During
the Spanish Civil War the National
Confederation of Trabajo (CNT), the Federación
Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) and the Worker's
Party (POUM) played an important role in running Barcelona.
This brought them into conflict with other left-wing groups in the
city including the Union General de Trabajadores
(UGT), the Catalan Socialist Party (PSUC)
and the Communist Party (PCE).
On the 3rd May 1937, Rodriguez
Salas, the Chief of Police, ordered the Civil
Guard and the Assault Guard to take
over the Telephone Exchange, which had been operated by the CNT since
the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Members of the CNT in the Telephone Exchange were armed and refused
to give up the building. Members of the CNT,
FAI and POUM became
convinced that this was the start of an attack on them by the UGT,
PSUC and the PCE
and that night barricades were built all over the city.
Fighting broke out on the
4th May. Later that day the anarchist
ministers, Federica Montseny and Juan
Garcia Oliver, arrived in Barcelona and attempted to negotiate
a ceasefire. When this proved to be unsuccessful, Juan
Negrin, Vicente
Uribe and Jesus Hernández
called on Francisco
Largo Caballero to
use government troops to takeover the city. Largo Caballero also came
under pressure from Luis Companys not
to take this action, fearing that this would breach Catalan autonomy.
On 6th May death squads
assassinated a number of prominent anarchists in their homes. The
following day over 6,000 Assault Guards
arrived from Valencia and gradually took
control of Barcelona. It is estimated
that about 400 people were killed during what became known as the
May Riots.
These events in Barcelona
severely damaged the Popular Front government.
Communist members of the Cabinet were highly critical of the way Francisco
Largo Caballero handled
the May Riots. President Manuel
Azaña agreed
and on 17th May he asked Juan Negrin to
form a new government. Negrin was a communist sympathizer and from
this date Joseph Stalin obtained more
control over the policies of the Republican government
Negrin's government
now 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.
(1)
Ethel
MacDonald, News
From Spain (1937)
There
is no doubt that the magnificent struggle of the Spanish workers challenges
the entire theory and historical interpretation of parliamentary socialism.
The civil war is a living proof of the futility and worthlessness
of parliamentary democracy as a medium of social
change. It clearly demonstrates that there is but one way, the way
of direct action. And that but one class can make the change - the
working class. Social democracy has lived too long. It is said Spain
has
killed it. And now it is merely necessary that the corrupted body
be burned.
The struggle in Spain
is maintained by the Anarchists and without the Anarchists the war
would have been lost for the workers before this. And it is because
of this fact that the Socialists, and those who call themselves Socialists,
refuse to have anything to do with the Spanish Revolution. It is true
that those persons organise collections for the poor children of Madrid
who have lost their parents as the result of barbarous bombardments,
and it is true that those persons are collecting clothes and food
and dispatching them to Madrid. But that is all. The Spanish conflict
is regarded as a case for charity, something on the same footing as
the poor of the Salvation Army. This is typical of the social democrats.
It exposes them clearly as petty bourgeoisie with hearts that beat
warmly for the poor starving children of Madrid. But speak to them
about the revolution and they gooseflesh all over. To them revolution
is illegal and unlawful, and as good law abiding citizens and subjects,
they refuse to have any association with it. That is the treachery
that is perpetrated on the working-class by those individuals
and parties. They claim to be socialists and with that label attached
to them they seduce the working-class.
(2)
The Inprecor (3rd May, 1937)
The police, led by the
Prefect of Police in person, occupied the central telephone
exchange in the afternoon of May 3rd. The police were shot at while
discharging their duty. This was the signal for the provocateurs to
begin shooting affrays
all over the city.
(3)
The Manchester Guardian (5th
May 1937)
Reports reaching Perpignan, on the Franco-Spanish frontier,
state that there was an Anarchist rising in Barcelona yesterday. At
least 100 people are reported to have been killed, and by the afternoon
the hospitals were filled with wounded.
