go underground. Indeed, the FJS began tentatively to organize its own militias. Carrillo’s efforts in this regard were central to what passed for the creation of Socialist militias prior to the general strike of October 1934 in Madrid. Both through the pages of Renovación and via numerous circulars, the FJS issued instructions about the creation of a paramilitary organization.66

Not fully perceiving the emptiness of Largo Caballero’s rhetoric, Carrillo could legitimately feel that he had full backing for this from the senior party leadership. The PSOE had named a special commission, presided over by Largo Caballero, to examine the practical side of organizing a revolutionary movement and, after another tense meeting on 9 January 1934, the UGT’s National Committee had reluctantly agreed to participate. Largo Caballero then insisted that the PSOE’s policies be submitted to the UGT’s National Committee. This was to meet on 27 January.67 In the meanwhile, on 13 January, the PSOE executive approved a five-point programme of immediate action, drawn up by Largo Caballero himself. This called for (1) the organization of a frankly revolutionary movement; (2) the declaration of such a movement at the right moment, preferably before the enemy could take definitive precautions; (3) contacts to be made between the PSOE and the UGT and any other groups ready to cooperate in the movement; and, in the event of triumph, (4) the PSOE and the UGT, in collaboration with other participants in the revolution, to take political power, and (5) the implementation of a ten-point reform programme drawn up by Prieto.68

When the UGT’s National Committee met on 27 January to discuss the various projects, against the fierce opposition of Besteiro, the PSOE’s revolutionary project was approved by thirty-three members of the committee. Only Trifón Gómez of the Railway Workers’ Union and Lucio Martínez Gil of the FNTT voted for the executive, which immediately resigned en masse. Two days later, a new UGT executive was elected, with Largo Caballero as secretary general and including some of the most radical members of the FJS: Ricardo Zabalza of the FNTT, Carlos Hernández Zancajo and Amaro del Rosal. On 30 January, the National Committee of the FNTT had also met to debate the revolutionary proposals. An identical situation had arisen within its ranks. The entire executive, all Besteiristas, resigned, and a new committee of young Caballeristas was elected under Zabalza’s presidency. The organizations of the Socialist movement were falling in quick succession to the extremist youth. A meeting of the most influential section within the PSOE, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, was packed by young Socialists, who passed a motion of censure against its president, Trifón Gómez, obliging him to resign. He was replaced by supporters of Largo Caballero, with Rafael Henche as president and Julio Álvarez del Vayo as vice-president backed by a group of the most fervent ‘bolshevizers’, including Hernández Zancajo and Santiago Carrillo.

With Largo Caballero now controlling both the UGT and PSOE executives and the FJS in the hands of his most fervent supporters, a joint committee was immediately established to make preparations for a revolutionary movement. It consisted of Juan Simeón Vidarte, Pascual Tomás and Enrique de Francisco for the Socialist Party, Felipe Pretel, José Díaz-Alor and Carlos Hernández Zancajo for the UGT and Santiago Carrillo for the FJS. Carrillo was thrilled and would take the appointment more seriously than most of the others on the committee. It was a remarkable appointment for someone who had only recently had his nineteenth birthday. With his large glasses and chubby, beardless cheeks, he looked even younger. Operating from UGT headquarters in Madrid, the committee contacted the PSOE, UGT and FJS organizations in each province and issued seventy-three instructions for the creation of militias, the acquisition of arms, the establishment of links with sympathetic local units of the army and the Civil Guard and the organization of squads of technicians able to take over the running of basic services. The response from the provinces was deeply discouraging and there is little evidence, apart from the flurry of communications generated by the committee, that any practical action was taken.69

Since all sections of the Socialist movement were outraged at the perceived injustice of the election results and the rapid dismantling of the few social advances made from 1931 to 1933, a resort to revolutionary verbalism was understandable. However, when it came to organizing real confrontation with the apparatus of the state, despite the Caballeristas’ sweeping conquest of the leadership positions in the PSOE, the UGT and the FJS, there was considerable trepidation. Most union functionaries and militants remained cautious, and even Largo Caballero and his older trade union supporters were far from comfortable with the bolshevizing policies of Carrillo and the other young radicals. Largo Caballero might call for the dissolution of the army and the Civil Guard and for the arming of the workers.70 However, for him and for the older trade unionists, revolutionary threats were little more than that: threats that they had neither the inclination nor the expertise to implement. The young bolshevizers, in contrast, felt an intense exhilaration about the ideas expressed in the pages of Renovación. They too had little idea of how to implement their rhetoric and were thus united with Largo Caballero only in irresponsibility and incompetence.

The provincial sections barely responded to the hopeful missives of the revolutionary committee. That, together with Largo Caballero’s cautious trade union instincts, ensured that, except in the mining districts of Asturias, the activities of the revolutionary committee never went much beyond rhetoric. The committee issued a ‘secret’ instruction that a revolutionary movement would be launched in the event of the CEDA joining the government. Since it was meant to be a warning to the President of the Republic, Alcalá Zamora was told about it and Gil Robles and other leaders of the right were fully aware of its existence. The lack of secrecy and the lack of any link between the chosen ‘revolutionary moment’ and any real working-class struggles effectively gave all the cards to the government. On 3 February, the new UGT executive met to decide whether to try to stop all strike action so that the movement could harness its energies for the projected revolution. Revealingly, it was decided, at the urging of Largo Caballero, that UGT members should not be asked to abstain from strike action in defence of their economic interests.71 Nevertheless, in issue after issue, the FJS gave ever more coverage to the achievements of the Soviet Union while calling for social revolution, armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat.72 Such indiscreet, not to say strident, revolutionism provided the perfect excuse throughout the spring and summer of 1934 for the government’s uncompromising repression of strikes that were not revolutionary but rather had only limited economic objectives.

Concern about the intentions of the right had intensified with the appointment at the beginning of March of a new Minister of the Interior, the thirty-nine-year-old Rafael Salazar Alonso. Although a member of the Radical Party, he was effectively the representative of the landowners of Badajoz, with whom he had many personal connections.73 Shortly after taking up his post, Salazar Alonso told the Director General of the Civil Guard that his forces need not be inhibited in their interventions in social conflicts.74 Gil Robles was delighted with Salazar Alonso who, on 7 March, declared a state of emergency and closed down the headquarters of the FJS, the Communist Party and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Renovación was banned and did not reappear until early April.

Santiago Carrillo’s own ever more vehement advocacy of ultra-revolutionary positions saw him arrested again in February 1934 for a speech made at the small town of Campo de Criptana in the province of Ciudad Real. His offence was to have insulted the President of the Republic, whom he accused of opening the way to fascism by dissolving the Constituent Cortes. During his short stay in the prison of Ciudad Real, Carrillo heard the news of the Austrian Socialist uprising against Dollfuss. It fired his growing enthusiasm for violence as the only valid means to combat fascism. Although the Austrian insurrection was crushed, he would incessantly cite it as an example for Spanish Socialists.75 At the Fifth Congress of the FJS held in the third week of April 1934, an airy commitment to an armed insurrection was made. A new executive committee was elected with Hernández Zancajo as president and Carrillo as secretary general. Carrillo’s closest friends among the bolshevizers – José Laín Entralgo, Federico Melchor, Serrano Poncela, José Cazorla and Aurora Arnaiz, all of whom later joined the Communist Party – were elected on to the committee. There was much talk of armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Espartaco, a theoretical journal, was created. Its first issue appeared three months later and contained an attack on the PSOE’s parliamentary group (minoría). Over the next few months, Prieto and those Socialists who believed in parliamentary action would be denigrated in the belief that they constituted an obstacle to the inevitable revolution.76

The extent to which the FJS was moving ahead of its idol Largo Caballero was illustrated by the decision of the new FJS executive, without consultation with the leadership of either the PSOE or the UGT, to call a general strike in Madrid. This was a response to the passage through the Cortes, while the FJS congress was in session, of the CEDA’s amnesty law for right-wing attacks on the Republic, which encompassed the plotters responsible for the military coup of August 1932. While the President dithered about signing it into law, the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular). It had been planned since January, and Renovación had warned that it might culminate in a fascist ‘march on Madrid’. The JAP held hundreds of meetings to drum up support and arranged special trains with subsidized tickets. Coinciding with the political crisis over the amnesty, the rally inevitably had the appearance of an attempt to pressurize Alcalá Zamora into signing the law. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an obviously anti-Republican gesture. In order to prevent the rally being the starting point for a ‘march on Madrid’, the FJS committee called a general strike. In the event, despite the giant publicity campaign and the large sums spent, torrential rain and the impact of the strike on the transport facilities offered by the organizers ensured that fewer than half of the expected 50,000 actually took part.77 The real initiative for the strike was probably taken not by Carrillo and the FJS but by the Izquierda Comunista. This Trotskyist group had been founded by Trotsky’s one-time friend and collaborator Andreu Nin and was led in Madrid by Manuel Fernández Grandizo, who used the pseudonym Grandizo Munis. Nevertheless, the strike order was actually issued by the FJS.78

The Izquierda Comunista was, like the FJS, part of the Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance). It was the brainchild of Joaquín Maurín, leader of the quasi-Trotskyist Bloc Obrer i Camperol (Worker and Peasant Bloc), who argued that only a united working class could resist the great advances of the authoritarian right.79 For Largo Caballero, the Alianza Obrera was just a possible means of dominating the workers’ movement in areas where the UGT was relatively weak, less an instrument of rank-and-file working-class unity than a liaison committee dominated by Socialists linking existing organizations.80 In Madrid, the Socialist leadership effectively imposed its own policy on the Alianza. Throughout the spring and into the early part of the summer of 1934, the Socialist members blocked every revolutionary initiative proposed by the Izquierda Comunista representative, Fernández Grandizo, claiming cynically that the UGT had to avoid partial strike actions and save itself for the ultimate struggle against fascism. The one exception seems to have been the general strike in protest against the JAP rally at El Escorial. Nevertheless, Carrillo was an enthusiast for the Alianza Obrera, since he was deeply committed to the idea of working-class unity.

Leaving aside the anarchists, there were effectively two processes going on within the workers’ movement in 1934. On the one hand, there were the young revolutionaries of the Socialist and Communist youth movements and the Alianza Obrera. On the other, there were the traditional trade unionists of the UGT who were trying to protect living standards against the assault of the landowners and industrialists. In a way that was damaging to both, Largo Caballero spanned the two, giving the erroneous impression that entirely economic strikes had revolutionary ends. Repression had intensified since the appointment as Minister of the Interior of Salazar Alonso. Deeming all strikes to be political, he deliberately provoked several throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. He seized the flimsiest excuses for heavy-handed action and defeated the printers, construction workers and metalworkers one after the other.

Salazar’s greatest victory, which to his great satisfaction pushed the Socialists ever nearer to having to implement their revolutionary threats, took place in June. After much agonized debate, the leaders of the landworkers’ union concluded that a general strike was the only way to halt the owners’ offensive. Under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard, the FNTT’s newly elected general secretary Ricardo Zabalza called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law. Although the strike action was economic in motivation, Salazar Alonso seized the chance to strike a blow at the most numerous section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. He undermined compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour by criminalizing the actions of the FNTT with a decree declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint on to lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Much was made by Renovación of the arrival in Madrid of hundreds of bedraggled rural workers en route to their homes in the south. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years of imprisonment. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936.81

The FJS was also subjected to various obstacles to its normal functioning. Renovación received a crippling fine at the beginning of July. The following week, Salazar Alonso issued a decree prohibiting the use of the clenched-fist salute. Inevitably, this hardened the FJS revolutionary rhetoric and pushed the organization close to the Communist Youth.82 On 26 July 1934, attracted by the incessant praise for the USSR in the pages of Renovación, the leadership of the Communist Youth proposed negotiations with the FJS with a view to a possible unification. Although the invitation was preceded by patronizing remarks which described the FJS as reformist social democrats, the conversations went ahead. The FJS was represented by Carrillo, Melchor, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla; the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas by Trifón Medrano, Segismundo Álvarez and Fernando Claudín (Claudín would later develop into the most sophisticated thinker in the Spanish Communist Party). The talks were dominated by Carrillo, who presented the FJS as the revolutionary vanguard of the Socialist movement while the UJC was merely a very junior offshoot of the tiny Communist Party.

