The
Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) was formed by Andres
Nin and Joaquin
Maurin in
1935. A revolutionary anti-Stalinist Communist party was strongly
influenced by the political ideas of Leon
Trotsky. The group supported the collectivization of the means
of production and agreed with Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution.
As a result
of Maurin's involvement, POUM was very strong in Catalonia. In most
areas of Spain it made little impact and in 1935 POUM is estimated
to have only around 8,000 members.
POUM supported
the Popular
Front government
but its radical policies such as nationalization without compensation,
were not introduced. Andres
Nin criticised
the Popular Front's conservatism and on 16th December he was ousted
from the government.
During
the Spanish
Civil War the
organization grew rapidly and by the end of 1936 it was 30,000 strong
with 10,000 in its own militia.
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Last updated: 20th March, 2002
(1)
George
Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
The P.O.U.M. (Partido
Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) was one of those dissident Communist
parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years
as a result of the opposition to 'Stalinism'; i.e. to the change,
real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly ofex-Communist
and partly of an earlier party, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc. Numerically
it was a small party, with not much influence outside Catalonia, and
chiefly important because it contained an unusually high proportion
of politically conscious members. In Catalonia its chief stronghold
was Lerida. It did not represent any block of trade unions. The P.O.U.M.
militiamen were mostly C.N.T. members, but the actual party-members
generally belonged to the U.G.T. It was, however, only in the C.N.T.
that the P.O.U.M. had any influence.
(2)
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)
It must be explained, in order to make intelligible the
attitude of the communist police, that Trotskyism is an obsession
with the communists in Spain. As to real Trotskyism, as embodied in
one section of the POUM, it definitely does not deserve the attention
it gets, being quite a minor element of Spanish political life. Were
it only for the real forces of the Trotskyists, the best thing for
the communists to do would certainly be not to talk about them, as
nobody else would pay any attention to this small and congenitally
sectarian group. But the communists have to take account not only
of the Spanish situation but of what is the official view about Trotskyism
in Russia. Still, this is only one of the aspects of Trotskyism in
Spain which has been artificially worked up by the communists. The
peculiar atmosphere which today exists about Trotskyism in Spain is
created, not by the importance of the Trotskyists themselves, nor
even by the reflex of Russian events upon Spain; it derives from the
fact that the communists have got into the habit of denouncing as
a Trotskyist everybody who disagrees with them about anything. For
in communist mentality, every disagreement in political matters is
a major crime, and every political criminal is a Trotskyist. A Trotskyist,
in communist vocabulary, is synonymous with
a man who deserves to be killed. But as usually happens in such cases,
people get caught themselves by their own demagogic propaganda. The
communists, in Spain at least, are getting into the habit of believing
that people whom they decided to call Trotskyists, for the sake of
insulting them, are Trotskyists in the sense of co-operating with
the Trotskyist political party. In this respect the Spanish communists
do not differ in any way from the German Nazis. The Nazis call everybody
who dislikes their political regime a 'communist' and finish by actually
believing that all their adversaries are communists; the same happens
with the communist propaganda against the Trotskyists. It is an atmosphere
of suspicion and denunciation, whose unpleasantness it is difficult
to convey to those
who have not lived through it. Thus, in my case, I have no doubt that
all the communists who took care to make things unpleasant for me
in Spain were genuinely convinced that I actually was a Trotskyist.
(3)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
Largo Caballero began to realize the need for
immediate drastic action. As president of the U.G.T., he summoned
the sub-leaders of this Revolutionary Socialist group and impressed
upon them the desperateness of the situation. The result was a round-table
conference among the U.G.T., the heads of the Syndicalists National
Confederation of Labor (C.N.T.), The Federation of Iberian Anarchists
(F.A.I.), The Trotsky Communists (Partido Obrero Unificado Marxists
- P.O.U.M.), The Stalin Communists and the Left Republicans. In the
first agreement which these divergent factions had been able to reach
since the beginning of the war they approved the immediate mobilization
of all able-bodied men in Loyalist territory. A decree to this effect
was issued. Whether they wanted to join or not, all men between the
ages of 20 and 45 were pressed into military service. From this moment
on, the Loyalist army ceased to be a voluntary army.