Telephone communication
with Barcelona is cut and the Franco-Spanish frontier is closed, and
it is therefore difficult
to obtain accurate information. A passenger who arrived at Perpignan
yesterday evening by 'plane from Barcelona stated that the Government
had regained control of the centre of the city after fierce fighting,
but that the Anarchists held the suburbs and the outlying districts.
The Government hoped to gain complete control to-day.
The Catalan authorities
have installed machine-guns at strategic points in the city, and tanks
have also been brought into use. The President of Catalonia, Senor
Companys, is understood to have appealed for troops from the Aragon
front to deal with the situation.
On the other hand, it
is reported that Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist leaders have
held a meeting to reach a settlement of the conflict. Representatives
of the two big labour organisations, the U.G.T. (Socialist-Communist)
and the C.N.T. (Anarchist), broadcast appeals while the fighting was
going on calling on their supporters to cease fire and to keep calm.
A warning to the population
to stay indoors was also broadcast, apparently by the Government,
and this broadcast ended with the words "These streams of blood
must cease to flow.'
The Anarchists are nominally
supporters of the Catalan Government and have, in fact, two seats
in the Cabinet. Their
ability to collaborate is not strong, however, and they are constantly
in dispute with the Socialists and Communists in the
Government.
Tension between the authorities
and the Anarchists has been acute for some days. The disorders began
when the Generalitat (the Catalan Government) ordered the Anarchists
to give up any arms they possessed. They refused, and the Generalitat
sent police reinforcements to places where the Anarchists were in
control.
Some Anarchists installed
themselves in the tall telephone building, and it was round this that
the most serious fighting took place. At first several Anarchists
were made prisoners in the building, but later the police are said
to have been beaten off. Then the Anarchists made a large-scale attack
on all policemen found in the streets and chased them into the suburbs
at the point of the revolver.
An alternative explanation
of the cause of the rising is given by the passenger who arrived at
Perpignan. He said that the
Valencia Government recently proposed the nomination of a general
to command the Catalan forces, but the Anarchists
refused to accept the appointment. The Valencia Government insisted
and fighting broke out.
The French Consulate,
states Reuter, is understood to have been cut off by the rioters,
and the Consul had to send an
appeal for help to a French vessel in the port.
The reported rising in
Barcelona is not an isolated instance of disagreement between the
Anarchists and the other supporters of the Catalan Government. The
Anarchists are also in revolt in the town of Puigcerda, two miles
from the French border, to the north-west of Barcelona. The trouble
there fol- lowed a recent incident in which Antonio Martin, head of
the Puigcerda Anarchists, was killed.
The Valencia Government,
it appears, asked the Catalan Government that the situation should
be got under control, and
the Generalitat accordingly sent 400 carabiniers and Civil Guards
to occupy strategic points round Puigcerda. They also
cut the bridge on the road between Puigcerda and a neighbouring town
to prevent the arrival of Anarchist reinforcements.
The Anarchists are described
as being well armed and determined not to submit to discipline from
the Catalan Government, and have erected barbed-wire entanglements
and dug trenches round Puigcerda to prevent an attack.
(4)
John Langdon-Davies, Daily Chronicle
(8th May, 1937)
This has not been an Anarchist
uprising. It is a frustrated putsch of the
"Trotskyist" P.O.U.M., working through their controlled
organizations, "Friends
of Durruti" and Liberation Youth. The tragedy began
on Monday afternoon when the Government sent armed police into
the Telephone Building, to disarm the workers there, mostly C.N.T.
men. Grave irregularities
in the service had been a scandal for some time.
A large crowd gathered
in the Plaza de Catalunya outside, while the C.N.T. Men resisted,
retreating floor by floor to the top of the building. The incident
was very obscure, but word went round that the Government was out
against the Anarchists. The streets filled with armed men. By nightfall
every workers' centre and Government building was barricaded, and
at ten o'clock the first volleys were fired and the first ambulances
began ringing their way through the streets. By dawn all Barcelona
was under fire.
