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Chapter 11
IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account
of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future
historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party
propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and
what I have learned from other eyewitnesses whom I believe to be reliable. I
can, however, contradict some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the
affair into some kind of perspective.
First of all, what actually happened?
For some time past there had been tension throughout Catalonia. In earlier
chapters of this book I have given some account of the struggle between
Communists and Anarchists. By May 1937 things had reached a point at which some
kind of violent outbreak could be regarded as inevitable. The immediate cause of
friction was the Government's order to surrender all private weapons, coinciding
with the decision to build up a heavily-armed 'non-political' police-force from
which trade union members were to be excluded. The meaning of this was obvious
to everyone; and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over
of some of the key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a
certain amount of resentment among the working classes because of the growing
contrast of wealth and poverty and a general vague feeling that the revolution
had been sabotaged. Many people were agreeably surprised when there was no
rioting on i May. On 3 May the Government decided to take over the Telephone
Exchange, which had been operated since the beginning of the war mainly by
C.N.T. workers; it was alleged that it was badly run and that official calls
were being tapped. Salas, the Chief of Police (who may or may not have been
exceeding his orders), sent three lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards to seize the
building, while the streets outside were cleared by armed police in civilian
clothes. At about the same time bands of Civil Guards seized various other
buildings in strategic spots. Whatever the real intention may have been, there
was a widespread belief that this was the signal for a general attack on the
C.N.T. by the Civil Guards and the P.S.U.C. (Communists and Socialists). The
word flew round the town that the workers' buildings were being attacked, armed
Anarchists appeared on the streets, work ceased, and fighting broke out
immediately. That night and the next morning barricades were built all over the
town, and there was no break in the fighting until the morning of 6 May. The
fighting was, however, mainly defensive on both sides. Buildings were besieged,
but, so far as I know, none were stormed, and there was no use of artillery.
Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-F.A.I.-P.O.U.M. forces held the working-class
suburbs, and the armed police-forces and the P.S.U.C. held the central and
official portion of the town. On 6 May there was an armistice, but fighting soon
broke out again, probably because of premature attempts by Civil Guards to
disarm C.N.T. workers. Next morning, however, the people began to leave the
barricades of their own accord. Up till, roughly, the night of 5 May the C.N.T.
had had the better of it, and large numbers of Civil Guards had surrendered. But
there was no generally accepted leadership and no fixed plan--indeed, so far as
one could judge, no plan at all except a vague determination to resist the Civil
Guards. The official leaders of the C.N.T. had joined with those of the U.G.T.
in imploring everyone to go back to work; above all, food was running short. In
such circumstances nobody was sure enough of the issue to go on fighting. By the
afternoon of 7 May conditions were almost normal. That evening six thousand
Assault Guards, sent by sea from Valencia, arrived and took control of the town.
The Government issued an order for the surrender of all arms except those held
by the regular forces, and during the next few days large numbers of arms were
seized. The casualties during the fighting were officially given out as four
hundred killed and about a thousand wounded. Four hundred killed is possibly an
exaggeration, but as there is no way of verifying this we must accept it as
accurate.
Secondly, as to the after-effects of the fighting. Obviously it is impossible
to say with any certainty what these were. There is no evidence that the
outbreak had any direct effect upon the course of the war, though obviously it
must have had if it continued even a few days longer. It was made the excuse for
bringing Catalonia under the direct control of Valencia, for hastening the
break-up of the militias, and for the suppression of the P.O.U.M., and no doubt
it also had its share in bringing down the Caballero Government. But we may take
it as certain that these things would have happened in any case. The real
question is whether the C.N.T. workers who came into the street gained or lost
by showing fight on this occasion. It is pure guesswork, but my own opinion is
that they gained more than they lost. The seizure of the Barcelona Telephone
Exchange was simply one incident in a long process. Since the previous year
direct power had been gradually manoeuvred out of the hands of the syndicates,
and the general movement was away from working-class control and towards
centralized control, leading on to State capitalism or, possibly, towards the
reintroduction of private capitalism. The fact that at this point there was
resistance probably slowed the process down. A year after the outbreak of war
the Catalan workers had lost much of their power, but their position was still
comparatively favourable. It might have been much less so if they had made it
clear that they would lie down under no matter what provocation. There are
occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at
all.
Thirdly, what purpose, if any, lay behind the outbreak? Was it any kind of
coup d'etat or revolutionary attempt? Did it definitely aim at overthrowing the
Government? Was it preconcerted at all?
My own opinion is that the fighting was only preconcerted in the sense that
everyone expected it. There were no signs of any very definite plan on either
side. On the Anarchist side the action was almost certainly spontaneous, for it
was an affair mainly of the rank and file. The people came into the streets and
their political leaders followed reluctantly, or did not follow at all. The only
people who even talked in a revolutionary strain were the Friends of Durruti, a
small extremist group within the F.A.I., and the P.O.U.M. But once again they
were following and not leading. The Friends of Durruti distributed some kind of
revolutionary leaflet, but this did not appear until 5 May and cannot be said to
have started the fighting, which had started of its own accord two days earlier.
The official leaders of the C.N.T. disowned the whole affair from the start.
There were a number of reasons for this. To begin with, the fact that the C.N.T.
was still represented in the Government and the Generalite ensured that its
leaders would be more conservative than their followers. Secondly, the main
object of the C.N.T. leaders was to form an alliance with the U.G.T., and the
fighting was bound to widen the split between C.N.T. and U.G.T., at any rate for
the time being. Thirdly--though this was not generally known at the time--the
Anarchist leaders feared that if things went beyond a certain point and the
workers took possession of the town, as they were perhaps in a position to do on
5 May, there would be foreign intervention. A British cruiser and two British
destroyers had closed in upon the harbour, and no doubt there were other
warships not far away. The English newspapers gave it out that these ships were
proceeding to Barcelona 'to protect British interests', but in fact they made no
move to do so; that is, they did not land any men or take off any refugees.
