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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