Defending the Revolution

Home , August 1936, December 1936, May Days, Pravda

chapter 7 Defending the Revolution

The POUM’s exclusions from both the Madrid Defence Council and the Catalan government were stages in a wider process of centralising power and reversing the revolutionary achievements that would reach its climax a few months later in Barcelona. It was accompanied by a campaign of vilification and slander against the POUM, organised by the PCE, the Comintern and other national Communist parties, that accused its members of, among other things, being ‘Trotsky-fascists’. May 1937 witnessed the playing out of a civil war within the Civil War that involved the POUM and other revolutionary forces in a des- perate attempt to defend the social revolution. The inevitable failure of this resistance was swiftly followed by the Republican government outlawing the POUM, Andreu Nin’s disappearance and murder by the official Communists and Soviet agents, and the arrest of many militants involved in the ‘May Days’. Some of those arrested were tried by the Republican government the following year. Today few historians would take issue with this summary of the POUM’s fate. However, explanations for the propaganda assault and the causes and nature of the May events and Nin’s murder are matters of considerable histori- cal and political debate. Much disagreement surrounds the roles played by the official Communists, Soviet agents and other forces; the culpability or other- wise of the POUM leaders; and whether or not the vilification campaign was connected to Soviet foreign policy, whose logic – it is argued – dictated termi- nating Spain’s social revolution and the forces supporting it. This chapter considers these questions, beginning with Nin’s response to the Communist campaign against the POUM. It then turns to the pivotal events of May: their causes, nature and outcome. What was the POUM’s role in defending the revolutionary advances? How did Nin evaluate the significance of his political organisation? How, why and by whom was he removed from the scene shortly after the May crisis? What does this episode reveal about the nature of Soviet intervention in the politics of the Republic? The chapter ends with a reflection upon the POUM’s theory and practice during the Spanish Revolution and considers how its position might be understood in the context of recent historiography.

7.1 The Campaign against the POUM

In early January 1937, La Batalla signalled its appreciation of the dangers facing its organisation by reproducing a quote, which it attributed to the Soviet press organ Pravda, announcing the hope that ‘the cleaning up of the Spanish Anarchists and the Trotskyists in Cataluña will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR’.1 Even if, as is most likely, this was not an accurate quotation from any of the Soviet news sources (Pravda appeared in several different editions), it nevertheless can be seen to express the POUM’s perception of the Communists’ intentions. After all, attacks upon the POUM and other avowedly Marxist organisations critical of Moscow or connected in any way with Trotsky were hardly new or unusual.2 Thus the POUM’s perspectives at the time of Nin’s expulsion from the Generalitat display the slow dawning of an appreciation of the seriousness of the situation facing them. Much had occurred on the international stage since the spring of 1936, especially the first Moscow ‘show trial’, in which Trotsky, in absentia, was the main accused. In Spain, the official Communists’ growth in power, influence and popularity was due not merely to the crucial military assistance the USSR was providing, but also to the apparently moderate and pragmatic political stance the PCE had adopted. The POUM could, with some plausibility, be portrayed in Communist propaganda as marginalised extremists who were linked to ‘convicted’ enemies of the Soviet Union.3 Nin was well aware that what he termed a ‘counterrevolution’ was in prog- ress. In response, he proposed that the POUM call for dissolving what they con- sidered to be a bourgeois parliament and assembling a congress of workers, peasants and militia representatives. A pressing task was to convince the CNT

1 La Batalla, 5 January 1937, quoted in Esenwein and Shubert 1995, p. 220. This quotation has been widely reproduced in studies of the Communist movement in Spain and is usually attributed to Pravda, 17 December 1936. See, for example, Pagès 2011, p. 331. However, it is clear from Esenwein’s research that this is an unreliable attribution. Yet the case is perhaps not wholly clear-cut, as shown by the exchange between authors in Schwartz, Esenwein and Horowitz 1989, pp. 153–7. 2 Durgan notes that in April 1936 the Comintern was advocating intensifying the campaign against Spanish ‘Trotskyists’, quoting recognition of these attacks by the POUM’s paper, La Batalla, from 10 and 17 April 1936. This came in the context of the ongoing fusion of the Socialist and Communist youth organisations, the USC and Catalan PCE (Durgan 2007, p. 94, and Durgan 1996, pp. 432–4). 3 The August 1936 Moscow trial was by no means immediately and unanimously condemned by the foreign press or many Russia ‘experts’ (see Conquest 2008, pp. 469–70).