The history of the Spanish Civil War - not least its final years, leading to the triumph of counter-revolution, has too often been distorted, especially by those who wish to cover-up the role that Stalinism played in this defeat.
Therefore, before looking at Trotsky's writings from this period (from after the defeat of the 'May Days' of Barcelona in 1937 to the end of the Civil War) in a further post, I have again first tried to summarise this history from a Marxist perspective by quoting, in some detail, from Felix Morrow's 1938 book 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain':
The Dismissal of Largo Caballero
"The defeat of the Catalonian proletariat (after the 'May Days') marked a new stage in the advance of the counter-revolution. Hitherto, the reaction had developed under cover of collaboration with the CNT and UGT leaders, and even from September to December in the Generalidad with the POUM leaders. Thus, the gap between the openly bourgeois programme of the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc and the revolutionary aspirations of the masses had been obscured by the 'centrists'. [Morrow: formations which are not revolutionary but which also do not proclaim the class-collaboration doctrines of classical reformism]
Now the moment arrived for the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc to dispense with the centrists. The first item of the bill presented by the Stalinists to the Valencia cabinet was the complete suppression of the POUM.
In spite of its vacillating policies, the POUM had in its ranks many revolutionary fighters for the interests of the proletariat. Even the POUM leaders, unready for revolution, would be driven to resist the naked counter-revolution. Stalin has understood that even the capitulators, the Zinovievs and Kamenevs, will be a danger on the day the masses rebel. Stalin’s formula is: wipe out every possible focus, every capable figure, around whom the masses can rally. That bloody formula, already carried out in the August and January trials in Moscow, was now applied to Spain and the POUM.
The cabinet convened on May 15, and Uribe, the Stalinist Minister of Agriculture, bluntly put the question to Caballero: was he prepared to agree to the dissolution of the POUM, confiscation of its broadcasting stations, presses, buildings, goods, etc., and imprisonment of the Central Committee and local committees which had supported the Barcelona rising? Caballero declared he could not preside over repression against other workers' organisations. ... Such was the last meeting of the Caballero cabinet.
Outlawry of the POUM was the first demand of the counter-revolution, but the Stalinists followed it up with other basic demands which Caballero and the left socialists would not accept responsibility for. ... one step, above all, which Caballero could not accept (was) the final moves in smashing the workers' control of the factories. ...
Caballero was just enough of a labour politician to recognise that the state he had himself revived was alien to the workers and that the bourgeois-Stalinist slogan of ‘state control of the factories’ meant smashing the power of the factory committees. ...
Was May 15 the correct moment for the rightists to break with Caballero? ... Were not the Stalinists too nakedly revealing their reactionary rôle by becoming the only labour group, apart from the long-hated (right-wing of the Socialists) Prieto group, to participate in the government?
The Stalinists probably overestimated their ability to secure expressions of support for the new cabinet from enough UGT unions to obscure the fact that the labour unions as a whole were opposed to the new government. ...
If, however, the Stalinists miscalculated their ability to provide a labour ‘front’ for (soon to be new Premier from the Prieto group) Negrin, they were undoubtedly correct in other calculations. For them, the Barcelona events revealed that the CNT ministers were no longer of use in keeping the CNT masses in line; the fighting of May 3–8 had revealed the chasm between the leaders and the masses of the CNT. Further governmental participation of the CNT would provide little brake to the resistance of the masses and, on the other hand, could only speed up a split between these leaders and the masses...
As for the opposition from Caballero, its temper and quality had already been experienced: his ‘revolutionary criticism’ of the People’s Front government of February–July 1936, and his even more radical declarations during the first war cabinet of July 19-September 4, 1936. In those periods Caballero had channelled discontent – and then had entered the government himself. ... (However,) it was safe to predict that Caballero’s opposition would not take the form of revival of the network of workers’ committees and the co-ordinating of them into soviets-and only along that road did the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc have anything serious to fear.
If dropping the UGT and CNT involved no serious dangers, it offered immediate and far-reaching advantages for the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc. Their immediate requirements were
1. Complete control of the army. ... For a ruthless reorganisation of the militias into bourgeois regiments, officered by bourgeois appointees in consonance with the old military code, and a purge of radical army leaders thrown up by the July days, it was necessary to wrest the army entirely from Caballero.
2. The War Ministry offered the best vantage point from which to begin wresting control of the factories from the workers. In the name of the exigencies of the war, the ministry could step in and break the hold of the workers in the most strategic industries: railroad and other transportation, mining, metals, textiles, coal and oil. ...
3. In Caballero’s cabinet the Ministry of the Interior, which controlled the two main police bodies (Assault and National Republican Guard) and the press, was presided over by Angel Galarza, a member of the Caballero group. The revolutionary workers had sufficient reason to denounce his policies. ... Nevertheless, the Caballero group recognized that repression of the CNT would be a fatal blow to the Caballero base, the UGT, and Caballero needed the CNT as a counterweight to the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc. Galarza had sent five thousand police to Barcelona, but had refused to carry out the Prieto-Stalinist proposals for complete liquidation of the POUM and reprisals against the FAI-CNT. ...
