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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