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

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СКАЧАТЬ the situation. This was followed by further meetings at which lists were drawn up of those cadres chosen to find refuge in the Soviet Union.2 Santiago Carrillo’s sentiments as he sat through these meetings may easily be imagined. Having nailed his colours so firmly to the PCE mast, he was at best deeply embarrassed, if not seriously frightened. He must have been extremely concerned that his father’s participation in the Casado Junta might have undone at a stroke all his efforts to rise within the Party hierarchy. He needed to take drastic action to avoid being besmirched in the eyes of the PCE leadership. After all, the recent purges in the Soviet Union had demonstrated that the treachery of a militant’s relative was believed to contaminate the blood of the entire family and so would have dire consequences for the Party member. Carrillo claims in his memoirs that he immediately locked himself in his hotel room and began to write an open letter denouncing his father. This is simply not true. His text is dated 15 May and opens by saying that it is a reply to a letter sent by his father from London. Since his father did not reach London until early April, that letter could not have arrived much before the end of the month. Moreover, there are ample signs in the letter that the two and half months’ delay had permitted lengthy contemplation, if not consultation with others, in the drafting process. Moreover, the fact that Santiago’s reply was very widely publicized suggested that his principal motivation was to prove his Stalinist orthodoxy by the ferocity of the attack on Wenceslao.

      The letter was thus directed more to his superiors than to his father. Without the slightest hint of sadness or sorrow, its text was a mixture of understandable outrage about the consequences of the Casado coup and absurdly exaggerated Stalinist rhetoric. Santiago declared that he had decided to break off all relations with his father because of his participation in ‘a counter-revolutionary coup and in the back-stabbing treachery that handed over the heroic Spanish people, bound hand and foot, to Franco, the OVRA [the Italian secret police] and the Gestapo’. He pointed out, rightly, that internationally the Casado coup had tipped the balance of power in favour of Hitler and, within Spain, had opened the way to a brutal repression. In particular, he wrote with indignation of those Communists who had been imprisoned for the convenience of the Francoists.

      Much of the rest of the extremely long text was a hymn of praise to those against whom the Casado coup had been directed: ‘my Party and its most beloved leaders; you insulted Pasionaria, the woman all Spaniards consider a symbol of the struggle for freedom, you hunted her like wolves to hand her over to Franco’. He wrote in similar terms of the Casado Junta’s denigration of, and determination to capture and execute, José Díaz, Jesús Hernández, Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. He then moved on to insult his erstwhile idol, Largo Caballero, and his one-time fellow bolshevizers Luis Araquistáin, Carlos Baraibar and Carlos Hernández Zancajo, whom he now denounced as Trotskyists motivated by ‘hatred of the great fatherland of socialism, the Soviet Union, and the leader of the international working class, the great Stalin, because they are the vanguard and the faithful friend of all the peoples who fight for liberty, because they have consistently helped the Spanish people, and because they have been able with an iron hand to sweep aside your twin brothers, the Trotskyist, Zinovievist and Bukharinite traitors’.

      The letter to his father ended with a final effort to convince the leadership of the PCE that he was a loyal element ready to sacrifice his family for the cause: ‘I remind you that every day I feel more proud of my party which has been the example of self-sacrifice and heroism in the struggle against the invaders, the party that in these difficult times of illegality does not lower its flag but continues to fight fascism with determination and courage … Every day I feel prouder of being a soldier in the ranks of the Great Communist International. Every day my love grows for the Soviet Union and the great Stalin.’ He ended with the words, ‘When you ask to be in touch with me, you forget that I am a Communist and you are a man who has betrayed his class and sold out his people. Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind.’3

      The letter was published in early June in the mouthpieces of both the Comintern and the KIM, La Correspondance Internationale and Jeunesses du Monde. Nevertheless, not everyone in the PCE believed in its sincerity. Manuel Tagüeña, who at the time was living in clandestinity in the same safe house as Carrillo near Paris, wrote later, ‘Between Carrillo and me there was never much trust and certainly no friendship. I always believed that he would do anything to further his political ambitions. He had just publicly disowned his father Wenceslao for joining Casado’s Junta. No matter how much it was made out to be the gesture of a heroic Spartan warrior, no one doubted that he had done it to show the PCE leadership that he was the complete militant, ready to sacrifice his family for the good of the cause.’4

      When Wenceslao read the letter some weeks later, he refused to believe that it had been written by his son. Accordingly, his reply, on 2 July 1939, was directed not to Santiago but to the person he considered its real author, ‘Señor Stalin’. Wenceslao suggested that the letter might have been dictated by Pasionaria and Jesús Hernández, but he believed it to have been inspired by Stalin. He acknowledged just how much ‘this dagger in the heart’ had hurt him. He ended with prophetic words: ‘I, Señor Stalin, had always educated my son in the love of freedom, you have converted him to slavery. Since I still love him, despite such a monstrous letter, I will ensure by my example that he returns to the place that he should never have left.’5

      It would be nearly five decades before Santiago Carrillo would return to the Socialist Party and nearly twenty years before he would see his father again. Then, the seriously ill Wenceslao Carrillo was living in Belgium with the support of the metalworkers’ union. Artur Gallí, the union’s secretary general, had brought Wenceslao to the clinic that he had founded in Charleroi and there he spent his last years. Santiago claimed that, after the PCE had developed its strategy of ‘national reconciliation’ in 1956, Pasionaria and others suggested that it would be politically useful if he were to be reconciled with his father. In this version, when they met, his father said, ‘As far as I am concerned, you have always been my son.’ Santiago introduced him to his wife and young sons and Wenceslao spent time with them at their home in Paris. According to an Asturian Socialist, Manuel Villa, when Wenceslao Carrillo died in 1963, Santiago appeared at the funeral. The many exiled Spanish Socialists who filed past the graveside gave their condolences to other members of the family but ostentatiously refused to shake hands with Santiago.6 However, all that was still in the future.

      In 1939, while in France, Carrillo was not part of the tortuous process whereby, since April, Comintern officials and the PCE leaders exiled in Moscow were engaged in the preparation of reports on the Party’s role in the Republican war effort and on the reasons for defeat. There were various contributory drafts. From the Comintern officials who had been in Spain there were reports by the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev (Stepanov) and Palmiro Togliatti (Alfredo). From the Spaniards, there were drafts from Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Cordón and testimony from many other witnesses to specific episodes. There was considerable disagreement as to whether the Party leadership was correct in assuming that the war had effectively been lost when Barcelona fell. Líster was convinced that greater foresight and resistance could have undermined the effects of the Casado coup.7

      The final report was only for the eyes of Stalin, Dimitrov and the very top echelons of the PCE. The debate was not widened to the rank and file, on the plausible grounds that this could only cause scandal and demoralization among the militants at a time when the Party was scattered around the world and still suffering the trauma of defeat. The Russians wanted the Comintern to be cleared of any responsibility and Dolores Ibárruri exonerated, especially as she was being groomed to take over the Party leadership. Carrillo emerged unscathed. On the few occasions that he was mentioned, his work with the JSU was commended.8 The way the process was managed ensured PCE loyalty to Moscow but left the СКАЧАТЬ