A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ 20 per cent block of seats went to the list that was second past the post. Accordingly, small fluctuations in the number of votes cast could lead to massive swings in the number of parliamentary seats actually won. The pressure to form coalitions was obvious. The 1931 elections therefore registered a heavy victory for the united Socialists, the left Republicans and the Radicals. The former gained 250 seats, Alejandro Lerroux’s Radicals 90, and the somewhat heterogeneous Right 80. By 1933, however, the success of rightist tactics in blocking reform and the consequent disappointment of the left-wing rank-and-file had provoked a significant realignment of forces. By then, the anarchists who had voted for the leftist parties in 1931 were committed to abstention. The Socialists had so lost faith in the possibilities of bourgeois democracy that they refused to make a coalition with the left Republicans. The apparatus of the state was thus allowed to slip out of the grasp of the left in the November 1933 elections.

      That change was a reflection of the enormity of the task that had faced the 1931 parliament, known as the Constituent Cortes because its primary task was to give Spain a new Constitution. For the Republic to survive, it had to increase wages and cut unemployment. Unfortunately, the regime was born at the height of the world depression. With agricultural prices falling, landowners had let land fall out of cultivation. The landless labourers, who lived near starvation at the best of times, were thus in a state of revolutionary tension. Industrial and building workers were similarly hit. To make matters worse, the wealthy classes were hoarding or exporting their capital. This posed a terrible dilemma for the Republican government. If the demands of the lower classes for expropriation of the great estates and take-overs of the factories were met, the Army would probably intervene to destroy the Republic. If revolutionary disturbances were put down in order to appease the upper classes, the government would find the working class arrayed against it. In trying to tread the middle course, the Republican-Socialist coalition ended up enraging both sides.

      This was demonstrated within a week of the Cortes’ first session. A general strike called by the anarchists led to thousands of CNT telephone workers leaving work. The strike achieved its most notable successes in Seville and Barcelona, and was an intense embarrassment to the government which was anxious to prove its ability to maintain order. The Ministry of Labour declared the strike illegal, and the Civil Guard was called in. In Seville, the CNT attempted to convert the strike into an insurrection. Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior, decided on drastic action: martial law was declared and the Army sent in to crush the strike. The revolutionary nature of the strike frightened the upper classes, while the violence with which it was put down – 30 killed and 200 wounded – confirmed the anarchists in their hostility to the Republic. The CNT was increasingly falling under the domination of the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (FAI), the secret organisation founded in 1927 to maintain the ideological purity of the movement. In the summer of 1931, there was a split between the orthodox unionists of the CNT and FAI members who advocated continuous revolutionary violence. The FAI won the internal struggle and the more reformist elements of the CNT were effectively expelled. The bulk of the anarcho-syndicalist movement was left in the hands of those who felt that the Republic was no better than either the monarchy or the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Thereafter, and until the CNT was uneasily reunited in 1936, the anarchists embarked on a policy of ‘revolutionary gymnastics’, anti-Republican insurrectionary strikes which invariably failed because of lack of coordination and fierce repression, but enabled the rightist press to identify the Repubic with violence and upheaval.

      In the autumn of 1931, however, before the waves of anarchist agitation were fully under way, the Cortes was occupied with the elaboration of the new Constitution. After an earlier draft by the conservative politician Angel Ossorio y Gallardo had been rejected, a new constitutional committee, under the Socialist law professor, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, met on 28 July. It had barely three weeks to draw up its draft. In consequence, some of its unsubtle wording was to give rise to three months of acrimonious debate. Presenting the project on 27 August, Jiménez de Asúa described it as a democratic, liberal document with great social content. An important Socialist victory was chalked up by Luis Araquistain, later to be one of Largo Cabal-lero’s radical advisers, when he prevailed on the chamber to accept Article I, which read ‘Spain is a republic of workers of all classes’. Article 44 stated that all the wealth of the country must be subordinate to the economic interests of the nation and that all property could be expropriated, with compensation, for reasons of social utility. Indeed, the Constitution, finally approved on 9 December 1931, was as democratic, laic, reforming and liberal on matters of regional autonomy as the Repubicans and Socialists could have wished. It appalled the most powerful interests in Spain, landowners, industrialists, Churchmen and Army officers.

      The opposition of the conservative classes to the Constitution crystallised around Articles 44 and 26. The latter concerned the cutting off of state financial support for the clergy and religious orders; the dissolution of orders, such as the Jesuits, that swore foreign oaths of allegiance; and the limitation of the Church’s right to wealth. The Republican-Socialist coalition’s attitude to the Church was based on the belief that, if a new Spain was to be built, the stranglehold of the Church on many aspects of society must be broken. That was a reasonable perception, but it failed to take into account the sensibilities of Spain’s millions of Catholics. Religion was not attacked as such, but the Constitution was to put an end to the government’s endorsement of the Church’s privileged position. To the right, the religious settlement of the constitution was a vicious onslaught on traditional values. The debate on Article 26, the crucial religious clause, coming in the wake of the bitterness provoked by Azaña’s military reforms, intensified the polarization which was to end in civil war. At a meeting in Ledesma (Salamanca), José María Gil Robles, leader of Acción Popular declared ‘while anarchic forces, gun in hand, spread panic in government circles, the government tramples on defenceless beings like poor nuns’.

      Indeed, the passing of the Constitution marked a major change in the nature of the Republic. By identifying the Republic with the Jacobinism of the Cortes majority, the ruling coalition alienated many members of the Catholic middle classes. The perceived ferocity of the Constitution’s anti-clericalism provoked the right into organising its forces at the same time as the union made at San Sebastian in 1930 began to break up. Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura resigned in October 1931 and Azaña, who had risen to prominence during the debate, became Prime Minister. This upset Lerroux, who had been grooming himself for the job, and was excluded because of widespread fear in political circles that he would be unable to keep his hands out of the till. He went into opposition with his Radicals. Thus Azaña was forced to rely more heavily upon the Socialists. This in turn made it more difficult for him to avoid provoking the enmity of the Right.

      In fact, Azaña was caught between two fires – that of the Left which wanted reform and that of the Right which rejected it. This was made apparent when he came to deal with the agrarian problem. Agrarian violence was a constant feature of the Republic. Based on the crippling poverty of rural labourers, it was kept at boiling point by the CNT. The anarchists, together with the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT: Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra, founded in April 1930), were calling for expropriation of estates and the creation of collectives. The Republicans, as middle class intellectuals, respected property and were not prepared to do this. Largo Caballero, as Minister of Labour, had improved the situation somewhat with the four decrees that he had introduced in the spring. However, the limits of such piecemeal reform were starkly exposed in December 1931 when the Badajoz section of the FNTT called a general strike. It was in the main a peaceful strike, in accordance with the instructions of its organisers. In an isolated village called Castilblanco, however, there was bloodshed. When the strike was called, the FNTT members in Castilblanco had already spent the winter without work. On 31 December, while they were holding a peaceful and disciplined demonstration, the Civil Guard started to break up the crowd. After a scuffle, a Civil Guard opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. The hungry villagers, in a frenzy of fear, anger and panic, fell upon the four guards and beat them to death with stones and knives.

      Almost before the cabinet had had time to come to terms with Castilblanco, there occurred an equally disturbing tragedy, this time in the north. At Arnedo, in Logroño, СКАЧАТЬ