As the day wore on and
the dead mounted to over a hundred, one could make a guess at what
was happening. The Anarchist C.N.T. and Socialist U.G.T. were not
technically "out in the street". So long as they remained
behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an attitude
which included the right to shoot at anything armed in the open street
the general bursts were invariably aggravated by pacos - hidden
solitary men, usually Fascists, shooting from roof-tops at nothing
in particular, but doing all they could to add to the general panic.
By Wednesday evening, however,
it began to be clear who was behind the revolt. All the walls had
been plastered with an inflammatory poster calling for an immediate
revolution and for the shooting of Republican and Socialist leaders.
It was signed by the "Friends of Durruti". On Thursday morning
the Anarchist daily denied all knowledge or sympathy with it, but
La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. paper, reprinted the document with
the highest praise. Barcelona, the first city of Spain, was plunged
into bloodshed by agents provocateurs using this subversive
organization.
(5)
Claude
Cockburn, The
Daily Worker (11th May, 1937)
Thousands
of loudspeakers, set up in every public place in the towns and villages
of Republican Spain, in the trenches all along the battlefront of
the Republic, brought the message of the Communist Party at this fateful
hour, straight to the soldiers and the struggling people of this hard-pressed
hard-fighting Republic.
The speakers were Valdes,
former Councillor of Public Works in the Catalan government, Uribe,
Minister of Agriculture in the government of Spain, Diaz, Secretary
of the Communist Party of Spain, Pasionaria, and Hemandez, Minister
of Education.
Then, as now, in the forefront
of everything stand the Fascist menace to Bilbao and Catalonia.
There is a specially dangerous
feature about the situation in Catalonia. We know now that the German
and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly in order
to "prepare" the notorious 'Congress of the Fourth International',
had one big task. It was this:
They were - in co-operation
with the local Trotskyists - to prepare a situation of disorder and
bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians
to declare that they were "unable to exercise naval control on
the Catalan coasts effectively" because of "the disorder
prevailing in Barcelona", and were, therefore, "unable to
do otherwise" than land forces in Barcelona.
In other words, what was
being prepared was a situation in which the Italian and German governments
could land troops or marines quite openly on the Catalan coasts, declaring
that they were doing
so "in order to preserve order".
That was the aim. Probably
that is still the aim. The instrument
for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians
in the shape of the Trotskyist organisation known as the POUM.
The POUM, acting in cooperation
with well-known criminal elements,
and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organisations,
planned, organised and led the attack in the rearguard,
accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front
at Bilbao.
In the past, the leaders
of the POUM have frequently sought to
deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People's
Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths
as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who
confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted
murder against the government of the Soviet Union.
Copies of La Batalla,
issued on and after 2 May, and the leaflets
issued by the POUM before and during the killings in Barcelona,
set down the position in cold print.
In the plainest terms
the POUM declares it is the enemy of the People's
Government. In the plainest terms it calls upon its followers
to turn their arms in the same direction as the Fascists, namely,
against the government of the People's Front and the anti-fascist
fighters.
900 dead and 2,500 wounded
is the figure officially given by Diaz
as the total in terms of human slaughter of the POUM attack
in Barcelona.
It was not, by any means,
Diaz pointed out, the first of such attacks. Why was it, for instance,
that at the moment of the big Italian drive at Guadalajara, the Trotskyists
and their deluded anarchist friends attempted a similar rising in
another district? Why was it that the same thing happened two months
before at the time of the heavy Fascist attack at Jarama, when, while
Spaniards and Englishmen, and honest anti-fascists of every nation
in Europe, were being killed holding Arganda Bridge the Trotskyist
swine suddenly produced their arms 200 kilometres from the front,
and attacked in the rear?
(6)
Claude
Cockburn, The
Daily Worker (17th May, 1937)
Tomorrow
the antifascist forces of the Republic will start rounding up all
those scores of concealed weapons which ought to be at the front and
are not.
The decree ordering this
action affects the whole of the Republic. It is, however, in Catalonia
that its effects are likely to
be the most interesting and important.
With it, the struggle
to "put Catalonia on a war footing", which has been going
on for months and was resisted with open
violence by the POUM and its friends in the first week of May, enters
a new phase.
