Preston Spanish Civil War Causes

1 AUTHOR: Paul Preston TITLE: Viva la revoluc%ion SOURCE: New Statesman & Society v9 p18-21 F 16 ’96 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. The Spanish government recently granted citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought against fascism during the civil war. It was a welcome, but belated, gesture of gratitude, and a fulfilment of the emotional words spoken by Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri, “La Pasionaria”, at the farewell parade held in Barcelona for the brigaders on 29 October 1938. Her moving speech ended: “Political reasons, reasons of state, the good of that same cause for which you offered your blood with limitless generosity, send some of you back to your countries and some to forced exile. You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy ... We will not forget you; and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back! Come back to us and here you will find a homeland.” It has taken 60 years, but the Spaniards are not the only ones to be late in giving their thanks. The volunteers who went were among the first in Europe to do something about the fascist menace. Italian, German and Austrian refugees saw the Spanish civil war as their chance to fight back against fascism. French (the most numerous contingent), British and North American volunteers went to Spain out of concern about what defeat for the Republic might mean for the rest of the world. They were the first in the field in a war that would not end until 1945. These “premature anti-fascists” were reviled on their return home to Britain, treated as the “scum of the earth” in French internment camps or regarded as dangerous and un-American in the US. Despite this, surviving volunteers fought in the second world war—after all, the anti-fascist war was their war. They are not bitter about the lack of recognition of their contribution to the defeat of fascism. They are, however, outraged at the belief fostered by Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom that the fight of the brigaders and of the Spanish people was not a fight against Spanish fascism and its German and Italian allies, but rather part of an internecine leftist civil war in which the central enemy was the Communist Party. Despite many merits, Loach’s script seems oblivious of two central facts about the Spanish civil war: in its origins, it was a Spanish social war and, in its course and outcome, it was an episode in a greater European civil war that ended in 1945. This Monday is the 60th anniversary of the electoral victory of the Popular Front in Spain in 1936, and is an appropriate moment to reflect on where that left-wing alliance came from, and the Spanish problems that it faced, and on its heroic defence against, and ultimate defeat by, the forces of international fascism. When the Second Republic was established in Spain on 14 April 1931, people thronged the city streets in an outburst of anticipatory joy. The new regime raised inordinate hopes among the most humble members of society and was seen as a threat by the most privileged—the landowners, industrialists and bankers, and their defenders in the armed forces and the church. For the first time, control of the apparatus of the state had passed from the oligarchy to the moderate left. This consisted of representatives of the most reformist section of the organised working class, the Socialists, and a mixed bag of petty bourgeois Republicans, some of whom were idealists and many of whom were cynics. Despite considerable disagreement over the finer details, together they hoped to use state

