Читать книгу The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo - Paul Preston - Страница 10

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 group of extremists from the FJS had stoned Besteiro’s home. In consequence, he virtually withdrew from the political stage for a time.12 However, renewed calls for his expulsion from the PSOE finally provoked his followers to take up his defence against the youthful bolshevizers. That was not to be until June 1935. In the meantime, Carrillo and his allies concentrated their fire on Indalecio Prieto. The irony of that was that it had been Prieto’s followers in Asturias who had taken the most active part in the events of October.

Egged on by Carrillo, Largo Caballero began to take up ever more revolutionary positions. In part, this reflected his acute personal resentment of Prieto, who with backing from the Asturian miners and the Basque metalworkers hoped to rebuild the democratic Republic of 1931–3. In the view of both Prieto and the Republican leader and ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azaña, the vindictive policies of the Radical–CEDA coalition were provoking a great national resurgence of support for the Republic. Accordingly, Prieto argued that the immediate goal for the left had to be the recapture of state power by a broad coalition that could ensure electoral success and thus bring working-class suffering to an end. In contrast, Carrillo and Largo Caballero believed that the repressive policies of the Radical–CEDA cabinet had dramatically undermined all working-class faith in the reforming possibilities of the Republic.13

In early 1935, those members of the PSOE executive committee not in prison were highly receptive to the arguments sent out by Prieto from his exile in Belgium in favour of a broad coalition with the Left Republicans. Their views were publicized within the Socialist movement in April by means of a circular which made an intelligent plea for the use of legal possibilities to defend the working class.14 The imprisoned Largo Caballero was informed about this initiative but did not object. Nevertheless, it infuriated Carrillo and the bolshevizers who advocated an exclusively proletarian revolutionary bloc. Prieto, thinking in terms only of a legal road to power, knew that not to ally with the Republicans would result in a disastrous three-sided contest as had happened in the elections of 1933. He was determined not to let the party fall into the hands of the extremist youth who, he believed, had to be obliged to accept party discipline.15

Prieto could count on support from the Asturian miners’ leader Ramón González Peña, who was widely considered to be the hero of October and had recently escaped a death sentence. In a letter to Prieto, González Peña called for a broad anti-fascist front for the next elections. He bitterly criticized Largo Caballero and his imprisoned comrades for denying participation in the events of October. His greatest outrage was reserved for ‘the kids of the FJS’ for their demands that the PSOE be bolshevized, that Besteiro and his followers be expelled and that Prieto and the ‘centrists’ be marginalized: ‘It would be an enormous shame if we were to suffer the misfortune of being led by the son of [Wenceslao] Carrillo and company.’ Copies of the letter, along with a similar letter from young Asturian members of the FJS imprisoned in Oviedo, were circulated throughout the Socialist Party, much to the annoyance of the imprisoned Caballeristas. Carrillo and others had sent González Peña a set of questions with the intention of getting his support for their plans. When they saw his answers in favour of electoral coalition and against the purging of the party, they refused to publish them.16 To their chagrin, Prieto had at his disposal his own newspaper, El Liberal de Bilbao, within whose pages he and Republicans could advocate an electoral alliance.17

The fact that the reformist policies of the Republican–Socialist coalition had provoked the fury of the right convinced Carrillo that Spain’s structural problems required a revolutionary solution. However, Prieto was correct that most of the Socialists’ problems derived from Largo Caballero’s tactical error before the elections of 1933. Out of government, no change, reformist or revolutionary, could be introduced. October had exposed the Socialists’ inability to organize a revolution. Thus two valid positions were possible: Prieto’s advocacy of the electoral return to power and the gradualist road to socialism; and the one principally advocated by the Trotskyists, which recognized the revolutionary incompetence of both the PSOE and the PCE and aimed at the long-term construction of a genuine Bolshevik party. This was a position that Carrillo found attractive. However, both these strategies required a prior electoral victory.18

The radical youth’s counter-attack against Prieto took the form of a long pamphlet, signed by the FJS president, Carlos Hernández Zancajo, entitled Octubre: segunda etapa. In fact, it had been written largely by Amaro del Rosal and Santiago Carrillo.19 The purpose was threefold: to cover up the FJS’s failures in the October events in Madrid, to combat Prieto’s interpretation of the Asturian rising as an attempt to defend the Republic, and to eradicate the influence of both Besteiro and Prieto from the Socialist movement as a first step to its bolshevization. The pamphlet began with a largely mendacious interpretation of the activities of the workers’ movement during 1934. Its authors pointed out correctly that the strikes of the construction workers, metalworkers and peasants had dissipated working-class energies while failing to mention that the ‘union organization’ blamed for these tactical errors was actually dominated at the time by members of the FJS. They blamed the defeat of October on Besteiro’s reformists, which was absurd. This was used to justify the ‘second stage’ announced in the pamphlet’s title, the expulsion of the reformists and the bolshevization of the PSOE, which signified the adoption of a rigidly centralized command structure and the creation of an illegal apparatus to prepare for an armed insurrection. Inhibited by Asturian backing for Prieto, the authors did not dare call for his expulsion but aggressively demanded the abandonment of his ‘centrist’ line in favour of their revolutionary one.20

Prieto and others were convinced that the pamphlet had been concocted during the authors’ walks around the prison patio or courtyard with Largo Caballero. Years later, despite being the subject of rapturous praise in the pamphlet, Largo Caballero claimed that it had been published without his permission and that, deeply annoyed, he had protested to Carrillo. Carrillo himself was to admit later that his group had acted without the boss’s authorization. Later still, he categorized the view expressed in the pamphlet as puerile, deriving from ‘infantile leftism’.21 In an interview published in December 1935, however, Largo Caballero agreed with much of the pamphlet, albeit not with its demand for expulsions and for entry into the Comintern.22

In response to the insulting attacks of the FJS pamphlet, the Besteiristas were emerging from their silence.23 They founded a publication to defend their ideas. Called Democracia, it appeared weekly from 15 June to 13 December. Its lawful appearance was taken by Carrillo’s crony Segundo Serrano Poncela as proof of the Besteirista treachery to the Socialist cause.24 This point of view was given some credibility by Besteiro’s inaugural lecture, ‘Marxism and Anti-Marxism’, on being elected to the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences. In this long and tortuous lecture, given on 28 April 1935, Besteiro set out to prove that Marx had been hostile to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He infuriated the imprisoned bolshevizers with his insinuations that the violence of the Socialist left was hardly distinguishable from fascism.25 A devastating reply to Besteiro’s lecture by Largo’s most competent adviser, Luis Araquistáin, appeared in the doctrinal journal Leviatán, which had survived the repression of the Socialist media. Araquistáin’s articles were of a notably higher level of theoretical competence than Octubre: segunda etapa and their demolition of the inaugural lecture ensured Besteiro’s withdrawal from the PSOE leadership stakes.26