4. The Prieto-Stalinist programme for conciliation with the Catholic Church – halfway house to conciliation with Franco – was being resisted by Caballero. Backbone of the monarchy and of the 'bienio negro', the 'two black years' of Lerroux-Gil Robles, the churches had been the fortresses of the fascist uprising. ... with the Vatican on the side of the Franco regime, it would inevitably use the church organisation to help Franco. ... Caballero had done many things to curry favour with the Anglo-French imperialists; but to permit the church organisation to operate freely in the midst of the civil war was too much for him. ...
Caballero conducted himself during the ministerial crisis according to the traditional rules of bourgeois politics, which is to say, that he kept the masses completely in the dark about developments and made no attempt to rally the workers against the right. (When his attempts to negotiate a compromise government had failed) he informed Azaña that he had failed to form a cabinet and Azaña promptly designated Negrin to form a government of the bourgeoisie, the Prieto group, and the Stalinists".
'El Gobierno de la Victoria'
"The Stalinists launched a world-wide campaign to prove that victory had been held up by Caballero and that it would now be forthcoming.
The annals of the Negrin government, however, proved to be not the record of military victory, nor even of serious attempts at military victory, but of ruthless repression of the workers and peasants. That reactionary course was dictated to the government by the Anglo-French rulers to whom it looked for succour. ...
On June 23, the government decreed special courts to deal with sedition. ... The sweeping definition of sedition made treason of any opinion, spoken or written or indicated by circumstantial evidence, which was construable as critical of the government. Applicable to any worker who agitated for better conditions, to strikers, to any governmental criticism in a newspaper, to almost any statement, act or attitude other than adoration of the régime, this decree was not only unprecedented in a democracy, it was more brazen than Hitler or Mussolini’s juridical procedure. ...
Press censorship operated under a system which not only destroyed free criticism but required that the very acts of censorship be concealed from the people. Thus, on August 7 (the CNT paper) Solidaridad Obrera was suspended for five days for disobeying censors’ orders, the specific act of disobedience being ... 'that they should not publish white spaces'. That is, deletions by the censor ... must be hidden from the masses by inserting other material! ...
The censorship decrees no longer referred to the radio. For, on June 18, police detachments had appeared at all the radio stations belonging to the trade unions and political parties and closed them down. Thenceforward, the government monopolised radio broadcasting. ...
Despite terrible instances – in almost every city captured by the fascists – of Assault and Civil Guards in large numbers going over to the fascists during the siege, the Ministry of the Interior proceeded to cleanse the police, not of the old elements, but of the workers sent in by their organisations after July 19. ...
Held to a slower pace until the political pre-conditions had been more fully achieved, the economic counter-revolution was now speeded up. In agriculture, the road to be followed had been mapped by the very first decree, October 7, 1936, which merely confiscated estates of fascists, leaving untouched the system of private property in land, including the right to own large properties and to exploit wage labour.
Despite the decree, however, collectivised agriculture became widespread during the first months of the revolution. ... With the Stalinist Uribe’s assumption of the Ministry of Agriculture, first in Caballero’s cabinet and then in Negrin’s, the weight of the government was thrown against the collectives. ...
Ricardo Zabalza, national head of the UGT’s Peasant and Landworkers’ Federation declared: 'The reactionaries of yesterday, the erstwhile agents of the big landowners are given all sort of assistance by the government while we are deprived of the very minimum of it or are even evicted from our small holdings ... They want to take advantage of the fact that our best comrades are now fighting on the war fronts. Those comrades will weep with rage when they find, upon leave from the war fronts, that their efforts and sacrifices were of no avail, that they only led to the victory of their enemies of old, now flaunting membership cards of a proletarian organisation [the Communist party]'.
These agents of the big landowners, the hated caciques – overseers and village bosses – had been the backbone of the political machine of Gil Robles and the landowners. Now they were to be found in the ranks of the Communist party. Even such an outstanding chieftain of Gil Robles’ machine as the secretary of the CEDA in Valencia had survived the revolution ... and joined the CP. ...
In the cities and industrial towns, too, the government proceeded to destroy all elements of socialisation. ... Through the Ministry of Defence, factories were taken over one by one. On August 28, a decree gave the government the right to intervene in or take over any mining or metallurgical plant. ...
The next step, for which the Stalinists had been campaigning for months, was militarisation of all industries necessary to war - transportation, mines, metal plants, munitions, etc. ... The militarisation decree is sugar-coated by being titled ‘militarisation and nationalisation decree’. But to militarise factories already in workers’ hands, coupled with government recognition of full indemnification of former owners, simply ends workers’ control and prepares for returning the factories to their former owners".
The Conquest of Catalonia
"On May 5, Catalan autonomy had ceased to exist. The central government had taken over the Catalan Ministries of Public Order and Defence. ... (soon to be) surrendered by Caballero’s delegate to the representatives of Negrin-Stalin, and the pogrom began in earnest. ...
