The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ Spain was passing seem to have given him a sense of knowing better than they did. Indeed, as President of the Cortes between 1931 and 1933, he had manifested some hostility towards the deputies of his own party.

      With the bulk of the PSOE and the UGT eager to use the apparatus of the state to introduce basic social reforms, Besteiro’s abstentionist views fell on deaf ears. In fact, the rank and file of the Socialist movement was moving rapidly away from the positions advocated by Besteiro. Right-wing intransigence radicalized the grass-roots militants. The conclusion drawn by an influential section of the leadership led by Largo Caballero was that the Socialists should meet the needs of the rank and file by seeking more rather than less responsibility in the government. Besteiro’s belief that socialism would come if only socialists were well behaved underlay a disturbing complacency regarding fascism. He opposed the growing radicalization of the Socialist movement.6 Thus he had opposed its participation in the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934 which had followed the inclusion of the right-wing CEDA in the government.7 His failure to understand the real threat of fascism prefigured some of his misplaced optimism about Franco at the end of the Spanish Civil War.8

      In the course of that Civil War, Besteiro had behaved in a way which confirmed the suspicion of many within the PSOE that he did not fully understand the great political struggles of the day. Outside of political circles, he reinforced his popularity by refusing numerous opportunities to seek a safe exile.9 He continued to work in the university, being elected Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in October 1936. At the same time, he assiduously fulfilled his duties as a parliamentary deputy, as councillor of the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, to which he had been elected on 12 April 1931, and as president of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Capital. His friends tried frantically to persuade him to leave Madrid. Yet, despite, indeed because of, his view that the war would end disastrously for the Republic, he steadfastly refused. From the beginning, Besteiro made no secret of his, at the time, inopportune commitment to a peace settlement. As Spain’s representative at the coronation of George VI in London on 12 May 1937, he had tried to seek mediation by the British government, but it was a bad moment for such an initiative. The rebels were in the ascendant – in the north, the fall of Bilbao was expected from one day to the next. At the same time, the Republican government was facing significant internal difficulties. In Barcelona, from 3 to 10 May, the forces of the government and the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT) were locked in a bloody struggle for control of the city. Besteiro’s mission was doomed to failure. In his absence, the Largo Caballero cabinet fell. The resolution of the crisis with the appointment of Juan Negrín as Prime Minister of the so-called ‘Government of Victory’ on 17 May seemed to bring to an end the political infighting that had characterized the previous history of the Republic at war. Negrín, with the remarkable organizational ability that he had demonstrated in the Ministry of Finance, was regarded as the man who could create a centralized war effort.

      This seemed possible because May 1937 had seen the defeat of the revolutionary elements within the Republic – the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), the extremist wing of the anarchist movement, and the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) – and the marginalization of the rhetorically revolutionary wing of the PSOE under Largo Caballero. However, that did not mean that any of these groups accepted their fate with docility. As military defeats mounted – the loss of the north, and of Teruel, and the division of the Republic in two – their resentments would grow and be focused increasingly on Negrín and the Communists. As far as Besteiro was concerned, his desire to be the man who brought peace was shattered on the rock of Negrín’s determination to fight on to victory. Since Negrín believed, rightly, that only a major military triumph by the Republic would bring Franco to the negotiating table, he had no interest in fostering Besteiro’s ambitions. The highly touchy Besteiro, however, perceived an insult in Negrín’s understandable failure to follow up on his London trip.10 Disappointed that his inflated sense of the importance of his own mission was not matched by Negrín, Besteiro began to harbour a fierce grudge against the new Prime Minister. The fall of the Largo Caballero government in mid-May 1937 opened up the post of ambassador in France. Besteiro aspired to the Spanish Embassy in Paris in order to seek French mediation in the war, but Negrín’s commitment to resistance to the last against Franco made such an appointment impossible.

      In the wake of the failure of his peace mission, Besteiro returned to his university post and his position in the Madrid Ayuntamiento. As a city councillor, he worked hard on the problems of the besieged capital to the detriment of his health. He was tortured by the idea that mistakes made in the early 1930s, particularly Socialist participation in government, had been responsible for the war. He was also appalled by the violence of the conflict and especially by the sound of firing squads and gunshots in the night – which he took to be the sounds of political assassinations.11 In contrast, in the last months of the war, he seemed oblivious to reports of the Francoist repression in captured areas.12

      Initially, Besteiro’s stance as a silent but critical spectator of the Republican government had puzzled many rank-and-file Socialists, although as the war progressed, his stock began to rise again. The departure from government of Largo Caballero in May 1937 had provoked considerable anti-Communist sentiment within the PSOE in Madrid and much of the UGT. Similarly, the removal in April 1938 of the ever pessimistic Prieto from his post as Minister of Defence had intensified anti-Communism within Socialist ranks. This was unfair. The Communists had certainly wanted to see a more positive and dynamic person as Minister of Defence, but they had been keen to see Prieto kept in the government. They feared, as actually was to happen, that his spleen would quickly be directed against them. As it turned out, it was Prieto who refused a different ministry in the cabinet formed on 5 April. Fomented even further by Prieto’s embittered and tendentious interpretations of what had happened, the growing resentment of the Communists would undermine the principal bulwark of the Republican war effort.13

      Besteiro, like Prieto, conveniently ignored the immense contribution of the Communist Party to the survival of the Republic. A key component of the People’s Army, the party had lost thousands of militants either killed, seriously wounded or captured as territory fell to the Francoists. By the end of 1937, some 60 per cent of the PCE’s militants were in the People’s Army. It was calculated that around 50,000 had been captured by the rebels after the fall of Málaga, Santander and the Asturias. Another 20,000 had been lost in the course of the battle of the Ebro and the last-ditch defence of Catalonia.14 On 18 February 1939, General Rojo sent Negrín an analysis of the possibilities of maintaining resistance in the centre-south zone. In his covering letter, he wrote of the PCE:

      I don’t need to tell you that of all the political parties, it has been and remains the only one with which I sympathize. I believe that they are making a big mistake, even in assuming the general responsibility for the field commanders and the overall leadership of this phase of the struggle, because they are going to ensure that the efforts of the enemy and from all countries will be concentrated on them even further. They will end up ensuring the definitive destruction of their party, the only one that is relatively healthy within our political organization.15

      In general, the anarchists resented the Communist pre-eminence in the armed forces. This was largely to do with the fact that, in endeavouring to create a centralized and effective war effort, the revolutionary ambitions of the anarchists had been reined in, sometimes brutally. This was perceived by all sectors of the libertarian movement as simply a desire on the part of the Communists to attain a monopoly of power, and the underlying military necessity was utterly ignored. On the other hand, there were numerous complaints СКАЧАТЬ