With Besteiro eliminated, in late May Prieto returned to the fray with a series of highly influential articles. Collectively entitled Posiciones socialistas, they were published shortly afterwards as a book. The first two restated the need to avoid the great tactical error of 1933, arguing that the right would be united at the next elections and an exclusively workers’ coalition would be the victim of anarchist indiscipline. For Prieto, only a Republican–Socialist coalition could guarantee an amnesty for political prisoners. The last three articles set out, in mild yet firm language, to expose some of the more absurd contradictions of Octubre: segunda etapa. Prieto indignantly dismissed the right of untried youngsters to call for the expulsion of militants who had dedicated their lives to the PSOE and pointed out that the accusations made against various sections of the Socialist movement by the pamphlet were most applicable to the FJS itself. Above all, he denounced the bolshevizers’ dictatorial tendencies and proposed a party congress to settle the direction that the movement was to take.27

With Carrillo’s name on the cover, Octubre was reissued with a reply to Prieto. Largo Caballero’s friend Enrique de Francisco wrote to Prieto to say that he had no right to make party policy in bourgeois newspapers. Prieto replied that the same moralistic view had not inhibited the Socialist Youth from advocating bolshevization. More stridently, the journalist Carlos de Baraibar, in consultation with Largo Caballero, prepared a book attacking the ‘false socialist positions’ of Prieto. In criticizing him for breaking party discipline by publicizing his ideas, Baraibar conveniently forgot that the FJS had not hesitated to broadcast its controversial views.28 The extremism of the FJS was seriously dividing Spanish socialism. While the repressive policies of the CEDA–Radical government and the existence of thousands of political prisoners made revolutionary propaganda attractive, they also ensured a sympathetic mass response to Prieto’s call for unity and a return to the progressive Republic of 1931–3. An indication of the bitterness being engendered was shown in the summer of 1935 when the Caballeristas produced a legal weekly newspaper called Claridad. Its pages loudly backed the FJS call for the expulsion of the Besteiristas and the marginalization of the Prietistas.29 Democracia responded by arguing that the bolshevization campaign was just a smokescreen to divert attention from the FJS’s failures in October 1934. When Saborit made the gracious gesture of visiting the prisoners in the Cárcel Modelo, Largo Caballero rudely refused to shake his hand or even speak to him.30

Everything changed after the Seventh Congress of the Comintern was held in Moscow in August 1935. The secretary general, Giorgi Dimitrov, launched a call for proletarian unity and a broad popular front of all anti-fascist forces. Already, in a speech on 2 June, the PCE secretary general, José Díaz, had openly called for union with the PSOE. On 3 November, he declared that the Seventh Congress showed the need for a Popular Front.31 Carrillo was delighted. In prison, he and Hernández Zancajo lived in close proximity to their comrades from the UJC, Trifón Medrano and Jesús Rozado. They were aware that in October 1934 there had been some collaboration on the ground between the rank-and-file militants of their respective organizations. Now their daily encounters and discussions favoured the eventual unification of their organizations.32

The FJS delegate at the Comintern congress, José Laín Entralgo, reported back enthusiastically that the Communist union, the Confederación General de Trabajo Unitaria (CGTU), would amalgamate with the UGT. He also claimed that the switch of tactics meant that Moscow had returned sovereignty to the various national parties and that there was therefore no longer any reason why the FJS should not join the Comintern.33 Carrillo was already trying to secure the incorporation of the Trotskyist Bloc Obrer i Camperol and the Communist Youth into the PSOE as part of the process of bolshevizing the party. Writing in Leviatán, Araquistáin rightly suggested that Moscow’s fundamental objective with the Popular Front tactic was to ensure that liberal and left-wing anti-fascist governments would be in power in the West to ensure favourable alliances should Germany declare war on the USSR. Far from breaking with the old Comintern habit of dictating the same policy for each country, as the FJS fondly thought, the new tactic confirmed the dictatorial customs of the Third International. Araquistáin accepted the need for proletarian unity but rejected the notion of alliance with the bourgeois left.34

Largo Caballero was keen on working-class unity as long as it meant the absorption of the Communist working-class rank and file into the UGT. However, he remained hostile to an electoral coalition with the Left Republicans and, like Araquistáin, he opposed the idea of the PSOE joining the Comintern.35 For this reason, Carrillo had to be circumspect in all the negotiations with the imprisoned UJC members and crucially with the most senior Comintern representative in Spain, the Argentinian Vittorio Codovila, codenamed ‘Medina’. The director of the Cárcel Modelo turned a blind eye as Codovila was smuggled into the prison as part of a family party visiting Carrillo. Codovila was surprised by Carrillo’s readiness to accept all of the conditions requested by the Communists. All he wanted in return was for the name of the new organization to be the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. His reasoning was that if the FJS lost the word ‘Socialista’ from its title, it would lose its seat on the PSOE executive and be less able to continue the struggle to purge Prieto and bolshevize the party.36

On the first anniversary of the October insurrection, the FJS had issued a circular signed by Santiago Carrillo authorizing its local sections to draft joint manifestos with the UJC but not to organize joint commemorations since the PSOE had decreed that the FJS could hold joint events only with other Socialist organizations. The circular noted regretfully that the PSOE had in fact made no arrangements to celebrate the anniversary. However, it recommended that local FJS sections organize their own publicity for the anniversary and to do so stressing that ‘October had been a proletarian movement to conquer power’, that the Socialist Party had been its only leader (something that the PSOE leadership never acknowledged) and that October had halted ‘the rise of fascism’.37