The meetings were tense, if slightly more cordial than might have been expected given the organizations’ history of mutual criticism. No concrete plans were made for formal unification. As Carrillo made clear, the FJS was already preparing a revolutionary action and this would take place within the Alianza Obrera. Nevertheless, Carrillo also indicated that he believed that the FJS should be prepared to make compromises in order to hasten the revolution. Thereafter there was ever more united action on the ground. At a local level, militants of both organizations were already acting together, particularly in cooperation against the JAP. They held joint demonstrations such as that which followed the murder by Falangists on 10 June of the young militant Juanita Rico. Their two news-sheets, Renovación and Juventud Roja, henceforth carried news of each other’s activities. Claudín was deeply impressed by the nineteen-year-old Carrillo’s remarkable self-confidence, the powerful and lucid way in which he presented his arguments, and his profound knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution. Amaro del Rosal was every bit as impressed with the talent, energy and capacity for work of his young comrade.83

Carrillo had also been noticed by others outside the FJS. After the talks with the UJC, Trifón Medrano invited him to meet a representative of KIM – the Communist Youth International – which effectively meant with a Soviet agent. He consulted with his comrades on the FJS executive committee and they agreed that he should go ahead with the encounter. He was excited by the idea of meeting someone whom he imagined to be linked with the assault on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Indeed, such was his admiration of the Soviet Union that his office as secretary general of the FJS was dominated by a large portrait of Stalin. Forty years later, he was to tell Fernando Claudín that, in the internal conflict within the PSOE and the UGT, he associated the workers’ champion Largo Caballero with Stalin and the intellectual Besteiro with Trotsky. When he got to the park where he was to meet the Russian agent, he was bitterly disappointed to be introduced not to a hardened Bolshevik revolutionary but to ‘fat Carmen’ (‘Carmen la gorda’), the pseudonym of a portly German woman who was a Soviet agent within the Spanish KIM Bureau. This first meeting with a representative of the fortress of world communism went from bad to worse. She accused the FJS of being potential Trotskyists. Then, believing erroneously that they had been followed by the police, she suddenly proposed that they flee from the bar where they were having a cold drink. Jumping on a moving tram, she tripped and collapsed on the platform to the immense hilarity of passers-by.84

As the summer wore on, Carrillo continued to push the insurrectionary line in Renovación, whose pages, when the entire issue was not seized by the police, carried more and more sections blacked out by the censor.85 In contrast, Largo Caballero was moving in the opposite direction. The UGT’s National Committee met on 31 July to hold an inquest into the failure of the peasant strike. The representative of the schoolteachers’ union criticized the UGT executive for its failure to go to the aid of the peasants and virtually accused Largo Caballero of being a reformist. He responded by condemning such rhetoric as frivolous extremism and by declaring that the Socialist movement must abandon its dangerous verbal revolutionism. He had apparently forgotten his own rhetoric of four months previously and the existence of the joint revolutionary committee. When the schoolteachers’ leader read out texts by Lenin, Largo Caballero replied that the UGT was not going to act in accordance with Lenin or any other theorist. Reminding his young comrade that Spain in 1934 was not Russia in 1917, he stated rightly that there was no armed proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was strong. It was exactly the opposite of his own recent speeches and of the line being peddled by Carrillo and the young hotheads of the FJS. In fact, Largo Caballero seems to have become increasingly annoyed by their facile extremism, complaining that ‘they did just what they felt like without consulting anyone’. Nevertheless, Carrillo was later to write that, as far as he knew at the time, Largo Caballero was forging ahead with detailed revolutionary preparations, for some of which he was using the FJS.86

In fact, Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS revolutionary liaison committee had not done much beyond compiling a large collection of file-cards with details of potential local revolutionary committees and militias. That filing system was the only place where there existed an infrastructure of revolution. Each UGT, PSOE or FJS section made its own arrangements for creating militias, which usually went no further than drawing up lists of names of those who might be prepared to take to the streets. Whatever Carrillo fondly believed, there was no central coordination. Largo Caballero himself admitted that the majority of local party and union leaders thought that ‘the revolution was inevitable but feared it and just hoped that some initiative or incident might see it avoided and so they invested only the minimum effort in its preparation, not wanting to appear to be hostile to it in order to keep the loyalty of their members’. He thus perfectly summed up his own attitude. For the bulk of the Socialist leadership, if not for the bolshevizing youth, there was never any real intention of making a revolution. Largo Caballero was convinced that President Alcalá Zamora would never invite the CEDA to join the government because its leaders had never declared their loyalty to the Republic.87

The loud revolutionary rhetoric of the FJS was followed with relish by both Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. They were aware that the revolutionary committee had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. They also knew – as did Largo Caballero but apparently not Carrillo – that the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Thorough police activity throughout the spring and summer of 1934 had undermined most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee. Most of the few weapons acquired by the left had been seized. Gil Robles admitted later that he was anxious to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the violent reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’88 Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.89

In similar terms, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was simply to begin a counter-revolutionary offensive to establish a government determined to put an end to the evil.’ It was not just a question of smashing the immediate revolutionary bid but of making sure that the left did not raise its head again.90

The moment of truth was coming nearer, but the reality would be very different from the Leninist dreams of armed insurrection nurtured by Carrillo and the other young bolshevizers. They had little or no idea of how to convert their threats into action. Largo Caballero and his hardened trade union followers were now using revolutionary phrases less frequently and with decreasing conviction. Their outrage in the wake of the November 1933 elections had given way to alarm at the way in which Salazar Alonso had managed to decimate the organized labour movement during the strikes of the spring and early summer of 1934. Throughout September, there were numerous minor strikes and waves of police activity. On 8 September, in response to a twenty-four-hour strike in Madrid, Salazar Alonso had ordered the Casa del Pueblo to be closed. It was searched, to no avail, by the police. When it was reopened six days later, the police went in again and allegedly found a substantial cache of bombs and firearms. This unlikely discovery was the excuse needed for the Socialist headquarters to be closed again.

The next day, 14 September, there took place an event which symbolized the naive hopes of the bolshevizers. Eighty thousand people attended a spectacular joint rally of the FJS and the Communist Youth at the Madrid Metropolitan Stadium. It was in response to a decree by Salazar Alonso, prohibiting those under the age of twenty-one from joining political organizations without written permission from their parents. Although there were speeches by members of the PSOE and the Communist Party, the main speakers were Carrillo for the FJS and Trifón Medrano for the UJC. All spoke of the imminent seizure of power. Greeted by a sea of raised fists, Carrillo declared that ‘if this government at the service of the right does not withdraw the decree, these youth movements will assault the citadels of power and establish a class dictatorship’. He spoke of the identification of the FJS with ‘the chief of the Spanish revolution’, an obvious reference to Largo Caballero. Intoxicated by the moment, he closed his intervention with cries of ‘Death to the Government! Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live the Revolution! Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!’ The event ended with the militants marching out ‘military style’ while waving a profusion of red flags. El Socialista rather ingenuously described the event as ‘a show of strength by the proletariat of Madrid’.91

The crunch came on 26 September, when the CEDA sparked off the crisis by announcing that it could no longer support a minority government. The only solution was either the calling of new elections or the entry into the government of the CEDA. Lerroux’s new cabinet, announced in the early hours of the morning of 4 October, included three CEDA ministers. The arrival in power of the CEDA had been denominated the first step towards the imposition of fascism in Spain. It was the moment for the much threatened revolutionary insurrection. In the event, the efficacy of the threatened revolution was to be in inverse proportion to the scale of the bolshevizers’ bombast. Much of the Socialist movement was paralysed with doubt. The executives of the PSOE and the UGT met and agreed that, if indeed the President did what they were sure he would not do – invite the CEDA to join the government – then the revolution must be launched. Coded telegrams – with messages like ‘I arrive tomorrow’, ‘Angela is better’, ‘Pepe’s operation went well’ – were sent to local committees in every province.

However, having hoped that threats of revolution would suffice to make Alcalá Zamora call new elections, Largo Caballero simply could not believe that he had failed. The revolutionary committee thus did nothing about making the final preparations for the threatened seizure of power. Instead, they spent the next three days in Prieto’s apartment ‘anxiously awaiting’ news of the composition of the cabinet. Largo still believed that Alcalá Zamora would never hand over power to the CEDA. Similarly, the FJS’s revolutionary militias were also lacking leadership and organization. At 11 p.m. on 3 October, two Socialist journalists, Carlos de Baraibar and José María Aguirre, arrived with the unofficial news that a government had been formed with CEDA participation. Several members of the revolutionary committee declared that the time had come to start the movement. Largo, however, stated flatly that ‘until I see it in the Gaceta, I won’t believe it’. He was finally convinced only by the arrival of some soldiers who brought news that the new cabinet had declared martial law. Even then, it was with reluctance that the Socialists prepared for action. They felt that they had no choice. ‘The die was cast,’ wrote Largo.92

Now the extent of his revolutionary intentions was revealed when the UGT gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a pacific general strike. He hoped that the President would change his mind, but he succeeded merely in giving the police time to arrest working-class leaders. In most parts of Spain, the strike was a failure largely because of the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and bringing in the army to run essential services.

The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet revealed the emptiness of the revolutionary bombast of the previous months. It was followed by the creation of an independent Catalan Republic, though it lasted only for ten hours; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. Indeed, the scale of failure was in direct proportion to the scale of the optimistic rhetoric that had preceded it. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.93 Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions, and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests was the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.94

Carrillo was arrested late at night on 7 October. He and several other prominent members of the UGT and the FJS were hiding in the Madrid studio belonging to the artist Luis Quintanilla, who was a friend of most of the PSOE top brass. According to Quintanilla, while awaiting the instructions that never came they had idled away the day by making and consuming an enormous paella. According to Carrillo, they had merely shared a French omelette. Quintanilla went to bed around 10.00 p.m. but was awakened shortly afterwards by the arrival of the police. They had been betrayed because Carrillo and other FJS comrades had gone out to enjoy the warm October evening on the studio’s wide terrace. Quintanilla had warned them not to do so because he had a neighbour whom he described as ‘a witch who spent all day snooping’. They sat heatedly discussing the bad news that they were hearing, whether it was about the failure to materialize of the promised military participation or the arrest of sections of the FJS. As expected, the neighbour overheard them and reported them to the police. The officers who arrived were extremely nervous and pointed rifles at the would-be revolutionaries as they were handcuffed and led away. Each one was put in a car with two policemen, one of whom kept a revolver pressed against their side. After a cursory interrogation, Carrillo was transferred the next morning to the Cárcel Modelo and locked in a malodorous cell.95 His dreams of revolutionary glory were shattered. Over the next seventeen months in prison, his reflections on the reasons for that failure would profoundly change the direction of his political life.

2
The Destruction of the PSOE: 1934–1939

The performance of the revolutionary committee and the Socialist Youth in Madrid can best be described as pathetic. Once it was clear that revolutionary threats had not diverted Alcalá Zamora from bringing the CEDA into the cabinet, the Socialist leaders went to ground. No arms were distributed and the masses were left without instructions. No serious plans for a rising had been made. The only militia group with arms, led by Manuel Tagüeña of the FJS, clashed with Assault Guards in the La Guindalera district of Madrid. After a skirmish, they were quickly disarmed and arrested.1 Amaro del Rosal, one of Carrillo’s more extremist comrades on the revolutionary committee, denied participation. In a sense, he was telling the truth. When Manuel Fernández Grandizo of the Izquierda Comunista met Del Rosal in a Madrid street on 5 October, he asked him what the revolutionary committee planned. Del Rosal allegedly replied, ‘if the masses want arms, they had better go and look for them, then do what they like’. In his own account, he complained that the crisis had come too soon, that the CNT had failed to collaborate and that the authorities had blocked any military assistance by confining troops to their barracks.2

The October issues of Renovación were confiscated by the police and the paper was shut down until 1936. After the failure of the ‘revolution’, Amaro del Rosal escaped to Portugal but was repatriated by Salazar’s police. Carrillo was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid along with his father and most of the leadership of the revolutionary committee, including Largo Caballero. The editor of El Socialista, Julián Zugazagoitia, was also imprisoned and the entire Socialist press was silenced. The clandestine life of the movement was, in fact, directed from the prison.3 Tens of thousands of workers were imprisoned. Many more lost their jobs. In Asturias, torture was used in interrogations, and military courts passed out many death sentences against miners’ leaders. All over Spain, Socialist local councils (ayuntamientos) were replaced by government nominees. The Casas del Pueblo were closed and the unions were unable to function.4

Many Socialist trade unionists, including the Asturian miners’ leaders, believed that the lesson of October and the subsequent repression was the same as that of the events of 1917. The movement would always lose in direct confrontation with the apparatus of the state. The members of the revolutionary committee, however, did not view the 1934 events as a defeat. Whether this was merely self-deception or a cynical ploy to cover their own ineptitude is not clear. Carrillo in particular, showing a capacity for unrealistic optimism that would characterize his entire political life, was convinced that the overall balance had been positive. His logic was that Gil Robles had been shown that the peaceful establishment of fascism would not be permitted by the working class. The brief success of the Alianza Obrera in Asturias profoundly strengthened his conviction that eventual revolution required a united working class. This view briefly brought him closer to the Trotskyists and inevitably fed the suspicions of ‘fat Carmen’, the KIM representative who was watching him closely. The Spanish Communist Party, the Partido Comunista de España, was also calling for proletarian unity. Hitherto, as part of its ‘class against class’ line, it had denounced Socialists as ‘social fascists’ because, so the logic went, reformism perpetuated bourgeois society. In the aftermath of the triumph of Nazism which had been facilitated by the reformism of the German Socialists, the line was softened and the PCE had entered the Alianza Obrera. Now the PCE sought to derive – largely undeserved – credit for Asturias and, with it, ownership of the most powerful symbol of working-class unity. The Communist fabrication of its own revolutionary legend would increase its attractiveness to the FJS.5

After his arrest on 14 October, Largo Caballero assured the military judge investigating his case that he had taken no part in the organization of the rising. Later, on 7 November, he told the Cortes committee that had to decide whether his parliamentary immunity could be waived for him to be prosecuted: ‘I was in my house … and I issued an instruction that anyone who came looking for me should be told that I was not there. I gave that order, as I had done in the past, because I was playing no part in what was going on, I was having nothing to do with anything that might happen; I did not want to have any contact with anyone, with anyone at all.’6 The scale of the repression provided some justification. Araquistáin later claimed that ‘only a madman or an agent provocateur’ would have admitted participation in the preparation of the rising because such an admission of guilt would have been used by the CEDA to justify carrying through its determination to smash both the PSOE and the UGT.7

Nevertheless, what Largo Caballero said in his defence was completely plausible in the light of the total failure of the movement in Madrid. Shortly before he was arrested, Carrillo had asked him, ‘What shall I tell the militias?’ To the young revolutionary’s surprise, Largo Caballero had replied, ‘Tell them anything you like,’ adding, ‘If you get arrested, say that this was spontaneous and not organized by the party.’8 However, Largo Caballero’s memoirs suggest that he continued to see himself as a revolutionary leader who had merely set out to deceive the bourgeois authorities. Initially, Carrillo was deeply disappointed both by Largo Caballero’s passivity in October and by public denials being made by the man now hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’. However, in their frequent conversations walking around the exercise yard, he was flattered by the apparent pleasure with which Largo listened to his harangues about the need to bolshevize the PSOE. That and his own optimism reconciled him to his hero. At this stage, they were still extremely close. Harking back to the warm relations between the two families, Largo Caballero called him ‘Santiaguito’ and other prisoners referred to him as ‘the boss’s spoiled child’.9 Certainly, Largo Caballero’s denials played directly into the hands of the Communists, who were only too glad to assume the responsibility. The secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party, José Díaz Ramos, visited him in prison and suggested that the PCE and the PSOE jointly claim to have organized the revolution. Largo Caballero refused. His denial of any responsibility was a potentially counter-productive tactic. It gave credibility to Communist claims that the October events showed that the PSOE and Largo Caballero were incapable of making a revolution. It ensured that 1935 was the period of ‘the great harvest’ for the Communists.10 Santiago Carrillo was to be an important part of that harvest, yet at the time he seems to have taken Largo Caballero’s excuses at face value.

