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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