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power to create a new Spain by curtailing the reactionary influence of the church and the army, breaking up the great estates or latifundios, and granting the demands for autonomy of Basque and Catalan regionalists. These hopes, and the atmosphere of popular fiesta that had greeted the coming of the Republic, were soon blunted by the strength of the old order’s defences. Social and economic power—ownership of the land, the banks and industry, as well as of the principal newspapers and radio stations—remained unchanged. Those who held that power were united with the church and the army in being determined to prevent any attacks on property, religion or national unity. Their repertoire of defence was rich and varied. Propaganda, through the right’s powerful press networks and from the pulpit of every parish church, denounced the efforts to carry out reform by the progressive leaders of the Republic as the subversive work of Moscow. New political parties were founded and lavishly funded to mount a legalist defence of the interests of the most powerful sections of society. Conspiracies were hatched to overthrow the new regime. Government and trade union officials who sought to implement the Republic’s timid agrarian reform were terrorised by thugs in the pay of the big owners. Rural and industrial lock-outs became a regular response to legislation aimed at protecting worker interests. So successful were the obstacles erected to reform that, by 1933, the RepublicanSocialist coalition began to break up. In an electoral system that heavily favoured coalitions, the decision of the Socialists to go it alone in the elections of November 1933 was a tragic error. It gave power to a right-wing determined to dismantle the Republic’s social reforms. Employers and landowners clebrated the victory by cutting wages, sacking workers, evicting tenants and raising rents. The largest party, the Catholic CEDA, wasn’t offered power because the Republican president suspected its leader, José María Gil Robles, of harbouring fascist ambitions to establish an authoritarian, corporative state. Thus, the conservative Radical Party ruled. Dependent on CEDA votes, the Radicals were to be Gil Robles’ puppets. Social legislation was dismantled and, one after another, the principal unions were weakened as strikes were provoked and crushed. It was widely believed on the left that Gil Robles was trying to destroy the Republic piecemeal. There was an atmosphere of great tension. The left saw fascism in every action of the right; the right smelt revolution in every left-wing move. The Socialists began to threaten a revolutionary rising in the hope of forestalling the destruction of the Republic. Gil Robles seized the opportunity to insist on CEDA joining the government on 6 October 1934, knowing that it would provoke a leftist response. The Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), called a general strike which, in most parts of Spain was a failure, largely because of the swift declaration of martial law and the hesitation of Socialist leaders who had not expected their bluff to be called. In Barcelona, an independent state of Catalonia “within the Federal Republic of Spain” was short-lived. However, in the mining valleys of Asturias, spontaneous rankand-file militancy impelled the local Socialist leaders to go along with a revolutionary movement organised jointly by the UGT, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and, belatedly, the Communists, united in the Alianza Obrera (workers’ alliance). For three weeks, a revolutionary commune held out against forces coordinated by General Franco until, finally, the miners were reduced to submission by heavy artillery attacks and bombing raids. The savage repression that followed their defeat was to be the background in which the Popular Front was born—although its ambitions were to be anything but revolutionary. It was the brainchild of two men, Manuel Azaña, leader of the Left Republican party, and Indalecio Prieto, centrist leader of the Socialist Party. Both moderate prag-

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matists, they were determined to ensure that the divisions which led to the 1933 electoral defeat would not be repeated. Azaña worked hard to reunite the various tiny Republican parties, while Prieto, from exile in Belgium, concentrated on countering the revolutionary extremism of the Socialist left under Francisco Largo Caballero. In the second half of 1935, Azaña addressed a series of gigantic open-air mass meetings at Bilbao, Valencia and Madrid. The solid enthusiasm for left-wing unity shown by the hundreds of thousands who attended helped to convince Largo Caballero to abandon his opposition to a revival of the 1931 Republican-Socialist electoral coalition, which eventually became known as the Popular Front. At the same time, the small Spanish Communist Party, prompted by Moscow’s anxiety for an understanding with the democracies against the aggressive ambitions of the Third Reich, used its influence with Largo in favour of the Popular Front. It knew that, in order to give it the more proletarian flavour that he wanted, Largo Caballero would insist on the CP’s presence. In this way, the Communists found a place in an electoral front which, contrary to rightist propaganda, was not, in Spain, a Comintern creation, although it did take the title of Popular Front coined at the VII Congress of the Comintern in August 1935. The left and centre left closed ranks on the basis of a programme of amnesty for prisoners, of basic social and educational reform and trade union freedom. In late 1935, the Radical Party collapsed under a welter of corruption accusations and pressure from Gil Robles for ever more rightist policies. Elections were called for mid-February 1936. The right enjoyed enormous financial advantages in mounting a campaign aimed at frightening the middle classes. The elections were presented as a life-or-death fight between good and evil, survival and destruction. The Popular Front based its campaign on the threat of fascism, the dangers facing the Republic and the need for an amnesty for the prisoners of October 1934. The elections held on 16 February resulted in a narrow victory for the left in terms of votes, but a massive triumph in terms of seats in the Cortes. The rising of October 1934 and the Popular Front victory in 1936 shattered rightwing hopes of being able to impose an authoritarian, corporative state without a civil war. Having predicted that left-wing electoral success would be the prelude to the most spine-chilling social disasters, Gil Robles did nothing to stop the younger members of CEDA from being recruited into the fascist Falange Española. At the same time, he and other right-wing leaders played up social unrest, both in parliamentary speeches and in the press, to create the atmosphere that made a military rising appear to the middle classes as the only alternative to catastrophe. At the same time, two years of aggressive rightist government had left the working masses, especially in the countryside, in a vengeful mood. Having been blocked once in its reforming ambitions, the left was now determined, at a local level at least, to proceed rapidly with meaningful agrarian reform. However, the central factor in the spring of 1936 was the fatal weakness of the Popular Front government. While Prieto was convinced that the situation demanded Socialist collaboration in government, Largo Caballero, fearful of a rank-and-file drift to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, insisted that the liberal Republicans govern alone. He fondly believed that the Republicans would carry out the Popular Front electoral programme, and then, having reached their bourgeois limitations, would make way for an all-Socialist government. He was confident that if their reforms provoked a fascist and/or military uprising, it would be defeated by the revolutionary action of the masses. Thus, by using his power to prevent Prieto forming a government, Largo Caballero ensured that there would be no real Popular Front. A cabinet of Republicans was simply not representative of the great electoral coalition that had defeated the right in February. That popular aspirations could not be sat-