The PSUC opened a monstrous campaign ... identical in language, slogans, etc., with the witch-hunts of the Soviet bureaucracy before the Moscow trials. .... On May 28, ( the POUM newspaper) La Batalla was suppressed permanently and the POUM radio seized. The Friends of Durruti headquarters were occupied and the organisation outlawed. Simultaneously, the official anarchist press was put under iron political censorship. Yet the POUM and CNT did not join in a mass protest. ...
In its darkest hour the POUM was completely isolated. On June 16, Nin was arrested in his office. The same night, widespread raids caught almost all the forty members of the Executive Committee. A few who escaped were forced to give themselves up because their wives were seized as hostages. The next morning the POUM was outlawed.
The Regional Committee of the CNT did not come to the defence of the POUM. ... Above all, the great masses had not been prepared to understand the Stalinist system of frame-up and slander. Currying favour with Stalin ... the anarchist press had preserved a dead silence about the Moscow trials and purges, publishing only the official news reports. ... By mid-July, the POUM’s leaders and active cadres were all in jail...
Only the small forces of the Bolshevik-Leninists, who had been expelled as ‘Trotskyists’ from the POUM, and had formed their organisation in the spring of 1937 – only this small band, working under the three-fold illegality of the state, the Stalinists and the CNT-POUM leadership, clearly pointed the road for the workers. Not only the ultimate road of the workers’ state but the immediate task of defending the democratic rights of the workers.
That the CNT masses could be aroused was shown by the protection they accorded Bolshevik-Leninists distributing illegal leaflets. ... A Bolshevik-Leninist leaflet of July 19 points the road: the united front of struggle of the CNT-FAI, POUM, the Bolshevik-Leninists and the dissident anarchists:
'Workers: demand of your organisation and your leaders a united front pact which must contain:
1. Struggle for the freedom of the workers’ press! Down with political censorship!
2. Liberation of all revolutionary prisoners. For the liberation of comrade Nin, transported to Valencia!
3. Joint protection of all centres and enterprises in the possession of our organisations.
4. Reconstitution of strengthened Workers’ Patrols. Cessation of disarming the working class.
5. Equal pay for officers and soldiers. The return to the front of all the armed forces sent from Valencia. General offensive on all fronts.
6. Control of prices and distribution through committees of working men and working women.
7. Arrest of the provocateurs of 3 May: Rodriguez Salas, Ayguade, etc.
To achieve this, all workers form the united front! Organise Committees of Workers, Peasants and Combatants in all enterprises, barracks and districts on the land and at the front!'
But not in a day, or a month, does a new organisation win the leadership of the masses. The road is long and hard – and yet the only road.
By July, according to the official CNT figures, eight hundred of their members in Barcelona alone were imprisoned, and sixty had ‘disappeared’ – euphemism for assassination. The left socialist press reported scores of its leading militants everywhere seized and jailed.
One of the most repulsive phases of the counter-revolution was its merciless persecution of the foreign revolutionists who had come to Spain to fight in the ranks of the militias. A single report to the CNT on July 24, counted 150 foreign revolutionists in a Valencia prison – arrested on ‘the charge of illegally entering Spain’. Hundreds were expelled from the country and the CNT cabled the workers’ organizations in Paris, appealing to them to prevent the German, Italian, Polish exiles from being delivered into the hands of their consulates. ...
On July 17, a group of POUM members (were told) that Nin had been taken from Barcelona to one of the private prisons of the Stalinists in Madrid. ... (later) he was found dead on the outskirts of Madrid, a victim of assassination. ...
Having done all this with the aid of the screen provided by CNT Ministers still sitting in the Generalidad, the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc now dispensed with their services. ... At the end of June, came the ministerial crisis. ... The CNT at last withdrew, leaving a government of the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie. ...
The economic counter-revolution in Catalonia advanced against the collectives. To the honour of the local sections of the libertarian movement, they stood their ground. ... But tens of thousands of Assault Guards, concentrated behind the lines, struck systematically at the collectives Without centralised direction, the villages were overpowered, one by one.
Libertad, one of the dissident illegal anarchist papers of Barcelona ... described the situation in the countryside in its issue of August 1:
'Censorship, in the power of one party, prevents a word being said about the thousands of blows inflicted on the workers’ organisations, the peasant collectives. In vain they prohibit mention of that terrible word, counter-revolution. The working masses know perfectly that the thing exists, that the counter-revolution advances under the protection of the government, and that the black beasts of reaction, the disguised fascists, the old caciques, are again raising their heads.
And how should they not know it, if there is not a village in Catalonia where the punitive expeditions of the Assault Guards have not been, where they have not assaulted the CNT workers, destroying their branch organisations or what is worse, destroyed those portentous works of the revolution, the collectives of the peasants, in order to return the land to the old proprietors, almost always known as fascists, ex-caciques of the black epoch of Gil Robles, Lerroux or Primo de Rivera?