Carrillo and the other prisoners lived in a kind of euphoric isolation, able to discuss politics all day without the preoccupations of daily life. Carrillo’s main concern was the health of his mother, who had serious heart problems, and he missed his girlfriend, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, a beautiful nineteen-year-old Asturian brunette whom he had met earlier in the year. Otherwise, he and the other political prisoners enjoyed relatively pleasant conditions. Carrillo had a typewriter and plenty of books in his cell. He claimed later to have spent most of his time reading the classics of Marxism until the early hours of every morning. He was particularly impressed by Trotsky. Indeed, he later described this period as his ‘university’. The warders put no obstacles in the way of the sending and receiving of correspondence or the virtually unlimited visits from comrades who brought them the legal press. To his surprise, the normally dour Largo Caballero was very good humoured.11

It was not long before Carrillo and the other imprisoned revolutionaries were blaming the less radical sections of the Socialist movement for the defeat of October. From that it was a short step to trying to hound the reformists out in order to build a ‘proper’ Bolshevik party. Initially, they were not concerned about the Besteiristas since they had already been defeated within the UGT and many affiliated trade union federations in early 1934. Besteiro had opposed the revolutionary project and had stood aside in October. Nevertheless, during the October events, a group of extremists from the FJS had stoned Besteiro’s home. In consequence, he virtually withdrew from the political stage for a time.12 However, renewed calls for his expulsion from the PSOE finally provoked his followers to take up his defence against the youthful bolshevizers. That was not to be until June 1935. In the meantime, Carrillo and his allies concentrated their fire on Indalecio Prieto. The irony of that was that it had been Prieto’s followers in Asturias who had taken the most active part in the events of October.

Egged on by Carrillo, Largo Caballero began to take up ever more revolutionary positions. In part, this reflected his acute personal resentment of Prieto, who with backing from the Asturian miners and the Basque metalworkers hoped to rebuild the democratic Republic of 1931–3. In the view of both Prieto and the Republican leader and ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azaña, the vindictive policies of the Radical–CEDA coalition were provoking a great national resurgence of support for the Republic. Accordingly, Prieto argued that the immediate goal for the left had to be the recapture of state power by a broad coalition that could ensure electoral success and thus bring working-class suffering to an end. In contrast, Carrillo and Largo Caballero believed that the repressive policies of the Radical–CEDA cabinet had dramatically undermined all working-class faith in the reforming possibilities of the Republic.13

In early 1935, those members of the PSOE executive committee not in prison were highly receptive to the arguments sent out by Prieto from his exile in Belgium in favour of a broad coalition with the Left Republicans. Their views were publicized within the Socialist movement in April by means of a circular which made an intelligent plea for the use of legal possibilities to defend the working class.14 The imprisoned Largo Caballero was informed about this initiative but did not object. Nevertheless, it infuriated Carrillo and the bolshevizers who advocated an exclusively proletarian revolutionary bloc. Prieto, thinking in terms only of a legal road to power, knew that not to ally with the Republicans would result in a disastrous three-sided contest as had happened in the elections of 1933. He was determined not to let the party fall into the hands of the extremist youth who, he believed, had to be obliged to accept party discipline.15

Prieto could count on support from the Asturian miners’ leader Ramón González Peña, who was widely considered to be the hero of October and had recently escaped a death sentence. In a letter to Prieto, González Peña called for a broad anti-fascist front for the next elections. He bitterly criticized Largo Caballero and his imprisoned comrades for denying participation in the events of October. His greatest outrage was reserved for ‘the kids of the FJS’ for their demands that the PSOE be bolshevized, that Besteiro and his followers be expelled and that Prieto and the ‘centrists’ be marginalized: ‘It would be an enormous shame if we were to suffer the misfortune of being led by the son of [Wenceslao] Carrillo and company.’ Copies of the letter, along with a similar letter from young Asturian members of the FJS imprisoned in Oviedo, were circulated throughout the Socialist Party, much to the annoyance of the imprisoned Caballeristas. Carrillo and others had sent González Peña a set of questions with the intention of getting his support for their plans. When they saw his answers in favour of electoral coalition and against the purging of the party, they refused to publish them.16 To their chagrin, Prieto had at his disposal his own newspaper, El Liberal de Bilbao, within whose pages he and Republicans could advocate an electoral alliance.17

The fact that the reformist policies of the Republican–Socialist coalition had provoked the fury of the right convinced Carrillo that Spain’s structural problems required a revolutionary solution. However, Prieto was correct that most of the Socialists’ problems derived from Largo Caballero’s tactical error before the elections of 1933. Out of government, no change, reformist or revolutionary, could be introduced. October had exposed the Socialists’ inability to organize a revolution. Thus two valid positions were possible: Prieto’s advocacy of the electoral return to power and the gradualist road to socialism; and the one principally advocated by the Trotskyists, which recognized the revolutionary incompetence of both the PSOE and the PCE and aimed at the long-term construction of a genuine Bolshevik party. This was a position that Carrillo found attractive. However, both these strategies required a prior electoral victory.18

The radical youth’s counter-attack against Prieto took the form of a long pamphlet, signed by the FJS president, Carlos Hernández Zancajo, entitled Octubre: segunda etapa. In fact, it had been written largely by Amaro del Rosal and Santiago Carrillo.19 The purpose was threefold: to cover up the FJS’s failures in the October events in Madrid, to combat Prieto’s interpretation of the Asturian rising as an attempt to defend the Republic, and to eradicate the influence of both Besteiro and Prieto from the Socialist movement as a first step to its bolshevization. The pamphlet began with a largely mendacious interpretation of the activities of the workers’ movement during 1934. Its authors pointed out correctly that the strikes of the construction workers, metalworkers and peasants had dissipated working-class energies while failing to mention that the ‘union organization’ blamed for these tactical errors was actually dominated at the time by members of the FJS. They blamed the defeat of October on Besteiro’s reformists, which was absurd. This was used to justify the ‘second stage’ announced in the pamphlet’s title, the expulsion of the reformists and the bolshevization of the PSOE, which signified the adoption of a rigidly centralized command structure and the creation of an illegal apparatus to prepare for an armed insurrection. Inhibited by Asturian backing for Prieto, the authors did not dare call for his expulsion but aggressively demanded the abandonment of his ‘centrist’ line in favour of their revolutionary one.20

Prieto and others were convinced that the pamphlet had been concocted during the authors’ walks around the prison patio or courtyard with Largo Caballero. Years later, despite being the subject of rapturous praise in the pamphlet, Largo Caballero claimed that it had been published without his permission and that, deeply annoyed, he had protested to Carrillo. Carrillo himself was to admit later that his group had acted without the boss’s authorization. Later still, he categorized the view expressed in the pamphlet as puerile, deriving from ‘infantile leftism’.21 In an interview published in December 1935, however, Largo Caballero agreed with much of the pamphlet, albeit not with its demand for expulsions and for entry into the Comintern.22

In response to the insulting attacks of the FJS pamphlet, the Besteiristas were emerging from their silence.23 They founded a publication to defend their ideas. Called Democracia, it appeared weekly from 15 June to 13 December. Its lawful appearance was taken by Carrillo’s crony Segundo Serrano Poncela as proof of the Besteirista treachery to the Socialist cause.24 This point of view was given some credibility by Besteiro’s inaugural lecture, ‘Marxism and Anti-Marxism’, on being elected to the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences. In this long and tortuous lecture, given on 28 April 1935, Besteiro set out to prove that Marx had been hostile to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He infuriated the imprisoned bolshevizers with his insinuations that the violence of the Socialist left was hardly distinguishable from fascism.25 A devastating reply to Besteiro’s lecture by Largo’s most competent adviser, Luis Araquistáin, appeared in the doctrinal journal Leviatán, which had survived the repression of the Socialist media. Araquistáin’s articles were of a notably higher level of theoretical competence than Octubre: segunda etapa and their demolition of the inaugural lecture ensured Besteiro’s withdrawal from the PSOE leadership stakes.26

With Besteiro eliminated, in late May Prieto returned to the fray with a series of highly influential articles. Collectively entitled Posiciones socialistas, they were published shortly afterwards as a book. The first two restated the need to avoid the great tactical error of 1933, arguing that the right would be united at the next elections and an exclusively workers’ coalition would be the victim of anarchist indiscipline. For Prieto, only a Republican–Socialist coalition could guarantee an amnesty for political prisoners. The last three articles set out, in mild yet firm language, to expose some of the more absurd contradictions of Octubre: segunda etapa. Prieto indignantly dismissed the right of untried youngsters to call for the expulsion of militants who had dedicated their lives to the PSOE and pointed out that the accusations made against various sections of the Socialist movement by the pamphlet were most applicable to the FJS itself. Above all, he denounced the bolshevizers’ dictatorial tendencies and proposed a party congress to settle the direction that the movement was to take.27

With Carrillo’s name on the cover, Octubre was reissued with a reply to Prieto. Largo Caballero’s friend Enrique de Francisco wrote to Prieto to say that he had no right to make party policy in bourgeois newspapers. Prieto replied that the same moralistic view had not inhibited the Socialist Youth from advocating bolshevization. More stridently, the journalist Carlos de Baraibar, in consultation with Largo Caballero, prepared a book attacking the ‘false socialist positions’ of Prieto. In criticizing him for breaking party discipline by publicizing his ideas, Baraibar conveniently forgot that the FJS had not hesitated to broadcast its controversial views.28 The extremism of the FJS was seriously dividing Spanish socialism. While the repressive policies of the CEDA–Radical government and the existence of thousands of political prisoners made revolutionary propaganda attractive, they also ensured a sympathetic mass response to Prieto’s call for unity and a return to the progressive Republic of 1931–3. An indication of the bitterness being engendered was shown in the summer of 1935 when the Caballeristas produced a legal weekly newspaper called Claridad. Its pages loudly backed the FJS call for the expulsion of the Besteiristas and the marginalization of the Prietistas.29 Democracia responded by arguing that the bolshevization campaign was just a smokescreen to divert attention from the FJS’s failures in October 1934. When Saborit made the gracious gesture of visiting the prisoners in the Cárcel Modelo, Largo Caballero rudely refused to shake his hand or even speak to him.30

Everything changed after the Seventh Congress of the Comintern was held in Moscow in August 1935. The secretary general, Giorgi Dimitrov, launched a call for proletarian unity and a broad popular front of all anti-fascist forces. Already, in a speech on 2 June, the PCE secretary general, José Díaz, had openly called for union with the PSOE. On 3 November, he declared that the Seventh Congress showed the need for a Popular Front.31 Carrillo was delighted. In prison, he and Hernández Zancajo lived in close proximity to their comrades from the UJC, Trifón Medrano and Jesús Rozado. They were aware that in October 1934 there had been some collaboration on the ground between the rank-and-file militants of their respective organizations. Now their daily encounters and discussions favoured the eventual unification of their organizations.32

The FJS delegate at the Comintern congress, José Laín Entralgo, reported back enthusiastically that the Communist union, the Confederación General de Trabajo Unitaria (CGTU), would amalgamate with the UGT. He also claimed that the switch of tactics meant that Moscow had returned sovereignty to the various national parties and that there was therefore no longer any reason why the FJS should not join the Comintern.33 Carrillo was already trying to secure the incorporation of the Trotskyist Bloc Obrer i Camperol and the Communist Youth into the PSOE as part of the process of bolshevizing the party. Writing in Leviatán, Araquistáin rightly suggested that Moscow’s fundamental objective with the Popular Front tactic was to ensure that liberal and left-wing anti-fascist governments would be in power in the West to ensure favourable alliances should Germany declare war on the USSR. Far from breaking with the old Comintern habit of dictating the same policy for each country, as the FJS fondly thought, the new tactic confirmed the dictatorial customs of the Third International. Araquistáin accepted the need for proletarian unity but rejected the notion of alliance with the bourgeois left.34

Largo Caballero was keen on working-class unity as long as it meant the absorption of the Communist working-class rank and file into the UGT. However, he remained hostile to an electoral coalition with the Left Republicans and, like Araquistáin, he opposed the idea of the PSOE joining the Comintern.35 For this reason, Carrillo had to be circumspect in all the negotiations with the imprisoned UJC members and crucially with the most senior Comintern representative in Spain, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila, codenamed ‘Medina’. The director of the Cárcel Modelo turned a blind eye as Codovila was smuggled into the prison as part of a family party visiting Carrillo. Codovila was surprised by Carrillo’s readiness to accept all of the conditions requested by the Communists. All he wanted in return was for the name of the new organization to be the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. His reasoning was that if the FJS lost the word ‘Socialista’ from its title, it would lose its seat on the PSOE executive and be less able to continue the struggle to purge Prieto and bolshevize the party.36

On the first anniversary of the October insurrection, the FJS had issued a circular signed by Santiago Carrillo authorizing its local sections to draft joint manifestos with the UJC but not to organize joint commemorations since the PSOE had decreed that the FJS could hold joint events only with other Socialist organizations. The circular noted regretfully that the PSOE had in fact made no arrangements to celebrate the anniversary. However, it recommended that local FJS sections organize their own publicity for the anniversary and to do so stressing that ‘October had been a proletarian movement to conquer power’, that the Socialist Party had been its only leader (something that the PSOE leadership never acknowledged) and that October had halted ‘the rise of fascism’.37

In mid-November, Carrillo received a letter from the left-wing Socialist and feminist Margarita Nelken, who was exiled in Russia. She enclosed some Soviet pamphlets including a Spanish translation of Dimitrov’s speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. He thought the speech ‘magnificent’, although he still had doubts about the Comintern leader’s readiness to make an alliance with the bourgeoisie without first securing the broad unity of the working class. In the package was a copy of a photograph of Largo Caballero that had been distributed among the crowd during an event in Moscow’s Red Square. When Carrillo showed him the photo, Largo Caballero was suitably flattered. Carrillo reported back that ‘the boss is in magnificent form, without any hesitation going further every day in the same direction as the Juventudes’.38