(4)
John
Dos Passos, The Villages
Are the Heart of Spain (1937)
The headquarters of the unified Marxist party (P.O.U.M.).
It's late at night in a large bare office furnished with odds and
ends of old furniture. At a bit battered fake Gothic desk out of somebody's
library. Andres Nin sits at the telephone. I sit in a mangy overstuffed
armchair. On the settee opposite me sits a man who used to be editor
of a radical publishing house in Madrid. We talk in a desultory way
with many pauses about old times in Madrid, about the course of the
war. They are telling me about the change that has come over the population
of Barcelona since the great explosion of revolutionary feeling that
followed the attempted military coup d'etat and swept the fascists
out of Catalonia in July. 'You can even see it in people's dress,'
said Nin from the telephone laughing. 'Now we're beginning to wear
collars and ties again but even a couple of months ago everybody was
wearing the most extraordinary costumes... you'd see people on the
street wearing feathers.'
Nin was wellbuilt and healthylooking
and probably looked younger than his age; he had a ready childish
laugh that showed a set of solid white teeth. From time to time as
we were talking the telephone would ring and he would listen attentively
with a serious face. Then he'd answer with a few words too rapid for
me to catch and would hang up the receiver with a shrug of the shoulders
and come smiling back into the conversation again. When he saw that
I was begin- ning to frame a question he said, 'It's the villages.
. . They want to know what to do.' 'About Valencia taking over the
police services?' He nodded. 'What are they going to do?' 'Take a
car and drive through the suburbs of Barcelona, you'll see that all
the villages are barricaded. The committees are all out on the streets
with machine guns.' Then he laughed. 'But maybe you had better not.'
'He'd be all right,' said
the other man. 'They have great respect for foreign journalists.'
'Is it an organized movement?' 'It's complicated. . . in Bellver our
people want to know whether they ought to move against the anarchists.
In other places they are with them. You know Spain.'
It was time for me to
push on. I shook hands with Nin and with a young Englishman who also
is dead now, and went out into the rainy night. Since then Nin has
been killed and his party suppressed.
(5)
George
Orwell,
Homage to Catalania (1938)
I have spoken of the militia
'uniform', which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly
a uniform. Perhaps a 'multiform' would be the proper name for it.
Everyone's clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never
quite the same in any two cases. Practically everyone in the army
wore corduroy knee-breeches, but there the uniformity ended. Some
wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others leather leggings or
high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the jackets
were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable colour. The
kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It was usual
to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition
nearly every man wore a red or red and black handkerchief round his
throat. A militia column at that time was an extraordinary-looking
rabble. But the clothes had to be issued as this or that factory rushed
them out, and they were not bad clothes considering the circumstances.
The shirts and socks were wretched cotton things, however, quite useless
against cold. I hate to think of what the militiamen must have gone
through in the earlier months before anything was organized. I remember
coming upon a newspaper of only about two months earlier in which
one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, after a visit to the front, said that
he would try to see to it that "every militiaman had a blankt"'.
A phrase to make you shudder if you have ever slept in a trench.
On my second day at the
barracks there began what was comically called 'instruction'. At the
beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were
mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona,
full of revolutionary ardour but completely ignorant of the meaning
of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline
did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the
ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. The lieutenant who instructed
us was a stout, fresh-faced, pleasant young man who had previously
been a Regular Army officer, and still looked like one, with his smart
carriage and spick-and-span uniform. Curiously enough he was a sincere
and ardent Socialist. Even more than the men themselves he insisted
upon complete social equality between all ranks. I remember his pained
surprise when an ignorant recruit addressed him as 'Senor'. 'What!