The peasants took the goods of the bosses – which in justice did not belong to them – to place them at the service of collective labour ... They believed, the peasants, that so noble a work was guaranteed by its own efficiency, if fascism were not triumphant, and it could not triumph. Scarcely did they suspect that in the midst of war against the terrible enemy, with the government being men of the left, the public forces [police] would come to destroy that which had been created with such fatigue and joy.
For this inconceivable thing to happen, there had to come to power, by dirty means, those called communists. And the workers, ready always to make the greatest sacrifices to defeat fascism do not end wondering how it is possible that they be attacked from behind, that they be humiliated and betrayed, when there still is so much lacking for conquering the common enemy ...'
This movingly simple description was followed by a long list of villages, the dates on which they were assaulted, the names of those arrested or killed – and in the ensuing months the list grew longer and longer. ...
The chief agency of economic counter-revolution was the GEPCI, the long-established businessman’s organisation taken bodily into the Catalan section of the UGT by the Stalinists but repudiated by the UGT nationally. With union cards in their pockets, these men did with impunity what they would never have dared before July 19 against the organised workers. Many of them were now no longer petty manufacturers but great entrepreneurs. They received preferential consideration in securing financial credits, raw materials, export services, etc. as against the factory collectives ...
In June, under the slogan of ‘municipalisation’, the PSUC launched a campaign to wrest the transportation, electric, gas, and other key industries from workers’ control. ...
But this time they were confronted, not merely by the temporising CNT leaders ... but with the mass response of the workers involved. The Transport Workers Union plastered every block of the city with huge posters: ‘The revolutionary conquests belong to the workers. The workers’ collectives are the product of these conquests. We must defend them ... To municipalise the urban public services, yes – but only when the municipalities belong to the workers and not to the politicians.’
... For the moment, the Stalinist advance was beaten in this field. ...
It was in the food industries, distribution, markets, etc., that the Stalinists had got their first grip, holding the Ministry of Supplies in the Generalidad since December, when they had promptly dissolved the workers’ supply committees, which then had been provisioning the cities under controlled prices. ...
Instead, these basic articles (rice, string beans, sugar, milk, etc.) were uncontrolled, left to the mercy of the GEPCI. ... And the result: hunger, yes, actual hunger stalked Catalonia".
The Conquest of Aragon
"The fertile province of Aragon was the living embodiment of victorious struggle against fascism. It was the only province actually invested by the fascists and then conquered from them by force of arms. It was especially the pride of the Catalan masses, for they had saved Aragon. Within three days of the victory in Barcelona, the CNT and POUM militias were off for Aragon. The PSUC then was small and contributed little or nothing. ...
It was in the victorious conquest of Aragon that Durruti acquired his legendary fame as a military leader, and the forces he brought to the defence of Madrid in November were the picked troops whose victorious morale had been welded in Aragon victories.
Not the least of the reasons for the successes in Aragon had been that, under Durruti’s leadership, the militias marched as an army of social liberation. Every village wrested from the fascists was transformed into a fortress of the revolution. The militias sponsored elections of village committees, to which were turned over all the large estates and their equipment. Property titles, mortgages, etc., went into bonfires. Having thus transformed the world of the village, the CNT-POUM columns could go forward, secure in the knowledge that every village behind them would fight to the death for the land that was now theirs.
Backed by their success in freeing Aragon, the anarchists met with little resistance there from the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc in the first months. Aragon’s municipal councils were elected directly by the communities. The Council of Aragon was at first largely anarchist. ...
At least three-fourths of the land was tilled by collectives. ... Schools were subsidised by the community. Agricultural production increased in the region from thirty to fifty per cent over the previous year, as a result of collective labour. Enormous surpluses were voluntarily turned over to the government, free of charge, for use at the front. ...
The manifest benefits of social revolution, however, scarcely weighed in the balance against the grim necessities of the bourgeois-Stalinist programme for stabilising a bourgeois regime and winning the favour of Anglo-French imperialism. The preconditions of such favour was destruction of every vestige of social revolution. But the masses of Aragon were united. The destruction must, therefore, come from outside.
Once the Negrin government came to power, a terrific barrage of propaganda against Aragon was laid down in the bourgeois and Stalinist press. And, after three months of this preparation, the invasion was launched ... by military forces under the leadership of the Stalinist, Enrique Lister.
One of the manufactured heroes of the Stalinists (the CNT published his picture with the title, ‘Hero of many battles. We know it because the Communist party has told us so’ – irony was the only way of getting past the censor), Lister marched his troops into the rear of Aragon. The municipal councils elected directly by the population were forcibly dissolved. Collectives were broken up and their leaders jailed".
The Military Struggle under Giral and Caballero
"Military warfare is merely the continuation of politics by forcible means. ... The creation of a workers’ and peasants’ government for which the masses will work and die like heroes is the best political adjunct of military struggle against the fascist enemy in civil war. ...
That reactionary political policies determined the false military policies of the Loyalist government can be demonstrated by surveying the course of the military struggle.
