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

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СКАЧАТЬ the enormous importance of the now massive JSU and also suggests that they were already in the highest echelons of the PCE.

      Late in the afternoon, Checa and Mije went to negotiate with Miaja the terms of the Communist participation in the Junta de Defensa. A grateful Miaja eagerly accepted their offer that the PCE run the two ‘ministries’ (consejerías) of War and Public Order in the Junta de Defensa. He also accepted their specific nominations of Antonio Mije as War Councillor and of Carrillo as Public Order Councillor with Cazorla as his deputy. While Mije and Checa were negotiating with Miaja, Carrillo and Cazorla had gone to ask Largo Caballero for a statement to explain to the people of Madrid why the government was leaving. The Prime Minister denied that the government was being evacuated, despite the suitcases piled outside his office. Further disillusioned by the lies of their already broken hero, Carrillo and Cazorla went back to the Central Committee of the PCE.66

      At about eight in the evening, Mije and Carrillo went to see Miaja to discuss their future roles. Shortly before his death, in discussing the Spanish edition of my book The Spanish Holocaust, Carrillo claimed that, at the end of this meeting, he had asked Miaja what he was expected to do about the fifth column and that the General had replied, ‘Smash it.’ In this account, Miaja allegedly said that victory would go to the army that annihilated the other and that this would be done with bullets and bayonets. He said that the fifth column must be prevented at all costs from attacking from behind. Looking at Carrillo, he said, ‘That is your job and you will have our help.’ It is curious that, in his innumerable statements about his role in the executions of right-wing prisoners in Madrid, Carrillo had never previously mentioned Miaja. In The Spanish Holocaust reference was made to a later Republican police report on collaboration between NKVD agents and the public order apparatus, an ambiguity of whose wording raised the possibility that Miaja may have approved of Carrillo’s activities. That Carrillo should seize upon this was a way of saying that, whatever he did subsequently, he was only obeying orders.67 There is an irony about this, since elsewhere he denied all knowledge of the massacres committed on his watch.

      In Carrillo’s own words, ‘on that same night of 6 November, I began to discharge my responsibilities along with Mije and others’.68 He was able to nominate his subordinates in the Public Order Council and assign them tasks immediately after this meeting with Miaja late on the night of 6–7 November. He set up a sub-committee, known as the Public Order Delegation, under Serrano Poncela, who was effectively given responsibility for the work in Madrid of the Dirección General de Seguridad, the national police headquarters. The Delegation was taking decisions from the very early hours of 7 November.69 The anarchist Gregorio Gallego highlighted the Communists’ ability to hit the ground running: ‘we realized that the operation was far too well prepared and manipulated to have been improvised’.70

      Overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. They took key decisions about the prisoners in the vacuum between the evacuation of the government late on the night of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and of the Soviet advisers, since Russian aid in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical expertise had started to arrive over the previous weeks. How much detail, other than airy references to ‘controlling the fifth column’, Miaja received is impossible to say. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and would get, assistance from the anarchist movement.

      Thus the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why the twenty-one-year-old leader of the Socialist Youth was given such a crucial and powerful position. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wish to join and were incorporated into the Party on the spot. The brevity of the proceedings confirms that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. After all, he had brought into the PCE’s orbit the 50,000 members of the FJS and the further 100,000 who had subsequently joined the JSU. He was already attending meetings of the PCE’s politburo, its small executive committee, which indicated that he was held in high esteem. He had long since been identified by Comintern agents as a candidate for recruitment. If he had not publicly made the switch before, it was because of his, and presumably their, hope that he could help bring about the unification of the PSOE and the PCE. Largo Caballero’s determined opposition to unity combined with his poor direction of the war effort had made this seem a futile aspiration. Moreover, the prestige accruing to the Communist Party from Soviet aid suggested that there was little advantage in delaying the leap. It was an eminently practical decision, although Fernando Claudín argued implausibly that Carrillo was brave to sever his links with a party within which he was so prominently placed.71

      Oddly, Carrillo claimed that his membership of the PCE was not public knowledge as late as July 1937.72 Certainly, in late December 1936 in Valencia, Carrillo, Cazorla, Melchor and Serrano Poncela had all informed Largo Caballero of what they had done. The ‘boss’ was devastated, as were others in his entourage. It finally dawned on him that he had let the future of the PSOE slip into the hands of the Communists. According to Carrillo, he said with tears in his eyes, ‘As of now, I no longer believe in the Spanish revolution.’73 Not long afterwards, he said of Carrillo to a close collaborator, perhaps Amaro del Rosal, ‘He was more than a son to me. I shall never forgive the Communists for stealing him from me.’74 Largo Caballero’s later reflections were altogether more vitriolic. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, ‘In the Socialist Youth, there were Judases like Santiago Carrillo and others who managed to simulate a fusion which they called the JSU. Later, they revealed their treachery when they joined the Communist International.’75

      Carlos de Baraibar, who had replaced Carrillo as the old leader’s favourite, recalled sarcastically that:

      a group of leaders of the JSU visited me to let me know that they had decided en masse to join the Communist Party. I knew nothing about it, but they made their case so eloquently that I was left with the impression that their lives had been rendered so impossible within the Socialist movement that, to be able to go on fighting effectively for the cause, the poor creatures had had no alternative but to join the Communists. Nevertheless, it seemed to me monstrous that this had been done without them consulting with senior comrades other than, as I later discovered, Álvarez del Vayo. They had been advised throughout by the man we called ‘the eye of Moscow’, the secret representative of the Comintern or rather of Stalin.

      Largo Caballero also referred to ‘Medina’/Codovila as ‘el ojo de Moscú’.76

      When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order СКАЧАТЬ