In July 1936, the heroic proletariat of Spain rose up against the fascist coup of General Franco. In Catalonia and elsewhere the workers took power into their own hands. The state collapsed as the bulk of the army officer caste went over to Franco. The Spanish workers made one attempt after another to take power. In Barcelona, the workers of the anarchist trade union CNT and the left-wing POUM stormed the barracks, armed with nothing more than kitchen knives, clubs and old hunting rifles. They smashed the fascists and power was in the hands of the working class. This would have been possible throughout Spain, but for the policies of the leaders of the workers’ organisations, who clung to their alliance with the bourgeois Republicans, in effect the shadow of the Spanish bourgeoisie.
Even the CP leaders had to admit that the revolutionary movement had already gone far beyond the limits of a bourgeois republic:
The destruction of the old ruling order, as José Díaz observed, had already been achieved; the revolution had not limited itself to ‘defending the Republic established on 14 April and revived last 16 February’ as the Communist Party had maintained at the start of the war. Communist militants in the front lines around Madrid, like Miguel Nuñez, an education militiaman, were well aware of the depth of the popular explosion.
– It was a thorough-going revolution. The people were fighting for all those things which the reactionary forces of this country had so long denied them. Land and liberty, an end to exploitation, the overthrow of capitalism. The people were not fighting for a bourgeois democracy, let’s be quite clear about that… (Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain – An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, p. 324.)
Power is, in the last expression, armed bodies of men. Whoever controls these holds power. But in July 1936, the workers of Spain rose against the fascists in reply to Franco’s military uprising. The old army was effectively destroyed and replaced by workers’ militias. These were the only armed forces that existed in the territory of the Republic. The only thing that prevented the working class from taking power was the leadership of their own organisations. They had smashed the fascist reaction, but the leaders of all the workers’ parties – anarchists, socialists, communists, and even the POUM, entered the bourgeois popular front government and became the main stumbling block in the path of the revolution.
In one way or another they betrayed the heroic spontaneous reaction to the fascist uprising. They blocked the elementary class movement of the workers by collaborating with the rotten Republican bourgeois leaders, who by this time represented nobody but themselves. As a matter of fact, this was not an alliance with the bourgeoisie, but the shadow of the bourgeoisie. The great majority of the landlords and capitalists supported Franco and had fled to the National zone. But the Republicans acted as a reactionary brake on the movement of the masses. They feared the workers and peasants much more than the fascists, to whom they were quite prepared to capitulate.
By this time most of the leaders of the parties of the Communist International had become agents of the foreign policy of the Russian bureaucracy. They unquestioningly carried out the instructions of Stalin. The latter was terrified that a successful socialist revolution in Spain, or in any other country of Western Europe, would undermine the power of the bureaucracy and lead to its overthrow. The workers of Russia were enthusiastic about the revolution in Spain, which stirred them more than any event since the usurpation of power by Stalin. In attempting to maintain their power through the Stalin regime, the bureaucracy was compelled to launch the modern equivalent of the medieval witchcraft trials, to annihilate practically all the leaders of the revolution and the Old Bolsheviks, to murder hundreds of thousands of the rank and file of the Communist Party. This was due partly to the repercussions of the revolution in Spain. The victory of the Spanish Revolution would have sounded the death knell for the Moscow bureaucracy.
In addition to this, the bureaucrats were not concerned with revolutionary diplomacy, as under Lenin, but were guided by purely nationalist considerations. They wanted at that time to placate the capitalists of Britain and France, to gain an alliance against Germany. They did not wish to upset this by a revolutionary conflagration, which would have spread to France and destroyed entirely the world political and social equilibrium. But by destroying the Spanish Revolution, they ensured the victory of Franco, and, in so doing, made the Second World War inevitable. For their part, the so-called democracies of Britain and France did all in their power to help Franco, while masquerading under the hypocritical banner of non-intervention. Stalin’s counter-revolutionary policy in Spain did not persuade the British and French imperialists to become allies of the Soviet Union but, on the contrary, placed it in the gravest danger.
A rank and file Communist Party member is quoted as saying:
Fighting and dying, we sometimes thought: “All this – and for what?” Was it to return to what we had known before? If that was the case, then it was hardly worth fighting for. The shamefaced way of making the revolution demoralised people; they didn’t understand. I think the Communist Party demonstrated the most correct understanding of what the war was about… (Ibid., p. 328.)
The workers of Spain strove time and again for a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1937, to take power into their own hands, but at every stage found themselves blocked by their own organisations. The last opportunity was in May 1937. The Stalinists, acting as the shock troops of the counter-revolution, attempted to seize the telephone exchange in Barcelona, which was under the control of the CNT. In reply to this betrayal, the anarchists and POUMist workers staged an insurrection in May 1937. This movement had the overwhelming support of the workers of Barcelona, even the rank and file communists and socialists. For four days, power was in the hands of the workers. But once again the POUM and the CNT refused to take power.