Meanwhile, on 14 November, Manuel Azaña, writing on behalf of the various Left Republican groups, formally proposed an electoral alliance to the PSOE executive. Faced with a dramatic choice, Largo Caballero quickly convoked a joint session of the PSOE, UGT and FJS executives for 16 November. Azaña’s proposal was accepted after Largo Caballero had acknowledged the absurdity of repeating the error of 1933. Carrillo and Amaro del Rosal followed the Comintern line and also spoke strongly in favour of the electoral alliance. Carlos Hernández Zancajo, however, opposed it. He thereby anticipated divisions inside Caballerista ranks that would seriously damage the Socialist movement during the Civil War, between those unswervingly committed to the Soviet Union and those, like Hernández Zancajo, for whom revolutionary politics were not understood as synonymous with Soviet interests. Determined that dealings with the bourgeois Republicans should not strengthen the Prietista wing of the Socialist movement, Largo Caballero insisted that any coalition should extend to other working-class organizations including the Communist Party. Carrillo was delighted. The UGT executive decided to open negotiations with the PCE for the incorporation of the Communist CGTU into the UGT. Moreover, Largo Caballero insisted that the Popular Front electoral programme should be approved by the PCE and the CGTU as well as by the FJS, the PSOE and the UGT.39 In contrast, Prieto feared that the disproportionate weight to be given to the Communist Party would damage the interests of the PSOE. He was also opposed to the idea that the programme required FJS approval since he was adamant that to consider it as an autonomous organization was entirely contrary to the PSOE’s statutes.40

Two weeks later, Carrillo published a typically triumphalist article that crowed over the defeat of reformist elements in the Socialist movement. He stated that the changes of strategy effected by the Comintern placed the FJS on ‘a similar political plane to the Communists’. His statement that ‘prior negotiations’ were moving ahead made it clear that the FJS was drawing ever nearer to the UJC. He dismissed as groundless any suspicion that unification would effectively mean a take-over of the Socialist Youth by the Communists. He argued that, if there was unity of purpose of the revolutionary elements on both sides, only the reformists could have any grounds for concern. He ended with the resounding declaration that ‘the knots that tie us to the affiliates of the Moscow International will end up untying those that still link us to certain “socialists”’.41

He crowed too soon. On 16 December, there was a meeting of the PSOE National Committee, at which Largo Caballero reiterated his view that any electoral coalition should be dominated by the workers’ organizations. Before a full-scale discussion could take place, Prieto criticized the activities of Carrillo and the FJS leadership. More importantly, he raised a procedural issue about the relationship of the parliamentary group to the PSOE executive. In immensely complicated circumstances, Largo Caballero resigned as president of the PSOE. After Largo Caballero had stormed out of the meeting, Prieto was able successfully to propound his moderate vision of the Republican–Socialist electoral coalition. The Caballerista desire that negotiations with the Republicans be carried out by a workers’ bloc including the FJS, the PCE and the CGTU was stymied. The resignations of Largo Caballero and three of his closest lieutenants, Enrique de Francisco, Wenceslao Carrillo and Pascual Tomás, meant that there would have to be a party congress in the spring to elect a new National Committee. This was clearly conceived as the first step to clearing out the centrists from the party and securing the bolshevizing objective of a centralized party hierarchy. However, it was a gamble that, in immediate terms, broke the control of both the party and the union established by the Caballeristas after the defeat of Besteiro in January 1934. Now the movement was divided, with the UGT in the hands of the Caballeristas and the PSOE in the hands of the Prietistas. In his formal letter of resignation, Largo Caballero revealed his motives. It was a step to securing a unanimous executive, as the ‘homogeneous organ of an iron leadership’: ‘We have resolved to keep on the October road.’ The gamble failed because, for a variety of complex reasons related to the tense political situation, that congress never materialized.42

This development in the higher echelons of the Socialist movement may have pushed an impatient Carrillo nearer to thinking that his revolutionary ambitions would be better fulfilled within the Communist Party. In the meantime, at the end of December 1935, in the first issue of the newly legalized Renovación, the FJS justified its acceptance of the Popular Front in terms of securing an electoral victory to put an end to ‘this painful situation’. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, Carrillo did not renounce the maximalist objectives of revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, calling for proletarian organizations to prepare their cadres for the coming struggle and urging them to intensify the work of purging the PSOE of reformist elements.43 During the Socialist election campaign, Largo Caballero harped on the need for proletarian unity and for the transformation of capitalist society. His superficially revolutionary rhetoric delighted his working-class audiences all over Spain. At one point, on 11 February 1936, with José Díaz he addressed a joint PSOE–PCE meeting on the subject of unity, by which both orators meant the take-over of the entire working-class movement by their own organizations.44

During the night of 16 February, Carrillo and his comrades waited anxiously for the election results and news as to whether there would be an amnesty. The next morning they heard the first rumours of the Popular Front victory and the noise of a huge crowd approaching the prison. It was a demonstration demanding their release. He and the others who, like him, were still awaiting trial were freed on the evening of 17 February.45 Carrillo immediately applied for a passport to travel to Russia, which was issued on 24 February in Madrid. He was going to Moscow as part of a joint delegation of the FJS and the UJC to attend a congress of the Communist Youth International and to discuss the forthcoming unification with the leadership of the KIM. Before leaving, he had several meetings with Vitorio Codovila at the apartment of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Araquistáin’s brother-in-law. The Comintern representative was now grooming him and chose intelligently not to reprimand him for the near-Trotskyist views expressed in Octubre: segunda etapa. Carrillo himself said later of Codovila, ‘I am indebted to him for becoming a Communist.’46

On the trip to Moscow, he was accompanied by Federico Melchor and the two UJC representatives, Trifón Medrano and Felipe Muñoz Arconada. In the Soviet capital, he was utterly bedazzled. After a year incarcerated with Largo Caballero, despite his residual affection for his father’s friend, Carrillo was beginning to suspect that the PSOE was yesterday’s party. The Socialist leadership of middle-aged men rarely allowed young militants near powerful positions in its sclerotic structures. He might be Largo Caballero’s spoilt favourite, but other senior Socialists treated him with suspicion. In Moscow, he was inspired by the sight of armed workers marching in the streets. Moreover, he was fêted as a celebrity. He described as a ‘fairy tale’ being accommodated in the luxurious Savoy Hotel and transported everywhere in a chauffeur-driven limousine to see the sights – Red Square, Lenin’s mausoleum, the Kremlin and the Bolshoi. He was even more impressed to be presented to the leaders of the Comintern, Giorgi Dimitrov and Dimitry Manuilsky, and to the secretary general of the KIM, Raymond Guyot, and his deputy, the Hungarian Mihály Farkas (‘Michael Wolf’). Barely two months after his twenty-first birthday, Carrillo was thrilled to be addressed as an equal by his heroes, especially the giant Dimitrov, who had been arrested in Berlin in March 1933 for his alleged part in the burning down of the Reichstag and then became an international hero after his courageous defence at the subsequent trial. Carrillo was entranced when Dimitrov modestly waved away talk of his exploits in the Reichstag trial. Apparently on this trip, Carrillo acquired a taste for vodka and caviar.47

He admitted later that the fusion with the UJC was merely the opening step of a project to take first the FJS and then the entire Socialist movement into the Communist International. In his submission to the KIM, he declared that the maintenance of the organizational structure of the Socialist Youth was a necessary interim measure dictated by the need first to complete the purging of the PSOE. This trip inevitably had a crucial influence on his subsequent development. The KIM, with its headquarters in Moscow, was closely invigilated by the Russian intelligence service, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), and Soviet Military Intelligence (Glavnoe Razvedupravlenie, or GRU). Having been identified by Codovila as a potential Comintern star, Carrillo would have been vetted anyway, but the process was probably more rigorous because of suspicions of his Trotskyist leanings reported by ‘fat Carmen’.48 Like all prospective Comintern leaders, Carrillo would have been obliged to convince his Moscow bosses, particularly the hard-line Stalinist Farkas/Wolf, that he would fully collaborate with the Soviet security services.49 It seems to have been no hardship. Seduced by Dimitrov, Manuilsky and other heroes, the young man who had presumed to argue that the FJS should dictate Socialist strategy would happily accept the diktats of the Kremlin. His first lesson was to accept that Trotsky was a traitor. The second was that the mission of a united youth movement was not to forge an elite revolutionary vanguard but to recruit a mass youth organization.

Even though it had been long coming, Carrillo’s change of position was breathtaking. He had played a significant part in encouraging the capricious and vacuous revolutionary rhetoric of Largo Caballero that had contributed to the disaster of October 1934. He had been a central figure in the project to bolshevize the PSOE and had done significant damage to the moderate and more realistic wings of the Socialist movement. Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso knew that Largo Caballero’s revolutionary threats were meaningless. In contrast, the insistent demands of Carrillo and the FJS leadership in Renovación for the conquest of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat can only have terrified moderates on the Spanish right and played into the hands of the conspiratorial extremists. The same can be said about Octubre: segunda etapa. Yet now he put all that behind him without apology or regret. He used to say in later life, ‘Repentence does not exist.’ Having contributed to the intensification of hatreds in Spain and thus weakened the Republic, he had now initiated a process that would mortally wound the party of his father and his patron. In doing so, he demonstrated a poisonous cocktail of vaulting ambition, supreme self-confidence and irresponsibility.

After the Civil War Carlos de Baraibar commented bitterly on the manic enthusiasm of Carrillo and Melchor for everything they had seen in the Soviet Union. On their return, ‘they spoke extravagantly about the people, their achievements, their laboratories and even their toilets’. He believed that, in a sense, they had been corrupted by the experience. ‘In Moscow,’ he wrote,

they, like many simple souls before them, had found their road to Damascus and, on their return, began to sketch wild plans for the reorganization of the youth movement that signified the undermining of its revolutionary essence. They brought back with them a confused mixture of totalitarian illusions of recruiting the entire young population of Spain, ambition to create a colossal organization and sheer village idiocy. They were seduced by the bewildering panoply of figures, tables and statistics cleverly put before them.50

Shortly after Carrillo’s return to Madrid, a joint meeting was held of the FJS and UJC executive committees to consider the report that the delegation had elaborated in Moscow in favour of a new mass united movement. The report was approved as the basis for unification and a joint national committee set up to implement the fusion process. Much effort had been made to combat suspicions that the Socialist movement was about to lose its youth movement to the Communists. Rather, it was hoped to reassure Largo Caballero that the UJC would be absorbed into the FJS. However, in practice, as could have been anticipated, that was not what happened, given Carrillo’s ever closer links to Moscow. Public meetings were held in local sections of both organizations to propagate the unification. They culminated in a mass gathering at the Las Ventas bull-ring in Madrid on Sunday 5 April 1936. In his speech on that occasion, Carrillo declared that what was happening repaired the schism of 1921 which had seen the radical wing of the PSOE depart to form the PCE. The event at Las Ventas was followed throughout May and July 1936 by meetings of the provincial sections of the FJS and UJC to prepare for a great national conference of unification which, because of the outbreak of civil war, never took place. In those months, the joint membership of 100,000 was swollen to 140,000.51

Retrospectively, Largo Caballero recalled his reaction in similar terms to those of Baraibar. He claimed that when Carrillo and others came to explain the proposed organizational plans, he told them that their plans for a mass youth movement undermined the purpose of the FJS as an elite training school for future PSOE leaders. He declared uncompromisingly that he now considered the FJS to be dead and, with it, the hope that it would be a bulwark for the Socialist Party. Carrillo tried to convince him of his good faith and his loyalty. He made ‘a solemn promise that he would create a formidable organization that was totally socialist’.52

Amaro del Rosal, who was one of those present when Largo Caballero was informed of the unification, recalled his distress: ‘his eyes filled with tears’. Carrillo had effectively delivered a shattering blow to the PSOE, undermining its political future. As Largo Caballero perceived, he was delivering to the PCE, in the words of Helen Graham, ‘a political vanguard which undoubtedly included many potential national and provincial leaders’. There were those, Serrano Poncela among them, who were alarmed that Carrillo now talked of creating a mass organization contrary to the traditional perception of the FJS as an elite training ground for the PSOE. Although Carrillo made a speech in which he paid tribute to Largo Caballero, the damage had been done.53

Carrillo took part in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee on 31 March, at which he suggested that the new JSU, the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, should seek membership of the KIM and that the PSOE should unite with the PCE and join the Comintern. Attendance at Central Committee meetings was a privilege not normally extended to outsiders.54 Carrillo would not formally join the Communist Party for another six months, but there is reason to believe that he was already a Communist in all but name. In 1974, he admitted that, on his return from Moscow, ‘I had begun to become a Communist. I did not join the Party immediately, although I began to collaborate with the Communists and was even invited to take part in meetings of the Central Committee. I had not yet joined because I was still hopeful of bringing about the unification of the Socialist and Communist parties.’55

The procedure whereby the new executive committee of the JSU was appointed in September 1936 was extremely opaque. There were fifteen members, of whom seven were Communists, although several of the eight Socialists were so close to the PCE as made little difference. Carrillo became secretary general of an organization that, despite its name, constituted a massive advance of Communist influence.56 Those who perceived the creation of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas as the loss of the FJS to the Third International coined the nickname ‘Juventudes Socialistas Urssificadas’ (USSR in Spanish being URSS).57

When the military coup in Spain began on 18 July, Carrillo was in Paris where he had gone with Trifón Medrano and José Laín Entralgo to discuss with Raymond Guyot, the secretary general of the Communist Youth International, the problems posed by the meeting in Madrid with the comical German woman delegate of the Comintern, Carmen. In his memoirs, he recounted his heroic response to hearing of the military coup. In this version, for which there is no corroboration, all three immediately set off for the border. Crossing into Spain at Irún, they headed for San Sebastián and immediately got involved in an assault on an hotel where some rebel supporters had barricaded themselves in. Later, in a vain effort to reach Madrid, Carrillo and his companions spent some weeks fighting on the Basque front with a unit organized by the Basque Communist Party. Being extremely short-sighted, Carrillo was anything but a natural soldier. Eventually, they were able to cross into France and then back into Spain via Puigcerdà. The Communist veteran Enrique Líster claimed that the entire account was pure invention and that, during this period, Carrillo remained in Paris. Whatever the truth, it is clear that already, in those early weeks of the war, he was convinced that the only party with the sense of direction to take control of events was the PCE.58

When he got back to Madrid at the beginning of August, the JSU was already trying to turn its pre-war militia structure into proper fighting units. Carrillo claims that he was made political commissar of the JSU’s ‘Largo Caballero’ battalion which was fighting in defence of the city in the sierras to the north. His heroic picture of that period of his life is somewhat undermined by Manuel Tagüeña, a much more reliable witness, who suggested that Carrillo was involved in political rivalries that undermined the efforts of the Italian Fernando De Rosa to link the various units.59 Certainly, his military career, if it took place at all, was brief. Given the vertiginous growth of the JSU, it was clear that Carrillo could be of most use in a political rather than a military capacity.