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isfied by the Republican government was demonstrated by a wave of land seizures in the south. Incapable of satisfying mass hunger for reform, and too weak to put a stop to preparations for a military uprising, it watched feebly as the fascist Falange orchestrated a strategy of tension, its terrorism provoking left-wing reprisals and an impression of a break-down of law and order. The uprising of army commanders prompted by discontent at the increasing socialist and anticlerical tendencies of the Republican government took place on the evening of 17 July in Spain’s Moroccan colony and in the peninsula itself on the morning of 18 July. The plotters were confident it would be over in a few days. Had they just had the Republican government to contend with, their predictions might have come true. In fact, Spain divided in terms of the electoral geography of February—the coup was successful in the Catholic small-holding areas that voted for CEDA. However, in the leftwing strongholds of industrial Spain and the great estates of the deep south, the uprising was defeated by the spontaneous action of the working-class organisations. Within days, the country was split into two war zones and there was every reason to suppose that the Republic would be able to crush the rising. While power in the streets lay with the workers and their militia organisations, there was still a bourgeois Republican government that had legitimacy in the international arena, and control of the nation’s gold and currency reserves and virtually all of Spain’s industrial capacity. There was not that much to chose between the armed forces of either side. What the working-class militias lacked in training, they made up for in an enthusiasm that could not be matched by the conscripts of the rebel army. There would, however, be two big factors that would eventually make all the difference between the two sides—the ferocious African army and the help of the fascist powers. At first, the colonial army under Franco was blockaded in Morocco by the fleet. However, while the Republican government in Madrid met only hesitation from its sister Popular Front government in Paris, and covert hostility from London, Franco was quickly able to persuade the local representatives of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that he was the man to back. By the end of July, Junkers 52 and Savoia-Marchetti transport aircraft were arriving to permit the airlift of the bloodthirsty Foreign Legion across the Strait of Gibraltar. That crucial early aid was soon followed by a regular stream of high-technology assistance. In contrast to the state-of-the-art equipment arriving from Germany and Italy, complete with technicians, spare parts and the correct workshop manuals, the Republic, shunned by the democracies, had to make do with overpriced and obsolete equipment from private arms dealers. The initial reaction of the Soviet Union had been one of deep embarrassment. The Kremlin did not want events in Spain to undermine its delicately laid plans for an alliance with France. However, by mid-August, it was apparent that an even greater disaster would befall those plans if the Spanish Republic fell. That would severely alter the European balance of power, leaving France with three fascist states on her borders. Eventually, it was reluctantly decided to send help. The tanks and planes that arrived in the autumn were, together with the arrival of the International Brigades, to save Madrid in November 1936. However, they were also to be used to justify the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini. The motivation of both was principally to undermine the Anglo-French hegemony of international relations, but they were sure of a sympathetic ear in London when they claimed to be fighting bolshevism. Accordingly, the Spanish Republic was fighting not only Franco and his armies, but also, to an ever greater degree, the military and economic might of Mussolini and Hitler. Besieged from outside, the Republic also had massive internal problems unknown in Franco’s brutally militarised zone. The crumpling of the bourgeois state in