There can be no certainty about this, but it was at least inherently likely that
the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish
Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from its own
working class.
The P.O.U.M. leaders did not disown the affair, in fact they encouraged their
followers to remain at the barricades and even gave their approval (in La
Batalla, 6 May) to the extremist leaflet issued by the Friends of Durruti.
(There is great uncertainty about this leaflet, of which no one now seems able
to produce a copy.) In some of the foreign papers it was described as an
'inflammatory poster' which was 'plastered' all over the town. There was
certainly no such poster. From comparison of various reports I should say that
the leaflet called for (i) The formation of a revolutionary council (junta),
(ii) The shooting of those responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange,
(iii) The disarming of the Civil Guards. There is also some uncertainty as to
how far La Batalla expressed agreement with the leaflet. I myself did not see
the leaflet or La Batalla of that date. The only handbill I saw during the
fighting was one issued by the tiny group of Trotskyists ('Bolshevik-Leninists')
on 4 May. This merely said: 'Everyone to the barricades--general strike of all
industries except war industries.' (In other words, it merely demanded what was
happening already.) But in reality the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders was
hesitating. They had never been in favour of insurrection until the war against
Franco was won; on the other hand the workers had come into the streets, and the
P.O.U.M. leaders took the rather pedantic Marxist line that when the workers are
on the streets it is the duty of the revolutionary parties to be with them.
Hence, in spite of uttering revolutionary slogans about the 'reawakening of the
spirit of 19 July', and so forth, they did their best to limit the workers'
action to the defensive. They never, for instance, ordered an attack on any
building; they merely ordered their followers to remain on guard and, as I
mentioned in the last chapter, not to fire when it could be avoided. La Batalla
also issued instructions that no troops were to leave the front. [Note 9, below]
As far as one can estimate it, I should say that the responsibility of the
P.O.U.M. amounts to having urged everyone to remain at the barricades, and probably
to having persuaded a certain number to remain there longer than they would
otherwise have done. Those who were in personal touch with the P.O.U.M. leaders
at the time (I myself was not) have told me that they were in reality dismayed
by the whole business, but felt that they had got to associate themselves with
it. Afterwards, of course, political capital was made out of it in the usual
manner. Gorkin, one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, even spoke later of 'the glorious
days of May'. From the propaganda point of view this may have been the right
line; certainly the P.O.U.M. rose somewhat in numbers during the brief period
before its suppression. Tactically it was probably a mistake to give countenance
to the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti, which was a very small organization
and normally hostile to the P.O.U.M. Considering the general excitement and the
things that were being said on both sides, the leaflet did not in effect mean
much more than 'Stay at the barricades', but by seeming to approve of it while
Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, repudiated it, the P.O.U.M. leaders
made it easy for the Communist press to say afterwards that the fighting was a
kind of insurrection engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. However, we may be
certain that the Communist press would have said this in any case. It was
nothing compared with the accusations that were made both before and afterwards
on less evidence. The C.N.T. leaders did not gain much by their more cautious
attitude; they were praised for their loyalty but were levered out of both the
Government and the Generalite as soon as the opportunity arose.
[Note 9. A recent number of Inprecor states the exact opposite--that
La Batalla orders the P.O.U.M. troops to leave the front! The point can
easily be settled by referring to La Batalla of the date named.]
So far as one could judge from what people were saying at the time, there was
no real revolutionary intention anywhere. The people behind the barricades were
ordinary C.N.T. workers, probably with a sprinkling of U.G.T. workers among
them, and what they were attempting was not to overthrow the Government but to
resist what they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as an attack by the police. Their
action was essentially defensive, and I doubt whether it should be described, as
it was in nearly all the foreign newspapers, as a 'rising'. A rising implies
aggressive action and a definite plan. More exactly it was a riot--a very
bloody riot, because both sides had fire-arms in their hands and were willing to
use them.
But what about the intentions on the other side? If it was not an Anarchist
coup d'etat, was it perhaps a Communist coup d'etat--a planned effort to smash
the power of the C.N.T. at one blow?
I do not believe it was, though certain things might lead one to suspect it.
It is significant that something very similar (seizure of the Telephone Exchange
by armed police acting under orders from Barcelona) happened in Tarragona two
days later. And in Barcelona the raid on the Telephone Exchange was not an
isolated act. In various parts of the town bands of Civil Guards and P.S.U.C.
adherents seized buildings in strategic spots, if not actually before the
fighting started, at any rate with surprising promptitude. But what one has got
to remember is that these things were happening in Spain and not in England.
Barcelona is a town with a long history of street-fighting. In such places
things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local
geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take their places almost as
in a fire-drill. Presumably those responsible for the seizure of the Telephone
Exchange expected trouble--though not on the scale that actually happened--and
had made ready to meet it. But it does not follow that they were planning a
general attack on the C.N.T. There are two reasons why I do not believe that
either side had made preparations for large-scale fighting:
(i) Neither side had brought troops to Barcelona beforehand. The fighting was
only between those who were in Barcelona already, mainly civilians and
police.
(ii) The food ran short almost immediately. Anyone who has served in Spain
knows that the one operation of war that Spaniards really perform really well is
that of feeding their troops. It is most unlikely that if either side had
contemplated a week or two of street--fighting and a general strike they would
not have stored food beforehand.
Finally, as to the rights and wrongs of the affair.
A tremendous dust was kicked up in the foreign anti-Fascist 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 something
that they regard as a provocation.