The JSU was being inundated with new recruits and soon had more militants than the adult membership of the PSOE and PCE combined.60 At every level of society, the economy and the war effort, in industry and the nascent armed forces, JSU members were playing a key role. Accordingly, Carrillo was now working in Madrid on the practicalities of consolidating Communist control over this powerful new instrument. After prolonged hesitation, on 4 September 1936 Largo Caballero finally succumbed to Prieto’s arguments that the survival of the Republic required a cabinet backed by the working-class parties as well as the bourgeois Republicans. A true Popular Front government was formed in which Largo Caballero was both Prime Minister and Minister of War. It contained Communists as well as Socialists and Republicans. Two months later, on 4 November, with the Nationalist rebels already at the gates of Madrid, four representatives of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT would also join the cabinet.

By then, rebel air raids were intensifying. Far from undermining the morale of the Madrileños, they did the opposite and provoked a deep loathing of the self-styled ‘Nationalists’. Virtually every left-wing political party and trade union had established squads to eliminate suspected fascists. With their tribunals, their prisons and their executioners, they were known loosely as checas. Their targets were those assumed to be rebel supporters within the capital. This included both imprisoned and as yet undetected right-wingers, all of whom in the frantic conditions of the besieged capital were indiscriminately regarded as ‘fifth columnists’. The name was inadvertently coined by General Mola, who in early October had infamously stated that he had four columns poised to attack Madrid but that the attack would be initiated by a fifth column already inside the city.61 On the basis of the massacres perpetrated in southern Spain by Franco’s African columns, it was believed that the rebels planned to kill anyone who had been a member of any party or group linked to the Popular Front, held a government post or was an affiliate of a trade union. Spine-chilling broadcasts from Seville made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano propagated fear and hatred.

In the claustrophobia generated by the siege, popular rage focused on the prison population. Among those detained were many who were considered potentially very dangerous. As rebel columns came ever nearer to the capital throughout October, there was growing concern about the many experienced right-wing army officers who had refused to honour their oath of loyalty to the Republic. These men boasted that they would form new units for the rebel columns once they were, as they expected, liberated. Anarchist groups were already randomly seizing prisoners and shooting them. On 4 November, Getafe to the south of Madrid fell and the four anarchist ministers joined the government. Advancing through the University City and the Casa de Campo, by 6 November the rebels were only 200 yards from the largest of the prisons, the Cárcel Modelo, in the Argüelles district.

In this context, the decision that Largo Caballero’s cabinet should leave for Valencia was finally taken in the early afternoon of 6 November. The two Communist ministers in the government, Jesús Hernández (Education) and Vicente Uribe (Agriculture), had argued the Party line that, even if the government had to be evacuated, Madrid could still be defended.62 General José Miaja Menent, head of the 1st Military Division, that is to say, Military Governor of Madrid, was placed in charge of the defence of the capital and ordered to establish a body, to be known as the Junta de Defensa, which would have full governmental powers in Madrid and its environs. In fact, Largo Caballero and the fleeing cabinet believed that the capital was doomed anyway. In their view, the Junta was there merely to administer its surrender. Indeed, when Largo Caballero informed him of his new responsibilities, Miaja turned pale, sure that he was being sacrificed in a futile gesture.63 Whether or not that was the intention, Madrid would survive the siege for another twenty-nine months.

Until the battle for the capital was resolved, Miaja’s awesome task was to organize the city’s military and civil defence at the same time as providing food and shelter for its citizens and the refugees who thronged its streets. In addition, he had to deal with the violence of the checas and the snipers and saboteurs of the ‘fifth column’.64 The Junta de Defensa would thus be a localized mini-government made up of ‘ministers’ (whose title was Councillor – Consejero) chosen from all those parties that made up the central government. However, Miaja would turn first to the Communists in search of help. And they were ready and waiting.

The two Communist ministers had immediately reported the cabinet’s decision to the PCE top brass, Pedro Fernández Checa and Antonio Mije. They were effectively leading the Party in the frequent absences of the secretary general, José Díaz, who was seriously ill with stomach cancer. Pedro Checa was already collaborating closely with the NKVD.65 The implications were discussed and plans made. Astonishingly, present at this historic meeting were Santiago Carrillo and José Cazorla, who were both, theoretically at least, still members of the Socialist Party. Their presence demonstrates the enormous importance of the now massive JSU and also suggests that they were already in the highest echelons of the PCE.

Late in the afternoon, Checa and Mije went to negotiate with Miaja the terms of the Communist participation in the Junta de Defensa. A grateful Miaja eagerly accepted their offer that the PCE run the two ‘ministries’ (consejerías) of War and Public Order in the Junta de Defensa. He also accepted their specific nominations of Antonio Mije as War Councillor and of Carrillo as Public Order Councillor with Cazorla as his deputy. While Mije and Checa were negotiating with Miaja, Carrillo and Cazorla had gone to ask Largo Caballero for a statement to explain to the people of Madrid why the government was leaving. The Prime Minister denied that the government was being evacuated, despite the suitcases piled outside his office. Further disillusioned by the lies of their already broken hero, Carrillo and Cazorla went back to the Central Committee of the PCE.66

At about eight in the evening, Mije and Carrillo went to see Miaja to discuss their future roles. Shortly before his death, in discussing the Spanish edition of my book The Spanish Holocaust, Carrillo claimed that, at the end of this meeting, he had asked Miaja what he was expected to do about the fifth column and that the General had replied, ‘Smash it.’ In this account, Miaja allegedly said that victory would go to the army that annihilated the other and that this would be done with bullets and bayonets. He said that the fifth column must be prevented at all costs from attacking from behind. Looking at Carrillo, he said, ‘That is your job and you will have our help.’ It is curious that, in his innumerable statements about his role in the executions of right-wing prisoners in Madrid, Carrillo had never previously mentioned Miaja. In The Spanish Holocaust reference was made to a later Republican police report on collaboration between NKVD agents and the public order apparatus, an ambiguity of whose wording raised the possibility that Miaja may have approved of Carrillo’s activities. That Carrillo should seize upon this was a way of saying that, whatever he did subsequently, he was only obeying orders.67 There is an irony about this, since elsewhere he denied all knowledge of the massacres committed on his watch.

In Carrillo’s own words, ‘on that same night of 6 November, I began to discharge my responsibilities along with Mije and others’.68 He was able to nominate his subordinates in the Public Order Council and assign them tasks immediately after this meeting with Miaja late on the night of 6–7 November. He set up a sub-committee, known as the Public Order Delegation, under Serrano Poncela, who was effectively given responsibility for the work in Madrid of the Dirección General de Seguridad, the national police headquarters. The Delegation was taking decisions from the very early hours of 7 November.69 The anarchist Gregorio Gallego highlighted the Communists’ ability to hit the ground running: ‘we realized that the operation was far too well prepared and manipulated to have been improvised’.70

Overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. They took key decisions about the prisoners in the vacuum between the evacuation of the government late on the night of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and of the Soviet advisers, since Russian aid in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical expertise had started to arrive over the previous weeks. How much detail, other than airy references to ‘controlling the fifth column’, Miaja received is impossible to say. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and would get, assistance from the anarchist movement.

Thus the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why the twenty-one-year-old leader of the Socialist Youth was given such a crucial and powerful position. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wish to join and were incorporated into the Party on the spot. The brevity of the proceedings confirms that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. After all, he had brought into the PCE’s orbit the 50,000 members of the FJS and the further 100,000 who had subsequently joined the JSU. He was already attending meetings of the PCE’s politburo, its small executive committee, which indicated that he was held in high esteem. He had long since been identified by Comintern agents as a candidate for recruitment. If he had not publicly made the switch before, it was because of his, and presumably their, hope that he could help bring about the unification of the PSOE and the PCE. Largo Caballero’s determined opposition to unity combined with his poor direction of the war effort had made this seem a futile aspiration. Moreover, the prestige accruing to the Communist Party from Soviet aid suggested that there was little advantage in delaying the leap. It was an eminently practical decision, although Fernando Claudín argued implausibly that Carrillo was brave to sever his links with a party within which he was so prominently placed.71

Oddly, Carrillo claimed that his membership of the PCE was not public knowledge as late as July 1937.72 Certainly, in late December 1936 in Valencia, Carrillo, Cazorla, Melchor and Serrano Poncela had all informed Largo Caballero of what they had done. The ‘boss’ was devastated, as were others in his entourage. It finally dawned on him that he had let the future of the PSOE slip into the hands of the Communists. According to Carrillo, he said with tears in his eyes, ‘As of now, I no longer believe in the Spanish revolution.’73 Not long afterwards, he said of Carrillo to a close collaborator, perhaps Amaro del Rosal, ‘He was more than a son to me. I shall never forgive the Communists for stealing him from me.’74 Largo Caballero’s later reflections were altogether more vitriolic. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, ‘In the Socialist Youth, there were Judases like Santiago Carrillo and others who managed to simulate a fusion which they called the JSU. Later, they revealed their treachery when they joined the Communist International.’75

Carlos de Baraibar, who had replaced Carrillo as the old leader’s favourite, recalled sarcastically that:

a group of leaders of the JSU visited me to let me know that they had decided en masse to join the Communist Party. I knew nothing about it, but they made their case so eloquently that I was left with the impression that their lives had been rendered so impossible within the Socialist movement that, to be able to go on fighting effectively for the cause, the poor creatures had had no alternative but to join the Communists. Nevertheless, it seemed to me monstrous that this had been done without them consulting with senior comrades other than, as I later discovered, Álvarez del Vayo. They had been advised throughout by the man we called ‘the eye of Moscow’, the secret representative of the Comintern or rather of Stalin.

Largo Caballero also referred to ‘Medina’/Codovila as ‘el ojo de Moscú’.76

When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order Delegation, in the early hours of 7 November, he used written orders for the evacuation of prisoners left by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.77 The Norwegian Consul, the German Felix Schlayer, claimed that the preparation of the necessary document was the price paid by Muñoz to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia.78 Evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations. Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of 8,000 prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.79

Among those pushing for the evacuation of the prisoners were the senior Republican military authorities in the capital, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also involved were Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day, and Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov. In fact, according to the principal expert on Soviet security services in Spain, Orlov was away from Madrid from 13 October to 10 November in Cartagena.80 However, his subordinate, Josif Grigulevich, was his liaison with Carrillo. They became active collaborators and friends. Grigulevich would certainly have transmitted to Carrillo the Russian view that the captive military officers who had refused to fight for the Republic should simply be liquidated.

Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Known by his pseudonym of ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had been instrumental in the founding of the Fifth Regiment, from which the Republic’s Popular Army evolved. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar, and his conviction that rebel supporters within Madrid should be eliminated was reflected in his vehement articles and speeches. Conscious that the prisoners were already boasting that they would soon join their rebel comrades, Gorev and other Soviet advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate them. As the rebel siege tightened, Vicente Rojo and Miaja fully concurred.81

Miaja soon established a close relationship with Carrillo’s deputy, José Cazorla, one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners.82 Taciturn and efficient, Cazorla believed that rebel supporters had to be eliminated. To carry out this task, as will be seen, he frequently relied on the advice of Russian security personnel. As concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old Vicente Rojo, recently promoted lieutenant colonel. Rojo believed that the fifth column was made up of spies, saboteurs and agitators and feared that they could play a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, he wrote, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.83

The public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo answered to Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, and it is clear that they were in constant touch with the Russians. In the Ministry of War, there were meetings between Mije, Gorev and Rojo. Pedro Checa also had a key meeting at PCE headquarters with Gorev’s messenger Mikhail Koltsov.84 This was almost certainly the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed with the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the 8,000 but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups. Accepting this argument, Checa despatched three men to ‘two big prisons’, which almost certainly meant San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo – from which prisoners were indeed taken away on the morning of 7 November.85 The removal of prisoners was known as a saca. Clearly, three men alone could not organize a large-scale saca, which required written authorizations, means of transport, escorts and other facilities.

Accordingly, Koltsov’s account seems to confirm Carrillo’s statement that the Consejería de Orden Público had begun to function late on the night of 6 November or in the early hours of 7 November and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. This required committed personnel, and Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela turned to ‘Carlos Contreras’ (Vittorio Vidali). Although in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern, Vidali was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Vidali and Josif Grigulevich, who was briefly his assistant at the Fifth Regiment, belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky. Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina.86

Enrique Castro Delgado, the Communist commander of the Fifth Regiment, described how, on the night of 6 November, he and Vidali/Contreras gave orders to the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s fifth column must be destroyed before it begins to move.’87 The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. There were many JSU members in the Fifth Regiment. In a revealing interview in 1986, two years before his death, Grigulevich stated that, in Madrid, he had worked under the orders of Santiago Carrillo, heading a special squad (brigada especial) of Socialist militants in the Dirección General de Seguridad dedicated to ‘dirty’ operations. The squad was formed by Grigulevich from what he called ‘trusted elements’ recruited from members of the JSU who had been part of the unit responsible for the security of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid.88

Grigulevich’s assertion is sustained by the record in the Francoist archive, the Causa General, of the post-war interrogations of JSU members of what came to be three brigadas especiales. Grigulevich had arrived in Spain in late September and worked for Contreras for some weeks before beginning to collaborate with Carrillo in late October or early November. Carrillo, Cazorla and the unit’s members knew Grigulevich as ‘José Escoy’, although he was known to others as ‘José Ocampo’.89 The documents in the Causa General are further corroborated by a report, written in the autumn of 1937, by the Republican police that referred to the frequent visits made to Carrillo’s office by Russian technicians specializing in security and counter-espionage matters. The report stated that these technicians had offered their ‘enthusiastic collaboration to the highest authority in public order in Madrid’, which would seem at first sight to have been a reference to Carrillo although it might have referred to Miaja since he was the authority under whom Carrillo worked. If the latter, it would mean that Carrillo’s activities were covered by Miaja’s approval, as he was quick to emphasize shortly after the publication of The Spanish Holocaust. Of course, his collaboration with the Russians would have happened anyway given the Soviet links with the Communist Party. The report went on to state that Carrillo had directed these technicians to ‘the chief and the officers of the brigada especial’.90 This was confirmed by Grigulevich, who later described himself as ‘the right hand of Carrillo’ in the Consejería de Orden Público.91 According to the records of the Soviet security services, their friendship was so close that years later Carrillo chose Grigulevich to be secular ‘godfather’ to one of his sons. Carrillo’s three sons were born in Paris between early 1950 and late 1952. During those years, Grigulevich was living in Rome under the name Teodoro Bonnefil Castro. The Russian security services had managed to create an identity for him as a Costa Rican businessman and his success in this role had seen him named as first secretary in the country’s Embassy to Italy. The ease of connections between Rome and Paris certainly made it possible for him and Carrillo to meet.92

It is clear that Miaja, Rojo, Gorev and the senior leadership of the Communist Party were all anxious to see the prisoner question resolved with the greatest urgency. There is no doubt that Miaja and Rojo approved of prisoner evacuations although not necessarily of executions. What is likely is that, in the meetings immediately following the creation of the Junta de Defensa, they delegated responsibility to the two-man leadership of the PCE. Checa and Mije, who, like the Russians, certainly did approve of the execution of prisoners, passed organizational responsibility to Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. To implement their instructions, the trio drew on members of the JSU who were given posts in the Public Order Delegation headed by Serrano Poncela, effectively head of the Dirección General de Seguridad for Madrid. They could also count on assistance from Contreras/Vidali and the Fifth Regiment and from Grigulevich and the brigada especial. However, they could do nothing against the will of the anarchist movement, which controlled the roads out of Madrid. Given that the anarchists had already seized and murdered prisoners, it was not likely that they would offer insuperable opposition to the Communists. Indeed, the formal agreement of senior elements of the CNT militias was soon forthcoming.

