The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