The trouble sprang naturally out of the Government's order to the Anarchists
to surrender their arms. In the English press this was translated into English
terms and took this form: that arms were desperately needed on the Aragon front
and could not be sent there because the unpatriotic Anarchists were holding them
back. To put it like this is to ignore the conditions actually existing in
Spain. Everyone knew that both the Anarchists and the P.S.U.C. were hoarding
arms, and when the fighting broke out in Barcelona this was made clearer still;
both sides produced arms in abundance. The Anarchists were well aware that even
if they surrendered their arms, the P.S.U.C., politically the main power in
Catalonia, would still retain theirs; and this in fact was what happened after
the fighting was over. Meanwhile actually visible on the streets, there were
quantities of arms which would have been very welcome at the front, but which
were being retained for the 'non-political' police forces in the rear. And
underneath this there was the irreconcilable difference between Communists and
Anarchists, which was bound to lead to some kind of struggle sooner or later.
Since the beginning of the war the Spanish Communist Party had grown enormously
in numbers and captured most of the political power, and there had come into
Spain thousands of foreign Communists, many of whom were openly expressing their
intention of 'liquidating' Anarchism as soon as the war against Franco was won.
In the circumstances one could hardly expect the Anarchists to hand over the
weapons which they had got possession of in the summer of 1936.
The seizure of the Telephone Exchange was simply the match that fired an
already existing bomb. It is perhaps just conceivable that those responsible
imagined that it would not lead to trouble. Company, the Catalan President, is
said to have declared laughingly a few days earlier that the Anarchists would
put up with anything. [Note 10, below] But certainly it was not a wise action.
For months past there had been a long series of armed clashes between
Communists and Anarchists in various parts of Spain. Catalonia and
especially Barcelona was in a state of tension that had already led
to street affrays, assassinations, and so forth. Suddenly the news ran round
the city that armed men were attacking the buildings that the workers had
captured in the July fighting and to which they attached great sentimental
importance. One must remember that the Civil Guards were not loved by the
working-class population. For generations past la guardia. had been simply an
appendage of the landlord and the boss, and the Civil Guards were doubly hated
because they were suspected, quite justly, of being of very doubtful loyalty
against the Fascists. [Note 11, below] It is probable that the emotion
that brought people into the streets in the first few hours was much the
same emotion as had led them to resist the rebel generals at the
beginning of the war. Of course it is arguable that the C.N.T. workers ought
to have handed over the Telephone Exchange without protest. One's opinion here
will be governed by one's attitude on the question of centralized government and
working-class control. More relevantly it may be said: 'Yes, very likely the
C.N.T. had a case. But, after all, there was a war on, and they had no business
to start a fight behind the lines.' Here I agree entirely. Any internal disorder
was likely to aid Franco. But what actually precipitated the fighting? The
Government may or may not have had the right to seize the Telephone Exchange;
the point is that in the actual circumstances it was bound to lead to a fight.
It was a provocative action, a gesture which said in effect, and presumably was
meant to say: 'Your power is at an end--we are taking over.' It was not common
sense to expect anything but resistance. If one keeps a sense of proportion one
must realize that the fault was not--could not be, in a matter of this kind--
entirely on one side. The reason why a one-sided version has been accepted is
simply that the Spanish revolutionary parties have no footing in the foreign
press. In the English press, in particular, you would have to search for a long
time before finding any favourable reference, at any period of the war, to the
Spanish Anarchists. They have been systematically denigrated, and, as I know by
my own experience, it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in
their defence.
[Note 10. New Statesman (14 May).]
[Note 11. At the outbreak of war the Civil Guards had
everywhere sided with the stronger party. On several occasions later in the war,
e.g. at Santander, the local Civil Guards went over to the Fascists in a
body.]
I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though,
obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is
practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am
on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in
other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about
the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn
everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have
done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is
completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the
Communist press. It is necessary to examine the Communist version, because it
was published all over the world, has been supplemented at short intervals ever
since, and is probably the most widely accepted one.
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. According to the
Daily Worker (11 May):
The German and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly to
'prepare' the notorious 'Congress of the Fourth International', had one big
task. It was this:
They were--in cooperation 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 of 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 German
and Italian Governments could land troops or marines quite openly on the
Catalan coasts, declaring that they were doing so 'in order to preserve
order'. . . .
The instrument for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians
in the shape of the Trotskyist organization known as the P.O.U.M.
The P.O.U.M., acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and
with certain other deluded persons in the Anarchist organizations planned,
organized, and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide
with the attack on the front at Bilbao, etc., etc.
Later in the article the Barcelona fighting becomes 'the P.O.U.M. attack',
and in another article in the same issue it is stated that there is 'no doubt
that it is at the door of the P.O.U.M. that the responsibility for the bloodshed
in Catalonia must be laid'. Inprecor (29 May) states that those who erected the
barricades in Barcelona were 'only members of the P.O.U.M. organized from that
party for this purpose'.
I could quote a great deal more, but this is clear enough. The P.O.U.M. was
wholly responsible and the P.O.U.M. was acting under Fascist orders. In a moment
I will give some more extracts from the accounts that appeared in the Communist
press; it will be seen that they are so self-contradictory as to be completely
worthless. But before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons
why this version of the May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the
P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible.
(i) The P.O.U.M. had not the numbers or influence to provoke disorders of
this magnitude. Still less had it the power to call a general strike. It was a
political organization with no very definite footing in the trade unions, and it
would have been hardly more capable of producing a strike throughout Barcelona
than (say) the English Communist Party would be of producing a general strike
throughout Glasgow. As I said earlier, the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders may
have helped to prolong the fighting to some extent; but they could not have
originated it even if they had wanted to.
(ii) The alleged Fascist plot rests on bare assertion and all the evidence
points in the other direction. We are told that the plan was for the German and
Italian Governments to land troops in Catalonia; but no German or Italian
troopships approached the coast. As to the 'Congress of the Fourth
International' and the' German and Italian agents', they are pure myth. So far
as I know there had not even been any talk of a Congress of the Fourth
International. There were vague plans for a Congress of the P.O.U.M. and its
brother-parties (English I.L.P., German S.A.P., etc., etc.); this had been
tentatively fixed for some time in July--two months later--and not a single
delegate had yet arrived. The 'German and Italian agents' have no existence
outside the pages of the Daily Worker. Anyone who crossed the frontier at that
time knows that it was not so easy to 'pour' into Spain, or out of it, for that
matter.