The inaugural session of the Junta began at 6.00 p.m. on 7 November.93 Before the meeting, at around 5.30 p.m., Carrillo, coming out of Miaja’s office in the Ministry of War, met a representative of the International Red Cross, Dr Georges Henny, with Felix Schlayer, the Norwegian Consul. Carrillo invited them to meet him in his office immediately after the plenary session. Before returning for that meeting, Schlayer and the Red Cross delegate went to the Cárcel Modelo where they learned that several hundred prisoners had been taken away earlier that day. On coming back to the Ministry of War, they were greeted amiably by Carrillo, who assured them of his determination to protect the prisoners and prevent any murders. When they told him what they had learned at the Cárcel Modelo, he denied knowledge of any evacuations. Schlayer reflected later that, even if this were true, it raises the question as to why Carrillo and Miaja, once having been informed by him of the evacuations, did nothing to prevent the others that continued that evening and on successive days.94

Later the same evening, a meeting took place between, on the one hand, two or three representatives of the JSU who controlled the newly created Public Order Council and members of the local federation of the CNT. They discussed what to do with the prisoners. Despite mutual hostility, liaison between both organizations was necessary, since the Communists held sway inside Madrid, controlling the police, the prisons and the files on prisoners, while the anarchists, through their militias, controlled the roads out of the city. The only record of the meeting is constituted by the minutes of a session of the CNT’s National Committee held the next morning. Those minutes include a report by Amor Nuño Pérez, the Councillor for War Industries in the Junta de Defensa, who had been one of the CNT representatives at the previous evening’s negotiation with the JSU. Amor Nuño’s report outlined what had been agreed at that encounter with the JSU. The minutes did not include the names of the other participants at the CNT–JSU meeting. However, it is reasonable to suppose that the JSU representatives included at least two of the following: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. The gravity of the matter under discussion and the practical agreements reached could hardly have permitted the Public Order Council to be represented by more junior members of the JSU. If Carrillo was not there, which is unlikely, it is inconceivable that he, as both Public Order Councillor and secretary general of the JSU, was not fully apprised of the meeting.

Nuño reported that the CNT and JSU representatives, on the evening of 7 November, had decided that the prisoners should be classified into three groups. The fate of the first, consisting of ‘fascists and dangerous elements’, was to be ‘Immediate execution’ ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ – the responsibility being that of those who took the decision and of those who implemented it. The second group, of prisoners considered to be supporters of the military uprising but, because of age or profession, less dangerous, were to be evacuated to Chinchilla, near Albacete. The third, those least politically committed, were to be released ‘with all possible guarantees, as proof to the Embassies of our humanitarianism’. This last comment suggests that whoever represented the JSU at the meeting knew about and had mentioned the earlier encounter between Carrillo and Schlayer.95

The first consignment of prisoners had already left Madrid early in the morning of 7 November, presumably in accordance with the instructions for evacuation issued by Pedro Checa in response to Koltsov/Miguel Martínez. Thus some prisoners were removed and killed before the formal agreement with the CNT made later that evening. There is no record of there being any difficulty about their getting through the anarchist militias on the roads out of the capital. That is not surprising since there were CNT–FAI representatives on Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation. Nevertheless, the agreement guaranteed that further convoys would face no problems at the anarchist checkpoints and that they could also rely on substantial assistance in the gory business of executing the prisoners. The strongest CNT controls were posted on the roads out to Valencia and Aragon which the convoys would take. The necessary flotillas of double-decker buses and many smaller vehicles could not get out of Madrid without the approval, cooperation or connivance of the CNT patrols. Since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela knew this only too well, it is not plausible that they would have ordered evacuation convoys without first securing the agreement of the CNT–FAI. This undermines Carrillo’s later assertions that the convoys were hijacked by anarchists. The grain of truth in those claims resides in the certainty that the anarchists took some part in the actual killing.

The first decisions taken by Carrillo and his collaborators had been the saca on the morning of 7 November at San Antón and, in the afternoon, the larger one at the Cárcel Modelo. The prisoners were loaded on to double-decker buses. Convoys consisting of the buses escorted by cars and trucks carrying militiamen shuttled back and forth over the next two days. Their official destinations were prisons well behind the lines, in Alcalá de Henares, Chinchilla and Valencia. However, of the more than 1,000 prisoners removed, only about 300 arrived there. Eleven miles from Madrid, on the road to Alcalá de Henares, at the small village of Paracuellos del Jarama, the first batch, from San Antón, were forced off the buses. At the base of the small hill on which the village stood, they were lined up by the militiamen, verbally abused and then shot. In the evening of the same day, the second batch, from the Cárcel Modelo, suffered the same fate.96 A further consignment of prisoners arrived on the morning of 8 November. The mayor was forced to round up the able-bodied inhabitants of the village (there were only 1,600 in total) to dig huge ditches for the approximately 800 bodies which had been left to rot. When Paracuellos could cope with no more, subsequent convoys made for the nearby village of Torrejón de Ardoz, where a disused irrigation channel was used for the approximately 400 victims.97 Sacas continued, with intervals, until 3 December. Some expeditions of prisoners arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. The total numbers killed over the four weeks following the creation of the Junta de Defensa cannot be calculated with total precision, but there is little doubt that it was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500.98

All these sacas were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or taken to Chinchilla or Alcalá de Henares. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This suggests that ‘to be released’ (libertad) and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.99 The specific orders for the evacuations of prisoners were not signed by Carrillo, nor by any member of the Junta de Defensa. Until 22 November, such orders were signed by Manuel Muñoz’s second-in-command in the Dirección General de Seguridad, the head of the police Vicente Girauta Linares. Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. On 22 November, he followed Muñoz to Valencia. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself or by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.100 In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. The anthology of this colossal archive, published in 1945, reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ and carried twenty-six names. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which listed 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.101 Explicit orders for the execution, as opposed to the ‘liberation’ or ‘transfer’ of prisoners, have not been found.

While the sacas were taking place, Carrillo had started to issue a series of decrees that would ensure Communist control of the security forces within the capital and put an end to the myriad parallel police forces that had sprung up in the first weeks of the war. On 9 November, he issued two decrees that constituted a significant step towards the centralized control of the police and security forces. The first required the surrender of all arms not in authorized hands. The second stated that the internal security of the capital would be the exclusive responsibility of forces organized by the Council for Public Order. This signified the dissolution, on paper at least, of all checas.102 Under the conditions of the siege, Carrillo was thus able to impose, by emergency decree, measures that had been beyond the government. Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay between the announcement of the decree and its successful implementation. The anarchists resisted as long as they could and the Communists never relinquished some of their own checas. Nevertheless, by his decree of 9 November, Carrillo returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions, although many of their militants were given positions in Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.103

Explicitly included within these reformed services was ‘everything relative to the administration of the arrest and release of prisoners, as well as the movement, transfer etc of those under arrest’. They were under the control of the Public Order Delegation.104 All functions of the Dirección General de Seguridad were controlled by Serrano Poncela. However, he followed the instructions of Carrillo or his deputy José Cazorla. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the Dirección General de Seguridad.105

Within Serrano Poncela’s Delegation, there were three sub-sections. The first dealt with investigation, interrogations and petitions for release. This was headed by Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT. After interrogations had been carried out, this section made recommendations to the Delegation and final decisions were taken by Carrillo. This function was entirely compatible with the decisions taken at the meeting between JSU and CNT members on the evening of 7 November. The second sub-section, headed by Serrano Poncela himself, dealt with prisons, prisoners and prison transfers. It used small tribunals of militiamen set up in each prison to go through the file-cards of the prisoners. The third sub-section dealt with the personnel of the police and other more or less official armed groups in the rearguard.106

The procedures that would be applied to prisoners between 18 November and 6 December were established on 10 November at a meeting of the Public Order Delegation. Serrano Poncela laid down three categories: army officers with the rank of captain and above; Falangists; other rightists. This was roughly similar to what had been agreed at the meeting on 7 November between members of the CNT–FAI and representatives of the JSU, one of whom had almost certainly been Serrano Poncela himself. When lists of prisoners were compiled, they were passed to Serrano Poncela. He then signed orders for their ‘release’, which meant their execution. It seems that those expeditions of prisoners that arrived safely at their destination consisted of men not listed for execution by the prison tribunals. Serrano Poncela had to report every day to Carrillo in his office in the Junta de Defensa (in the Palace of Juan March in Calle Núñez de Balboa in the Barrio de Salamanca). Carrillo also often visited the office of Serrano Poncela at Number 37 in nearby Calle Serrano.107

The procedure was that agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners whose names were listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated orally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists, sometimes Communists and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, and were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses.108

That Carrillo was fully aware of this is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November 1936. One of the anarchist consejeros asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuations had to continue, given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.109

In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more sacas until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. The sacas and the executions have come to be known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, the name of the village where a high proportion of the executions took place. Those executions constituted the greatest single atrocity perpetrated in Republican territory during the war. Its scale is explained but not justified as a response to the fear that rebel forces were about to take Madrid. Whereas previous sacas had been triggered by spontaneous mass outrage provoked by bombing raids or by news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, the extra-judicial murders carried out at Paracuellos were the result of political-military decisions. The evacuations and subsequent executions were organized by the Council for Public Order but could not have been implemented without help from other, largely anarchist elements in the rearguard militias.

The brief interlude after the mass sacas of 7 and 8 November was thanks to Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice who arranged for the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez to be named Special Inspector of Prisons.110 The first initiative taken by Melchor Rodríguez on the night of 9 November was decisive. Hearing that a saca of 400 prisoners was planned, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all sacas cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no sacas between 10 and 17 November, when Melchor Rodríguez was forced to resign his post by Juan García Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice. His offence was to have demanded that those responsible for the killings be punished.111 After his resignation, the sacas started again.112

Manuel Azaña, who had succeeded Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, and at least two government ministers in Valencia (Manuel Irujo and José Giral) had learned about the sacas.113 Indeed, a speech made on 12 November by Carrillo suggests that, at the time, secrecy was not a major priority. Speaking before the microphones of Unión Radio, he boasted about the measures being taken against the prisoners:

it is guaranteed that there will be no resistance to the Junta de Defensa from within. No such resistance will emerge because absolutely every possible measure has been taken to prevent any conflict or alteration of order in Madrid that could favour the enemy’s plans. The ‘Fifth Column’ is on the way to being crushed. Its last remnants in the depths of Madrid are being hunted down and cornered according to the law, but above all with the energy necessary to ensure that this ‘Fifth Column’ cannot interfere with the plans of the legitimate government and the Junta de Defensa.114

On 1 December 1936, the Junta de Defensa was renamed the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid by order of Largo Caballero. Having led the government to Valencia, the Prime Minister was deeply resentful of the aureole of heroism that had accumulated around Miaja as he led the capital’s population in resisting Franco’s siege. Thus Largo Caballero wished to restrain what he considered the Junta’s excessive independence.115 Serrano Poncela had already left the Public Order Delegation at some point in early December and his responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla.

At the end of the war, Serrano Poncela gave an implausible account of why he had left the Public Order Delegation. He told the Basque politician Jesús de Galíndez that he did not know that the words ‘transfer to Chinchilla’ or ‘release’ on the orders that he signed were code that meant the prisoners in question were to be executed. The use of such code could have been the method by which those responsible covered their guilt – as suggested by the phrase ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ in the minutes of the meeting of the evening of 7 November. Serrano Poncela told Galíndez the orders were passed to him by Santiago Carrillo and that all he did was sign them. He told Galíndez that, as soon he realized what was happening, he resigned from his post and not long afterwards left the Communist Party.116 This was not entirely true since he held the important post of JSU propaganda secretary until well into 1938. In an extraordinary letter to the Central Committee, written in March 1939, Serrano Poncela claimed that he had resigned from the Communist Party only after he had reached France the previous month, implying that previously he had feared for his life. He referred to the disgust he felt about his past in the Communist Party. He also claimed that the PCE had prevented his emigration to Mexico because he knew too much.117 Indeed, he even went so far as to assert that he had joined the PCE on 6 November 1936 only because Carrillo had browbeaten him into doing so.118

Subsequently, and presumably in reprisal for Serrano Poncela’s rejection of the Party, Carrillo denounced him. In a long interview given to Ian Gibson in September 1982, Carrillo claimed that he had had nothing to do with the activities of the Public Order Delegation and blamed everything on Serrano Poncela. He alleged that ‘my only involvement was, after about a fortnight, I got the impression that Serrano Poncela was doing bad things and so I sacked him’. Allegedly, Carrillo had discovered in late November that ‘outrages were being committed and this man was a thief’. He claimed that Serrano Poncela had in his possession jewels stolen from those arrested and that consideration had been given to having him shot.119 Serrano Poncela’s continued pre-eminence in the JSU belies this. Interestingly, neither in his memoirs of 1993 nor in Los viejos camaradas, a book published in 2010, does he repeat these detailed charges other than to say that it was during their time together in the Consejería de Orden Público that their differences began to emerge.120

The claim that he personally had nothing to do with the killings was repeated by Carrillo in his memoirs. He alleged that the classification and evacuation of prisoners was left entirely to the Public Order Delegation under Serrano Poncela. He went on to assert that the Delegation did not decide on death sentences but merely selected those who would be sent to Tribunales Populares (People’s Courts) and those who would be freed. His account is brief, vague and misleading, making no mention of executions and implying that the worst that happened to those judged to be dangerous was to be sent to work battalions building fortifications. The only unequivocal statement in Carrillo’s account is a declaration that he took part in none of the Public Order Delegation’s meetings.121 However, if Azaña, Irujo and Giral in Valencia knew about the killings and if, in Madrid, Melchor Rodríguez, the Ambassador of Chile, the Chargé d’Affaires of Argentina, the Chargé d’Affaires of the United Kingdom and Félix Schlayer knew about them, it is inconceivable that Carrillo, as the principal authority in the area of public order, could not know. After all, despite his later claims, he received daily reports from Serrano Poncela.122 Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping sacas raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same.

Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was just one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.123

For instance, in more than one interview in 1977, Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been sacas before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Consejero de Orden Público. Carrillo’s admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.124 Elsewhere, he claimed that, after he had ordered an evacuation, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’125 This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery of documentary proof of the CNT–JSU meeting of the night of 7 November.

Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 5 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an ‘amplified’ plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Such a meeting, with additional invited participants, was midway between a normal meeting and a full Party congress. Francisco Antón, a rising figure in the Party and known to be Pasionaria’s lover, declared: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Consejero de Orden Público and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause that greeted these remarks had died down, Carrillo rose and spoke of the work done to ensure that the 60 per cent of the members of the JSU who were fighting at the front could do so ‘in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is not a crime, it is not a manoeuvre, but a duty to demand such a purge.’126

Comments made both at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 one of the Comintern’s delegates in Spain, wrote indignantly to the head of the Comintern, Giorgi Dimitrov, of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo simply because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.127 In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov wrote proudly that the Communists took note of the implications of Mola’s statement about his five columns and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleanse Madrid of fifth columnists’. In this report, Stepanov explained how, in July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investigations into what had happened at Paracuellos including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.128 Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is possible that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.129

What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow, and commissioned by Carrillo when he became secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’130

Rather unexpectedly, at the meeting of the Junta Delegada de Defensa on 25 December 1936, Carrillo resigned as Consejero de Orden Público and was replaced by his deputy, José Cazorla Maure. He announced that he was leaving to devote himself totally to preparing the forthcoming congress which was intended to seal the unification of the Socialist and Communist youth movements. It was certainly true that a JSU congress was to be held, for which he was preparing an immensely long speech. However, it is very likely that the precipitate timing of his departure was also connected with an incident two days earlier.131 On 23 December, a Communist member of the Junta de Defensa, Pablo Yagüe, had been shot and seriously wounded at an anarchist control post when he was leaving the city on official business. The culprits then took refuge in the local anarchist headquarters, the Ateneo Libertario, of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the CNT Comité Regional refused to hand them over to the police. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. At the meeting of the Junta at which this was discussed, he called for them to be shot.132 It was the prelude to a spate of revenge attacks and counter-reprisals. Ultimately, Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta de Defensa to condemn to death the anarchists responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was beyond its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal where the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty on the grounds that Yagüe had not shown his credentials to the CNT militiamen at the checkpoint.133

Despite the Yagüe crisis, there can be little doubt that Carrillo needed to devote time to the JSU. The organization had expanded massively since July 1936 and its importance in every aspect of the war effort can scarcely be exaggerated. The PCE’s determination to consolidate its control of the JSU could be seen in Carrillo’s role in the national youth conference held in January 1937 in Valencia. It replaced the congress which had initially been scheduled to establish the structure and programme of the new organization. A congress had formal procedures that required the election of representative delegates, and wartime circumstances made that virtually impossible. A conference had the advantage of permitting Carrillo to choose the delegates himself. Thus he was able to pack the proceedings with hand-picked young Communists from the battle fronts and the factories. He then exploited that to perpetrate the sleight of hand whereby the conference made decisions corresponding to a congress. To the astonishment and chagrin of those FJS members who still harboured the illusion that the new organization was ‘Socialist’, the entire event was organized along totally Stalinist lines. All policy directives were pre-packaged, there was virtually no debate and there was no voting.134

One of the delegates from Alicante, Antonio Escribano, reflected later that ‘Ninety percent of the young Socialists present did not know that Carrillo, Laín, Melchor, Cabello, Aurora Arnaiz, etc had gone over lock, stock and barrel to the Communist Party. We thought that they were still young Socialists and they were acting in agreement with Largo Caballero and the PSOE. If we had known that these deserters had betrayed us, something else would have happened.’135 The impression that the proceedings were carried out under the auspices of Largo Caballero was shamelessly given by Carrillo, who declared, ‘It is necessary to say that Comrade Largo Caballero has, as ever, or more than ever, the support of the Spanish youth fighting at the front and working in the factories. It is necessary to say here that Comrade Largo Caballero is for us the same as before: the man who helped our unification, the man from whom we expect much excellent advice so that, in defence of the common cause, the unity of Spanish youth may be a reality.’136

As newsreel footage revealed, apart from Julio Álvarez del Vayo and Antonio Machado, the poet and alcalde (mayor) of Valencia, the stage party was made up of Communists headed by Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri. Carrillo opened his long speech with thanks to the Communist Youth International, the KIM, for its support. He made especially fulsome reference to the KIM representative, Mihály Farkas, introduced as ‘Michael Wolf’, with whom his relationship was growing closer. No longer the revolutionary firebrand of the Cárcel Modelo, Carrillo explained that, while the Socialist Youth, the FJS, had tried to undermine the government in 1934, now the JSU supported the Republican government’s war effort. According to Carrillo’s close collaborator Fernando Claudín, Farkas/Wolf had considerable input into Carrillo’s speech. Thus the Comintern line was paramount in Carrillo’s talk of broad national unity against a foreign invader. Central to his rhetoric was the defence of the smallholding peasants and the small businessmen with some bitter criticisms of anarchist collectives. There was also the ritual denunciation of the POUM (the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) as a subversive Trotskyist outfit. With the guidance of Codovila and Farkas/Wolf, Carrillo had already started down the road of linking the POUM to the Francoists. The primary function of the JSU was no longer the fomenting of revolution but the education of the masses – the basic reformist aspiration of the Republican–Socialist coalition for which he had previously excoriated Prieto and the PSOE centrists. This was Comintern policy, although it also made perfect sense in the wartime context.137

Carrillo boasted that the new organization had had 40,000 members immediately after its creation but now had 250,000. He placed special emphasis on the fact that the JSU was a completely new organization entirely independent of both the PSOE and the PCE, in which neither component had the right to demand its leadership. This was a sophistry to neutralize Socialist annoyance about the fact that, since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela had formally joined the PCE, the JSU executive now had eleven Communists to four Socialists.138 It was hardly surprising, given the primordial role of the Soviet Union in helping the Republic, that Carrillo should express such enthusiasm for the Communist Party. It would not be long before he would clinch his betrayal of his erstwhile patron.

In the light of Largo Caballero’s incompetence as a war leader, the PCE was increasingly determined to see his removal as Prime Minister. Within barely a month of the JSU conference, the opportunity arose with the disastrous fall of Málaga to rebel forces on 8 February. The disaster could be attributed to Largo Caballero’s mistakes as Minister of War and those of his under-secretary, General José Asensio Torrado. By mid-May, mounting criticism had forced Largo Caballero to resign and he was replaced by the Treasury Minister, Dr Juan Negrín. An internationally renowned physiologist, the moderate Socialist Negrín shared the Communist view that priority should be given to the war effort rather than to revolutionary aspirations. An early contribution to the process of undermining Largo Caballero’s reputation was made by Carrillo when, in early March 1937, he headed a delegation from the JSU to an amplified plenum of the Central Committee of the PCE. In his speech, he was especially savage in his criticism of the POUM. What entirely undermined his constant claims about the JSU’s independence was his hymn of praise to the Communist Party. Moreover, the way he referred to his pride in leaving past mistakes behind must have galled Largo Caballero: ‘Finally, we found this party and this revolutionary line for which we have fought all our life, our short life. We are not ashamed of our past, in our past there is nothing deserving of reproach, but we are proud to have overcome all the mistakes of the past and to be today militants of the glorious Communist Party of Spain.’ His remarks on his reasons for joining the PCE were even more devastating for Largo Caballero. He referred to ‘those who, when the rebels were nearing Madrid, set off for Valencia’. He went on to say that ‘many of those who today are attacking the JSU were among those who fled’.139

Despite the prominence that came with his earlier position in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid and now as leader of the JSU, Carrillo’s role within the Spanish Communist hierarchy was a subordinate one. He accepted this, doing as he was told with relish. At that March 1937 meeting, he was made a non-voting member of the PCE’s politburo. He attended and listened but took little part in the discussions – being, as Claudín put it, ‘simply the man whose job it was to make sure that the JSU implemented party policy. He did not belong in the inner circles where the important issues were discussed and debated by the delegates of the Comintern (Palmiro Togliatti, Boris Stepanov, Ernst Gerö, Vittorio Codovila), by the top Soviet diplomatic, military and security staff and by the most prominent leaders of the PCE (José Díaz, Pasionaria, Pedro Checa, Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Mije).’ Carrillo himself believed at this stage that he was simply not trusted enough to be admitted to these top-secret meetings and was determined to achieve that trust. Accordingly, he was careful to maintain excellent relations with the Comintern representatives, especially with Togliatti and Codovila, the man he regarded as his mentor. Codovila was certainly satisfied with the progress made by his pupil.140

The extent to which Carrillo had transformed himself into ‘his master’s voice’ was confirmed at the JSU National Committee meeting on 15–16 May 1937 – just as Largo Caballero was being removed from the government. Carrillo roundly criticized Largo Caballero’s supporters within the organization and called for their expulsion. Indeed, throughout 1937 and 1938, together with Claudín, Carrillo presided over the systematic elimination of his erstwhile Caballerista allies from the JSU. Claudín’s efforts earned him the nickname of ‘the Jack the Ripper of the JSU’ (el destripador de las juventudes). This process would return to haunt the PCE leadership at the end of the war.141

The importance of Carrillo’s position derived from the fact that the mobilization of the male population, in which the PCE played a key role beginning with the creation of the Fifth Regiment, relied on the continued expansion of the JSU. Its members filled the ranks of the Fifth Regiment and then of the newly created Popular Army as well as those of the Republic’s rearguard security forces. For most of the time during 1937 and 1938, Carrillo devoted himself to building up the PCE’s most valuable asset. However, because he was of military age and should have been in a fighting unit, it was arranged for him to meet his obligations by spending brief periods attached to the General Staff of the commander of Fifth Army Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto. He claimed later to have witnessed parts of the battles of Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. This later provoked outraged jibes by General Enrique Líster. It is almost certainly the case that any visits to the battle front were made in order to check on the JSU’s many political commissars. However, Carrillo’s subsequent attempts to fabricate an heroic military career in response to Líster’s accusations of cowardice were perhaps unnecessary. He could legitimately have argued that he had made a substantial contribution to the Republican war effort through his work in terms of the political education of the great influx of new recruits.142

Indeed, he worked hard to bring both Republican and anarchist youth organizations under the umbrella of the JSU. At every turn, his loyalty to the Spanish Party and the Comintern was unquestionable, symbolized by the large portrait of Stalin that dominated his office. In April 1937, he drafted and presented in Paris an application for the entry of the JSU into the International Union of Socialist Youth, from which, three years earlier, he had removed the Spanish Socialist Youth (FJS). In Britain, France and other democratic countries, the Socialist youth organizations were putting pressure on their respective governments to support the Spanish Republic. It made perfect sense in terms of the Republican quest for international support for Carrillo to try to take JSU into the organization. He later claimed that the idea for this initiative was entirely his own. Since, as he later admitted, a key element of his initiative was to work towards the unity of the Socialist and Communist Youth Internationals, the idea received the approval of the KIM hierarchy. As the creation of the JSU showed, this would be the first step to a Communist take-over of the larger Socialist organization. The initiative led to the JSU being provisionally admitted to the International Union of Socialist Youth and generated the expected increase in support for the Republic.143

He was rewarded for his loyalty by being made the object of a carefully constructed personality cult. He was referred to as the ‘undisputed leader of the youth of Spain’ and as ‘the rudder and great guide of our great Youth Federation’. On the first page of the JSU journal Espartaco, there was a photograph of Carrillo accompanied by a description of him as ‘the leader beloved of all the young masses of Spain, the solid creator of, and the key to, the unity of the JSU. He, along with the executive committee, channels with a safe and steady hand the enormous strength of the young generation that is fighting for the independence of Spain.’ In July 1938, the JSU newspaper Ahora carried a photograph under which the caption was ‘Our secretary general … beloved leader of Spanish youth, whose intelligent and selfless efforts have enabled him to lead the struggle and the labour of our country’s youth in the fight for the independence of the motherland.’ Not long afterwards, Claudín was to be found referring to Carrillo in identical terms. There was some ribaldry in other organizations about the interruptions to the war effort constituted by great public meetings in which it was not clear if the purpose was to raise the morale of the young militants or to massage Carrillo’s ego.144

In April 1938, Franco’s forces had reached the Mediterranean and split the Republican zone in two. By the summer, the Republic was edging to defeat, with Valencia under direct threat. The Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, decided to mount a spectacular counter-offensive to stem the continual erosion of territory. To restore contact between the central zone and Catalonia, an assault across the River Ebro was planned by his chief of staff General Vicente Rojo. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, Franco poured in massive reinforcements in reaction to the initial Republican success in advancing to Gandesa. For over three months, he pounded the Republicans with air and artillery attacks in an effort to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. Negrín hoped that the Western democracies would finally see the dangers facing them from the Axis. Before that could happen the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. The Munich agreement destroyed the Republic’s last hope of salvation in a European war. By mid-November, the decimated remnants of the Republican army, led by Manuel Tagüeña, abandoned the right bank of the Ebro. The Republic had lost the bulk of its army and would never recover.

