ALTHOUGH Spain had been neutral during the First World War, the country’s quick descent into corruption meant that people were becoming more and more disillusioned with the bankrupt model of Western capitalism and began to regard Soviet-style communism as a viable alternative. As a result, the reactionary coup of 1923 resulted in a seizure of power by Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870-1930) and the country was soon labouring under a military junta. When he resigned in January 1930, due to the vastly unpopular nature of his rule, Spain was governed first by General Dámaso Berenguer’s (1873-1953) ‘toothless dictatorship’ and then by staunch monarchist Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar-Cabañas (1860-1933). In April 1931, following the deposition of King Alfonso XIII (1886-1941) and the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic that had resulted from a series of electoral victories by various socialist and liberal candidates, the government of Aznar-Cabañas was vanquished and King Alfonso forced to flee the country.
Between April and December, a new provisional government – headed by Spanish lawyer Niceto Alcalá-Zamora (1877-1949) – held on to the reins of power until the 1931 Constitution could be ratified. Throughout this period there were riots and disturbances all over the country. Many supported the Republic, but the Right’s concern that the Catholic Church was about to face persecution led to the rise of a formidable fascist opposition. That summer, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) organised a litany of nationwide strikes and this led to its suppression by the Civil Guard. Angry that the Republican government was oppressing ordinary workers, particularly in Seville, the CNT called for a revolution and this led the provisional committee to stave off the threat of insurrection by implementing various reforms. However, with issues surrounding wages, land distribution and female employment unresolved, the CNT promoted class struggle and this led to further strikes, theft from employers, arson, robbery and assaults on businesses, strike-breakers and machinery. The reforms had failed to quell the rising tide of discontent.
As public anger began to focus on the Church, 20,000 ecclesiastical buildings were bombed or set on fire and this caused immense damage to graves, libraries and the country’s ancestral heritage. In December 1931, the Republican regime initiated a programme of widespread secularisation and abolished all Catholic schools and universities. Due to these outages, the Spanish Right enjoyed a sudden surge of popularity and the newly-formed Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) shocked everyone by winning 115 seats in the November 19th, 1933 election. More tellingly, a large proportion of CEDA’s votes had been cast by Spain’s recently enfranchised women in protest at their exclusion by the Republicans. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), on the other hand, won just 59 seats and this was partly a result of anarchists refusing to vote for yet another reformist government.
From that moment on, the fascists became more organised and over the course of two years a succession of unstable governments led to the complete polarisation of the country into two distinct camps. In December 1933 an anarchist uprising in protest at the new CEDA regime was crushed with a combination of government troops and members of the nationalist Falange Española y de las JONS. Predictably, the Left struck back with a vengeance and an alliance between the anti-clercial Acción Republicana, socialist PSOE and Partido Comunista de España (PCE) strove for all-out rebellion. By October 1934 the ruling coalition led by Alejandro Lerroux’s (1864-1949) Partido Republicano Radical and its CEDA allies entered a state of rapid decline and an effort was made to purge all pro-leftists from the military.
With landowners now brutalising the country’s starving peasantry and taking back the land that had been handed to them under Alcalá-Zamora’s government, people lost their jobs and were cynically told to beg the Republic for mercy. The behaviour of southern landowners was so violent that many historians attribute it to growing resentment towards fascism and the eventual onset of the Spanish Civil War. In the legislative elections of February 16th, 1936, victory went to a Popular Front alliance consisting of the socialist PSOE, communist PCE, Izquierda Republicana (IR), Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), Unión Republicana (UR), Acció Catalana (AC) and several minor parties.
In July 1936, after the government had twice collapsed, a coup organised by the military and its nationalist supporters led to the overthrow of the Second Republic and the coming-to-power of General Francisco Franco (1892-1975). However, although the fascists managed to control Málaga, Jaén and Almería, anarchist rebels held on to parts of Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. With a significant portion of Aragon and Catalonia in their grasp, not to mention 66,000 soldiers, the anarchists and their communist allies became a target for Franco’s new dictatorship.
