The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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to be replaced by government nominees. Emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years of imprisonment. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936.81
The FJS was also subjected to various obstacles to its normal functioning. Renovación received a crippling fine at the beginning of July. The following week, Salazar Alonso issued a decree prohibiting the use of the clenched-fist salute. Inevitably, this hardened the FJS revolutionary rhetoric and pushed the organization close to the Communist Youth.82 On 26 July 1934, attracted by the incessant praise for the USSR in the pages of Renovación, the leadership of the Communist Youth proposed negotiations with the FJS with a view to a possible unification. Although the invitation was preceded by patronizing remarks which described the FJS as reformist social democrats, the conversations went ahead. The FJS was represented by Carrillo, Melchor, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla; the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas by Trifón Medrano, Segismundo Álvarez and Fernando Claudín (Claudín would later develop into the most sophisticated thinker in the Spanish Communist Party). The talks were dominated by Carrillo, who presented the FJS as the revolutionary vanguard of the Socialist movement while the UJC was merely a very junior offshoot of the tiny Communist Party.
The meetings were tense, if slightly more cordial than might have been expected given the organizations’ history of mutual criticism. No concrete plans were made for formal unification. As Carrillo made clear, the FJS was already preparing a revolutionary action and this would take place within the Alianza Obrera. Nevertheless, Carrillo also indicated that he believed that the FJS should be prepared to make compromises in order to hasten the revolution. Thereafter there was ever more united action on the ground. At a local level, militants of both organizations were already acting together, particularly in cooperation against the JAP. They held joint demonstrations such as that which followed the murder by Falangists on 10 June of the young militant Juanita Rico. Their two news-sheets, Renovación and Juventud Roja, henceforth carried news of each other’s activities. Claudín was deeply impressed by the nineteen-year-old Carrillo’s remarkable self-confidence, the powerful and lucid way in which he presented his arguments, and his profound knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution. Amaro del Rosal was every bit as impressed with the talent, energy and capacity for work of his young comrade.83
Carrillo had also been noticed by others outside the FJS. After the talks with the UJC, Trifón Medrano invited him to meet a representative of KIM – the Communist Youth International – which effectively meant with a Soviet agent. He consulted with his comrades on the FJS executive committee and they agreed that he should go ahead with the encounter. He was excited by the idea of meeting someone whom he imagined to be linked with the assault on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Indeed, such was his admiration of the Soviet Union that his office as secretary general of the FJS was dominated by a large portrait of Stalin. Forty years later, he was to tell Fernando Claudín that, in the internal conflict within the PSOE and the UGT, he associated the workers’ champion Largo Caballero with Stalin and the intellectual Besteiro with Trotsky. When he got to the park where he was to meet the Russian agent, he was bitterly disappointed to be introduced not to a hardened Bolshevik revolutionary but to ‘fat Carmen’ (‘Carmen la gorda’), the pseudonym of a portly German woman who was a Soviet agent within the Spanish KIM Bureau. This first meeting with a representative of the fortress of world communism went from bad to worse. She accused the FJS of being potential Trotskyists. Then, believing erroneously that they had been followed by the police, she suddenly proposed that they flee from the bar where they were having a cold drink. Jumping on a moving tram, she tripped and collapsed on the platform to the immense hilarity of passers-by.84
As the summer wore on, Carrillo continued to push the insurrectionary line in Renovación, whose pages, when the entire issue was not seized by the police, carried more and more sections blacked out by the censor.85 In contrast, Largo Caballero was moving in the opposite direction. The UGT’s National Committee met on 31 July to hold an inquest into the failure of the peasant strike. The representative of the schoolteachers’ union criticized the UGT executive for its failure to go to the aid of the peasants and virtually accused Largo Caballero of being a reformist. He responded by condemning such rhetoric as frivolous extremism and by declaring that the Socialist movement must abandon its dangerous verbal revolutionism. He had apparently forgotten his own rhetoric of four months previously and the existence of the joint revolutionary committee. When the schoolteachers’ leader read out texts by Lenin, Largo Caballero replied that the UGT was not going to act in accordance with Lenin or any other theorist. Reminding his young comrade that Spain in 1934 was not Russia in 1917, he stated rightly that there was no armed proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was strong. It was exactly the opposite of his own recent speeches and of the line being peddled by Carrillo and the young hotheads of the FJS. In fact, Largo Caballero seems to have become increasingly annoyed by their facile extremism, complaining that ‘they did just what they felt like without consulting anyone’. Nevertheless, Carrillo was later to write that, as far as he knew at the time, Largo Caballero was forging ahead with detailed revolutionary preparations, for some of which he was using the FJS.86
In fact, Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS revolutionary liaison committee had not done much beyond compiling a large collection of file-cards with details of potential local revolutionary committees and militias. That filing system was the only place where there existed an infrastructure of revolution. Each UGT, PSOE or FJS section made its own arrangements for creating militias, which usually went no further than drawing up lists of names of those who might be prepared to take to the streets. Whatever Carrillo fondly believed, there was no central coordination. Largo Caballero himself admitted that the majority of local party and union leaders thought that ‘the revolution was inevitable but feared it and just hoped that some initiative or incident might see it avoided and so they invested only the minimum effort in its preparation, not wanting to appear to be hostile to it in order to keep the loyalty of their members’. He thus perfectly summed up his own attitude. For the bulk of the Socialist leadership, if not for the bolshevizing youth, there was never any real intention of making a revolution. Largo Caballero was convinced that President Alcalá Zamora would never invite the CEDA to join the government because its leaders had never declared their loyalty to the Republic.87
The loud revolutionary rhetoric of the FJS was followed with relish by both Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. They were aware that the revolutionary committee had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. They also knew – as did Largo Caballero but apparently not Carrillo – that the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Thorough police activity throughout the spring and summer of 1934 had undermined most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee. Most of the few weapons acquired by the left had been seized. Gil Robles admitted later that he was anxious to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the violent reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’88 Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:
I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.89
In similar terms, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was simply to begin a counter-revolutionary offensive