In response to food shortages and conscription of ever younger recruits, demoralization was rife. The deteriorating conditions saw a growth of anti-communism. One symptom of this was the effort being made from the autumn of 1938 by the Socialist Party executive to re-establish a separate Socialist Youth. The JSU organizations of Valencia, Alicante, Albacete, Murcia, Jaen and Ciudad Real were in favour of returning to the old FJS model. Carrillo’s knee-jerk, and futile, response was to denounce the dissidents as Trotskyists. His alarm was understandable since JSU members made up a high proportion of the Republican armed forces. The fact that Serrano Poncela played a key role in this crisis, writing a critical report on the JSU passed to the PSOE executive in 1938, perhaps explains Carrillo’s long-term resentment of him.145 When the JSU headquarters in Alicante were taken over by supporters of Largo Caballero, the FJS was reconstituted. Busts of Lenin and large portraits of Carrillo were destroyed in an iconoclastic venting of rage.146

After the Ebro, and the end of any reasonable hope of victory, war-weariness overwhelmed the Republican zone. Hunger, privation and the scale of casualties took their toll and much of the frustration was visited on the PCE and the JSU. In October, Carrillo and Pedro Checa were sent to Madrid in an attempt to reverse the process whereby anti-communism was undermining what remained of a war effort. They found not only a generalized fatigue but the determined hostility of the leadership of both the PSOE and the CNT. When the Francoists bombed Madrid with loaves of fresh white bread, JSU militants burned them in the streets. Given the scale of hunger suffered by the Madrileños, this was a less successful gesture than Carrillo later claimed. While in the capital, Santiago heard that his father was actively working with the anti-Negrín elements in the PSOE. They had a monumental row over Wenceslao’s claim that the only solution was to seek an honourable surrender.147

Just before Christmas 1938, Franco launched a final offensive armed with new German equipment. His reserves were sufficient for his troops to be relieved every two days. Carrillo and others were sent to Barcelona in the vain hope that they might be able to organize the kind of popular resistance that had saved Madrid in November 1936. His days were spent commuting to the front trying to keep up morale, but the shattered Republican army of the Ebro could barely fight on. He also worked with militants of the Catalan JSU in an effort to organize popular resistance. Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939. Carrillo claimed later that he was still in the Catalan capital as the Francoists approached and did not leave until they were near the city centre. His own accounts are the only source for his claims that, as he headed north, he was nearly captured by Francoist troops in Girona on 4 February. Shortly afterwards, he crossed the French frontier.148 The same is true of his assertion that he was anxious to return to Madrid not only to continue the fight but to be reunited with his wife, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, and their one-year-old daughter, Aurora. They had married shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. He was particularly anxious since Chon had heart problems and Aurora was weak as a result of consistently poor nutrition in the first year of her life.149 Why Carrillo did not go back to Madrid and what happened to Chon and Aurora at the end of the war are issues clouded in mystery, as will be explained in the next chapter.

Hundreds of thousands of hungry and terrified refugees from all over Spain left the Catalan capital and began to trek towards France. A huge area of about 30 per cent of Spanish territory still remained to the Republic, but the population was afflicted with ever deepening war-weariness. Although further military resistance was virtually impossible, the Communists were determined to hold on to the bitter end. On the one hand, this was important to their Russian masters as a way of delaying inevitable fascist aggression against the Soviet Union.150 It would also allow them to derive political capital out of the ‘desertion’ of their rivals. In fact, they were far from alone in the belief that, given the determination of Franco to carry out a savage repression, it was crucial to resist in the hope of the Western Powers waking up to the fascist threat. However, the Communists were seen as the main advocates of dogged resistance, and they thereby became the target of the popular resentment, frustration and war-weariness. In contrast, the determination of non-Communist elements to make peace on the best possible terms was immensely attractive to the starving populations of most cities in the Republican zone.

In France, Carrillo missed the coup launched on 5 March by Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre. Casado thought that he could put a stop to the increasingly senseless slaughter. Together with Wenceslao Carrillo and Julián Besteiro, and with anarchist leaders, Casado formed an anti-Communist National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General Miaja. Casado wrongly believed that this would facilitate negotiation with Franco, with whose representatives he had been in touch. In fact, he sparked off a disastrous civil war within the Republican zone, ensured the deaths of many Communists and undermined the evacuation plans for hundreds of thousands of Republicans. In Paris on 7 March, a Party comrade, Luis Cabo Giorla, gave Carrillo two pieces of bad news. He told him about the coup and his father’s role therein and also that his mother had died some weeks before. Carrillo’s reaction, a virulent denunciation of his own father, would be among the most revealing episodes of his life.151

3
A Fully Formed Stalinist: 1939–1950

With the Civil War still raging, Carrillo remained in France along with other members of the politburo. The prominent Communist General Enrique Líster later claimed that his place should have been back in the central zone where the majority of the JSU’s militants were to be found. However, Carrillo did not accompany Líster and some members of the politburo to Spain on the night of 13 February 1939. Interviewed in 1974, he claimed that he had wanted to return to Spain but had been prevented by a series of reasons. The most implausible of these was that the politburo wished to ensure that he would not find himself fighting against his own father. Carrillo had been in France for nearly six weeks when he learned of the coup carried out by Colonel Segismundo Casado on 5 March. Casado’s anti-Communist Junta included Wenceslao Carrillo as Councillor for Public Order, an ironic echo of his son’s role in 1936 – the irony being that it was Wenceslao’s mission to hunt down Communists. Santiago claimed in 1974 that the news of his father’s involvement with Casado had upset him more than did that of the death of his mother which he had received at the same time. News of the coup could hardly explain why Carrillo had not returned to Spain three weeks earlier. Hardly more plausible was his claim that he could not travel because there was no room on any aircraft flying to Alicante. Líster pointed out that the thirty-three-seat aircraft in which he travelled on 13 February had twenty empty seats. The head of the Republican air force, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, told Burnett Bolloten that the last six aircraft that flew from France to Republican Spain were ‘nearly empty’. The most likely of Carrillo’s three excuses, which did little for his attempts to construct an heroic past, was that he had been unable to travel because he had scabies. Since Manuel Tagüeña believed that Carrillo had just ignored orders to return, scabies may well have been the excuse that he gave to his superiors.1

The PCE’s politburo met on 12 March to discuss the situation. This was followed by further meetings at which lists were drawn up of those cadres chosen to find refuge in the Soviet Union.2 Santiago Carrillo’s sentiments as he sat through these meetings may easily be imagined. Having nailed his colours so firmly to the PCE mast, he was at best deeply embarrassed, if not seriously frightened. He must have been extremely concerned that his father’s participation in the Casado Junta might have undone at a stroke all his efforts to rise within the Party hierarchy. He needed to take drastic action to avoid being besmirched in the eyes of the PCE leadership. After all, the recent purges in the Soviet Union had demonstrated that the treachery of a militant’s relative was believed to contaminate the blood of the entire family and so would have dire consequences for the Party member. Carrillo claims in his memoirs that he immediately locked himself in his hotel room and began to write an open letter denouncing his father. This is simply not true. His text is dated 15 May and opens by saying that it is a reply to a letter sent by his father from London. Since his father did not reach London until early April, that letter could not have arrived much before the end of the month. Moreover, there are ample signs in the letter that the two and half months’ delay had permitted lengthy contemplation, if not consultation with others, in the drafting process. Moreover, the fact that Santiago’s reply was very widely publicized suggested that his principal motivation was to prove his Stalinist orthodoxy by the ferocity of the attack on Wenceslao.

The letter was thus directed more to his superiors than to his father. Without the slightest hint of sadness or sorrow, its text was a mixture of understandable outrage about the consequences of the Casado coup and absurdly exaggerated Stalinist rhetoric. Santiago declared that he had decided to break off all relations with his father because of his participation in ‘a counter-revolutionary coup and in the back-stabbing treachery that handed over the heroic Spanish people, bound hand and foot, to Franco, the OVRA [the Italian secret police] and the Gestapo’. He pointed out, rightly, that internationally the Casado coup had tipped the balance of power in favour of Hitler and, within Spain, had opened the way to a brutal repression. In particular, he wrote with indignation of those Communists who had been imprisoned for the convenience of the Francoists.

Much of the rest of the extremely long text was a hymn of praise to those against whom the Casado coup had been directed: ‘my Party and its most beloved leaders; you insulted Pasionaria, the woman all Spaniards consider a symbol of the struggle for freedom, you hunted her like wolves to hand her over to Franco’. He wrote in similar terms of the Casado Junta’s denigration of, and determination to capture and execute, José Díaz, Jesús Hernández, Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. He then moved on to insult his erstwhile idol, Largo Caballero, and his one-time fellow bolshevizers Luis Araquistáin, Carlos Baraibar and Carlos Hernández Zancajo, whom he now denounced as Trotskyists motivated by ‘hatred of the great fatherland of socialism, the Soviet Union, and the leader of the international working class, the great Stalin, because they are the vanguard and the faithful friend of all the peoples who fight for liberty, because they have consistently helped the Spanish people, and because they have been able with an iron hand to sweep aside your twin brothers, the Trotskyist, Zinovievist and Bukharinite traitors’.

The letter to his father ended with a final effort to convince the leadership of the PCE that he was a loyal element ready to sacrifice his family for the cause: ‘I remind you that every day I feel more proud of my party which has been the example of self-sacrifice and heroism in the struggle against the invaders, the party that in these difficult times of illegality does not lower its flag but continues to fight fascism with determination and courage … Every day I feel prouder of being a soldier in the ranks of the Great Communist International. Every day my love grows for the Soviet Union and the great Stalin.’ He ended with the words, ‘When you ask to be in touch with me, you forget that I am a Communist and you are a man who has betrayed his class and sold out his people. Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind.’3

The letter was published in early June in the mouthpieces of both the Comintern and the KIM, La Correspondance Internationale and Jeunesses du Monde. Nevertheless, not everyone in the PCE believed in its sincerity. Manuel Tagüeña, who at the time was living in clandestinity in the same safe house as Carrillo near Paris, wrote later, ‘Between Carrillo and me there was never much trust and certainly no friendship. I always believed that he would do anything to further his political ambitions. He had just publicly disowned his father Wenceslao for joining Casado’s Junta. No matter how much it was made out to be the gesture of a heroic Spartan warrior, no one doubted that he had done it to show the PCE leadership that he was the complete militant, ready to sacrifice his family for the good of the cause.’4

When Wenceslao read the letter some weeks later, he refused to believe that it had been written by his son. Accordingly, his reply, on 2 July 1939, was directed not to Santiago but to the person he considered its real author, ‘Señor Stalin’. Wenceslao suggested that the letter might have been dictated by Pasionaria and Jesús Hernández, but he believed it to have been inspired by Stalin. He acknowledged just how much ‘this dagger in the heart’ had hurt him. He ended with prophetic words: ‘I, Señor Stalin, had always educated my son in the love of freedom, you have converted him to slavery. Since I still love him, despite such a monstrous letter, I will ensure by my example that he returns to the place that he should never have left.’5

It would be nearly five decades before Santiago Carrillo would return to the Socialist Party and nearly twenty years before he would see his father again. Then, the seriously ill Wenceslao Carrillo was living in Belgium with the support of the metalworkers’ union. Artur Gallí, the union’s secretary general, had brought Wenceslao to the clinic that he had founded in Charleroi and there he spent his last years. Santiago claimed that, after the PCE had developed its strategy of ‘national reconciliation’ in 1956, Pasionaria and others suggested that it would be politically useful if he were to be reconciled with his father. In this version, when they met, his father said, ‘As far as I am concerned, you have always been my son.’ Santiago introduced him to his wife and young sons and Wenceslao spent time with them at their home in Paris. According to an Asturian Socialist, Manuel Villa, when Wenceslao Carrillo died in 1963, Santiago appeared at the funeral. The many exiled Spanish Socialists who filed past the graveside gave their condolences to other members of the family but ostentatiously refused to shake hands with Santiago.6 However, all that was still in the future.

In 1939, while in France, Carrillo was not part of the tortuous process whereby, since April, Comintern officials and the PCE leaders exiled in Moscow were engaged in the preparation of reports on the Party’s role in the Republican war effort and on the reasons for defeat. There were various contributory drafts. From the Comintern officials who had been in Spain there were reports by the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev (Stepanov) and Palmiro Togliatti (Alfredo). From the Spaniards, there were drafts from Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Cordón and testimony from many other witnesses to specific episodes. There was considerable disagreement as to whether the Party leadership was correct in assuming that the war had effectively been lost when Barcelona fell. Líster was convinced that greater foresight and resistance could have undermined the effects of the Casado coup.7

The final report was only for the eyes of Stalin, Dimitrov and the very top echelons of the PCE. The debate was not widened to the rank and file, on the plausible grounds that this could only cause scandal and demoralization among the militants at a time when the Party was scattered around the world and still suffering the trauma of defeat. The Russians wanted the Comintern to be cleared of any responsibility and Dolores Ibárruri exonerated, especially as she was being groomed to take over the Party leadership. Carrillo emerged unscathed. On the few occasions that he was mentioned, his work with the JSU was commended.8 The way the process was managed ensured PCE loyalty to Moscow but left the Party committed to the unswerving defence of its own behaviour during the Civil War. It is difficult to see what else the exiled PCE leaders could have done in the context of the Soviet purges given their dependence on Russian charity. Nevertheless, the commitment to Stalinism deprived the Party of flexibility and credibility at a time when the unity of the entire anti-Francoist opposition was of the first importance.9

During the summer of 1939, Carrillo was occupied in a vain effort to prevent the expulsion of the JSU from the International Union of Socialist Youth. In July, at the congress in Lille at which the issue was to be decided, his position was definitively undermined when the letter to his father was distributed to all the delegates.10 This disappointment was followed by the news of the signing on 23 August of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Such was the adherence of Carrillo to the Stalinist cause that it caused him no distress. His view of the consequences for the Western Powers, which he blamed for the defeat of the Spanish Republic, was: ‘Those bastards have got exactly what they deserved.’11

Carrillo claimed that it was around this time that his wife Chon and their daughter Aurora arrived in Paris. He told María Eugenia Yagüe, with whom he prepared an authorized biography as part of his electoral campaign in 1977, that the Party leadership had not allowed him to risk going to get them out of Madrid. The dual implication was that he was far too valuable and that he put his loyalty to the Party above family considerations. The description that he gave Yagüe of their experiences in the ten months since he had last seen them is contradictory and also differs from that in his memoirs. Nevertheless, both versions recount intense suffering and hardship. He told Yagüe that Chon and Aurora had managed to get across the French border and, thanks to help from French Communists, had avoided internment in a concentration camp. In the same text, he also claimed that they had

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