The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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Juan Modesto. He claimed later to have witnessed parts of the battles of Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. This later provoked outraged jibes by General Enrique Líster. It is almost certainly the case that any visits to the battle front were made in order to check on the JSU’s many political commissars. However, Carrillo’s subsequent attempts to fabricate an heroic military career in response to Líster’s accusations of cowardice were perhaps unnecessary. He could legitimately have argued that he had made a substantial contribution to the Republican war effort through his work in terms of the political education of the great influx of new recruits.142
Indeed, he worked hard to bring both Republican and anarchist youth organizations under the umbrella of the JSU. At every turn, his loyalty to the Spanish Party and the Comintern was unquestionable, symbolized by the large portrait of Stalin that dominated his office. In April 1937, he drafted and presented in Paris an application for the entry of the JSU into the International Union of Socialist Youth, from which, three years earlier, he had removed the Spanish Socialist Youth (FJS). In Britain, France and other democratic countries, the Socialist youth organizations were putting pressure on their respective governments to support the Spanish Republic. It made perfect sense in terms of the Republican quest for international support for Carrillo to try to take JSU into the organization. He later claimed that the idea for this initiative was entirely his own. Since, as he later admitted, a key element of his initiative was to work towards the unity of the Socialist and Communist Youth Internationals, the idea received the approval of the KIM hierarchy. As the creation of the JSU showed, this would be the first step to a Communist take-over of the larger Socialist organization. The initiative led to the JSU being provisionally admitted to the International Union of Socialist Youth and generated the expected increase in support for the Republic.143
He was rewarded for his loyalty by being made the object of a carefully constructed personality cult. He was referred to as the ‘undisputed leader of the youth of Spain’ and as ‘the rudder and great guide of our great Youth Federation’. On the first page of the JSU journal Espartaco, there was a photograph of Carrillo accompanied by a description of him as ‘the leader beloved of all the young masses of Spain, the solid creator of, and the key to, the unity of the JSU. He, along with the executive committee, channels with a safe and steady hand the enormous strength of the young generation that is fighting for the independence of Spain.’ In July 1938, the JSU newspaper Ahora carried a photograph under which the caption was ‘Our secretary general … beloved leader of Spanish youth, whose intelligent and selfless efforts have enabled him to lead the struggle and the labour of our country’s youth in the fight for the independence of the motherland.’ Not long afterwards, Claudín was to be found referring to Carrillo in identical terms. There was some ribaldry in other organizations about the interruptions to the war effort constituted by great public meetings in which it was not clear if the purpose was to raise the morale of the young militants or to massage Carrillo’s ego.144
In April 1938, Franco’s forces had reached the Mediterranean and split the Republican zone in two. By the summer, the Republic was edging to defeat, with Valencia under direct threat. The Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, decided to mount a spectacular counter-offensive to stem the continual erosion of territory. To restore contact between the central zone and Catalonia, an assault across the River Ebro was planned by his chief of staff General Vicente Rojo. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, Franco poured in massive reinforcements in reaction to the initial Republican success in advancing to Gandesa. For over three months, he pounded the Republicans with air and artillery attacks in an effort to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. Negrín hoped that the Western democracies would finally see the dangers facing them from the Axis. Before that could happen the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. The Munich agreement destroyed the Republic’s last hope of salvation in a European war. By mid-November, the decimated remnants of the Republican army, led by Manuel Tagüeña, abandoned the right bank of the Ebro. The Republic had lost the bulk of its army and would never recover.
In response to food shortages and conscription of ever younger recruits, demoralization was rife. The deteriorating conditions saw a growth of anti-communism. One symptom of this was the effort being made from the autumn of 1938 by the Socialist Party executive to re-establish a separate Socialist Youth. The JSU organizations of Valencia, Alicante, Albacete, Murcia, Jaen and Ciudad Real were in favour of returning to the old FJS model. Carrillo’s knee-jerk, and futile, response was to denounce the dissidents as Trotskyists. His alarm was understandable since JSU members made up a high proportion of the Republican armed forces. The fact that Serrano Poncela played a key role in this crisis, writing a critical report on the JSU passed to the PSOE executive in 1938, perhaps explains Carrillo’s long-term resentment of him.145 When the JSU headquarters in Alicante were taken over by supporters of Largo Caballero, the FJS was reconstituted. Busts of Lenin and large portraits of Carrillo were destroyed in an iconoclastic venting of rage.146
After the Ebro, and the end of any reasonable hope of victory, war-weariness overwhelmed the Republican zone. Hunger, privation and the scale of casualties took their toll and much of the frustration was visited on the PCE and the JSU. In October, Carrillo and Pedro Checa were sent to Madrid in an attempt to reverse the process whereby anti-communism was undermining what remained of a war effort. They found not only a generalized fatigue but the determined hostility of the leadership of both the PSOE and the CNT. When the Francoists bombed Madrid with loaves of fresh white bread, JSU militants burned them in the streets. Given the scale of hunger suffered by the Madrileños, this was a less successful gesture than Carrillo later claimed. While in the capital, Santiago heard that his father was actively working with the anti-Negrín elements in the PSOE. They had a monumental row over Wenceslao’s claim that the only solution was to seek an honourable surrender.147
Just before Christmas 1938, Franco launched a final offensive armed with new German equipment. His reserves were sufficient for his troops to be relieved every two days. Carrillo and others were sent to Barcelona in the vain hope that they might be able to organize the kind of popular resistance that had saved Madrid in November 1936. His days were spent commuting to the front trying to keep up morale, but the shattered Republican army of the Ebro could barely fight on. He also worked with militants of the Catalan JSU in an effort to organize popular resistance. Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939. Carrillo claimed later that he was still in the Catalan capital as the Francoists approached and did not leave until they were near the city centre. His own accounts are the only source for his claims that, as he headed north, he was nearly captured by Francoist troops in Girona on 4 February. Shortly afterwards, he crossed the French frontier.148 The same is true of his assertion that he was anxious to return to Madrid not only to continue the fight but to be reunited with his wife, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, and their one-year-old daughter, Aurora. They had married shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. He was particularly anxious since Chon had heart problems and Aurora was weak as a result of consistently poor nutrition in the first year of her life.149 Why Carrillo did not go back to Madrid and what happened to Chon and Aurora at the end of the war are issues clouded in mystery, as will be explained in the next chapter.
Hundreds of thousands of hungry and terrified refugees from all over Spain left the Catalan capital and began to trek towards France. A huge area of about 30 per cent of Spanish territory still remained to the Republic, but the population was afflicted with ever deepening war-weariness. Although further military resistance was virtually impossible, the Communists were determined to hold on to the bitter end. On the one hand, this was important to their Russian masters as a way of delaying inevitable fascist aggression against the Soviet Union.150 It would also allow them to derive political capital out of the ‘desertion’ of their rivals. In fact, they were far from alone in the belief that, given the determination of Franco to carry out a savage repression, it was crucial