Senor? Who is that calling me Senor? Are we not all comrades?' I doubt
whether it made his job any easier. Meanwhile the raw recruits were
getting no military training that could be of the slightest use to
them. I had been told that foreigners were not obliged to attend 'instruction'
(the Spaniards, I noticed, had a pathetic belief that all foreigners
knew more of military matters than themselves), but naturally I turned
out with the others. I was very anxious to learn how to use a machine-gun;
it was a weapon I had never had a chance to handle. To my dismay I
found that we were taught nothing about the use of weapons. The so-called
instruction was simply parade-ground drill of the most antiquated,
stupid kind; right turn, left turn, about turn, marching at attention
in column of threes and all the rest of that useless nonsense which
I had learned when I was fifteen years old. It was an extraordinary
form for the training of a guerilla army to take. Obviously if you
have only a few days in which to train a soldier, you must teach him
the things he will most need; how to take cover, how to advance across
open ground, how to mount guards and build a parapet - above all,
how to use his weapons. Yet this mob of eager children, who were going
to be thrown into the front line in a few days' time, were not even
taught how to fire
a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb. At the time I did not grasp
that this was because there were no weapons to be had.
In the P.O.U.M. militia the shortage of rifles was so desperate that
fresh troops reaching the front always had to take their rifles from
the troops they relieved in the line. In the whole of the Lenin Barracks
there were, I believe, no rifles except those used by the sentries.
(6)
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?
(7)
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.
(8)
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.
(9)
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.
(10)
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.
(11)
Albert Weisbord, Class Struggle (February 1937)
Many advanced workers, disillusioned with the Socialists and Stalinists,
have been willing to believe that in the P.O.U.M. there is some hope
that the workers will be able to surmount their difficulties and establish
the dictatorship of the proletariat and a socialist regime. They point
out that the most influential leader, Andreas Nin, was closely connected
with Trotsky for many years and was a strong adherent of the theory
of peasant revolution. They show that the P.O.U.M. in contradistinction
to the other parties in Spain, has called for the rule of the workers,
even for Soviets, and has steadily maintained its independence from
the other opportunistic organizations.
On the other hand there
are those workers who assert that the P.O.U.M. was willing to become
a part of the capitalist Catalonian government and that no revolutionary
party could possibly have taken such a move. They also declare that
the Catalonian government, being capitalist, was as bad as the Madrid
government and both were reactionary and against the working class.
In the light of this polemic,
it seems to us that the best way to treat the question of revolutionary
policy as involved as the actions of P.O.U.M. is to take up the following
basic questions:
1. What is the character
of the present governments of Madrid and of Catalonia; is it correct
to call these governments "reactionary"?
2. Can a revolutionary
party at any time enter a government such as that which exists in
Madrid or Catalonia?
3. Can the Spanish workers
rest their hopes upon the P.O.U.M.?
It seems to us entirely
incorrect to estimate the present governments either of Madrid or
of Catalonia as "reactionary". Certainly they are not reactionary
from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. The present republican-democratic
set-up can not be compared with the regime under Alphonso XIII. It
is not the habit of Marxists to use the term "reactionary"
as a mere expletive. The word "reactionary" means something:
it means going backward. A reactionary system is one that would move
the social order backward bringing back outworn techniques and methods
of production and outworn political forms and social customs.. Alphonso
XIII and his forces are clearly reactionary in that sense of the word
since they rested state power upon the old feudal grandees and a system
of production that was stifling Spain.
The government in Madrid,
from the angle of the capitalists, is far from reactionary, since
this government intends to unleash all the productive forces of Spain
for their benefit. Power will shift from the country to the city,
from agriculture to industry, from the landlord to the industrialists
and modern capitalist elements. From the capitalist point of view
the victory of the present Madrid or Catalonian government means the
beginning of the modernization of Spain.