(iii) Nothing happened either at Lerida, the chief stronghold of the
P.O.U.M., or at the front. It is obvious that if the P.O.U.M. leaders had wanted
to aid the Fascists they would have ordered their militia to walk out of the
line and let the Fascists through. But nothing of the kind was done or
suggested. Nor were any extra men brought out of the line beforehand, though it
would have been easy enough to smuggle, say, a thousand or two thousand men back
to Barcelona on various pretexts. And there was no attempt even at indirect
sabotage of the front. The transport of food, munitions, and so forth continued
as usual; I verified this by inquiry afterwards. Above all, a planned rising of
the kind suggested would have needed months of preparation, subversive
propaganda among the militia, and so forth. But there was no sign or rumour of
any such thing. The fact that the militia at the front played no part in the
'rising' should be conclusive. If the P.O.U.M. were really planning a coup
d'etat it is inconceivable that they would not have used the ten thousand or so
armed men who were the only striking force they had.
It will be clear enough from this that the Communist thesis of a P.O.U.M.
'rising' under Fascist orders rests on less than no evidence. I will add a few
more extracts from the Communist press. The Communist accounts of the opening
incident, the raid on the Telephone Exchange, are illuminating; they agree in
nothing except in putting the blame on the other side. It is noticeable that in
the English Communist papers the blame is put first upon the Anarchists and only
later upon the P.O.U.M. There is a fairly obvious reason for this. Not everyone
in England has heard of'Trotskyism', whereas every English-speaking person
shudders at the name of 'Anarchist'. Let it once be known that 'Anarchists' are
implicated, and the right atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the
blame can safely be transferred to the 'Trotskyists'. The Daily Worker begins
thus (6 May):
A minority gang of Anarchists on Monday and Tuesday seized and attempted to
hold the telephone and telegram buildings, and started firing into the
street.
There is nothing like starting off with a reversal of roles. The Civil Guards
attack a building held by the C.N.T.; so the C.N.T. are represented as attacking
their own building attacking themselves, in fact. On the other hand, the Daily
Worker of 11 May states:
The Left Catalan Minister of Public Security, Aiguade, and the United
Socialist General Commissar of Public Order, Rodrigue Salas, sent the armed
republican police into the Telefonica building to disarm the employees there,
most of them members of C.N.T. unions.
This does not seem to agree very well with the first statement; nevertheless
the Daily Worker contains no admission that the first statement was wrong. The
Daily Worker of 11 May states that the leaflets of the Friends of Durruti, which
were disowned by the C.N.T., appeared on 4 May and 5 May, during the fighting.
Inprecor (22 May) states that they appeared on 3 May, before the fighting, and
adds that 'in view of these facts' (the appearance of various leaflets):
The police, led by the Prefect of Police in person, occupied the central
telephone exchange in the afternoon of 3 May. The police were shot at while
discharging their duty. This was the signal for the provocateurs to begin
shooting affrays all over the city.
And here is Inprecor for 29 May:
At three o'clock in the afternoon the Commissar for Public Security,
Comrade Salas, went to the Telephone Exchange, which on the previous night had
been occupied by 50 members of the P.O.U.M. and various uncontrollable
elements.
This seems rather curious. The occupation of the Telephone Exchange by 50
P.O.U.M. members is what one might call a picturesque circumstance, and one
would have expected somebody to notice it at the time. Yet it appears that it
was discovered only three or four weeks later. In another issue of Inprecor the
50 P.O.U.M. members become 50 P.O.U.M. militiamen. It would be difficult to pack
together more contradictions than are contained in these few short passages. At
one moment the C.N.T. are attacking the Telephone Exchange, the next they are
being attacked there; a leaflet appears before the seizure of the Telephone
Exchange and is the cause of it, or, alternatively, appears afterwards and is
the result of it; the people in the Telephone Exchange are alternatively C.N.T.
members and P.O.U.M. members--and so on. And in a still later issue of the
Daily Worker (3 June) Mr J. R. Campbell informs us that the Government only
seized the Telephone Exchange because the barricades were already erected!
For reasons of space I have taken only the reports of one incident, but the
same discrepancies run all through the accounts in the Communist press. In
addition there are various statements which are obviously pure fabrication. Here
for instance is something quoted by the Daily Worker (7 May) and said to have
been issued by the Spanish Embassy in Paris:
A significant feature of the uprising has been that the old monarchist flag
was flown from the balcony of various houses in Barcelona, doubtless in the
belief that those who took part in the rising had become masters of the
situation.
The Daily Worker very probably reprinted this statement in good faith, but
those responsible for it at the Spanish Embassy must have been quite
deliberately lying. Any Spaniard would understand the internal situation better
than that. A monarchist flag in Barcelona! It was the one thing that could have
united the warring factions in a moment. Even the Communists on the spot were
obliged to smile when they read about it. It is the same with the reports in the
various Communist papers upon the arms supposed to have been used by the
P.O.U.M. during the 'rising'. They would be credible only if one knew nothing
whatever of the facts. In the Daily Worker of 17 May Mr Frank Pitcairn
states:
There were actually all sorts of arms used by them in the outrage. There
were the arms which they have been stealing for months past, and hidden, and
there were arms such as tanks, which they stole from the barracks just at the
beginning of the rising. It is clear that scores of machine-guns and several
thousand rifles are still in their possession.
Inprecor (29 May) also states:
On 3 May the P.O.U.M. had at its disposal some dozens of machine-guns and
several thousand rines. ... On the Plaza de Espana the Trotskyists brought
into action batteries of '75' guns which were destined for the front in Aragon
and which the militia had carefully concealed on their premises.