From July 19 until September 4, 1936 – seven decisive weeks – the Giral cabinet of the People’s Front was at the helm, with the unconditional political support of the Stalinists and the Prieto Socialists (Prieto, indeed, was unofficially part of the ministry, establishing an office in the government on July 20).
The Giral government had about $600,000,000 in gold at its disposal. Recall that the real embargo on the sale of munitions to Spain was not established until August 19, when the British Board of Trade revoked all licences for export of arms and planes to Spain. Thus, the Giral régime had at least a month in which to purchase stores of arms – but the damning fact is that it bought almost nothing! ...
The most important gains of the first seven weeks were the successful march on Aragon by the Catalan militias, using socialisation of the land as much as they used their rifles; and the attack of the loyalist warships on Franco’s transportation of troops from Morocco to the mainland. ... the warships were under the command of elected sailors’ committees, which, like the militias, had no faith in the Giral government and carried on operations, despite the passivity of the government. ...
The Giral cabinet gave way to the ‘real, complete’ People’s Front government of Caballero-Prieto-Stalin. Undoubtedly, it had the confidence of a large part of the masses. The militias and the sailors’ committees obeyed its orders from the first.
There were three major military campaigns that the new government had to undertake:
1. Morocco and Algeciras
Franco's military base during the first six months was Spanish Morocco. From here he had to bring his Moors and Legionnaires and military stores.
The first successes of the Loyalist navy under the sailors’ committees in harassing Franco’s communication lines with Morocco were followed by others. On August 4, the Loyalist cruiser Libertad effectively shelled the fascist fortress at Tarrifa in Morocco. It was a deadly blow at Franco. So deadly that it was answered by the first open Italian act of intervention: an Italian plane proceeded to bomb the Libertad.
When Loyalist warships steamed into position for a large-scale shelling of Ceuta in Morocco while fascist transports were loading, the German battleship Deutschland brazenly steamed back and forth between the Loyalist warships and Ceuta to prevent the bombardment. ...The Loyalist naval operations, if continued, were fatal to Franco, and his allies had to unmask completely to save him.
At this point the Caballero cabinet was formed and Prieto, now in the closest collaboration with the Stalinists, and always ‘France’s man’, became head of the Naval Ministry. He put an end to naval operations off Morocco and the straits of Gibraltar, and recalled the Loyalist forces which had held Majorca.
The task of the hour was to prevent the Moors and Legionnaires from landing at Algeciras and constituting that army which was soon to make that fearful march from Badajoz straight through to Toledo, through Toledo and Talavera de la Reina to the gates of Madrid. The first line in that task belonged to the navy. It was not used for this purpose.
Instead, in mid-September, almost the whole fleet ... were ordered to leave Malaga and go all the way around the peninsula to the Biscayan coast! ... Returning eventually from the northern coast, the fleet was anchored far from the strait, at Cartagena – and there it stayed, except for a few pointless trips down the coast.
Why did Prieto and the governmental bloc follow this suicidal policy? It was simply one factor of the whole policy which rested on securing the goodwill of England and France. ...
Anglo-French imperialism ... demonstrated that it (had) no intention whatsoever of aiding the Loyalists to victory. ... The only reason the Anglo-French bloc did not openly court Franco was that it dared not abandon its chief advantage in the coming war: the myth of democratic war against fascism ...
The main pre-occupation of Anglo-French imperialism from the first was: how postpone the war, maintain the democratic myth, and yet begin to edge Hitler and Mussolini out of Spain? The answer was also obvious: a compromise between the Loyalist and fascist camps. ...
An aggressive Loyalist naval policy, as the August incidents off Morocco had shown, would have precipitated the decisive stage of the civil war. It would have threatened to crush Franco immediately. ...
Here is the first terrible instance of how anti-revolutionary politics hamstrung the military struggle.
The same Anglo-French orientation explains the failure to strike by land at Algeciras, the Spanish port at which the fascist forces were landing from Morocco. Malaga was strategically located to be the spearhead for this drive. Instead, Malaga itself was left defenceless.
Chiefly defended by CNT forces, who pleaded in vain from August until February for the necessary equipment, Malaga was invaded by an Italian landing force, while the fleet which could have stopped them rode at anchor in Cartagena. Malaga fell on February 8. ...
It was not a military defeat, but a betrayal. The basic treachery was not the last-minute desertion by the general staff but the political policy which dictated the inactivity of the navy and disuse of Malaga as a base against Algeciras.
If not by sea or by land, there was still another way of striking at Franco’s Moroccan base. (The government should have made) unequivocal declarations, announcing the abandonment of Morocco and the protection of Moroccan autonomy. ...
But the Loyalist government, far from arousing French and English fears by inciting insurrection in Spanish Morocco, proceeded to offer them concessions in Morocco!
2. The Aragon Offensive against Zaragoza and Huesca
"The CNT, FAI, and POUM troops predominated in Aragon. ... By the end of October, having captured the surrounding heights of Monte Aragon and Estrecho Quinto, the Aragon militias were in position to take Huesca, the gateway to Zaragoza.
