The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (10 page)

The alliance between the CEDA and Lerroux’s radicals finally collapsed at the end of 1935 as a result of political scandals. In October there was the
estraperlo
gambling scandal, which allowed the president of the Republic to demand the resignation of Lerroux.
³⁸
He entrusted Joaquín Chapaprieta with forming a new government, but the following month another row broke out over corruption, which provided the
coup de grâce
for the Radical Party as a whole.
³⁹
Gil Robles thought that his time had come to take over the government and he withdrew support from Chapaprieta, but his move proved a mistake. President Alcalá Zamora, who did not like him and wanted to create a large centre party, entrusted the government to a man he trusted, the former governor of Catalonia, Manuel Portela Valladares. Blind to the fact that democracy in Spain had become so fragile, Alcalá Zamora had pushed republican democracy into its endgame. It soon became clear that the clash of attitudes throughout the country was so great that the forces of conflict could not be contained within the Cortes.

The Popular Front

W
hen the new head of government, Manuel Portela Valladares, summoned the council of ministers on 1 January 1936 he already had in his hands the decree to dissolve the Cortes. New elections were to be announced for 16 February. They were to be the last free elections held in Spain for forty years.

The decree was finally published on 7 January and the electoral campaign rapidly became heated. The results of the previous election had underlined the way the law gave such a favourable weighting to political coalitions. This encouragement to both the left and the right to create alliances had the effect of emptying the centre ground.

Any possibility of compromise had been destroyed by the revolutionary uprising of the left and its cruel repression by the army and Civil Guard. The depth of feeling was too strong on either side to allow democracy to work. Both sides used apocalyptic language, funnelling the expectations of their followers towards a violent outcome, not a political one. Largo Caballero declared, ‘If the right win the elections, we will have to go straight to open civil war.’
¹
Not surprisingly, the right reacted with a similar attitude. In their view a left-wing victory in the polls was bound to lead to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat which Largo Caballero had promised.

The main group on the right was basically an alliance of the CEDA with monarchists and Carlists of the National Block. José María Gil Robles, the CEDA leader, called it ‘the national counter-revolutionary front’.
²
Gil Robles, whose Catholic corporatism had acquired some superficial fascist trappings, allowed himself to be acclaimed by his followers at mass meetings as the leader, with the cry ‘
Jefe, jefe, jefe!’
. (The Spanish for ‘chief’ was an amateurish imitation of ‘
Duce!’
or ‘
Führer!’
.) His advertising for the campaign included a massive poster covering the façade of a building in central Madrid with the slogan: ‘Give me an absolute majority and I will give you a great Spain.’ Millions of leaflets were distributed saying that a victory for the left would produce ‘an arming of the mob, the burning of banks and private houses, the division of property and land, looting and the sharing out of your women’.
³
The finance for such a campaign came from landowners, large companies and the Catholic Church, which hurried to bless the alliance with the idea that a vote for the right was a vote for Christ.

Since the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931, with the subsequent burning of churches and convents and the anti-clerical provisions in the Constitution, the Catholic hierarchy had already demonstrated its hostility. But the rising of October 1934 had pushed it into advocating disobedience to a legally constituted government if it were necessary to protect the interests of the Church. When the Republic suppressed the state subsidy the Church had soon found itself impoverished, and its priests depended even more on contributions from their parishioners.
⁴

In 1936 Spain had some 30,000 priests, most of whom were poor and very uneducated, incapable of any other employment. The hierarchy, however, was jealous of its privileges. When Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, faced with the Church’s financial crisis, proposed that the richer dioceses should help the poorer ones, most of the bishops objected furiously.
⁵

On 15 January 1936 the parties of the centre-left and left signed a pact to contest the elections as a single group.
⁶
A Popular Front programme was drafted, concentrating mainly on agrarian reform, the re-establishment of the Catalan statute of autonomy and an amnesty for the prisoners in Spain arrested after the October revolution.
⁷
Nothing was said about nationalization of banks or division of the land, but the right claimed that there were secret clauses in the pact.
⁸
This was a natural suspicion in the circumstances. The Popular Front election manifesto was indeed mild, yet the
caballeristas
had already called for the nationalization of the land, the dissolution of the army, Civil Guard and all religious orders with seizure of their property. In May 1935 the manifesto of the Alianza Obrera had called in addition for ‘confiscation and nationalization of large industry, finance, transportation and communications’.
⁹

The proposal to free all those sentenced for taking part in a violent rebellion against the legally elected government of the day was bound to provoke the right. In fact, the open determination of the left as a whole to release from prison all those sentenced for the uprising of 1934 was hardly an assurance of its respect for the rule of law and constitutional government. The Janus-like nature of the Popular Front alliance was demonstrated one week after the election. On the same day Diego Martínez Barrio said that the Popular Front was a ‘conservative enterprise’ and
El Socialista
proclaimed: ‘We are determined to do in Spain what has been done in Russia. The plan of Spanish socialism and Russian communism is the same.’
¹⁰

The electoral pact, first urged by socialists and left republicans, had been born in the Asturias rising. It coincided with the new policy of the Comintern which called on communists to ally with non-revolutionary left-wing groups to fight the new threat of fascism in Europe. This was a two-stage plan, moderate at first, then revolutionary in the longer term.
¹¹
In June 1936 the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov stated that given the present situation in Spain, ‘the fundamental and urgent task of the Communist Party in Spain and the Spanish proletariat’ was to ensure victory over fascism by completing ‘the democratic revolution’ and isolating ‘the fascists from the mass of peasants and urban petit bourgeoisie’.
¹²

