Alfonso XIII, including a brief stint as Minister of the Interior in late 1918, alleged that bribes from the owners of illegal gambling dens were used by Martínez Anido to pay pistoleros.50
The Basque novelist Pío Baroja composed a savage portrait of Martínez Anido: ‘General don Severiano, short, stunted, red-faced, with the gloomy air of the true executioner, presented a disturbing image: he had a large head, his hair close cropped, short arms, square hands. Clumsy of speech, with misty eyes, he augured nothing good. He was the bulldog of the monarchy.’ Pío Baroja alleged that Martínez Anido, ‘a satyr like an orangutan’, sexually abused the wives, daughters and sisters of prisoners who came to plead for their release. Once he had had his pleasure, he was as likely to order the execution as the release of the prisoners. It was also suggested that he was corrupt and used his power for ‘dirty dealings’.51
As for Arlegui, Baroja was even more scathing, describing him as ‘uncouth, clumsy, conceited: the typical Civil Guard sergeant raised up to an important post. He was a braggart always boasting about male virility. Deep down he was a cowardly chicken. Don Severiano is rather more interesting. Arlegui was gloomy, jumpy, neurotic, with stomach, heart and nerve problems.’ On 19 January 1921, an action group led by Ramon Archs and Pere Vandellós shot Antonio Espejo, one of Arlegui’s men who had been a member of the Bravo Portillo and Koenig gangs. Arlegui ordered reprisals. He then went to the mortuary where Espejo’s body lay surrounded by a dozen or more of the anarchists shot on his orders. Hysterical, Arlegui addressed the corpse: ‘Espejo, you cannot complain about me. There they are; they are the flowers with which I decorate your body.’ His evil temper was perhaps linked to the pain from his stomach ulcers which caused him frequently to vomit blood.52
One of the most effective weapons at the disposal of Martínez Anido was the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. With the CNT effectively paralysed by the repression orchestrated by the Civil Governor, many workers joined the Sindicatos Libres which, for seven years, would be the second largest union in Catalonia despite its poor labour record.53 The Libres were secretly financed by a group of industrial magnates led by one of the richest men in Spain, Claudio López Bru, Marqués de Comillas. Previously, helped by advice from the Papal Nuncio, Comillas had also financed Catholic mineworkers’ unions in Asturias and railway workers’ unions in Valladolid, both of which had acted as strike breakers in 1917. He had also sponsored the so-called Uniones Profesionales which consisted largely of his employees, mainly shop assistants, never went on strike and were controlled by non-worker, often clerical, elements. Just as they were withering away, there was a revival of Carlism in Barcelona in reaction to the populist anti-clerical demagoguery of Lerroux’s Radicals. Founded in October 1919, the Sindicatos Libres played the role of a scab union of paid thugs acting as terrorist strike breakers for both the Civil Governor and the patronal organizations. Martínez Anido called on the Libres to shoot ten anarchists for every one of their own killed.54 In the course of 1921, casualties among the bosses were four murdered and nine wounded and, among the workers, sixty-nine murdered and fifty-nine wounded. CNT action groups responded in kind. As the more moderate elements were murdered or imprisoned, the action groups, made up of young militants, became more influential within the CNT. Martínez Anido could legitimately boast that he had destroyed the terrorist wing of the CNT, but the consequences would live on. He had ensured the division of the anarchist movement into the more moderate trade unionists and the insurrectionary or terrorist groups which would later do so much damage to the Second Republic.55
In contrast to the CNT, as a result of the severity of the repression, over the next fifteen years the Socialist movement cautiously avoided risking conflict with the state apparatus. The defeat of the 1917 strike reinforced the Socialists’ gradualist, reformist strategy. Indeed, whereas the anarchists greeted the Russian revolution with enthusiasm, the Socialists saw it as dangerously inopportune. The infirm Pablo Iglesias was more concerned with the probability that the Bolsheviks would seek a separate peace with Germany and thus undermine the Allied chances of victory. Shortly after the October revolution, El Socialista declared: ‘The news we are getting from Russia fills us with distress. We sincerely believe, and we have always said so, that the mission of that great country is to put all her strength into the enterprise of crushing German imperialism.’ No favourable comment on the Bolshevik revolution appeared until March 1918. This reflected a division within the movement between those for whom the defeat in 1917 meant that reformism should be accentuated and those who believed that the movement should prepare better for the next revolutionary attempt.56