In mid-November, Carrillo received a letter from the left-wing Socialist and feminist Margarita Nelken, who was exiled in Russia. She enclosed some Soviet pamphlets including a Spanish translation of Dimitrov’s speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. He thought the speech ‘magnificent’, although he still had doubts about the Comintern leader’s readiness to make an alliance with the bourgeoisie without first securing the broad unity of the working class. In the package was a copy of a photograph of Largo Caballero that had been distributed among the crowd during an event in Moscow’s Red Square. When Carrillo showed him the photo, Largo Caballero was suitably flattered. Carrillo reported back that ‘the boss is in magnificent form, without any hesitation going further every day in the same direction as the Juventudes’.38

Meanwhile, on 14 November, Manuel Azaña, writing on behalf of the various Left Republican groups, formally proposed an electoral alliance to the PSOE executive. Faced with a dramatic choice, Largo Caballero quickly convoked a joint session of the PSOE, UGT and FJS executives for 16 November. Azaña’s proposal was accepted after Largo Caballero had acknowledged the absurdity of repeating the error of 1933. Carrillo and Amaro del Rosal followed the Comintern line and also spoke strongly in favour of the electoral alliance. Carlos Hernández Zancajo, however, opposed it. He thereby anticipated divisions inside Caballerista ranks that would seriously damage the Socialist movement during the Civil War, between those unswervingly committed to the Soviet Union and those, like Hernández Zancajo, for whom revolutionary politics were not understood as synonymous with Soviet interests. Determined that dealings with the bourgeois Republicans should not strengthen the Prietista wing of the Socialist movement, Largo Caballero insisted that any coalition should extend to other working-class organizations including the Communist Party. Carrillo was delighted. The UGT executive decided to open negotiations with the PCE for the incorporation of the Communist CGTU into the UGT. Moreover, Largo Caballero insisted that the Popular Front electoral programme should be approved by the PCE and the CGTU as well as by the FJS, the PSOE and the UGT.39 In contrast, Prieto feared that the disproportionate weight to be given to the Communist Party would damage the interests of the PSOE. He was also opposed to the idea that the programme required FJS approval since he was adamant that to consider it as an autonomous organization was entirely contrary to the PSOE’s statutes.40

Two weeks later, Carrillo published a typically triumphalist article that crowed over the defeat of reformist elements in the Socialist movement. He stated that the changes of strategy effected by the Comintern placed the FJS on ‘a similar political plane to the Communists’. His statement that ‘prior negotiations’ were moving ahead made it clear that the FJS was drawing ever nearer to the UJC. He dismissed as groundless any suspicion that unification would effectively mean a take-over of the Socialist Youth by the Communists. He argued that, if there was unity of purpose of the revolutionary elements on both sides, only the reformists could have any grounds for concern. He ended with the resounding declaration that ‘the knots that tie us to the affiliates of the Moscow International will end up untying those that still link us to certain “socialists”’.41

He crowed too soon. On 16 December, there was a meeting of the PSOE National Committee, at which Largo Caballero reiterated his view that any electoral coalition should be dominated by the workers’ organizations. Before a full-scale discussion could take place, Prieto criticized the activities of Carrillo and the FJS leadership. More importantly, he raised a procedural issue about the relationship of the parliamentary group to the PSOE executive. In immensely complicated circumstances, Largo Caballero resigned as president of the PSOE. After Largo Caballero had stormed out of the meeting, Prieto was able successfully to propound his moderate vision of the Republican–Socialist electoral coalition. The Caballerista desire that negotiations with the Republicans be carried out by a workers’ bloc including the FJS, the PCE and the CGTU was stymied. The resignations of Largo Caballero and three of his closest lieutenants, Enrique de Francisco, Wenceslao Carrillo and Pascual Tomás, meant that there would have to be a party congress in the spring to elect a new National Committee. This was clearly conceived as the first step to clearing out the centrists from the party and securing the bolshevizing objective of a centralized party hierarchy. However, it was a gamble that, in immediate terms, broke the control of both the party and the union established by the Caballeristas after the defeat of Besteiro in January 1934. Now the movement was divided, with the UGT in the hands of the Caballeristas and the PSOE in the hands of the Prietistas. In his formal letter of resignation, Largo Caballero revealed his motives. It was a step to securing a unanimous executive, as the ‘homogeneous organ of an iron leadership’: ‘We have resolved to keep on the October road.’ The gamble failed because, for a variety of complex reasons related to the tense political situation, that congress never materialized.42

This development in the higher echelons of the Socialist movement may have pushed an impatient Carrillo nearer to thinking that his revolutionary ambitions would be better fulfilled within the Communist Party. In the meantime, at the end of December 1935, in the first issue of the newly legalized Renovación, the FJS justified its acceptance of the Popular Front in terms of securing an electoral victory to put an end to ‘this painful situation’. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, Carrillo did not renounce the maximalist objectives of revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, calling for proletarian organizations to prepare their cadres for the coming struggle and urging them to intensify the work of purging the PSOE of reformist elements.43 During the Socialist election campaign, Largo Caballero harped on the need for proletarian unity and for the transformation of capitalist society. His superficially revolutionary rhetoric delighted his working-class audiences all over Spain. At one point, on 11 February 1936, with José Díaz he addressed a joint PSOE–PCE meeting on the subject of unity, by which both orators meant the take-over of the entire working-class movement by their own organizations.44

During the night of 16 February, Carrillo and his comrades waited anxiously for the election results and news as to whether there would be an amnesty. The next morning they heard the first rumours of the Popular Front victory and the noise of a huge crowd approaching the prison. It was a demonstration demanding their release. He and the others who, like him, were still awaiting trial were freed on the evening of 17 February.45 Carrillo immediately applied for a passport to travel to Russia, which was issued on 24 February in Madrid. He was going to Moscow as part of a joint delegation of the FJS and the UJC to attend a congress of the Communist Youth International and to discuss the forthcoming unification with the leadership of the KIM. Before leaving, he had several meetings with Vitorio Codovila at the apartment of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Araquistáin’s brother-in-law. The Comintern representative was now grooming him and chose intelligently not to reprimand him for the near-Trotskyist views expressed in Octubre: segunda etapa. Carrillo himself said later of Codovila, ‘I am indebted to him for becoming a Communist.’46