Mr Pitcairn does not tell us how and when it became dear that the P.O.U.M.
possessed scores of machine-guns and several thousand rifles. I have given an
estimate of the arms which were at three of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings--
about eighty rifles, a few bombs, and no machine-guns; i.e. about sufficient for
the armed guards which, at that time, all the political parties placed on their
buildings. It seems strange that afterwards, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed
and all its buildings seized, these thousands of weapons never came to light;
especially the tanks and field-guns, which are not the kind of thing that can be
hidden up the chimney. But what is revealing in the two statements above is the
complete ignorance they display of the local circumstances. According to Mr
Pitcairn the P.O.U.M. stole tanks 'from the barracks'. He does not tell us which
barracks. The P.O.U.M. militiamen who were in Barcelona (now comparatively few,
as direct recruitment to the party militias had ceased) shared the Lenin
Barracks with a considerably larger number of Popular Army troops. Mr Pitcaim is
asking us to believe, therefore, that the P.O.U.M. stole tanks with the
connivance of the Popular Army. It is the same with the 'premises' on which the
75-mm. guns were concealed. There is no mention of where these 'premises' were.
Those batteries of guns, firing on the Plaza de Espana, appeared in many
newspaper reports, but I think we can say with certainty that they never
existed. As I mentioned earlier, I heard no artillery-fire during the fighting,
though the Plaza de Espana was only a mile or so away. A few days later I
examined the Plaza de Espana and could find no buildings that showed marks of
shell-fire. And an eye-witness who was in that neighbourhood throughout the
fighting declares that no guns ever appeared there. (Incidentally, the tale of
the stolen guns may have originated with Antonov-Ovseenko, the Russian
Consul-General. He, at any rate, communicated it to a well-known English
journalist, who afterwards repeated it in good faith in a weekly paper.
Antonov-Ovseenko has since been 'purged'. How this would affect his credibility
I do not know.) The truth is, of course, that these tales about tanks,
field-guns, and so forth have only been invented because otherwise it is
difficult to reconcile the scale of the Barcelona fighting with the P.O.U.M.'S
small numbers. It was necessary to claim that the P.O.U.M. was wholly
responsible for the fighting; it was also necessary to claim that it was an
insignificant party with no following and 'numbered only a few thousand
members', according to Inprecor. The only hope of making both statements
credible was to pretend that the P.O.U.M. had all the weapons of a modern
mechanized army.
It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without
realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and
have no other purpose than to work up prejudice. Hence, for instance, such
statements as Mr Pitcairn's in the Daily Worker of 11 May that the 'rising' was
suppressed by the Popular Army. The idea here is to give outsiders the
impression that all Catalonia was solid against the 'Trotskyists'. But the
Popular Army remained neutral throughout the fighting; everyone in Barcelona
knew this, and it is difficult to believe that Mr Pitcairn did not know it too.
Or again, the juggling in the Communist Press with the figures for killed and
wounded, with the object of exaggerating the scale of the disorders. Diaz,
General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, widely quoted in the Communist
Press, gave the numbers as 900 dead and 2500 wounded. The Catalan Minister of
Propaganda, who was hardly likely to underestimate, gave the numbers as 400
killed and 1000 wounded. The Communist Party doubles the bid and adds a few more
hundreds for luck.
The foreign capitalist newspapers, in general, laid the blame for the
fighting upon the Anarchists, but there were a few that followed the Communist
line. One of these was the English News Chronicle, whose correspondent, Mr John
Langdon-Davies, was in Barcelona at the tune I quote portions of his article
here:
A TROTSKYIST REVOLT
. . . This has not been an Anarchist uprising. It is a frustrated putsch of
the 'Trotskyist' P.O.U.M., working through their controlled organizations,
'Friends of Durruti' and Libertarian Youth. . . . The tragedy began on Monday
afternoon when the Government sent armed police into the Telephone Building,
to disarm the workers there, mostly C.N.T. men. Grave irregularities in the
service had been a scandal for some time. A large crowd gathered in the Plaza
de Cataluna outside, while the C.N.T. men resisted, retreating floor by floor
to the top of the building. . . . The incident was very obscure, but word went
round that the Government was out against the Anarchists. The streets filled
with armed men. . . . By nightfall every workers' centre and Government
building was barricaded, and at ten o'clock the first volleys were fired and
the first ambulances began ringing their way through the streets. By dawn all
Barcelona was under fire. ... As the day wore on and the dead mounted to over
a hundred, one could make a guess at what was happening. The Anarchist C.N.T.
and Socialist U.G.T. were not technically 'out in the street'. So long as they
remained behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an
attitude which included the right to shoot at anything armed in the open
street. . . (the) general bursts were invariably aggravated by pacos--hidden
solitary men, usually Fascists, shooting from roof--tops at nothing in
particular, but doing all they could to add to the general panic.. . . By
Wednesday evening, however, it began to be clear who was behind the revolt.
All the walls had been plastered with an inflammatory poster calling for an
immediate revolution and for the shooting of Republican and Socialist leaders.
It was signed by the 'Friends of Durruti'. On Thursday morning the Anarchists
daily denied all knowledge or sympathy with it, but La Batalla, the P.O.U.M.
paper, reprinted the document with the highest praise. Barcelona, the first
city of Spain, was plunged into bloodshed by agents provocateurs using this
subversive organization.
This does not agree very completely with the Communist versions I have quoted
above, but it will be seen that even as it stands it is self--contradictory.