To draw an historical analogy:
It might be said that the present Madrid government stands to Alphonso
XIII as the French Revolitionary government stood to Louis XVI. There
is, however, this vast distinction. In the 18th century the French
Revolutionary Government, operating on behalf of modern capitalism,
could not help be progressive and clear the road for the new social
order. In the 20th century, there has appeared on the horizon a new
class, a working class that should be able to make an independent
bid for power. No longer tied to the apron strings of capital, the
proletariat of Spain is ready to modernize Spain not in the capitalist
sense but in the socialist sense. And thus the modernization of Spain
in the capitalist sense has to be the work not of a progressive government
but of forces that stifle and crush the revolutionary proletariat
and the toiling masses.
Many of those who wish
to modernize Spain from a bourgeois point of view are now with the
forces of Franco precisely for this reason. The insurgents are not
of one piece; there are the Carlists and the Bourbonists, but there
are also the fascists. The fascists do not wish to bring back the
old Spain that has been irrevocably destroyed. They too wish essentially
to industrialize and modernize Spain, but they understand clearly
that no longer is this the job of revolution - as was the case in
France in 1789 - but of counter-revolution.
In this the counter-revolutionary
fascists disagree violently with their capitalist brethren who are
still behind the Madrid government. The capitalists of the Madrid
government who are in the Left Republican Parties, believe that the
workers can be controlled, that they will not make a bid for power
and that therefore the Madrid government can become, like the government
of present day England or of France, a fine vehicle for the development
of capital. The fascist capitalists, however, believe that the day
is too late for this, that democratic control is too weak, that the
working class can no longer be restrained and that the first job of
the day is to crush the aspirations of the masses for Socialism. Only
thus can capitalism be revived in Spain.
Here, then, are the exploiting
classes divided. Generally speaking, it is the big capitalists of
heavy industry and the financiers that take the side of the fascists;
the landowners go with the monarchists; both units against the present
Madrid regime. It is the petty bourgeoisie and the factory owners
of small and light industry that tend to support the Madrid Republic
or at least not openly fight against it.
Nor can it be said that
even from the workers' point of view that either the Catalonian government
or the Madrid government was "reactionary". Were these governments
engaged in shooting down the working class and putting down the lower
orders, were the masses ready to push the revolution forward to socialism
and were being kept back by the broad might of these governments,
then it might be said that these governments were reactionary in the
sense that they were preventing the people from building Socialism,
the only system of society that could improve upon the moribund capitalism
of the present.
But the fact of the matter
is, the masses are more or less imprisoned by the opportunism of the
Socialists and Stalinists on the one hand, and the Anarchists and
Syndicalists on the other. The Socialists and Stalinists have openly
declared that they are not fighting for Socialism but merely for bourgeois
democracy. They have become ardent bourgeois democrats and republicans
and have no other thought than loyal support of the status quo that
was being attacked by the rebel reactionaries. The Socialists and
Stalinists do not want Socialism, they do not want even workers' control
over production. They make no move to socialize the industries. They
do not form Soviets. They do not resists the formation of a new capitalist
army under the control of bourgeois officers. They do not break from
the Azanas and the Companys, bourgeois leaders of the Madrid and Catelonian
governments. They make no effort to carry the revolution forward for
the benefit of the people. Instead they carry on bitter war against
the Left Wing, especially the P.O.U.M. that tends to go in the revolutionary
direction.
The Anarchists also have
come out strongly against the dictatorship of the proletariat and
it was for this reason that the Anarcho-Syndicalists of the C.N.T.
refused to participate in the Asturias revolt of 1934 and quietly
saw their own brethren shot down by the Madrid government of those
days because the workers refused to pledge themselves to the Asturias
revolt that they would not take the power and inaugurate Socialism
and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Today, together with the
Socialists and Stalinists, the Anarchists and Syndicalists have also
become part of the governmental forces of Madrid and of Catalonia.
These Anarchists, who would not fight for the rule of the workers,
are quit ready to give their lives for the continuance of Madrid rule,
and thus they prove to be basically one with the petty-bourgeois reformists
of the Socialist and Stalinist parties.
In the light of the fact
that all of the big proletarian organizations, Anarchist, Syndicalist,
Socialist and Stalinist support the present governments of Madrid
and of Catalonia, it is difficult to call these governments reactionary.