On the trip to Moscow, he was accompanied by Federico Melchor and the two UJC representatives, Trifón Medrano and Felipe Muñoz Arconada. In the Soviet capital, he was utterly bedazzled. After a year incarcerated with Largo Caballero, despite his residual affection for his father’s friend, Carrillo was beginning to suspect that the PSOE was yesterday’s party. The Socialist leadership of middle-aged men rarely allowed young militants near powerful positions in its sclerotic structures. He might be Largo Caballero’s spoilt favourite, but other senior Socialists treated him with suspicion. In Moscow, he was inspired by the sight of armed workers marching in the streets. Moreover, he was fêted as a celebrity. He described as a ‘fairy tale’ being accommodated in the luxurious Savoy Hotel and transported everywhere in a chauffeur-driven limousine to see the sights – Red Square, Lenin’s mausoleum, the Kremlin and the Bolshoi. He was even more impressed to be presented to the leaders of the Comintern, Giorgi Dimitrov and Dimitry Manuilsky, and to the secretary general of the KIM, Raymond Guyot, and his deputy, the Hungarian Mihály Farkas (‘Michael Wolf’). Barely two months after his twenty-first birthday, Carrillo was thrilled to be addressed as an equal by his heroes, especially the giant Dimitrov, who had been arrested in Berlin in March 1933 for his alleged part in the burning down of the Reichstag and then became an international hero after his courageous defence at the subsequent trial. Carrillo was entranced when Dimitrov modestly waved away talk of his exploits in the Reichstag trial. Apparently on this trip, Carrillo acquired a taste for vodka and caviar.47

He admitted later that the fusion with the UJC was merely the opening step of a project to take first the FJS and then the entire Socialist movement into the Communist International. In his submission to the KIM, he declared that the maintenance of the organizational structure of the Socialist Youth was a necessary interim measure dictated by the need first to complete the purging of the PSOE. This trip inevitably had a crucial influence on his subsequent development. The KIM, with its headquarters in Moscow, was closely invigilated by the Russian intelligence service, the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), and Soviet Military Intelligence (Glavnoe Razvedupravlenie, or GRU). Having been identified by Codovila as a potential Comintern star, Carrillo would have been vetted anyway, but the process was probably more rigorous because of suspicions of his Trotskyist leanings reported by ‘fat Carmen’.48 Like all prospective Comintern leaders, Carrillo would have been obliged to convince his Moscow bosses, particularly the hard-line Stalinist Farkas/Wolf, that he would fully collaborate with the Soviet security services.49 It seems to have been no hardship. Seduced by Dimitrov, Manuilsky and other heroes, the young man who had presumed to argue that the FJS should dictate Socialist strategy would happily accept the diktats of the Kremlin. His first lesson was to accept that Trotsky was a traitor. The second was that the mission of a united youth movement was not to forge an elite revolutionary vanguard but to recruit a mass youth organization.

Even though it had been long coming, Carrillo’s change of position was breathtaking. He had played a significant part in encouraging the capricious and vacuous revolutionary rhetoric of Largo Caballero that had contributed to the disaster of October 1934. He had been a central figure in the project to bolshevize the PSOE and had done significant damage to the moderate and more realistic wings of the Socialist movement. Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso knew that Largo Caballero’s revolutionary threats were meaningless. In contrast, the insistent demands of Carrillo and the FJS leadership in Renovación for the conquest of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat can only have terrified moderates on the Spanish right and played into the hands of the conspiratorial extremists. The same can be said about Octubre: segunda etapa. Yet now he put all that behind him without apology or regret. He used to say in later life, ‘Repentence does not exist.’ Having contributed to the intensification of hatreds in Spain and thus weakened the Republic, he had now initiated a process that would mortally wound the party of his father and his patron. In doing so, he demonstrated a poisonous cocktail of vaulting ambition, supreme self-confidence and irresponsibility.

After the Civil War Carlos de Baraibar commented bitterly on the manic enthusiasm of Carrillo and Melchor for everything they had seen in the Soviet Union. On their return, ‘they spoke extravagantly about the people, their achievements, their laboratories and even their toilets’. He believed that, in a sense, they had been corrupted by the experience. ‘In Moscow,’ he wrote,

they, like many simple souls before them, had found their road to Damascus and, on their return, began to sketch wild plans for the reorganization of the youth movement that signified the undermining of its revolutionary essence. They brought back with them a confused mixture of totalitarian illusions of recruiting the entire young population of Spain, ambition to create a colossal organization and sheer village idiocy. They were seduced by the bewildering panoply of figures, tables and statistics cleverly put before them.50

Shortly after Carrillo’s return to Madrid, a joint meeting was held of the FJS and UJC executive committees to consider the report that the delegation had elaborated in Moscow in favour of a new mass united movement. The report was approved as the basis for unification and a joint national committee set up to implement the fusion process. Much effort had been made to combat suspicions that the Socialist movement was about to lose its youth movement to the Communists. Rather, it was hoped to reassure Largo Caballero that the UJC would be absorbed into the FJS. However, in practice, as could have been anticipated, that was not what happened, given Carrillo’s ever closer links to Moscow. Public meetings were held in local sections of both organizations to propagate the unification. They culminated in a mass gathering at the Las Ventas bull-ring in Madrid on Sunday 5 April 1936. In his speech on that occasion, Carrillo declared that what was happening repaired the schism of 1921 which had seen the radical wing of the PSOE depart to form the PCE. The event at Las Ventas was followed throughout May and July 1936 by meetings of the provincial sections of the FJS and UJC to prepare for a great national conference of unification which, because of the outbreak of civil war, never took place. In those months, the joint membership of 100,000 was swollen to 140,000.51

Retrospectively, Largo Caballero recalled his reaction in similar terms to those of Baraibar. He claimed that when Carrillo and others came to explain the proposed organizational plans, he told them that their plans for a mass youth movement undermined the purpose of the FJS as an elite training school for future PSOE leaders. He declared uncompromisingly that he now considered the FJS to be dead and, with it, the hope that it would be a bulwark for the Socialist Party. Carrillo tried to convince him of his good faith and his loyalty. He made ‘a solemn promise that he would create a formidable organization that was totally socialist’.52

Amaro del Rosal, who was one of those present when Largo Caballero was informed of the unification, recalled his distress: ‘his eyes filled with tears’. Carrillo had effectively delivered a shattering blow to the PSOE, undermining its political future. As Largo Caballero perceived, he was delivering to the PCE, in the words of Helen Graham, ‘a political vanguard which undoubtedly included many potential national and provincial leaders’. There were those, Serrano Poncela among them, who were alarmed that Carrillo now talked of creating a mass organization contrary to the traditional perception of the FJS as an elite training ground for the PSOE. Although Carrillo made a speech in which he paid tribute to Largo Caballero, the damage had been done.53