(This city) lies athwart the road from Catalonia and Aragon to Navarre, the heart of the fascist movement. Zaragoza taken, the rear of the fascist army facing the Basque province would be endangered, as well as the rear of the forces converging on Madrid from the north. An offensive on this front, therefore, would have enabled the initiative in the military struggle to pass to the Loyalists.
Moreover, Zaragoza had been one of the great strongholds of the CNT, and had only fallen to the fascists because of the outright treachery of the civil governor, a member of Azaña’s party and his appointee. ... A strong attack on Zaragoza would have been accompanied by an uprising of the workers within, as the anarchists pledged.
To take the strongly fortified cities of Huesca and Saragossa, however, required planes and heavy artillery.
But from September onward, there developed a systematic boycott, conducted by the government against the Aragon front ... dictated by the Stalinists.
The artillery and planes which arrived from abroad, beginning in October, were sent only to the Stalinist-controlled centres. Even in the matter of rifles, machine-guns and ammunition, the boycott was imposed. The Catalonian munition plants, dependent on the central government for financing, were compelled to surrender their product to such destinations as the government chose....
The government plans for liquidating the militias into a bourgeois army could not be carried out so long as the CNT militias had the prestige of a string of victories to their credit. Ergo, the Aragon front must be held back. This situation, among others, drove the CNT leaders into the central government.
The two principal figures figures of Spanish anarchism, Garcia Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti, transferred their activities to Madrid, Durruti bringing the pick of the troops of the Aragon front. But the boycott of the Aragon front continued despite all anarchist concessions. ...
The pitiful armament on the Aragon front has been described by the English author, George Orwell, who fought there in the ILP Battalion: ‘A government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear,’ concluded Orwell, ‘is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists' ...
Thus, the government surrendered the opportunity provided in Aragon to wrest the initiative and carry the war into fascist territory.
3. The Northern Front
"Bilbao, and the industrial towns and iron and coal mines surrounding it, constituted a concentrated industrial area second only to Catalonia. For war purposes, it was even superior to the Catalonian area, which had to build its metallurgical plants up out of nothing when the civil war began.
Bilbao should have become the centre of Spain’s greatest munitions source. From this material base, the northern armies should have driven sharply south toward Burgos and east against Navarre, to effect a junction with the troops from the Aragon front. ...
The Basque capitalists, however, were the masters in the Biscayan region. As an English sphere of influence for centuries, it had no enthusiasm for joining Franco and his Italo-German allies. Neither, however, had the Basque bourgeoisie any intention of fighting to the death against Franco. ...
they had no guarantee that a Loyalist victory over Franco would not be followed by seizure of their factories also.
The property question determined the military conduct of the Basque regional government. This was seen as early as mid-September 1936 when the fascists advanced on San Sebastian. Before the attack was well launched, San Sebastian surrendered. ... Thus, the city was delivered intact to Franco.
The Basque bourgeoisie simply had no basic stake in fighting fascism. If the struggle involved serious sacrifice, they were ready to withdraw. One of the factors which gave them pause, however, was the growing CNT movement in the Basque regions. ... Systematic persecution of the CNT thereafter paved the way for going over to Franco.
The Loyalist government was aware of the danger, aware of Bilbao’s failure to transform her plants for munitions purposes, aware of the criminal inactivity of the Basque front which enabled (fascist General) Mola to shift his troops southward to join the encirclement of Madrid. ...
There was only one way to save the northern front: by confronting the Basque bourgeoisie with a powerful united front of the proletarian forces in the region, ready to take power if the bourgeoisie faltered, and to prepare for this by ideological criticism of the Basque capitalists. That way, however, was alien to this government which, above all, feared to arouse the masses to political initiative.
Why Madrid became the Key Front
With Morocco and its communications lines with the mainland undisturbed, with the northern front quiescent thanks to Basque passivity, and with governmental sabotage of the Aragon front ... Franco was enabled to throw his main forces against Madrid. By October the encirclement of Madrid was well on the way.
Franco wanted the nation’s capital in order to provide his German and Italian allies with a plausible basis for recognizing his regime. ... (But) Franco made his major strategical blunder here, when he attempted, in his haste to take Madrid by frontal attack instead of completing its encirclement by cutting the Valencia road ... giving the Loyalists the opportunity to fortify the area sufficiently to withstand the flank attacks when they came in February and March. ...
The significant fact to note in the defence of Madrid was the use of revolutionary-political methods. ... Internationally, the prestige of the Comintern and the Soviet Union would have collapsed irrevocably with the fall of Madrid. The retreat to Valencia and Catalonia would have found a new relationship of forces, with the Stalinists taking a back seat. ...
Madrid absolutely had to be held. In dire necessity, the Stalinists abandoned purely bourgeois methods – but only for a time and only within the confines of Madrid. Methods of defence which, in other cities, were proposed by the local POUM, FAI and CNT organisations and denounced as adventuristic, as alienating the liberal bourgeoisie, were sanctioned here by the Stalinists themselves. ...
