Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain: 1931-1939, and: The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (review)

Historians of the Spanish Civil War have often treated anarchism, proportionately more important in Spain than in any other European country, with a degree of philosophical sympathy, or of romantic indulgence, at least in comparison with either Stalinist communism or the internally self-destructive history of the Socialist party and its labor federation, the UGT. Professor Casanova offers us a detailed, sober, and accurate history of the anarchists from the late 1920s to the end of the tragic civil war. Their scorn of the Socialists had greatly increased due to the UGT's cooperation with the mild, but still military, and actively pro-Catholic, dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera. When the Republic was proclaimed in April 1931, the less dogmatic anarchists were pleased with the Republican social legislation, but the militant FAI imposed the line that no "bourgeois" government could benefit the working classes.

In the years 1931 to 1933, they conducted a number of "general strikes" which lacked the kind of planning and coordination that might have produced real results. At the same time, the new Republican government, especially its Prime Minister, Manuel Azaña, and its Minister of the Interior, Santiago Casares Quiroga, were extremely anxious to prove to public opinion that the Republic was capable of maintaining public order. This self-conscious determination, together with inexperience in police operations, and the combative hositility of most of the nonintellectual leadership within the anarchist movement, led to much violence, which by mid-1933 had both greatly discouraged the strikers and tarnished the democratic and humane credentials of the young republican regime.

Among the many important interpretations made by Casanova are the facts that, due to discouragement and suffering (unemployment was high at all times, especially in agriculture), the anarchists were much less feisty in the years 1934–35 than they had been in the years of the Republican-Socialist coalition. But also, inspired by the slogan: "free the prisoners" of the October 1934 Asturian revolution, many of them voted for the Popular Front in February, 1936 rather than maintain their normal attitude of electoral abstention. In the Civil War itself they fought loyally on the Republican side but without the enthusiasm and discipline of the Communists, Socialists, and Republicans.

I cannot remotely do justice to Professor Payne's book in so brief a review. I constantly include his works in my bibliographies. He brings important data, writes clearly, and makes the best case that can be made for the conservative forces in Spain in the 1930s. He tells the truth but not the whole truth, in accord with a long nurtured hostility to everything associated with "communism." On p. 221 he quotes Luis Araquistáin's characterization of Socialist premier Juan Negrín as "the most disastrous and irresponsible stateman that Spain has had for many centuries." When fellow Socialist Araquistáin wrote that in 1939 he was bitterly disillusioned and ashamed of his own "infantile leftism" of the years 1933–37. He knew perfectly well, since he and Negrîn had been good friends for years, that Negrín never bought in to those fantasies, that Negrín refused during his premiership to endorse the proposed fusion of the socialist and communist parties, that Negrín had solid support in the Socialist Party executive until the end of the war, and that his dependence on the Soviet Union was due 99% to the fact that the farcically named "Non-Intervention Committee" had left him with no choices but to surrender or buy arms from the Soviets. On p. 222, "At no time was Negr...