Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 11: Moscow and Madrid: A Controversial Relationship

11 Moscow and Madrid A Controversial Relationship 180 When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Franco’s brother-in-law and foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer, delivered a dramatic speech from the balcony of the Falangist headquarters in Madrid: “Russia is guilty! Guilty of having caused our Civil War! Guilty of the death of José Antonio, our founder, and of the deaths of so many comrades and soldiers fallen in that war provoked by Russian Communist aggression! . . . The extermination of Russia is a necessity of history and for the future of Europe!”1 This expressed graphically the stance of the Movimiento Nacional and the Franco regime, whose official position was that the Soviet Union and its Comintern had instigated the Civil War, and had engaged in military aggression against Spain. The truth, however, was different and much more complex. In fact, the Communist International, or Comintern, bore comparatively little responsibility for instigating the Civil War. In the final weeks before the conflict its leaders had sought to discipline and in certain ways to moderate the revolutionary Left in order to avoid a cataclysm, even though they encouraged an aggressive Communist policy in parliament. More broadly, Communism had a certain indirect responsibility only to the extent that the era of the Russian Revolution had opened a generation of “European civil war,” launching the menace of revolution and counterrevolution that would last through the 1940s. The Partido Comunista de España (PCE—Communist Party of Spain) was founded by two agents of the Comintern in 1920, with the assistance of young radicals who had broken away from the Socialist Party. For the next sixteen years it was distinguished primarily by its insignificance, failing to establish a significant base. Until 1935 the policy of the Comintern was nonetheless to foment immediate revolution in almost every country in which there was a Communist Party, and to move immediately to “form Soviets.” In Spain the Second Republic was rejected as “bourgeois reaction,” but the emphasis on immediate revolution proved entirely fruitless.2 The policy of the Comintern, and therefore of its underling the PCE, changed drastically in August 1935 with adoption of the tactic of the Popular Front. Communist insistence on immediate violent revolution had isolated the movement and led to a variety of disasters, above all the triumph of Hitler in Germany. Comintern leaders defined the Popular Front as a change in tactics rather than a change in strategy, abandoning the isolationist insistence on immediate revolution in favor of forming electoral alliances with other leftist and even liberal democratic parties, not to install Communism but rather first to “defeat fascism.” They declared that the new tactics would ultimately hasten rather than delay revolution.3 In Spain this coincided with the new priority of the Left Republicans and the semimoderate sector of the Socialists for an all-Left alliance to win the next elections . Azaña had little desire to include the small revolutionary parties, however, and it was only at the insistence of Largo Caballero and the revolutionary Socialists that the Communists, with their small numbers, were brought in, although the alliance did eventually adopt the Comintern terminology of “Popular Front,” somewhat to the distaste of Azaña and the Left Republicans. It was thanks primarily to the assistance of these new allies that the Communists gained seventeen seats in the Cortes elections of 1936. By this time the PCE was growing rapidly for the first time, while the revolutionary sector of the Socialists declared their own goal to be what they called “bolshevization,” though their aim was to absorb the Communists rather than vice versa. In the spring of 1936 the leaders of the Comintern encountered a situation in Spain without any precedent. For fifteen years, down to 1935, the Comintern had preached immediate revolution and had gone from defeat to defeat, usually in isolation . In 1936, after adoption of the electoral alliance of the Popular Front, the Left found itself in power in Spain, and the Communists, though not in the government, were allied with a leftist administration, something that had never happened before. As Hitler’s rearmament continued, Stalin sought to reduce the Moscow and Madrid 181 fear of Communist revolution in Europe so as to gain allies against Germany. The first victory of this new tactic had occurred in Spain (even though Spain had not been the primary objective), and...