Carrillo took part in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee on 31 March, at which he suggested that the new JSU, the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, should seek membership of the KIM and that the PSOE should unite with the PCE and join the Comintern. Attendance at Central Committee meetings was a privilege not normally extended to outsiders.54 Carrillo would not formally join the Communist Party for another six months, but there is reason to believe that he was already a Communist in all but name. In 1974, he admitted that, on his return from Moscow, ‘I had begun to become a Communist. I did not join the Party immediately, although I began to collaborate with the Communists and was even invited to take part in meetings of the Central Committee. I had not yet joined because I was still hopeful of bringing about the unification of the Socialist and Communist parties.’55

The procedure whereby the new executive committee of the JSU was appointed in September 1936 was extremely opaque. There were fifteen members, of whom seven were Communists, although several of the eight Socialists were so close to the PCE as made little difference. Carrillo became secretary general of an organization that, despite its name, constituted a massive advance of Communist influence.56 Those who perceived the creation of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas as the loss of the FJS to the Third International coined the nickname ‘Juventudes Socialistas Urssificadas’ (USSR in Spanish being URSS).57

When the military coup in Spain began on 18 July, Carrillo was in Paris where he had gone with Trifón Medrano and José Laín Entralgo to discuss with Raymond Guyot, the secretary general of the Communist Youth International, the problems posed by the meeting in Madrid with the comical German woman delegate of the Comintern, Carmen. In his memoirs, he recounted his heroic response to hearing of the military coup. In this version, for which there is no corroboration, all three immediately set off for the border. Crossing into Spain at Irún, they headed for San Sebastián and immediately got involved in an assault on an hotel where some rebel supporters had barricaded themselves in. Later, in a vain effort to reach Madrid, Carrillo and his companions spent some weeks fighting on the Basque front with a unit organized by the Basque Communist Party. Being extremely short-sighted, Carrillo was anything but a natural soldier. Eventually, they were able to cross into France and then back into Spain via Puigcerdà. The Communist veteran Enrique Líster claimed that the entire account was pure invention and that, during this period, Carrillo remained in Paris. Whatever the truth, it is clear that already, in those early weeks of the war, he was convinced that the only party with the sense of direction to take control of events was the PCE.58

When he got back to Madrid at the beginning of August, the JSU was already trying to turn its pre-war militia structure into proper fighting units. Carrillo claims that he was made political commissar of the JSU’s ‘Largo Caballero’ battalion which was fighting in defence of the city in the sierras to the north. His heroic picture of that period of his life is somewhat undermined by Manuel Tagüeña, a much more reliable witness, who suggested that Carrillo was involved in political rivalries that undermined the efforts of the Italian Fernando De Rosa to link the various units.59 Certainly, his military career, if it took place at all, was brief. Given the vertiginous growth of the JSU, it was clear that Carrillo could be of most use in a political rather than a military capacity.

The JSU was being inundated with new recruits and soon had more militants than the adult membership of the PSOE and PCE combined.60 At every level of society, the economy and the war effort, in industry and the nascent armed forces, JSU members were playing a key role. Accordingly, Carrillo was now working in Madrid on the practicalities of consolidating Communist control over this powerful new instrument. After prolonged hesitation, on 4 September 1936 Largo Caballero finally succumbed to Prieto’s arguments that the survival of the Republic required a cabinet backed by the working-class parties as well as the bourgeois Republicans. A true Popular Front government was formed in which Largo Caballero was both Prime Minister and Minister of War. It contained Communists as well as Socialists and Republicans. Two months later, on 4 November, with the Nationalist rebels already at the gates of Madrid, four representatives of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT would also join the cabinet.

By then, rebel air raids were intensifying. Far from undermining the morale of the Madrileños, they did the opposite and provoked a deep loathing of the self-styled ‘Nationalists’. Virtually every left-wing political party and trade union had established squads to eliminate suspected fascists. With their tribunals, their prisons and their executioners, they were known loosely as checas. Their targets were those assumed to be rebel supporters within the capital. This included both imprisoned and as yet undetected right-wingers, all of whom in the frantic conditions of the besieged capital were indiscriminately regarded as ‘fifth columnists’. The name was inadvertently coined by General Mola, who in early October had infamously stated that he had four columns poised to attack Madrid but that the attack would be initiated by a fifth column already inside the city.61 On the basis of the massacres perpetrated in southern Spain by Franco’s African columns, it was believed that the rebels planned to kill anyone who had been a member of any party or group linked to the Popular Front, held a government post or was an affiliate of a trade union. Spine-chilling broadcasts from Seville made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano propagated fear and hatred.

In the claustrophobia generated by the siege, popular rage focused on the prison population. Among those detained were many who were considered potentially very dangerous. As rebel columns came ever nearer to the capital throughout October, there was growing concern about the many experienced right-wing army officers who had refused to honour their oath of loyalty to the Republic. These men boasted that they would form new units for the rebel columns once they were, as they expected, liberated. Anarchist groups were already randomly seizing prisoners and shooting them. On 4 November, Getafe to the south of Madrid fell and the four anarchist ministers joined the government. Advancing through the University City and the Casa de Campo, by 6 November the rebels were only 200 yards from the largest of the prisons, the Cárcel Modelo, in the Argüelles district.

In this context, the decision that Largo Caballero’s cabinet should leave for Valencia was finally taken in the early afternoon of 6 November. The two Communist ministers in the government, Jesús Hernández (Education) and Vicente Uribe (Agriculture), had argued the Party line that, even if the government had to be evacuated, Madrid could still be defended.62 General José Miaja Menent, head of the 1st Military Division, that is to say, Military Governor of Madrid, was placed in charge of the defence of the capital and ordered to establish a body, to be known as the Junta de Defensa, which would have full governmental powers in Madrid and its environs. In fact, Largo Caballero and the fleeing cabinet believed that the capital was doomed anyway. In their view, the Junta was there merely to administer its surrender. Indeed, when Largo Caballero informed him of his new responsibilities, Miaja turned pale, sure that he was being sacrificed in a futile gesture.63 Whether or not that was the intention, Madrid would survive the siege for another twenty-nine months.