First the affair is described as 'a Trotskyist revolt', then it is shown to have
resulted from a raid on the Telephone building and the general belief that the
Government was 'out against' the Anarchists. The city is barricaded and both
C.N.T. and U.G.T. are behind the barricades; two days afterwards the
inflammatory poster (actually a leaflet) appears, and this is declared by
implication to have started the whole business--effect preceding cause. But
there is a piece of very serious misrepresentation here. Mr Langdon-Davies
describes the Friends of Durruti and Libertarian Youth as 'controlled
organizations' of the P.O.U.M. Both were Anarchist organizations and had no
connexion with the P.O.U.M. The Libertarian Youth was the youth league of the
Anarchists, corresponding to the J.S.U. of the P.S.U.C., etc. The Friends of
Durruti was a small organization within the F.A.I., and was in general bitterly
hostile to the P.O.U.M. So far as I can discover, there was no one who was a
member of both. It would be about equally true to say that the Socialist League
is a 'controlled organization' of the English Liberal Party. Was Mr
Langdon-Davies unaware of this? If he was, he should have written with more
caution about this very complex subject.
I am not attacking Mr Langdon-Davies's good faith; but admittedly he left
Barcelona as soon as the fighting was over, i.e. at the moment when he could
have begun serious inquiries, and throughout his report there are clear signs
that he has accepted the official version of a 'Trotskyist revolt' without
sufficient verification. This is obvious even in the extract I have quoted. 'By
nightfall' the barricades are built, and 'at ten o'clock' the first volleys are
fired. These are not the words of an eye-witness. From this you would gather
that it is usual to wait for your enemy to build a barricade before beginning to
shoot at him. The impression given is that some hours elapsed between the
building of the barricades and the firing of the first volleys; whereas--
naturally--it was the other way about. I and many others saw the first volleys
fired early in the afternoon. Again, there are the solitary men, 'usually
Fascists', who are shooting from the roof--tops. Mr Langdon-Davies does not
explain how he knew that these men were Fascists. Presumably he did not climb on
to the roofs and ask them. He is simply repeating what he has been told and, as
it fits in with the official version, is not questioning it. As a matter of
fact, he indicates one probable source of much of his information by an
incautious reference to the Minister of Propaganda at the beginning of his
article. Foreign journalists in Spain were hopelessly at the mercy of the
Ministry of Propaganda, though one would think that the very name of this
ministry would be a sufficient warning. The Minister of Propaganda was, of
course, about as likely to give an objective account of the Barcelona trouble as
(say) the late Lord Carson would have been to give an objective account of the
Dublin rising of 1916.
I have given reasons for thinking that the Communist version of the Barcelona
fighting cannot be taken seriously. In addition I must say something about the
general charge that the P.O.U.M. was a secret Fascist organization in the pay of
Franco and Hitler.
This charge was repeated over and over in the Communist Press, especially
from the beginning of 1937 onwards. It was part of the world-wide drive of the
official Communist Party against 'Trotskyism', of which the P.O.U.M. was
supposed to be representative in Spain. 'Trotskyism', according to Frente Rojo
(the Valencia Communist paper) 'is not a political doctrine. Trotskyism is an
official capitalist organization, a Fascist terrorist band occupied in crime and
sabotage against the people.' The P.O.U.M. was a 'Trotskyist' organization in
league with the Fascists and part of 'Franco's Fifth Column'. What was
noticeable from the start was that no evidence was produced in support of this
accusation; the thing was simply asserted with an air of authority. And the
attack was made with the maximum of personal libel and with complete
irresponsibility as to any effects it might have upon the war. Compared with the
job of libelling the P.O.U.M., many Communist writers appear to have considered
the betrayal of military secrets unimportant. In a February number of the Daily
Worker, for instance, a writer (Winifred Bates) is allowed to state that the
P.O.U.M. had only half as many troops on its section of the front as it
pretended. This was not true, but presumably the writer believed it to be true.
She and the Daily Worker were perfectly willing, therefore, to hand to the enemy
one of the most important pieces of information that can be handed through the
columns of a newspaper. In the New Republic Mr Ralph Bates stated that the
P.O.U.M. troops were 'playing football with the Fascists in no man's land' at a
time when, as a matter of fact, the P.O.U.M. troops were suffering heavy
casualties and a number of my personal friends were killed and wounded. Again,
there was the malignant cartoon which was widely circulated, first in Madrid and
later in Barcelona, representing the P.O.U.M. as slipping off a mask marked with
the hammer and sickle and revealing a face marked with the swastika. Had the
Government not been virtually under Communist control it would never have
permitted a thing of this kind to be circulated in wartime. It was a deliberate
blow at the morale not only of the P.O.U.M. militia, but of any others who
happened to be near them; for it is not encouraging to be told that the troops
next to you in the line are traitors. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether the
abuse that was heaped upon them from the rear actually had the effect of
demoralizing the P.O.U.M. militia. But certainly it was calculated to do so, and
those responsible for it must be held to have put political spite before
anti-Fascist unity.
The accusation against the P.O.U.M. amounted to this: that a body of some
scores of thousands of people, almost entirely working class, besides numerous
foreign helpers and sympathizers, mostly refugees from Fascist countries, and
thousands of militia, was simply a vast spying organization in Fascist pay. The
thing was opposed to common sense, and the past history of the P.O.U.M. was
enough to make it incredible. All the P.O.U.M. leaders had revolutionary
histories behind them. Some of them had been mixed up in the 1934 revolt, and
most of them had been imprisoned for Socialist activities under the Lerroux
Government or the monarchy. In 1936 its then leader, Joaquin Maurin, was one of
the deputies who gave warning in the Cortes of Franco's impending revolt. Some
time after the outbreak of war he was taken prisoner by the Fascists while
trying to organize resistance in Franco's rear. When the revolt broke out the
P.O.U.M. played a conspicuous part in resisting it, and in Madrid, in
particular, many of its members were killed in the street-fighting. It was one
of the first bodies to form columns of militia in Catalonia and Madrid. It seems
almost impossible to explain these as the actions of a party in Fascist pay. A
party in Fascist pay would simply have joined in on the other side.