Gone now were the governmental – and Stalinist – strictures against ‘illegal searches’, ‘unauthorised seizures and arrests’, etc., etc. Over five hundred Assault Guards were arrested and imprisoned in those days as fascist suspects – the first and last time the Stalinists sanctioned such a purge of bourgeois elements. ...
The Stalinist-controlled Fifth Regiment issued a manifesto which, among other things, called for the masses to elect street and house committees for vigilance against the fifth column within the city! ...
The Stalinists were even so desperate as to welcome the triumphal entry into Madrid of the picked troops from the CNT Aragon front columns, whose heroic conduct destroyed the slanderous myth, already being propagated by the Stalinists, about the Aragon militias. Shortly after bringing these troops, however, the greatest military figure produced by the war, the anarchist Durruti, was killed.
(Morrow quotes from an interview given by Durruti in September 1936, words that he explains not only Durruti's views but "express the revolutionary outlook of the class-conscious workers" of the Spanish Revolution:
'No government in the world fights fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. The liberal government of Spain could have rendered the fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it temporised and compromised and dallied. ...
We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to fascist barbarism by Stalin. ... We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class how to deal with fascism. ...'
‘But you will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins if you are victorious?'
Durruti answered: 'We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time, For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, we can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.')
... But the political methods pursued on the southern, northern and Aragon fronts, remained the same. The incessant campaign of the CNT, the POUM, and sections of the UGT for an offensive on all fronts as the best way to help Madrid, and the only way to lift the siege of the city, was ignored. ...
By January the immediate danger was over, and the Stalinist-bourgeois bloc reverted to ‘normal’. The house-to-house searches for fascists and arms by the workers’ committees were discouraged and then suppressed. Soldiers replaced workers at the street barricades. The work of the women’s committees was taken over by the army. Mass initiative was no longer invited. ...
The failure to co-ordinate the Madrid fighting with offensives on the other fronts, for the political reasons we have outlined, thus by default made Madrid the key front and simultaneously made impossible lifting of the siege of Madrid".
The Military Struggle under Negrin-Prieto
"That the 'government of victory’ would inevitably continue the disastrous military policy of its predecessor was apparent the day it was constituted. ...
In addition, the Negrin cabinet added new obstacles to prosecution of the war. ... (It) proceeded, as we have seen, to wipe out Catalan autonomy. ... The pay of militiamen was reduced from ten pesetas a day to seven. ...
The whole northern front was soon to be betrayed by the Basque bourgeoisie and officers, and by the ‘Fifth Column’ of fascist sympathisers in the Assault and Civil Guards and among the civilian population. ...
While the northern front was left to the Basque bourgeoisie, the Aragon front was subjected to a frightful purge. General Pozas initiated what was ostensibly a general offensive in June. After several days of artillery and aerial conflict, orders to advance were given to the 29th (formerly the POUM’s Lenin) division and other formations. But on the day for the advance, neither artillery nor aviation was provided to protect it ...
The POUM soldiers fully realised that they were being exposed deliberately. But not to go into fire would have given the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc a case against the Aragon front. They went into the line of fire ... The lieutenant-colonel in charge of a formation of Assault Guards on the other flank later congratulated the POUM troops: ... ‘Thanks to your bravery and your discipline, we have avoided a catastrophe'.
A few days later two battalions of the division were ordered to march on Fiscal (on the Jaca front) to repulse a fascist attack. Not only did they crush the attack but they reconquered positions and material previously lost. Then they were retired to await new orders – but not sent back to their division. Why? To disarm them. Pozas ordered it. ...
(Morrow's 1938 'Postscript' makes the following comment: 'General Sebastian Pozas adequately symbolises the period: An officer under the monarchy; an officer under the republican-socialist coalition of 1931–1933; an officer under the Lerroux-Gil Robles bienio negro of 1933–1935. Minister of War before the fascist revolt broke out. He moved heaven and earth to get away from Madrid in the dark days of the siege in November 1936. When Catalan autonomy was done away with and the CNT troops were at last subordinated entirely to the bourgeois regime, Pozas was appointed chief of all the armed forces of Catalonia and the Aragon front. He effectively purged the armies of CNT and POUM ‘uncontrollables’, arranging for whole divisions to be wiped out when they were sent under fire without artillery or aerial protection. ‘Comrade’ Pozas, who graced the plenum of the Central Committee of the PSUC, was ‘obviously’ the man to hold the Aragon front against Franco ... Now he is in a Barcelona prison, charged – and the military story is only too clear – with betraying the Aragon front to Franco').
A few weeks later the 29th division was officially dissolved, the remaining men being distributed far and wide in small groups. ...
The Ascaso (CNT) division was also cut to pieces. Acracia, CNT organ of Lerida, wrote: 'the betrayal of the air forces (controlled by PSUC) was responsible for the disaster with which this operation ended. Our militiamen were not backed up by the air forces and were thus left defenceless in face of an intensive machine-gunning by the fascist air forces'.