Until the battle for the capital was resolved, Miaja’s awesome task was to organize the city’s military and civil defence at the same time as providing food and shelter for its citizens and the refugees who thronged its streets. In addition, he had to deal with the violence of the checas and the snipers and saboteurs of the ‘fifth column’.64 The Junta de Defensa would thus be a localized mini-government made up of ‘ministers’ (whose title was Councillor – Consejero) chosen from all those parties that made up the central government. However, Miaja would turn first to the Communists in search of help. And they were ready and waiting.

The two Communist ministers had immediately reported the cabinet’s decision to the PCE top brass, Pedro Fernández Checa and Antonio Mije. They were effectively leading the Party in the frequent absences of the secretary general, José Díaz, who was seriously ill with stomach cancer. Pedro Checa was already collaborating closely with the NKVD.65 The implications were discussed and plans made. Astonishingly, present at this historic meeting were Santiago Carrillo and José Cazorla, who were both, theoretically at least, still members of the Socialist Party. Their presence demonstrates the enormous importance of the now massive JSU and also suggests that they were already in the highest echelons of the PCE.

Late in the afternoon, Checa and Mije went to negotiate with Miaja the terms of the Communist participation in the Junta de Defensa. A grateful Miaja eagerly accepted their offer that the PCE run the two ‘ministries’ (consejerías) of War and Public Order in the Junta de Defensa. He also accepted their specific nominations of Antonio Mije as War Councillor and of Carrillo as Public Order Councillor with Cazorla as his deputy. While Mije and Checa were negotiating with Miaja, Carrillo and Cazorla had gone to ask Largo Caballero for a statement to explain to the people of Madrid why the government was leaving. The Prime Minister denied that the government was being evacuated, despite the suitcases piled outside his office. Further disillusioned by the lies of their already broken hero, Carrillo and Cazorla went back to the Central Committee of the PCE.66

At about eight in the evening, Mije and Carrillo went to see Miaja to discuss their future roles. Shortly before his death, in discussing the Spanish edition of my book The Spanish Holocaust, Carrillo claimed that, at the end of this meeting, he had asked Miaja what he was expected to do about the fifth column and that the General had replied, ‘Smash it.’ In this account, Miaja allegedly said that victory would go to the army that annihilated the other and that this would be done with bullets and bayonets. He said that the fifth column must be prevented at all costs from attacking from behind. Looking at Carrillo, he said, ‘That is your job and you will have our help.’ It is curious that, in his innumerable statements about his role in the executions of right-wing prisoners in Madrid, Carrillo had never previously mentioned Miaja. In The Spanish Holocaust reference was made to a later Republican police report on collaboration between NKVD agents and the public order apparatus, an ambiguity of whose wording raised the possibility that Miaja may have approved of Carrillo’s activities. That Carrillo should seize upon this was a way of saying that, whatever he did subsequently, he was only obeying orders.67 There is an irony about this, since elsewhere he denied all knowledge of the massacres committed on his watch.

In Carrillo’s own words, ‘on that same night of 6 November, I began to discharge my responsibilities along with Mije and others’.68 He was able to nominate his subordinates in the Public Order Council and assign them tasks immediately after this meeting with Miaja late on the night of 6–7 November. He set up a sub-committee, known as the Public Order Delegation, under Serrano Poncela, who was effectively given responsibility for the work in Madrid of the Dirección General de Seguridad, the national police headquarters. The Delegation was taking decisions from the very early hours of 7 November.69 The anarchist Gregorio Gallego highlighted the Communists’ ability to hit the ground running: ‘we realized that the operation was far too well prepared and manipulated to have been improvised’.70

Overall operational responsibility for the prisoners lay with three men: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. They took key decisions about the prisoners in the vacuum between the evacuation of the government late on the night of 6 November and the formal constitution of the Junta de Defensa twenty-four hours later. However, it is inconceivable that those decisions were taken in isolation by three inexperienced young men aged respectively twenty-one (Carrillo), thirty (Cazorla) and twenty-four (Serrano Poncela). The authorization for their operational decisions, as will be seen, had to have come from far more senior elements. Certainly, it required the go-ahead from Checa and Mije who, in turn, needed the approval of Miaja and of the Soviet advisers, since Russian aid in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical expertise had started to arrive over the previous weeks. How much detail, other than airy references to ‘controlling the fifth column’, Miaja received is impossible to say. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and would get, assistance from the anarchist movement.

Thus the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why the twenty-one-year-old leader of the Socialist Youth was given such a crucial and powerful position. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wish to join and were incorporated into the Party on the spot. The brevity of the proceedings confirms that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. After all, he had brought into the PCE’s orbit the 50,000 members of the FJS and the further 100,000 who had subsequently joined the JSU. He was already attending meetings of the PCE’s politburo, its small executive committee, which indicated that he was held in high esteem. He had long since been identified by Comintern agents as a candidate for recruitment. If he had not publicly made the switch before, it was because of his, and presumably their, hope that he could help bring about the unification of the PSOE and the PCE. Largo Caballero’s determined opposition to unity combined with his poor direction of the war effort had made this seem a futile aspiration. Moreover, the prestige accruing to the Communist Party from Soviet aid suggested that there was little advantage in delaying the leap. It was an eminently practical decision, although Fernando Claudín argued implausibly that Carrillo was brave to sever his links with a party within which he was so prominently placed.71

Oddly, Carrillo claimed that his membership of the PCE was not public knowledge as late as July 1937.72 Certainly, in late December 1936 in Valencia, Carrillo, Cazorla, Melchor and Serrano Poncela had all informed Largo Caballero of what they had done. The ‘boss’ was devastated, as were others in his entourage. It finally dawned on him that he had let the future of the PSOE slip into the hands of the Communists. According to Carrillo, he said with tears in his eyes, ‘As of now, I no longer believe in the Spanish revolution.’73 Not long afterwards, he said of Carrillo to a close collaborator, perhaps Amaro del Rosal, ‘He was more than a son to me. I shall never forgive the Communists for stealing him from me.’74 Largo Caballero’s later reflections were altogether more vitriolic. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, ‘In the Socialist Youth, there were Judases like Santiago Carrillo and others who managed to simulate a fusion which they called the JSU. Later, they revealed their treachery when they joined the Communist International.’75

Carlos de Baraibar, who had replaced Carrillo as the old leader’s favourite, recalled sarcastically that:

a group of leaders of the JSU visited me to let me know that they had decided en masse to join the Communist Party. I knew nothing about it, but they made their case so eloquently that I was left with the impression that their lives had been rendered so impossible within the Socialist movement that, to be able to go on fighting effectively for the cause, the poor creatures had had no alternative but to join the Communists. Nevertheless, it seemed to me monstrous that this had been done without them consulting with senior comrades other than, as I later discovered, Álvarez del Vayo. They had been advised throughout by the man we called ‘the eye of Moscow’, the secret representative of the Comintern or rather of Stalin.

