The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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dagger in the heart’ had hurt him. He ended with prophetic words: ‘I, Señor Stalin, had always educated my son in the love of freedom, you have converted him to slavery. Since I still love him, despite such a monstrous letter, I will ensure by my example that he returns to the place that he should never have left.’5
It would be nearly five decades before Santiago Carrillo would return to the Socialist Party and nearly twenty years before he would see his father again. Then, the seriously ill Wenceslao Carrillo was living in Belgium with the support of the metalworkers’ union. Artur Gallí, the union’s secretary general, had brought Wenceslao to the clinic that he had founded in Charleroi and there he spent his last years. Santiago claimed that, after the PCE had developed its strategy of ‘national reconciliation’ in 1956, Pasionaria and others suggested that it would be politically useful if he were to be reconciled with his father. In this version, when they met, his father said, ‘As far as I am concerned, you have always been my son.’ Santiago introduced him to his wife and young sons and Wenceslao spent time with them at their home in Paris. According to an Asturian Socialist, Manuel Villa, when Wenceslao Carrillo died in 1963, Santiago appeared at the funeral. The many exiled Spanish Socialists who filed past the graveside gave their condolences to other members of the family but ostentatiously refused to shake hands with Santiago.6 However, all that was still in the future.
In 1939, while in France, Carrillo was not part of the tortuous process whereby, since April, Comintern officials and the PCE leaders exiled in Moscow were engaged in the preparation of reports on the Party’s role in the Republican war effort and on the reasons for defeat. There were various contributory drafts. From the Comintern officials who had been in Spain there were reports by the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev (Stepanov) and Palmiro Togliatti (Alfredo). From the Spaniards, there were drafts from Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Cordón and testimony from many other witnesses to specific episodes. There was considerable disagreement as to whether the Party leadership was correct in assuming that the war had effectively been lost when Barcelona fell. Líster was convinced that greater foresight and resistance could have undermined the effects of the Casado coup.7
The final report was only for the eyes of Stalin, Dimitrov and the very top echelons of the PCE. The debate was not widened to the rank and file, on the plausible grounds that this could only cause scandal and demoralization among the militants at a time when the Party was scattered around the world and still suffering the trauma of defeat. The Russians wanted the Comintern to be cleared of any responsibility and Dolores Ibárruri exonerated, especially as she was being groomed to take over the Party leadership. Carrillo emerged unscathed. On the few occasions that he was mentioned, his work with the JSU was commended.8 The way the process was managed ensured PCE loyalty to Moscow but left the Party committed to the unswerving defence of its own behaviour during the Civil War. It is difficult to see what else the exiled PCE leaders could have done in the context of the Soviet purges given their dependence on Russian charity. Nevertheless, the commitment to Stalinism deprived the Party of flexibility and credibility at a time when the unity of the entire anti-Francoist opposition was of the first importance.9
During the summer of 1939, Carrillo was occupied in a vain effort to prevent the expulsion of the JSU from the International Union of Socialist Youth. In July, at the congress in Lille at which the issue was to be decided, his position was definitively undermined when the letter to his father was distributed to all the delegates.10 This disappointment was followed by the news of the signing on 23 August of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Such was the adherence of Carrillo to the Stalinist cause that it caused him no distress. His view of the consequences for the Western Powers, which he blamed for the defeat of the Spanish Republic, was: ‘Those bastards have got exactly what they deserved.’11
Carrillo claimed that it was around this time that his wife Chon and their daughter Aurora arrived in Paris. He told María Eugenia Yagüe, with whom he prepared an authorized biography as part of his electoral campaign in 1977, that the Party leadership had not allowed him to risk going to get them out of Madrid. The dual implication was that he was far too valuable and that he put his loyalty to the Party above family considerations. The description that he gave Yagüe of their experiences in the ten months since he had last seen them is contradictory and also differs from that in his memoirs. Nevertheless, both versions recount intense suffering and hardship. He told Yagüe that Chon and Aurora had managed to get across the French border and, thanks to help from French Communists, had avoided internment in a concentration camp. In the same text, he also claimed that they had
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