Between 1919 and 1921, the PSOE was enmeshed in a civil war over its relationship with the Bolsheviks. The Secretary General of UGT since October 1918, Francisco Largo Caballero, was more concerned with the immediate material welfare of the trade union organization than with possible future revolutionary goals. He was determined never again to risk existing legislative gains and the movement’s buildings and assets in a direct confrontation with the state.57 Both Besteiro and Saborit also became progressively less radical. In different ways, all three perceived the futility of Spain’s weak Socialist movement undertaking a frontal assault on the state. In the wake of the Russian revolution, continuing inflation and the rising unemployment of the post-1918 depression fostered a revolutionary group within the Socialist movement, particularly in Asturias and the Basque Country. Anguiano and others saw the events in Russia and the failure of the 1917 strike as evidence that reformism was pointless. In consequence, between 1918 and 1921 the Socialist movement was to be divided by a bitter three-year debate on the PSOE’s relationship with the Comintern. The pro-Bolshevik tendency was defeated in a series of three party congresses held in December 1919, June 1920 and April 192l. In a closely fought struggle, the PSOE leadership won by relying on the votes of the strong UGT bureaucracy of paid permanent officials. Anguiano and the pro-Russian elements left to form the Spanish Communist Party.58 Numerically, this was not a serious loss, but it accentuated the Socialists’ ideological weakness at a time of grave economic and social crisis. The party’s fundamental moderation was strengthened and, under a cautious and pragmatic leadership, there was a plunge in morale which lasted for nearly ten years. The Communists’ influence was immediately felt in a series of strikes in the Asturian coalmines and the Basque iron and steel industry. In the aftermath of the defeat of 1917, the 1921 split left the Socialist leadership without a clear sense of direction and, in many respects, remote from the burning issues of the day. The syndical battles which raged elsewhere attracted less Socialist attention than the parliamentary campaign against the Moroccan war and eventually the King’s involvement therein. In contrast, the essential moderate reformism of the Socialist movement was consolidated.59
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1920 the UGT was inclined to seek unity with the CNT. In the event, the negotiations did not prosper because the CNT leadership regarded the Socialists’ parliamentary strategy as ‘collaboration with the capitalist regime’. However, in early September, a provisional pact was signed in order to respond to the repression. Its manifesto stated:
the government has met every demand of the bourgeoisie and has bent over backwards before the threats made by its organizations. They have suspended constitutional guarantees in order to close unions and dissolve important workers’ groups; they have pursued savagely and, against all justice and in opposition to the law, have kept thousands of men in prison for the crime of having united to defend their right to life. They have agreed to close down our newspapers in those areas where protest against such arbitrary measures could endanger the bastard interests of the political clique that is under the thumb of the employers. They have decreed the shameful measure of deeming the collection of union dues to be the crime of fraud … The government has legalized the arming of the bourgeoisie and has given it privileges which are the equivalent of a licence to commit murder.
The pact came to nothing when the Socialists refused to back CNT calls for a general strike in protest at the repression being carried out in Barcelona by Martínez Anido. This caused bitter resentment within the CNT towards Largo Caballero.60
The most extreme case of reprisal for the murderous policies of Martínez Anido took place on 8 March 1921 when the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato was assassinated in the Plaza de la Independencia in Madrid by three Catalan anarchists. He was the third Prime Minister to be murdered in the Restoration period. However, unlike those of Cánovas and Canalejas, his death was