Largo Caballero also referred to ‘Medina’/Codovila as ‘el ojo de Moscú’.76

When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order Delegation, in the early hours of 7 November, he used written orders for the evacuation of prisoners left by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.77 The Norwegian Consul, the German Felix Schlayer, claimed that the preparation of the necessary document was the price paid by Muñoz to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia.78 Evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations. Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of 8,000 prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.79

Among those pushing for the evacuation of the prisoners were the senior Republican military authorities in the capital, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also involved were Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day, and Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov. In fact, according to the principal expert on Soviet security services in Spain, Orlov was away from Madrid from 13 October to 10 November in Cartagena.80 However, his subordinate, Josif Grigulevich, was his liaison with Carrillo. They became active collaborators and friends. Grigulevich would certainly have transmitted to Carrillo the Russian view that the captive military officers who had refused to fight for the Republic should simply be liquidated.

Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Known by his pseudonym of ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had been instrumental in the founding of the Fifth Regiment, from which the Republic’s Popular Army evolved. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar, and his conviction that rebel supporters within Madrid should be eliminated was reflected in his vehement articles and speeches. Conscious that the prisoners were already boasting that they would soon join their rebel comrades, Gorev and other Soviet advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate them. As the rebel siege tightened, Vicente Rojo and Miaja fully concurred.81

Miaja soon established a close relationship with Carrillo’s deputy, José Cazorla, one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners.82 Taciturn and efficient, Cazorla believed that rebel supporters had to be eliminated. To carry out this task, as will be seen, he frequently relied on the advice of Russian security personnel. As concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old Vicente Rojo, recently promoted lieutenant colonel. Rojo believed that the fifth column was made up of spies, saboteurs and agitators and feared that they could play a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, he wrote, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.83

The public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo answered to Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, and it is clear that they were in constant touch with the Russians. In the Ministry of War, there were meetings between Mije, Gorev and Rojo. Pedro Checa also had a key meeting at PCE headquarters with Gorev’s messenger Mikhail Koltsov.84 This was almost certainly the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed with the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the 8,000 but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups. Accepting this argument, Checa despatched three men to ‘two big prisons’, which almost certainly meant San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo – from which prisoners were indeed taken away on the morning of 7 November.85 The removal of prisoners was known as a saca. Clearly, three men alone could not organize a large-scale saca, which required written authorizations, means of transport, escorts and other facilities.

Accordingly, Koltsov’s account seems to confirm Carrillo’s statement that the Consejería de Orden Público had begun to function late on the night of 6 November or in the early hours of 7 November and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. This required committed personnel, and Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela turned to ‘Carlos Contreras’ (Vittorio Vidali). Although in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern, Vidali was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Vidali and Josif Grigulevich, who was briefly his assistant at the Fifth Regiment, belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky. Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina.86

Enrique Castro Delgado, the Communist commander of the Fifth Regiment, described how, on the night of 6 November, he and Vidali/Contreras gave orders to the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s fifth column must be destroyed before it begins to move.’87 The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. There were many JSU members in the Fifth Regiment. In a revealing interview in 1986, two years before his death, Grigulevich stated that, in Madrid, he had worked under the orders of Santiago Carrillo, heading a special squad (brigada especial) of Socialist militants in the Dirección General de Seguridad dedicated to ‘dirty’ operations. The squad was formed by Grigulevich from what he called ‘trusted elements’ recruited from members of the JSU who had been part of the unit responsible for the security of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid.88

Grigulevich’s assertion is sustained by the record in the Francoist archive, the Causa General, of the post-war interrogations of JSU members of what came to be three brigadas especiales. Grigulevich had arrived in Spain in late September and worked for Contreras for some weeks before beginning to collaborate with Carrillo in late October or early November. Carrillo, Cazorla and the unit’s members knew Grigulevich as ‘José Escoy’, although he was known to others as ‘José Ocampo’.89 The documents in the Causa General are further corroborated by a report, written in the autumn of 1937, by the Republican police that referred to the frequent visits made to Carrillo’s office by Russian technicians specializing in security and counter-espionage matters. The report stated that these technicians had offered their ‘enthusiastic collaboration to the highest authority in public order in Madrid’, which would seem at first sight to have been a reference to Carrillo although it might have referred to Miaja since he was the authority under whom Carrillo worked. If the latter, it would mean that Carrillo’s activities were covered by Miaja’s approval, as he was quick to emphasize shortly after the publication of The Spanish Holocaust. Of course, his collaboration with the Russians would have happened anyway given the Soviet links with the Communist Party. The report went on to state that Carrillo had directed these technicians to ‘the chief and the officers of the brigada especial’.90 This was confirmed by Grigulevich, who later described himself as ‘the right hand of Carrillo’ in the Consejería de Orden Público.91 According to the records of the Soviet security services, their friendship was so close that years later Carrillo chose Grigulevich to be secular ‘godfather’ to one of his sons. Carrillo’s three sons were born in Paris between early 1950 and late 1952. During those years, Grigulevich was living in Rome under the name Teodoro Bonnefil Castro. The Russian security services had managed to create an identity for him as a Costa Rican businessman and his success in this role had seen him named as first secretary in the country’s Embassy to Italy. The ease of connections between Rome and Paris certainly made it possible for him and Carrillo to meet.92

It is clear that Miaja, Rojo, Gorev and the senior leadership of the Communist Party were all anxious to see the prisoner question resolved with the greatest urgency. There is no doubt that Miaja and Rojo approved of prisoner evacuations although not necessarily of executions. What is likely is that, in the meetings immediately following the creation of the Junta de Defensa, they delegated responsibility to the two-man leadership of the PCE. Checa and Mije, who, like the Russians, certainly did approve of the execution of prisoners, passed organizational responsibility to Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. To implement their instructions, the trio drew on members of the JSU who were given posts in the Public Order Delegation headed by Serrano Poncela, effectively head of the Dirección General de Seguridad for Madrid. They could also count on assistance from Contreras/Vidali and the Fifth Regiment and from Grigulevich and the brigada especial. However, they could do nothing against the will of the anarchist movement, which controlled the roads out of Madrid. Given that the anarchists had already seized and murdered prisoners, it was not likely that they would offer insuperable opposition to the Communists. Indeed, the formal agreement of senior elements of the CNT militias was soon forthcoming.