So where was the British government in all this? Although Parliament quickly established a so-called Non-Intervention Committee, proposing that itself, France, Germany and Russia take no part in the Spanish conflict, it was nothing more than a way of maintain the balance of power in Europe. As later became clear when five Cambridge Spies – Maclean, Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Cairncross – were discovered to have been passing on intelligence to the Soviets, the Non-Intervention Committee was about as effective as holding a candle to a force ten gale. It was never meant to be, of course, and whilst some sections of the public may have swallowed this lie British diplomat Sir Orme Sargent (1884-1962) had clearly seen the writing on the wall when he said
If the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of Spain breaks down […] it may well be that the first step will have been taken in dividing Europe into two blocs each based on a rival ideology […] horrible development.[1]
Conservative minister Stanley Baldwin took things one step further, when he admitted:
We English hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So, if there is somewhere that fascists and bolshevists can kill each other off, so much the better.[2]
Needless to say, apart from the fact that Baldwin had merely set out to provide the illusion that Britain was not taking sides, once these rival ‘blocs’ had fought it out in Spain they would take their ideological spat into the unforgiving trenches of the Second World War.
Returning to the infiltration of the British establishment by the Cambridge Spies, it was secret communist Donald Maclean (1913-1983) who discovered during the course of his duplicitous activities at the London Foreign Office that although Westminster was keen to expose Soviet support for the Spanish Republicans, the Royal Navy had been ordered to send supplies to General Franco’s troops via British-occupied Gibraltar. Other transgressions of ‘non-intervention’ included the United States supplying fuel to the fascists by way of Shell-Standard Oil, despite American president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) pretending to observe an official embargo, and both the German Condor Legion and Italian Legionary Air Force bombing the anarcho-communist stronghold of Guernica and killing up to 1,650 Basque citizens.
Another crucial development in the fight against General Franco and his reactionary allies was the formation of the International Brigades (Brigadas Internacionales). Originally established by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, during its two-year existence it attracted between 40,000 and 60,000 combatants – 4,000 of them from Great Britain – and fought twelve key battles against the nationalists. Some of the main organisational participants included the aforementioned CNT, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), Columna Durruti (CD) and Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (IWA). In addition, whilst the fascists were being financed by Nazi Germany the International Brigades were in the pay of Moscow and Russian officials from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) were involved in military training and strategy. Among the Republican volunteers were socialists, communists and anarchists drawn from a variety of European countries. Many were famous, too, or became so after the war and some of the more well-known personalities were George Orwell (1903-1950), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), André Malraux (1901-1976) and Simone Weil (1909-1943). Despite this enormously co-ordinated effort, between 1936 and 1938 around 15,000 men and women from the International Brigades would lose their lives.
The Comintern encouraged Marxist-Leninists from all over the world to join the fight against fascism, although few of the leaders were involved in action or lost their lives. For lesser members, on the other hand, it was another matter entirely and communist parties across Europe soon began to wonder how on earth they could influence people when their supporters were being slaughtered overseas in such alarming numbers. Some Party organisers were even rounding-up groups of homeless Londoners and shipping them off to Iberia in the way that the infamous British press gangs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would force men to serve in the Royal Navy. A fine example of communist ‘humanitarianism’ in action.
Things were far from rosy among the International Brigades, either, and it soon transpired that Communist Party leaders were wresting control of the anti-Francoist struggle from their anarchist counterparts and many were betrayed. The latter, pushed to the sidelines of history by their former allies, have never forgotten this perfidy and must ensure that there are no future alliances with the shock troops of the Left.
Notes:
1. Orme Sargent, Sir Harold; “Documents on British Foreign Policy” in Robert Cecil, A Divided Life: A Biography of Donald Maclean (London, 1988), p.46.
2. Gardiner, Juliet; The Thirties: An Intimate History (London, 2010), p.393.
