The
Antifascist Militias Committee was set up in Barcelona
on 24th July 1936. The
committee immediately sent Buenaventura
Durruti and 3,000 Anarchists
to Aragón in an attempt to take
the Nationalist held Saragossa.
Over the first few weeks
of the Spanish Civil War an estimated 100,000
men joined Anarcho-Syndicalists militias.
Anarchists also established the Iron Column,
many of whose 3,000 members were former prisoners. In Guadalajara,
Cipriano
Mera, leader
of the CNT construction workers in Madrid,
formed the Rosal Column and Federica
Montseny established the Tierra y Libertad
(Land and Liberty).
At the beginning of November,
25,000 Nationalist troops under General Jose Varela had reached the
western and southern suburbs of Madrid.
Five days later he was joined by General Hugo
Sperrle and the
Condor
Legion.
This began the siege of Madrid that was to last for nearly three years.
On 14th November
Buenaventura
Durruti
arrived in Madrid from Aragón
with his Anarchist
Brigade.
Six days later Durruti was killed while fighting on the outskirts
of the city. Durruti's supporters in the CNT
claimed that he had been murdered by members of the Communist
Party (PCE).
The Popular
Front government
attempted to bring the Anarchist Brigades under the control of the
Republican Army.
At first the Anarcho-Syndicalists
resisted and attempted
to retain hegemony over their units. This proved impossible when the
government made the decision to only pay and supply militias that
subjected themselves to unified command and structure.
CNT-FAL
units continued to serve together and retained their independence
in the Catalan Army of the East that fought at Belchite
and Teruel.
Anarchists were also prominent in the 149 Brigade, the 64th Division
in the Army of the Levante and the Army of the North.
Members
of the Durruti Column in Aragón
(August, 1936)
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Last updated: 25th June, 2002
(1)
Franz
Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Political
and Social Conflicts of the Political and Social Conflicts of the
Spanish Civil War (1937)
The village bar is full of peasants. The appearance of
three foreigners naturally is a big event. They immediately start
telling us proudly about their feats. Most of them are anarchists.
One man with a significant gesture of the fingers across the throat
tells us that they have killed thirty-eight 'fascists' in their village;
they evidently enjoyed it enormously. (The village has only about
a thousand inhabitants.) They had not killed any women or children,
only the priest, his most active adherents, the lawyer and his son,
the squire, and a number of richer peasants! At first I thought the
figure of thirty-eight was a boast, but next morning it was verified
from the conversation of other peasants, who, some of them, were not
at all
pleased with the massacre. From them I got details of what had happened.
Not the villagers themselves had organized the execution, but the
Durruti column when it first came through the village. They had arrested
all those suspected of reactionary activities, took them to the jail
by motor-lorry, and shot them. They told the lawyer's son to go home,
but he had chosen to die with his father.
As a result of this massacre
the rich people and the Catholics in the
next village rebelled; the alcalde mediated, a militia column entered
the village, and again shot twenty-four of its adversaries.
What had been done with
the property of those executed? The houses, of course, had been appropriated
by the committee, the stores of food and wine had been used for feeding
the militia. I omitted to ask about money. But the big problem was
the land and the rents which the landlords had previously received
from their tenants. To my intense surprise, no decision had been taken
about this matter, though it was more than two weeks since the executions.
The only certain thing was that the land of the deceased continued
to be worked as it had been previously: those parts
which had been let were still worked by their former tenants, and
those formerly managed
as an estate and cultivated by agricultural labourers were still functioning
in the same way; only instead of the squire it was now the committee
which employed the necessary labour. As to the rest, there was only
vague talk: the committee would eventually receive 50 per cent of
the old rents, the other half being remitted, and half of the expropriated
lands would be distributed among the poorer peasants, while the other
half would be managed by the committee as collective property of the
village.
Evidently in this village
the agrarian revolution had not been the result of passionate struggle
by the peasants themselves, but an almost automatic consequence of
the executions, which were themselves but an incident in the civil
war. Now most of the peasants were bewildered by the new situation.
One of them, among many others, simply said: 'What do I know? They
will give an order about it.' I ask: 'Who will give an order?' 'Oh,
how do I know? There will be some government,' he replied. This threw
a new light upon the vague replies I had got the day before in other
villages when inquiring about land expropriation and rent abolition.
(2)
Ilya
Ehrenburg, letter
sent to Marcel Rosenberg (17th September,
1936)
I
spoke with Garcia Oliver. He was also in a frenzied state. Intransigent.
At the same time that Lopez, the leader of the Madrid syndicalists,
was declaring to me that they had not permitted and would not permit
attacks on the Soviet Union
in the CNT newspaper, Oliver declared that they had said that they
were "criticizing" the Soviet Union because it was not an
ally, since it had signed the non-interference pact, and so on. Durruti,
who has been at the front, has learned a lot, whereas Oliver, in Barcelona,
is still nine-tenths anarchist ravings. For instance, he is against
a unified command on the Aragon front; a unified command is necessary
only when a general offensive begins. Sandino, who was present during
this part of the conversation, spoke out for a unified command. They
touched on the question of mobilization and the transformation of
the militia into an army. Durruti made much of the mobilization plans
(I do not know why - there are volunteers but no guns). Oliver said
that he agreed with Durruti, since "Communists and Socialists
are hiding themselves in the rear and pushing the FAI-ists out of
the cities and villages." At this point he was almost raving.
I would not have been surprised if he had shot me.
I spoke with Trueba, the
PSUC (Communist) political commissar. He complained about the FAI-ists.
They are not giving our men ammunition. We have only thirty-six bullets
left per man. The anarchists have reserves of a million and a half.
Colonel Villalba's soldiers only have a hundred cartridges each. He
cited many instances of the petty tyrannies of FAI. People from the
CNT complained to me that Fronsosa, the leader of PSUC, gave a speech
at a demonstration in San Boi in which he said that the Catalans should
not be given even one gun, since the guns would just fall into the
hands of the anarchists. In general, during the ten days that I was
in Catalonia, relations between Madrid and the generalitat on the
one hand, and that between the Communists and the anarchists on the
other, became very much more strained. Companys is wavering; either
he gravitates toward the anarchists, who have agreed to recognize
the national and even nationalistic demands of the Esquerra, or he
depends on the PSUC in the struggle against FAI. His circle is divided
between supporters of the former and of the latter solutions. If the
situation on the Talavera front worsens, we can expect him to come
out on one or the other side. We must improve relations between the
PSUC and the CNT and then try to get closer to Companys.
In Valencia our party
is working well, and the influence of the UGT is growing. But the
CNT has free rein there. The governor takes their side completely.
This is what happened when I was there: sixty anarchists with two
machine-guns turned up from the front, as their commander had been
killed. In Valencia they burned the archives and then wanted to break
into the prison to free the criminals. The censor (this is under Lopez,
the leader of the CNT) prohibited our newspaper from reporting about
any of this outrage, and in the CNT paper
there was a note that the "free masses destroyed the law archives
as part of the accursed
past."
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