The Comintern controllers were hardly interested in preserving the middle class. The Popular Front strategy was simply a means to power. This was confirmed later at the Comintern’s meeting on 23 July to discuss the right-wing rising. Dimitrov warned that the Spanish communists should not attempt to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ‘at the present stage’. ‘That would be a fatal mistake. Therefore we must say: act under the banner of defending the Republic…In other words, comrades, we believe that in the present international situation it is advantageous and necessary for us to carry out a policy that would preserve our opportunity to organize, educate, unify the masses and to strengthen our own positions in a number of countries–in Spain, France, Belgium and so forth–where there are governments dependent on the Popular Front and where the Communist Party has extensive opportunities. When our positions have been strengthened, then we can go further.’
¹³

Going further also meant that the elimination of political rivals was a high priority right from the start. On 17 July, just as the anarchists were preparing to defeat the generals’ rising in Barcelona, the Comintern ‘advised’ the Spanish communist politburo: ‘It is necessary to take preventative measures with the greatest urgency against the putschist attempts of the anarchists, behind which the hand of the fascists is hidden.’
¹⁴

The Spanish Communist Party, as the French Comintern representative André Marty reported later to Moscow, was run almost entirely by Vittorio Codovilla (who had the cover-name ‘Medina’) and the PSUC in Catalonia by Erno Gerö (alias ‘Singer’ or ‘Pedro’), another Comintern envoy. Marty later dismissed the work of the Spanish Communist Party’s politburo as ‘terribly primitive’.
¹⁵
José Díaz was the only competent member, but he was too ill with liver problems to be effective.

The largest party of the Popular Front was the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Francisco Largo Caballero, now 66 years old, had become its most radical and bolshevized leader. He distrusted the broad alliance with the Left Republicans of Manuel Azaña and allowed himself to be courted by Jacques Duclos, another Comintern representative in Spain, who had identified Largo Caballero as the most suitable leader of the Spanish working class. Not only
Claridad
, the newspaper of the
caballeristas
, but the communist press of Europe began to hail this old trade union leader as the ‘Spanish Lenin’. Yet Largo Caballero, carried away by his own rhetoric, began to alarm his new communist friends. His inflammatory and revolutionary speeches at mass meetings around Spain calling for the elimination of the middle class was contrary to Dimitrov’s policy. (Some wit at the time coined the slogan ‘Vote communist and save Spain from Marxism’.) But whether or not his speeches were the product of revolutionary intoxication or revealed his own intentions at that time, it was hardly surprising that the right, threatened with extinction by the left, should have prepared to strike back.

The influence of the Spanish Communist Party was considerable for an organization which when founded in 1921 had numbered just a few dozen militants. A decade later, at the time of the fall of the monarchy, it mustered a few thousand members. In the elections of November 1933 it received 170,000 votes and its first seat in the Cortes. But in the first half of 1936 it went from 30,000 members to nearly 100,000.
¹⁶
The left needed the anarchists to vote if it was to win such a closely fought election. This time the anarchists were prepared to vote, even though it was against their principles. The only hope of getting their comrades out of prison lay with the Popular Front.

On 16 February the voting stations opened in a tense yet calm atmosphere. The two coalitions of both right and left were each convinced that they would win. General Franco’s propagandists later tried to claim that there had been serious irregularities and implied that the results were somehow invalid, but this was completely untrue. Even the monarchist newspaper,
ABC
, wrote on 17 February that the poll had taken place ‘without strikes, without threats and without any scandals. Everybody voted as they wanted to, in absolute liberty.’

The provincial electoral commissions finally gave their verdict on 20 February: the Popular Front had won by just over 150,000 votes. The electoral law encouraging coalitions, which had favoured the right in 1933, now favoured the left. The Popular Front, despite winning by a margin of less than 2 per cent of the total vote, achieved an absolute majority of seats in the Cortes.
¹⁷
Perhaps the most striking figure from the election revealed that the Falangists of José Antonio Primo de Rivera received only 46,000 votes out of nearly ten million throughout Spain: on average less than 1,000 votes per province. That provided a rather more realistic indication of the fascist threat than that proclaimed by Largo Caballero.

The left, ignoring the narrowness of their victory, proceeded to behave as if they had received an overwhelming mandate for revolutionary change. Predictably, the right was horrified to see crowds rush forth to release prisoners themselves, without even waiting for an amnesty. Almost as soon as the results were known, a group of monarchists asked Gil Robles to lead a
coup d’état
, but he would have nothing to do with it personally. Instead he asked Portela Valladares to proclaim a state of war before the revolutionary masses rushed into the streets. Embittered by defeat, Gil Robles also came out with a surprising and hypocritical attack against the rich, the very people who had supported and financed his campaign, accusing them of having demonstrated a ‘suicidal egotism’ in the way they had reduced wages.

General Franco, the chief of the general staff, sent an emissary to General Pozas, director-general of the Civil Guard, inviting him to take part ‘in the decisions which need to be taken in the defence of order and the well-being of Spain’.
¹⁸
Franco also tried to convince Portela Valladares that he should not hand over power to the Popular Front and offered the support of the army. This was evidently the first time that Franco had considered military intervention. He fully realized the importance of the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard.

Franco, not yet convinced that a coup would work, went to see Portela again on 19 February. He said that if he allowed the country to go communist he would bear a heavy responsibility before history. But Portela, although driven to the wall and shattered–he ‘gave the impression of a ghost’, wrote Manuel Azaña, ‘not that of a head of government’–did not cede to Franco’s moral blackmail.
¹⁹
He resigned that very day. The President of the Republic, Alcalá Zamora, had no alternative but to ask Azaña, whom he disliked, to form a government.