The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 полностью

There had been many more serious developments to make the anarchists and the POUM feel threatened in Catalonia. In the winter the PSUC had set out to exclude the POUM from the Catalan government. The anarchists, who until then had regarded the Communist-POUM battle simply as a Marxist rivalry, began to realize that its outcome would affect them too. The Generalitat, now feeling that it had sufficient power to face down the anarchists, issued a decree on 4 March, dissolving the control patrols and the security council dominated by the FAI. At the same time it amalgamated the Assault Guard and the Republican National Guard into a single force under the command of the councillor for internal security, Artemi Aiguader. The decree also demanded the surrender of weapons.

The Communist PSUC stepped up the pressure over the following month. It issued a ‘victory plan’, which demanded the complete integration of Catalan forces in the People’s Army, the call-up of all classes between 1932 and 1936, the nationalization of war industries, the militarization of all transport and the government control of all weapons.¹⁸ The anarchists, although torn in two directions, felt that they had given up enough to their colleagues in the government. ‘We have made too many concessions and have reached the moment of turning off the tap,’ declared their newspaper, Solidarid Obrera.¹⁹

Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM, was exultant that the CNT had reached the end of its tether. He wanted the anarchists to join the POUM in an attack ‘on the counter-revolution’.²⁰ The battle lines of the so-called ‘events of May’ were being drawn. The POUM could not be defined as ‘Trotskyist’, as Stalinist propaganda continually proclaimed, and certainly not as ‘Trotskyist-Fascist’, which was the usual Comintern epithet–a death sentence in Soviet terms. But Stalinists refused to acknowledge that Trotsky’s Fourth International had condemned the POUM for having joined the Popular Front in the elections, with Trotsky himself repudiating his former colleague in furious articles.²¹

For Nin, everything that was not revolutionary was reactionary, which was why he despised republican institutions and called on the CNT to install a workers’ democracy. The POUM in its revolutionary fanaticism had even convinced itself that the government of the Popular Front was secretly hatching a plot with the nationalists, a curious mirror image of Stalinist suspicions. It was, however, on more rational ground in its belief that the communists were preparing a purge similar to those taking place in the Soviet Union.²²

In Barcelona towards the end of April a series of developments and incidents increased an already tense situation. On 16 April Companys reshuffled his government, giving the post of minister of justice to Joan Comorera, the leader of the communist PSUC. This caused deep unease, especially among the POUM, whom he had threatened with liquidation. On 24 April an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made against the Generalitat’s commissioner for public order, Eusebi Rodríguez Salas, another leading member of the PSUC.

The next day, 25 April, carabineros sent by Juan Negrín took control of the Pyrenean frontier posts, which up until then had been in the hands of CNT militia. They clashed with anarchists in Bellver de Cerdanya and killed several, including Antonio Martín, president of the revolutionary committee of Puigcerdà.¹ In Madrid, José Cazorla, infuriated by Melchor Rodríguez’s denunciation of his secret prisons, closed down the CNT newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. Also on that day, in Barcelona, the communist and UGT leader, Roldán Cortada, was killed in Molins de Rei, probably by an anarchist, but there have long been other theories.² The PSUC organized a public funeral, which was to be used as a mass demonstration against the CNT. Meanwhile, Rodríguez Salas unleashed an aggressive sweep through the anarchist bastion of Hospitalet de Llobregat to search for the killers of Cortada.

The fear of open conflict on the streets of Barcelona prompted the Generalitat, with the agreement of the UGT and the CNT, to cancel all May Day parades. On 2 May Solidaridad Obrera asked workers not to allow themselves to be disarmed under any circumstances: ‘The storm clouds are hanging, more and more threateningly, over Barcelona.’³

The very next day the Generalitat, deciding to take back all the power lost since 19 July 1936, seized control of the Telefónica in the Plaza de Cataluña. Although this telephone exchange was directed by a mixed committee of CNT and UGT, together with a delegate from the Catalan government, the anarchists had considered it their own since capturing it the previous July. It allowed them to listen in on any conversations made to and from Barcelona, including those of Companys and Azaña.