The Destruction of the PSOE: 1934–1939
The performance of the revolutionary committee and the Socialist Youth in Madrid can best be described as pathetic. Once it was clear that revolutionary threats had not diverted Alcalá Zamora from bringing the CEDA into the cabinet, the Socialist leaders went to ground. No arms were distributed and the masses were left without instructions. No serious plans for a rising had been made. The only militia group with arms, led by Manuel Tagüeña of the FJS, clashed with Assault Guards in the La Guindalera district of Madrid. After a skirmish, they were quickly disarmed and arrested.1 Amaro del Rosal, one of Carrillo’s more extremist comrades on the revolutionary committee, denied participation. In a sense, he was telling the truth. When Manuel Fernández Grandizo of the Izquierda Comunista met Del Rosal in a Madrid street on 5 October, he asked him what the revolutionary committee planned. Del Rosal allegedly replied, ‘if the masses want arms, they had better go and look for them, then do what they like’. In his own account, he complained that the crisis had come too soon, that the CNT had failed to collaborate and that the authorities had blocked any military assistance by confining troops to their barracks.2
The October issues of Renovación were confiscated by the police and the paper was shut down until 1936. After the failure of the ‘revolution’, Amaro del Rosal escaped to Portugal but was repatriated by Salazar’s police. Carrillo was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo in Madrid along with his father and most of the leadership of the revolutionary committee, including Largo Caballero. The editor of El Socialista, Julián Zugazagoitia, was also imprisoned and the entire Socialist press was silenced. The clandestine life of the movement was, in fact, directed from the prison.3 Tens of thousands of workers were imprisoned. Many more lost their jobs. In Asturias, torture was used in interrogations, and military courts passed out many death sentences against miners’ leaders. All over Spain, Socialist local councils (ayuntamientos) were replaced by government nominees. The Casas del Pueblo were closed and the unions were unable to function.4
Many Socialist trade unionists, including the Asturian miners’ leaders, believed that the lesson of October and the subsequent repression was the same as that of the events of 1917. The movement would always lose in direct confrontation with the apparatus of the state. The members of the revolutionary committee, however, did not view the 1934 events as a defeat. Whether this was merely self-deception or a cynical ploy to cover their own ineptitude is not clear. Carrillo in particular, showing a capacity for unrealistic optimism that would characterize his entire political life, was convinced that the overall balance had been positive. His logic was that Gil Robles had been shown that the peaceful establishment of fascism would not be permitted by the working class. The brief success of the Alianza Obrera in Asturias profoundly strengthened his conviction that eventual revolution required a united working class. This view briefly brought him closer to the Trotskyists and inevitably fed the suspicions of ‘fat Carmen’, the KIM representative who was watching him closely. The Spanish Communist Party, the Partido Comunista de España, was also calling for proletarian unity. Hitherto, as part of its ‘class against class’ line, it had denounced Socialists as ‘social fascists’ because, so the logic went, reformism perpetuated bourgeois society. In the aftermath of the triumph of Nazism which had been facilitated by the reformism of the German Socialists, the line was softened and the PCE had entered the Alianza Obrera. Now the PCE sought to derive – largely undeserved – credit for Asturias and, with it, ownership of the most powerful symbol of working-class unity. The Communist fabrication of its own revolutionary legend would increase its attractiveness to the FJS.5
After his arrest on 14 October, Largo Caballero assured the military judge investigating his case that he had taken no part in the organization of the rising. Later, on 7 November, he told the Cortes committee that had to decide whether his parliamentary immunity could be waived for him to be prosecuted: ‘I was in my house … and I issued an instruction that anyone who came looking for me should be told that I was not there. I gave that order, as I had done in the past, because I was playing no part in what was going on, I was having nothing to do with anything that might happen; I did not want to have any contact with anyone, with anyone at all.’6 The scale of the repression provided some justification. Araquistáin later claimed that ‘only a madman or an agent provocateur’ would have admitted participation in the preparation of the rising because such an admission of guilt would have been used by the CEDA to justify carrying through its determination to smash both the PSOE and the UGT.7
Nevertheless, what Largo Caballero said in his defence was completely plausible in the light of the total failure of the movement in Madrid. Shortly before he was arrested, Carrillo had asked him, ‘What shall I tell the militias?’ To the young revolutionary’s surprise, Largo Caballero had replied, ‘Tell them anything you like,’ adding, ‘If you get arrested, say that this was spontaneous and not organized by the party.’8 However, Largo Caballero’s memoirs suggest that he continued to see himself as a revolutionary leader who had merely set out to deceive the bourgeois authorities. Initially, Carrillo was deeply disappointed both by Largo Caballero’s passivity in October and by public denials being made by the man now hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’. However, in their frequent conversations walking around the exercise yard, he was flattered by the apparent pleasure with which Largo listened to his harangues about the need to bolshevize the PSOE. That and his own optimism reconciled him to his hero. At this stage, they were still extremely close. Harking back to the warm relations between the two families, Largo Caballero called him ‘Santiaguito’ and other prisoners referred to him as ‘the boss’s spoiled child’.9 Certainly, Largo Caballero’s denials played directly into the hands of the Communists, who were only too glad to assume the responsibility. The secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party, José Díaz Ramos, visited him in prison and suggested that the PCE and the PSOE jointly claim to have organized the revolution. Largo Caballero refused. His denial of any responsibility was a potentially counter-productive tactic. It gave credibility to Communist claims that the October events showed that the PSOE and Largo Caballero were incapable of making a revolution. It ensured that 1935 was the period of ‘the great harvest’ for the Communists.10 Santiago Carrillo was to be an important part of that harvest, yet at the time he seems to have taken Largo Caballero’s excuses at face value.
Carrillo and the other prisoners lived in a kind of euphoric isolation, able to discuss politics all day without the preoccupations of daily life. Carrillo’s main concern was the health of his mother, who had serious heart problems, and he missed his girlfriend, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, a beautiful nineteen-year-old Asturian brunette whom he had met earlier in the year. Otherwise, he and the other political prisoners enjoyed relatively pleasant conditions. Carrillo had a typewriter and plenty of books in his cell. He claimed later to have spent most of his time reading the classics of Marxism until the early hours of every morning. He was particularly impressed by Trotsky. Indeed, he later described this period as his ‘university’. The warders put no obstacles in the way of the sending and receiving of correspondence or the virtually unlimited visits from comrades who brought them the legal press. To his surprise, the normally dour Largo Caballero was very good humoured.11
It was not long before Carrillo and the other imprisoned revolutionaries were blaming the less radical sections of the Socialist movement for the defeat of October. From that it was a short step to trying to hound the reformists out in order to build a ‘proper’ Bolshevik party. Initially, they were not concerned about the Besteiristas since they had already been defeated within the UGT and many affiliated trade union federations in early 1934. Besteiro had opposed the revolutionary project and had stood aside in October. Nevertheless, during the October events, a