Juan
Garcia Oliver
was
born in Spain in 1901. After the First
World War he worked as a waiter. He joined the CNT
and became a close associate of Buenaventura
Durruti and is believed to have taken part in the
assassination of Juan Soldevila Romero, the archbishop of Saragossa.
Garcia Oliver was imprisoned
during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de
Rivera. After six months he was released and soon afterwards fled
to France.
In the first year of the
Spanish Civil War Garcia Oliver and the
CNT tried to reorganize the Spanish economy.
National and regional conferences of peasants, communication workers,
metal workers and railway employees made efforts to introduce collectivization.
In September 1936 José
Giral was replaced by Francisco
Largo Caballero as
prime minister. Largo Caballero brought into his government several
left-wing radicals into his government including four anarchists,
Garcia Oliver (Justice), Juan López
(Commerce), Federica Montseny (Health)
and Juan Peiró (Industry).
(1)
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."
(2)
Ilya
Ehrenburg, letter
sent to Marcel Rosenberg (18th September,
1936)
Today I again had a long
conversation with Companys. He proposed to form a local government
in this way: half Esquerra, half CNT and UGT. He said that he would
reserve for himself finance and the police. After my words on the
fact that the anarchists' lack of personal responsibility would interfere
with manufacturing, he declared that he "agreed" to put
a Marxist at the head of industry. He called Oliver a fanatic. He
reproached the PSUC for not answering the terror of the anarchists
with the same. On the conduct of the Catalan militia in Madrid, he
said that that was the FAI-ists and that the national Guardia and
the Esquerrists would fight anyone. He said that Madrid itself wanted
the CNT militia, while not hiding the fact that the latter left to
"establish order in Madrid." He advised sending them back
from Madrid.
The whole time he cursed
the FAI. He knew that I was going from him to the CNT and was very
interested in how the FAI-ists would converse with me. He requested
that I communicate the results of the conversation with him. He complained
that the FAI-ists were against Russia were carrying out anti-Soviet
propaganda, or more accurately, carried out but that he was our friend,
and so on. A steamship, even if it held only sugar
would soften his heart.
(3)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
A large share of the abuses on the Loyalist side has been
credited to the common criminals liberated with the political prisoners
in the general amnesty which followed the February, 1936, elections.
Extremist leaders demanded and secured the freedom of these criminals
on the grounds that the courts which sentenced them, having been set
up under the old capitalistic regimes, were incapable of administering
"proletarian justice." Given arms and authority, many of
these ex-convicts lost no time in reverting to lawlessness. The Generalitat
Ministry of Interior, answering charges that it had failed to curtail
crime in Catalonia, declared:
"Before order can
be re-established in Catalonia, we must round up the irresponsible
criminals now loose in our territory. Where are the thousands of murderers,
robbers and other evil-doers who gained their freedom when the
gates of the prisons were opened? They were armed along with the rest,
but they are not at the front. We must find them and put them back
where they belong before we can hope to have order here."
A few of these ex-prisoners
have, however, distinguished themselves on the side of law and order
since they were released. The most notable instance of this has been
the career of Jose Garcia Oliver, anarchist Minister of Justice in
the Popular Front cabinet. Garcia Oliver was serving an indeterminate
term for robbery when the amnesty was declared. He has proved a popular
and efficient minister. Impartial legal minds termed his decree giving
equal rights to women "one of the finest bits of legal terminology
in the Spanish civil code."
(4)
Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseenko,
General
Consul of the Soviet Union in Barcelona
, top secret document sent to NKVD
(18th October,
1936)
My conversations with
Garcia Oliver and with several other CNT members, and their latest
speeches, attest to the fact that the leaders of the CNT have an honest
and serious wish to concentrate all forces in a strengthened united
front and on the development of military action against the fascists.
I must note that the PSUC is not free from certain instances that
hamper the "consolidation of a united front": in particular,
although the Liaison Commission has just been set up, the party organ
Treball suddenly published an invitation to the CNT and the
FAI that, since the experience with the Liaison Commission had gone
so well, the UGT and the PSUC had suggested that the CNT and the FAI
create even more unity in the form of an action commission. This kind
of suggestion was taken by leaders of the FAI as simply a tactical
maneuver. Comrade Valdes and Comrade Sese did not hide from me that
the just-mentioned suggestion was meant to "talk to the masses
of the CNT over the heads of their leaders." The same sort of
note was sounded at the appearance of Comrade Comorera at the PSUC
and UGT demonstration on 18 October - on the one hand, a call for
protecting and developing the united front and, on the other, boasting
about the UGT's having a majority among the working class in Catalonia,
accusing the CNT and the FAI of carrying out a forced collectivization
of the peasants,
of hiding weapons, and even of murdering "our comrades."
The PSUC leaders-designate
agreed with me that such tactics were completely wrong and expressed
their intention to change them. I propose that we get together in
the near future with a limited number of representatives of the CNT
and the FAI to work out a concrete program for our next action.
In the near future,
the PSUC intends to bring forward the question on reorganizing the
management of military industry. At this point the Committee on Military
Industry works under the chairmanship of Tarradellas, but the
main role in the committee is played by Vallejos (from the FAI). The
PSUC proposes to put together leadership from representatives from
all of the organizations, to group the factories by specialty, and
to place at the head of each group a commissar, who would answer to
the government.
The evaluation by Garcia
Oliver and other CNT members of the Madrid government seems well founded
to me. Caballero's attitude toward the question of attracting the
CNT into that or any other form of government betrays his obstinate
incomprehension of that question's importance. Without the participation
of the CNT, it will not, of course, be possible to create the appropriate
enthusiasm and discipline in the people's militia/Republican militia.
The information concerning
the intentions of the Madrid government for a timely evacuation from
Madrid was confirmed. This widely disseminated information undermines
confidence in the central government to an extraordinary degree and
paralyzes the defense of Madrid.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