They would be reactionary only if the mass organizations were ready
to go forward beyond the present capitalist system and were throwing
themselves against this government. But for this there would have
to be a genuinely revolutionary party guiding the masses. Up to the
present, unfortunately, this is not the case; the masses through their
organizations are heartily supporting the governmental regimes.
But if the Madrid and Catalonian
governments are not reactionary, this does not mean that they are
not capitalistic. For anyone to idealize the Madrid governments or
the Left Madrid government that exists in Catalonia would be to make
a criminal error. There is no such thing as a government without classes
and class domination. The class that dominates Madrid and to a weaker
degree Catalonia, is the capitalist class.
It is true there has been
some talk of socialization of the factories in Catalonia and also
in Madrid, but the Socialists and Stalinists have seen to it that
it is mostly talk. There have been some spontaneous seizures of the
factories by the workers and a degree of worker control over them,
but private property in the means of production is still retained
intact, on the whole. Foreign property is carefully protected; the
property of the agrarian landholder is assured, the petty-bourgeoisie
is quieted. During the present civil war, there may have to be some
severe measures of confiscation, some degree of nationalization of
industry and public utilities, as there was in the days of the Jacobins
of the 18th century in France, but the system of private property
remains secure. That is the situation today where the Republicans
control.
(12)
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.
(13)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
Juan Negrin, former Minister of Treasury under
Largo and a friend of the foreign correspondents, was named Premier
to succeed Largo. I had known Negrin for several years and sincerely
admired him. Even after the stocky, bespectacled multi-linguist became
a cabinet minister he continued his nightly visits to the Miami bar
for his after-dinner liqueur. I often chatted with him there, getting
angles on the financial situation.
The presence of a moderate
Socialist at the head of the new government was a boon to the regime
because it strengthened the fiction of a "democratic" government
abroad. Largo's ouster, however, produced fresh troubles. Feeling
much stronger after its critical first test of strength against the
Catalonian Anarcho-Syndicalists, the government had ousted the Anarchist
members of the Catalonian Generalitat government and followed this
up by excluding the Anarcho-Syndicalists from representation in the
new Negrin cabinet.
Largo, it had been thought,
would step down gracefully, but, bitterly disappointed and angry,
the former Premier immediately began plotting his return to power.
The Anarchists, equally bitter at their being deprived of a voice
in government, suddenly threw their support to Largo, who adopted
as his new campaign slogan the Anarchist cry "We want our social
revolution now."
Largo has another important,
if less powerful, ally, in the outlawed P.O.U.M. Trotskyites. The
disappearance and reported murder of the Trotskyite leader, Andres
Nin, added to the bitterness of the P.O.U.M. Nin, one of the
foremost revolutionaries in Spain, was arrested last June when the
government, at the behest of the Stalin Communists, raided the P.O.U.M.
headquarters in Barcelona and arrested many of the members.
It was announced that
Nin had been taken first to Valencia and then to Madrid for imprisonment
pending trial. When the P.O.U.M., supported by the Anarchists and
many of Largo's extreme Socialists, became more and more insistent
in their demands that Nin be produced and tried, and the government
was unable to dodge the issue any longer, it issued a communiqué
to the effect that Nin had "escaped" from the Madrid prison
with his guards. Even
the Anarchist newspapers were obliged to print this version, but Anarchist
and Trotskyite circles were convinced that Nin was murdered enroute
to Madrid, and he became a martyr.
Largo regards the present
government as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and is frankly
working for its overthrow. With the opposition to the Negrin government
now three-way, neutral observers do not believe that a decisive program
can long be avoided. The well-disciplined Communists supporting the
Negrin cabinet are confident that if an open fight eventuates, as
it seems likely to do either before or after the war, it will have
the support of a large percentage of Loyalist Spain. The government
will be able to count on its "army within an army."
Whether this will be able
to cope with the powerful labor unions supporting Largo is problematical.
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