Despite the Stalinist propaganda, the POUM was not a Trotskyist organisation but contained elements who had once been Trotskyist such as Nin and Andrade. In the space of six weeks, it had grown rapidly from one thousand to 70,000 members, on the strength of its left-wing image and the radical-sounding declarations of its leaders. It had its own radio station and daily newspaper. But Trotsky warned that, without a correct policy, a class policy directed against the bourgeois Republicans, all the gains of the POUM would turn to dust. This remarkable prediction was soon shown to be correct. At the decisive moment, they led the workers to defeat. Lacking a consistent revolutionary policy, the CNT and POUM leaders demanded that the workers abandon the struggle and return to work. This call was obeyed, but that did not save them, and was disastrous for the revolution. Within six weeks, the main leaders of the POUM were murdered in the dungeons of the GPU. The POUM was illegalised and the CNT disarmed. The road was now clear for the bourgeoisification of the armed forces and the reconstruction of the state under bourgeois leadership.
In March 1937 José Díaz, PCE General Secretary, called for the elimination of those “agents of fascism – Trotskyists disguised as POUMists” – a reflection of the accusations being made at the Moscow show trials. But the real force behind the purge in Spain was Stalin’s GPU which was now present on all the leading bodies of the Spanish Communist Party. For example, the notorious Hungarian Stalinist Ernö Gerö, one of Stalin’s agents, always attended meetings of the leading body of the PSUC. The leaders of the Communist Party and the PSUC, however, actively participated in these activities. Pere Ardiaca, editor of the PSUC newspaper Treball, while denying the Party’s participation in the murder of Andreu Nin, admits that the Party supported the persecution of the POUM: “Though we had nothing to do with the POUM’s persecution, we regarded it with favour. Later, at the POUM trial, we were stupefied by the evidence given, but at the same time it never occurred to us to protest because we shared the prosecution’s opinion…” (Ibid., p. 390.)
Ardiaca and his comrades were ‘stupefied’ because they knew perfectly well that the accusations directed against the POUM militants were entirely false, as he admits: “I had been in the BOC [workers’ and peasants’ bloc, one of the main component parts of the POUM] before joining the Communist Party, so I knew that its militants were honest and sincere in their revolutionary beliefs, even if those were different to ours…” (Ibid., p. 390.) No wonder Ardiaca describes Nin’s assassination as “a heavy legacy indeed”. But nothing can change the fact that the Spanish and Catalan leaders at the very least were active accomplices of Stalin’s GPU in Spain.
The liquidation of the revolution led inevitably to the disaster that Trotsky had predicted. The Stalinists backed the so-called government of victory of Negrín, the right-wing socialist, which in fact presided over the most terrible defeats. That was inevitable once the bourgeois counter-revolution had triumphed behind the Republican lines. The working class was disillusioned and demoralised. In revolution, even more than in war, morale is the key factor. In purely military terms, the revolution can never triumph against the professional army with trained officers and military experts. The sole factor which gives the masses the advantage is their revolutionary élan. Without this, the victory of reaction is inevitable. The precondition for victory in Spain was political – the confidence of the masses in the cause for which they were fighting.
This assertion can be proven by many historical examples. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia was due above all to political factors. Power was in the hands of the workers, who defended it ferociously. Likewise, in the countryside, the peasants fought for the land which they had won thanks to the October Revolution. Some years later in China, Mao Zedong waged a semi-revolutionary war against the Guomindang. In the Chinese civil war, Mao’s forces were tiny when compared to the army of Chiang Kai-shek, armed by the USA. Basing himself on a simple revolutionary slogan – “land to the peasants” – Mao succeeded in winning over the rural masses. He even offered plots of land to the soldiers of Chiang’s army. Whole divisions came over to the Reds, and the forces of reaction simply melted away. A similar result was possible in Spain, but it would have required a genuinely revolutionary policy.
The Spanish Revolution constituted a deadly threat to Stalin and the bureaucracy. Here for the first time, Moscow carried out a policy deliberately aimed at preventing revolution. Previously, in China and Germany, it was a question of mistakes. But this was different. A victorious revolution in Spain would have meant the end of Stalin’s rule. The movement of the Spanish workers aroused hope in the minds of the Russian workers that a new workers’ state would be established at the other extreme of Europe. They were moved in a way not seen since the Revolution. This was dangerous for the bureaucracy, which responded by launching the Purge trials.