A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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government’s attacks on regional autonomy and the increasingly threatening attitude of the CEDA was driving the Socialists to play with the idea of a revolutionary rising to forestall the destruction of the Republic.
The JAP held another rally, on 9 September, this time at Covadonga in Asturias, the starting point for the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. This was clearly a symbol of warlike aggression which foreshadowed the Francoist use after 1936 of the violent crusade imagery of the Reconquista. Gil Robles spoke in violent terms of the need to annihilate the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque Nationalists. Revelling in the adulation of the assembled ranks of the JAP, the supreme ‘Jefe’ worked himself up to a frenzy of patriotic rhetoric calling for nationalism to be exalted ‘with ecstacy, with paroxysms, with anything; I prefer a nation of lunatics to a nation of wretches’. Behind his apparently spontaneous passion there was a cold-blooded determination to provoke the left. Gil Robles knew full well that the left considered him a fascist. He was also aware that it intended to prevent the CEDA coming to power, although he was confident that the left was not in a position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. The preparations for revolution of the young Socialists had consisted largely of Sunday picnics in Madrid’s Casa del Campo during which military manoeuvres were amateurishly practised without weapons. Salazar Alonso had had no difficulty in tracking down the few revolvers and rifles that had been acquired by means of expensive encounters with unscrupulous arms dealers. Thanks to informers in the PSOE or to the arms dealers themselves, when the police subsequently raided the houses of militants and Casas del Pueblo they seemed to know exactly where guns were concealed behind partitions or under floorboards. The most notorious arms purchase was carried out by Prieto. Arms – initially ordered by exiled enemies of the Portuguese dictatorship who could not pay for them – were shipped to Asturias on the steamer Turquesa. In a bizarre incident, the shipment fell largely into the hands of the police although Prieto escaped. Only in Asturias was the local working class even minimally armed, as a result of pilfering from local small-arms factories and dynamite available in the mines.
On 26 September, the CEDA opened the crisis by announcing that it could no longer support a minority government. Lerroux’s new cabinet, announced late at night on 3 October, included three CEDA ministers. To the left, it seemed as if this was the first step towards the imposition of fascism in Spain. The reaction of the Republican forces was abrupt. Azaña and other leading Republicans denounced the move and even the conservative Miguel Maura broke off relations with the President. The Socialists were paralysed with doubt. They had hoped that threats of revolution would suffice to make Alcalá Zamora call new elections. Now, the UGT gave the government twenty-four hours notice of a pacific general strike. The Socialists hoped that the President would change his mind but they merely succeeded in giving the police time to arrest working class leaders. In most parts of Spain, the strike was a failure largely because of the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and bringing in the army to run essential services.
In Barcelona, events were more dramatic. In an attempt to outflank extreme Catalan nationalists, and seriously alarmed by developments in Madrid, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’. It was a protest against what was perceived as the fascist betrayal of the Republic. The CNT stood aside since it regarded the Esquerra as a purely bourgeois affair. In fact, the rebellion of the Generalitat was doomed when Companys refused requests to arm the workers. Bloodshed was avoided by his moderation which was matched by that of General Domingo Batet, the officer in command of the Catalan military region (or Fourth Organic Division as it was called). General Batet employed common sense and restraint in restoring the authority of the central government. He ordered his men to be ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ before any provocations. In so preventing a potential blood-bath, he incurred the wrath of Franco who was directing the repression from Madrid. In avoiding the exemplary violence that Franco regarded as essential, Batet was paving the way to his own execution by the Francoists during during the Spanish Civil War.
The only place where the protests of the left in October 1934 were not easily brushed aside was in Asturias. There, spontaneous rank-and-file militancy impelled the local PSOE leaders to go along with a revolutionary movement organized jointly by the UGT, the CNT and, belatedly, the Communists, united in the Alianza Obrera (workers’ alliance). The local Socialist leaders of the mineworkers knew that the strike was doomed without support from the rest of Spain but they opted to stay with their men. Entrusted with the repression, General Franco brought in the hardened mercenaries of Spain’s colonial Army of Africa. The miners organized a revolutionary commune with transport, communications, hospital facilities and food distribution, but had few weapons. Armed largely with dynamite, they were reduced to submission by both heavy artillery attacks and bombing raids. The Spanish Foreign Legion committed atrocities, many women and children were killed and, when the principal Asturian cities, Gijón and Oviedo, fell, the army carried out summary executions of leftists.
The Asturian rising marked the end for the Republic. To Gerald Brenan, it was ‘the first battle of the Civil War’. The conflict did not end with the defeat of the miners. As their leader, Belarmino Tomás, put it, ‘our surrender today is simply a halt on the road, where we make good our mistakes, preparing for the next battle’. There could be no going back. The October revolution had terrified the middle and upper classes; and in their terror they took a revenge which determined the left that the next time there must be no half measures. The Socialist movement was, in fact, badly scarred by the events of October. The repression unleashed in the aftermath of the October rising was truly brutal. In Asturias, prisoners were tortured. Thousands of workers were imprisoned, virtually the entire UGT executive was in jail. The Socialist press was silenced.
Nothing was done in the next fifteen months to reconcile the hostilities aroused by the revolution and its repression. Despite the CEDA’s much vaunted aim of beating the revolution by a programme of social reform, proposals for moderate land reform and for tax reforms were defeated by right-wing intransigence. Indeed, Manuel Giménez Fernández, the CEDA Minister of Agriculture, encountered embittered opposition within his own party to his mildly reformist plans. He was denounced as the ‘white Bolshevik’. There was room only for the punishment of the October rebels. Gil Robles demanded the ‘inflexible application of the law’. Companys was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. The thousands of political prisoners remained in jail. A vicious campaign was waged against Azaña in an unsuccessful attempt to prove him guilty of preparing the Catalan revolution. The Catalan autonomy statute was suspended.
Then, when the CEDA failed to secure the death penalty for two Asturian Socialist leaders, its three ministers resigned. Gil Robles thus resumed his tactic of provoking cabinet crises in order to weaken the Radicals. He hoped to move crab-like towards taking power himself. He was rewarded in early May when Lerroux’s new government contained five Cedistas, including Gil Robles himself as Minister of War. It was a period of open reaction. Landlords halved wages and order was forcibly restored in the countryside. Gil Robles purged the Army of loyal Republican officers and appointed known opponents of the regime to high positions – Francisco Franco became Chief of the General Staff, Manuel Goded Inspector General, and Joaquin Fanjul Under-Secretary of War. In a number of ways, regimental reorganization, motorization, equipment procurement, Gil Robles continued the reforms of Azaña and effectively prepared the Army for its role in the Civil War.
In response to rightist intransigence, the left was also growing in strength, unity and belligerence. In jail, political prisoners were soaking up revolutionary literature. Outside, the economic misery of large numbers of peasants and workers, the savage persecution of the October rebels and the attacks on Manuel Azaña combined to produce an atmosphere of solidarity among all sections of the left. After his release from jail, Azaña and Indalecio Prieto, who was in exile in Belgium, began a campaign to ensure that the disunity behind the 1933 electoral defeat would not be repeated. Azaña worked hard to reunite the various tiny Republican parties, while Prieto concentrated on countering the revolutionary extremism of the Socialist left under Largo Caballero. A series of gigantic mass meetings in Bilbao, Valencia and Madrid were addressed by Azaña in the second half of 1935. The enthusiasm for left-wing unity shown by the hundreds of thousands who came from all over Spain to attend these Discursos en campo abierto (open air speeches) helped convince