The Northern Front
As a government pledged to class collaborations even more completely than Caballero’s, the Negrin government did nothing to counter the more and more brazen sabotage of the Basque bourgeoisie. ...
The decisive factor in the fall of Bilbao was open treachery. ... On June 19, they surrendered the city, as they had San Sebastian the previous September. ...
The regular army of the Basques, directed by the bourgeois leaders, joined hands with the ‘republican police’ in attacking the Asturians and militia from the rear, disarmed as many as they could, and dismantled the houses and street barricades which the workers had prepared for street fighting. Shortly after the occupation, the same police donned Carlist berets and became Franco’s regular police. ...
The Fall of Asturias
The Asturian and Santander militiamen – largely CNT and left Socialists – bitterly contested every foot of the ground. The terrain here was even more favourable to the defence than the hilly Santander region. The Asturian dynamiters were still unshakeably holding their grip on the suburbs of Oviedo, immobilising the garrison there since July 1936. ...
The striking contrast between the defence put up by the Asturians and the previous surrender of Bilbao and Santander was indicated by the fact that not a village was given up before the fascist artillery had razed it. And when encirclement did force retreat, nothing usable was left behind. ...
In the Oviedo region ... the militia held firm (but the city of) Gijon ... surrendered, on October 21. ... Once again the praetorian forces of the government and its bourgeois allies had gone over to Franco. ...
‘El gobierno de la Victoria’, ( the CP leader) Pasionaria had christened it. Six months demonstrated the grotesque ludicrousness of that christening. The one conceivable ‘justification’ for its repressions against the workers and peasants might have been its military victories. But precisely from its reactionary politics flowed its disastrous military policies.
Whether Spain remained under this terrible yoke and went down to the depths, or freed herself from these organisers of defeat and went forward to victory – whatever happened, history had already stamped the government of Negrin-Stalin with its true title: ‘the government of defeat’."
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Although Morrow's book adds a postscript in 1938, his detailed account ends at this point, in November 1937.
To complete the history, I have added below notes on the remaining period, taken from the preface to the 'Civil War' section of the Pathfinder Press collection of Trotsky's writings on the Spanish Revolution:
"From December 1937 through February 1938 came the battle of Teruel, in which the republican forces took the city from the fascists and then lost it again at terrible cost. The fascists claimed to have found 10,000 republican dead when they finally re-entered the city.
The CP began a campaign for the ousting of Prieto, whom they blamed for the defeat. Prieto was dismissed on April 8, but that did not stop the fascist advance in Catalonia and Valencia. At the same time, the fascist general Alonso Vega took the town of Vinaroz on the Mediterranean coast. This victory was consolidated with the fall of Castellón on June 14, and the republic was permanently cut in two.
The battle of the Ebro, the last major offensive of the republic, began on the night of July 24-25. The republican advance was contained by August 2. After that the fascists began to retake the ground they had lost. The withdrawal of the International Brigades from Spain followed in November.
By late 1938 industrial production began to collapse in the republic, in part because of the now nearly complete fascist naval blockade, but also in large part because of the demoralisation of the ranks of the Anarchist workers under the persecution of the Stalinist-controlled police.
In October the surviving leaders of the POUM were brought to trial, more than a year after their arrest. Caballero and other prominent figures testified in defense of the POUM, and the Stalinists' case collapsed.
On December 23, the fascists began the final assault on Catalonia, taking Barcelona on January 26, 1939. The refugees who fled across the border into France numbered some 500,000. Most of the republican government, including Azaña and Companys, fled with them.
France and Britain, who had refused to sell arms to the republic throughout the war, officially recognised Franco's government on February 27, while the loyalists still held a third of the country.
At this point the "republican" officer corps, led by Colonel Casado in Madrid, decided to make their own peace with Franco behind the backs of the republican government. Casado banned the Communist Party press in Madrid for urging continued resistance. The CP had by this time decimated the radicalised working class and had few forces with which to resist when the bourgeois army turned against it.
General José Miaja Menant, an old career officer who had been singled out for special support by the Communist Party, joined Casado in the treacherous effort to establish a new government of capitulation in Madrid. At midnight on March 4 the plotters broadcast a manifesto on Madrid radio repudiating the Negrín government and proposing peace with Franco. Casado ordered the arrest of members of the government and of the Communist Party.
Negrín, along with the top leaders of the CP and the remaining Russian advisors, chose this moment to make their escape from Spain, and on March 6 they flew to France.
Meanwhile in Madrid heavy fighting broke out between units loyal to Casado and those commanded by the Communist Party. The CP had the upper hand, but leaderless, its local commanders lost the initiative, and Casado drove them from Madrid and opened negotiations with Franco.
This last demoralising betrayal finished the republic. The fascists began a final advance uncontested by the republican troops, who began to disband en masse. The end came on March 28, 1939.
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