Nor was there any sign of pro-Fascist activities during the war. It was
arguable--though finally I do not agree--that by pressing for a more
revolutionary policy the P.O.U.M. divided the Government forces and thus aided
the Fascists;
I think any Government of reformist type would be justified in regarding a
party like the P.O.U.M. as a nuisance. But this is a very different matter from
direct treachery. There is no way of explaining why, if the P.O.U.M. was really
a Fascist body, its militia remained loyal. Here were eight or ten thousand men
holding important parts of the line during the intolerable conditions of the
winter of 1936-7. Many of them were in the trenches four or five months at a
stretch. It is difficult to see why they did not simply walk out of the line or
go over to the enemy. It was always in their power to do so, and at times the
effect might have been decisive. Yet they continued to fight, and it was shortly
after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed as a political party, when the event was fresh
in everyone's mind, that the militia--not yet redistributed among the Popular
Army--took part in the murderous attack to the east of Huesca when several
thousand men were killed in one or two days. At the very least one would have
expected fraternization with the enemy and a constant trickle of deserters. But,
as I have pointed out earlier, the number of desertions was exceptionally small.
Again, one would have expected pro-Fascist propaganda, 'defeatism', and so
forth. Yet there was no sign of any such thing. Obviously there must have been
Fascist spies and agents provocateurs in the P.O.U.M.; they exist in all
Left-wing parties; but there is no evidence that there were more of them there
than elsewhere.
It is true that some of the attacks in the Communist Press said, rather
grudgingly, that only the P.O.U.M. leaders were in Fascist pay, and not the rank
and file. But this was merely an attempt to detach the rank and file from their
leaders. The nature of the accusation implied that ordinary members, militiamen,
and so forth, were all in the plot together; for it was obvious that if Nin,
Gorkin, and the others were really in Fascist pay, it was more likely to be
known to their followers, who were in contact with them, than to journalists in
London, Paris, and New York. And in any case, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed
the Communist-controlled secret police acted on the assumption that all were
guilty alike, and arrested everyone connected with the P.O.U.M. whom they could
lay hands on, including even wounded men, hospital nurses, wives of P.O.U.M.
members, and in some cases, even children.
Finally, on 15-16 June, the P.O.U.M. was suppressed and declared an illegal
organization. This was one of the first acts of the Negrin Government which came
into office in May. When the Executive Committee of the P.O.U.M. had been thrown
into jail, the Communist Press produced what purported to be the discovery of an
enormous Fascist plot. For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was
flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various
Spanish Communist papers):
SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO
Following the arrest of a large number of leading Trotskyists in Barcelona
and elsewhere . . . there became known, over the weekend, details of one of
the most ghastly pieces of espionage ever known in wartime, and the ugliest
revelation of Trotskyist treachery to date. . . Documents in the possession of
the police, together with the full confession of no less than 200 persons
under arrest, prove, etc. etc.
What these revelations 'proved' was that the P.O.U.M. leaders were
transmitting military secrets to General Franco by radio, were in touch with
Berlin, and were acting in collaboration with the secret Fascist organization in
Madrid. In addition there were sensational details about secret messages in
invisible ink, a mysterious document signed with the letter N. (standing for
Nin), and so on and so forth.
But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most
of the P.O.U.M. leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to
trial, and the charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never
even been formulated. Had they really been guilty of espionage they would have
been tried and shot in a week, as so many Fascist spies had been previously. But
not a scrap of evidence was ever produced except the unsupported statements in
the Communist Press. As for the two hundred 'full confessions', which, if they
had existed, would have been enough to convict anybody, they have never been
heard of again. They were, in fact, two hundred efforts of somebody's
imagination.
More than this, most of the members of the Spanish Government have disclaimed
all belief in the charges against the P.O.U.M. Recently the cabinet decided by
five to two in favour of releasing anti-Fascist political prisoners; the two
dissentients being the Communist ministers. In August an international
delegation headed by James Maxton M.P., went to Spain to inquire into the
charges against the P.O.U.M. and the disappearance of Andres Nin. Prieto, the
Minister of National Defence, Irujo, the Minister of Justice, Zugazagoitia,
Minister of the Interior, Ortega y Gasset, the Procureur-General, Prat Garcia,
and others all repudiated any belief in the P.O.U.M. leaders being guilty of
espionage. Irujo added that he had been through the dossier of the case, that
none of the so-called pieces of evidence would bear examination, and that the
document supposed to have been signed by Nin was 'valueless'--i.e. a forgery.
Prieto considered the P.O.U.M. leaders to be responsible for the May fighting in
Barcelona, but dismissed the idea of their being Fascist spies. 'What is most
grave', he added,' is that the arrest of the P.O.U.M. leaders was not decided
upon by the Government, and the police carried out these arrests on their own
authority. Those responsible are not the heads of the police, but their
entourage, which has been infiltrated by the Communists according to their usual
custom.' He cited other cases of illegal arrests by the police. Irujo likewise
declared that the police had become 'quasi-independent' and were in reality
under the control of foreign Communist elements. Prieto hinted fairly broadly to
the delegation that the Government could not afford to offend the Communist
Party while the Russians were supplying arms. When another delegation, headed by
John McGovern M.P., went to Spain in December, they got much the same answers as
before, and Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior, repeated Prieto's hint
in even plainer terms. 'We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit
certain actions which we did not like.' As an illustration of the autonomy of
the police, it is interesting to learn that even with a signed order from the
Director of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, McGovern and the others could
not obtain admission to one of the 'secret prisons' maintained by the Communist
Party in Barcelona. [Note 12. For reports on the two delegations see Le
Populaire (7 September), Laleche (18 September), Report on the Maxton delegation
published by Independent News (219 Rue Saint-Denis, Paris), and McGovern's
pamphlet Terror in Spain.]