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the first days of the war saw the rapid emergence of revolutionary organs of parallel power. A massive popular collectivisation of agriculture and industry took place. Exhilarating to participants and observers like George Orwell and Franz Borkenau, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine. That would lie at the heart of the undeclared civil war that would rage within the Republican zone until mid-1937. Socialist leaders like Prieto and Juan Negrin were convinced that a conventional state, with central control of the economy and the institutional instruments of mass mobilisation, was essential if there was to be an efficacious war effort. The Communists and the Soviet advisers agreed—not only was this common sense, but the playing down of the revolutionary activities of Trotskyists and anarchists was necessary to reassure the bourgeois democracies with which the Soviets sought understanding. Henceforth, there would be a struggle to establish a Popular Front government that fulfilled the expectations of the architects of the Popular Front electoral coalition of February 1936. That was eventually established under the premiership of Negrín from May 1937. Despite having crushed the revolution, incorporating the working-class militias into the regular forces and dismantling the collectives, it still did not achieve victory—not because the policies were wrong, but because of the strength of the international forces arrayed against the Republic. In this context, Loach’s Land and Liberty has to be seen as marginal, if not perverse, as an explanation for the 1990s of the Spanish civil war. The film’s opening— the death of the old Liverpudlian left-winger David Carr in a shabby flat in a windswept towerblock—and its emotional ending at his funeral encase the central action in which his granddaughter pieces together the story of his heroic past during the Spanish civil war in a multinational unit of the militia of the quasi-Trotskyist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The message of that part of the film at least is clear: the selfless heroism of this man has come to an end in the despair of postThatcherite Britain. Otherwise, according to various interviews given by Ken Loach, the film’s purpose is to recapture for a young audience something of the emotional purity of the “last great cause”. That is a laudable aim and partially achieved in a number of emotionally charged moments. There are also scenes of didactic efficacy in which some of the great issues of the Spanish civil war are laid out naturally and in all their complexity. Elsewhere, however, the line between cinematic licence and distortion is breached. It is easy to see why International Brigaders who faced death daily on the Madrid front feel diminished by the political and personal self-indulgence on the minor Aragón front of the attractive boys and girls of the POUM unit. Ultimately, the problem lies in the fact that Loach’s position is virtually identical to that of George Orwell. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is a brilliant and painfully honest book but it is not a “true” book. That is to say, it is not true if it is taken, as it is by most readers, as an overview of the Spanish civil war, when, in reality, it is a narrow and partisan account of one relatively marginal issue within the war. As it is, in both Orwell’s book and Loach’s film, as much less innocently in the historiography of the Spanish civil war sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, a minor episode is allowed to dwarf the wider issues of the war. With the Spanish Republic abandoned by the western powers and opposed by Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, only the Soviet Union came to its aid. Of course, Stalin did not do so out of sentiment. Rather the case was that, threatened by expansionist Germany, he was hoping to limit the threat by seeking an encircling alliance with France. He feared, rightly, that if Franco won the war with the help of Hitler, France would crumble.

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Accordingly, he set out to give sufficient aid to the Republic to keep it alive, while ensuring that the revolutionary elements on the left were prevented from provoking the conservative decision-makers in London from supporting the Axis in an anti-bolshevik crusade. It is appalling that the revolutionary élan of the Spanish people, the Republic’s greatest asset, should have been squandered, or that the sincere revolutionaries of the POUM should have been smeared as Nazi agents and bloodily suppressed by the agents of the Soviet NKVD. It is certainly true that the quest for respectability did nothing to alter the contempt felt in Whitehall for the Spanish Republic. However, Ken Loach simplifies massively in the underlying assumption of the second half of his film that it was the Stalinist repression that led to Franco’s victory. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for that victory, not Stalin. It is difficult to imagine how a revolutionary Spain could have succeeded without the support of Russian arms. Indeed, without Russian arms and the International Brigades, Madrid would probably have fallen in November 1936 and Franco been victorious before the anarchists and Trotskyists of Barcelona became an issue. There are so many wonderful things about Land and Liberty that it seems churlish to complain that its historical inaccuracies go beyond the bounds of cinematic licence. Yet like Orwell before him, Loach has produced something that may stay in the memory more as an anti-Stalinist tract than a celebration of those Spanish and foreign men and women who gave their lives fighting Franco and his Axis allies. Added material Photos by Robert Capa/Magnum Farewell salutes and ceremonies for troops of the International Brigade leaving for the front, Barcelona, October 1938 A militia couple, Barcelona, Spain, August 1936 WBN:

9604701483008