This weekend may well
be a turning-point. If the decree is successfully carried out it means:
First: That the groups
led by the POUM who rose against the government last week will lose
their main source of strength, namely, their arms.
Second: That, as a result
of this, their ability to hamper by terrorism the efforts of the antifascist
workers to get the war
factories on to a satisfactory basis will be sharply reduced.
Third: That the arms at
present hidden will be available for use on the front, where they
are badly needed.
Fourth: That in future
those who steal arms from the front or steal arms in transit to the
front will be liable to immediate arrest and trial as ally of the
fascist enemy.
Included in the weapons
which have to be turned in are rifles, carbines, machine-guns, machine-pistols,
trench mortars, field guns, armoured cars, hand-grenades, and all
other sorts of bombs.
The list gives you an
idea of the sort of armaments accumulated by the Fascist conspirators
and brought into the
open for the first time last week.
(7)
George
Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
A tremendous dust was
kicked up in the foreign antifascist press, but, as usual only one
side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result the
Barcelona fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal
Anarchists and Trotskyists who were "stabbing the Spanish Government
in the back" and so forth. The issue was not quite so simple
as that. Undoubtedly when you are at war with a deadly enemy it is
better not to begin fighting among yourselves - but it is worth remembering
that it takes two to make a quarrel and that people do not begin building
barricades unless they have received samething that they regard as
a provocation.
In the Communist and pro-Communist
press the entire blame for the Barcelona fighting was laid upon the
P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak,
but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government,
engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided
'uncontrollables'. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot,
carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war
in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The P.O.U.M. was 'Franco's
Fifth Column' - a 'Trotskyist' organization working in league with
the Fascists.
(8)
Bill
Alexander, British Volunteers
for Liberty (1992)
Early in May 1937 news reached the front of the fighting in the streets
of Barcelona between supporters of the POUM aided by some Anarchists,
on the one hand, and Government forces on the other. The POUM, who
had always been hostile to unity, talked of "beginning the struggle
for working-class power."
The news of the fighting
was greeted with incredulity consternation and then extreme anger
by the International Brigaders. No supporters of the Popular Front
Government could conceive of raising the slogan of "socialist
revolution" when that Government was fighting for its life against
international fascism, the power of whose war-machine was a harsh
reality a couple of hundred yards across no-man's-land. The anger
in the Brigade against those who fought the Republic in the rear was
sharpened by reports of weapons, even tanks, being kept from the front
and hidden for treacherous
purposes.
(9)
Ilya
Ehrenburg,
Izvestia,
on the May Riots
(3rd November, 1937)
I must express the sense
of shame which I now feel as a man. The same day that the fascists
are busy shooting the women of Asturias, there appeared in the French
paper a protest against injustice. But these people did not
protest against the butchers of Asturias but rather against the republic
who dares to detain
fascists and provocateurs of the POUM.
(10)
Tom
Murray,
Voices From the Spanish Civil War (1986)
Prospects for the future
of the Republic were quite good as a sort of a liberal progressive
administration. Nobody could call it anything other than that. It
wasn't a Government of Socialists. The Republican Government was a
Government more or less of Liberals, with Socialists and supporting
Communists and so on. And the terrible crime of the P.O.U.M. in my
view was that they tried to foster the idea that this was a revolutionary
war. It wasn't a revolutionary war. It never had any signs of a revolutionary
war. The people of Spain were not revolutionary in the sense of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. They were people concerned to expel
the Italians and the Germans from their territory, which was a revolt
against an invasion by foreigners into their territory, a foreign
invasion which was sponsored by the handful of generals led by Franco.
I think it was a great tragedy that at a certain period in the struggle
there was fighting behind the lines, instigated in my view by those
who believed that it was a revolutionary struggle. And this has got
to be clearly understood: it wasn't a revolutionary struggle. It had
none of the elements of a revolutionary struggle. It was a struggle
for the expulsion of foreign invaders. But the lack of unity ensuing
created a terrible handicap.
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