I think this should be enough to make the matter clear. The accusation of
espionage against the P.O.U.M. rested solely upon articles in the Communist
press and the activities of the Communist-controlled secret police. The P.O.U.M.
leaders, and hundreds or thousands of their followers, are still in prison, and
for six months past the Communist press has continued to clamour for the
execution of the 'traitors' But Negrin and the others have kept their heads and
refused to stage a wholesale massacre of'Trotskyists'. Considering the pressure
that has been put upon them, it is greatly to their credit that they have done
so. Meanwhile, in face of what I have quoted above, it becomes very difficult to
believe that the P.O.U.M. was really a Fascist spying organization, unless one
also believes that Maxton, Mc-Govern, Prieto, Irujo, Zugazagoitia, and the rest
are all in Fascist pay together.
Finally, as to the charge that the P.O.U.M. was 'Trotskyist'. This word is
now flung about with greater and greater freedom, and it is used in a way that
is extremely misleading and is often intended to mislead. It is worth stopping
to define it. The word Trotskyist is used to mean three distinct things:
(i) One who, like Trotsky, advocates 'world revolution' as against 'Socialism
in a single country'. More loosely, a revolutionary extremist.
(ii) A member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head.
(iii) A disguised Fascist posing as a revolutionary who acts especially by
sabotage in the U.S.S.R., but, in general, by splitting and undermining the
Left-wing forces.
In sense (i) the P.O.U.M. could probably be described as Trotskyist. So can
the English I.L.P., the German S.A.P., the Left Socialists in France, and so on.
But the P.O.U.M. had no connexion with Trotsky or the Trotskyist
('Bolshevik-Lenninist') organization. When the war broke out the foreign
Trotskyists who came to Spain (fifteen or twenty in number) worked at first for
the P.O.U.M., as the party nearest to their own viewpoint, but without becoming
party-members; later Trotsky ordered his followers to attack the P.O.U.M.
policy, and the Trotskyists were purged from the party offices, though a few
remained in the militia. Nin, the P.O.U.M. leader after Maurin's capture by the
Fascists, was at one time Trotsky's secretary, but had left him some years
earlier and formed the P.O.U.M. by the amalgamation of various Opposition
Communists with an earlier party, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc. Nin's
one-time association with Trotsky has been used in the Communist press to show
that the P.O.U.M. was really Trotskyist.
By the same line of argument it could be shown that the English Communist
Party is really a Fascist organization, because of Mr John Strachey's one-time
association with Sir Oswald Mosley.
In sense (ii), the only exactly defined sense of the word, the P.O.U.M. was
certainly not Trotskyist. It is important to make this distinction, because it
is taken for granted by the majority of Communists that a Trotskyist in sense
(ii) is invariably a Trotskyist in sense (iii)--i.e. that the whole Trotskyist
organization is simply a Fascist spying-machine. 'Trotskyism' only came into
public notice in the time of the Russian sabotage trials, and to call a man a
Trotskyist is practically equivalent to calling him a murderer, agent
provocateur, etc. But at the same time anyone who criticizes Communist policy
from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trotskyist. Is it
then asserted that everyone professing revolutionary extremism is in Fascist
pay?
In practice it is or is not, according to local convenience. When Maxton went
to Spain with the delegation I have mentioned above, Verdad, Frente Rojo, and
other Spanish Communist papers instantly denounced him as a 'Trotsky-Fascist',
spy of the Gestapo, and so forth. Yet the English Communists were careful not to
repeat this accusation. In the English Communist press Maxton becomes merely a
'reactionary enemy of the working class', which is conveniently vague. The
reason, of course, is simply that several sharp lessons have given the English
Communist press a wholesome dread of the law of libel. The fact that the
accusation was not repeated in a country where it might have to be proved is
sufficient confession that it is a lie.
It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at
greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil
war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable
injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I
believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind
they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist
cause.
Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of
dealing with political opponents by means of trumped-up accusations is nothing
new. Today the key-word is 'Trotsky-Fascist'; yesterday it was 'Social-Fascist'.
It is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials 'proved' that the
leaders of the Second International, including, for instance, Leon Blum and
prominent members of the British Labour Party, were hatching a huge plot for the
military invasion of the U.S.S.R. Yet today the French Communists are glad
enough to accept Blum as a leader, and the English Communists are raising heaven
and earth to get inside the Labour Party. I doubt whether this kind of thing
pays, even from a sectarian point of view. And meanwhile there is no possible
doubt about the hatred and dissension that the 'Trotsky-Fascist' accusation is
causing. Rank-and--file Communists everywhere are led away on a senseless
witch-hunt after 'Trotskyists', and parties of the type of the P.O.U.M. are
driven back into the terribly sterile position of being mere anti-Communist
parties. There is already the beginning of a dangerous split in the world
working-class movement. A few more libels against life-long Socialists, a few
more frame-ups like the charges against the P.O.U.M., and the split may become
irreconcilable. The only hope is to keep political controversy on a plane where
exhaustive discussion is possible. Between the Communists and those who stand or
claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists
hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist
class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives
Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the
wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so
long as no argument is produced except a scream of 'Trotsky-Fascist!' the
discussion cannot even begin. It would be impossible for me, for instance, to
debate the rights and wrongs of the Barcelona fighting with a Communist Party
member, because no Communist--that is to say, no' good' Communist--could admit
that I have given a truthful account of the facts. If he followed his party
'line dutifully he would have to declare that I am lying or, at best, that I am
hopelessly misled and that anyone who glanced at the Daily Worker headlines a
thousand miles from the scene of events knows more of what was happening in
Barcelona than I do. In such circumstances there can be no argument; the
necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached. What purpose is served by
saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay? Only the purpose of making
serious discussion impossible. It is as though in the middle of a chess
tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is
guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched.
Libel settles nothing.
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