The inaugural session of the Junta began at 6.00 p.m. on 7 November.93 Before the meeting, at around 5.30 p.m., Carrillo, coming out of Miaja’s office in the Ministry of War, met a representative of the International Red Cross, Dr Georges Henny, with Felix Schlayer, the Norwegian Consul. Carrillo invited them to meet him in his office immediately after the plenary session. Before returning for that meeting, Schlayer and the Red Cross delegate went to the Cárcel Modelo where they learned that several hundred prisoners had been taken away earlier that day. On coming back to the Ministry of War, they were greeted amiably by Carrillo, who assured them of his determination to protect the prisoners and prevent any murders. When they told him what they had learned at the Cárcel Modelo, he denied knowledge of any evacuations. Schlayer reflected later that, even if this were true, it raises the question as to why Carrillo and Miaja, once having been informed by him of the evacuations, did nothing to prevent the others that continued that evening and on successive days.94

Later the same evening, a meeting took place between, on the one hand, two or three representatives of the JSU who controlled the newly created Public Order Council and members of the local federation of the CNT. They discussed what to do with the prisoners. Despite mutual hostility, liaison between both organizations was necessary, since the Communists held sway inside Madrid, controlling the police, the prisons and the files on prisoners, while the anarchists, through their militias, controlled the roads out of the city. The only record of the meeting is constituted by the minutes of a session of the CNT’s National Committee held the next morning. Those minutes include a report by Amor Nuño Pérez, the Councillor for War Industries in the Junta de Defensa, who had been one of the CNT representatives at the previous evening’s negotiation with the JSU. Amor Nuño’s report outlined what had been agreed at that encounter with the JSU. The minutes did not include the names of the other participants at the CNT–JSU meeting. However, it is reasonable to suppose that the JSU representatives included at least two of the following: Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela. The gravity of the matter under discussion and the practical agreements reached could hardly have permitted the Public Order Council to be represented by more junior members of the JSU. If Carrillo was not there, which is unlikely, it is inconceivable that he, as both Public Order Councillor and secretary general of the JSU, was not fully apprised of the meeting.

Nuño reported that the CNT and JSU representatives, on the evening of 7 November, had decided that the prisoners should be classified into three groups. The fate of the first, consisting of ‘fascists and dangerous elements’, was to be ‘Immediate execution’ ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ – the responsibility being that of those who took the decision and of those who implemented it. The second group, of prisoners considered to be supporters of the military uprising but, because of age or profession, less dangerous, were to be evacuated to Chinchilla, near Albacete. The third, those least politically committed, were to be released ‘with all possible guarantees, as proof to the Embassies of our humanitarianism’. This last comment suggests that whoever represented the JSU at the meeting knew about and had mentioned the earlier encounter between Carrillo and Schlayer.95

The first consignment of prisoners had already left Madrid early in the morning of 7 November, presumably in accordance with the instructions for evacuation issued by Pedro Checa in response to Koltsov/Miguel Martínez. Thus some prisoners were removed and killed before the formal agreement with the CNT made later that evening. There is no record of there being any difficulty about their getting through the anarchist militias on the roads out of the capital. That is not surprising since there were CNT–FAI representatives on Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation. Nevertheless, the agreement guaranteed that further convoys would face no problems at the anarchist checkpoints and that they could also rely on substantial assistance in the gory business of executing the prisoners. The strongest CNT controls were posted on the roads out to Valencia and Aragon which the convoys would take. The necessary flotillas of double-decker buses and many smaller vehicles could not get out of Madrid without the approval, cooperation or connivance of the CNT patrols. Since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela knew this only too well, it is not plausible that they would have ordered evacuation convoys without first securing the agreement of the CNT–FAI. This undermines Carrillo’s later assertions that the convoys were hijacked by anarchists. The grain of truth in those claims resides in the certainty that the anarchists took some part in the actual killing.

The first decisions taken by Carrillo and his collaborators had been the saca on the morning of 7 November at San Antón and, in the afternoon, the larger one at the Cárcel Modelo. The prisoners were loaded on to double-decker buses. Convoys consisting of the buses escorted by cars and trucks carrying militiamen shuttled back and forth over the next two days. Their official destinations were prisons well behind the lines, in Alcalá de Henares, Chinchilla and Valencia. However, of the more than 1,000 prisoners removed, only about 300 arrived there. Eleven miles from Madrid, on the road to Alcalá de Henares, at the small village of Paracuellos del Jarama, the first batch, from San Antón, were forced off the buses. At the base of the small hill on which the village stood, they were lined up by the militiamen, verbally abused and then shot. In the evening of the same day, the second batch, from the Cárcel Modelo, suffered the same fate.96 A further consignment of prisoners arrived on the morning of 8 November. The mayor was forced to round up the able-bodied inhabitants of the village (there were only 1,600 in total) to dig huge ditches for the approximately 800 bodies which had been left to rot. When Paracuellos could cope with no more, subsequent convoys made for the nearby village of Torrejón de Ardoz, where a disused irrigation channel was used for the approximately 400 victims.97 Sacas continued, with intervals, until 3 December. Some expeditions of prisoners arrived safely in Alcalá de Henares. The total numbers killed over the four weeks following the creation of the Junta de Defensa cannot be calculated with total precision, but there is little doubt that it was somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500.98

All these sacas were initiated with documentation on Dirección General de Seguridad notepaper indicating that the prisoners were either to be released or taken to Chinchilla or Alcalá de Henares. When the order was for them to go to Alcalá de Henares, they usually arrived safely. This suggests that ‘to be released’ (libertad) and ‘Chinchilla’ were codewords for elimination.99 The specific orders for the evacuations of prisoners were not signed by Carrillo, nor by any member of the Junta de Defensa. Until 22 November, such orders were signed by Manuel Muñoz’s second-in-command in the Dirección General de Seguridad, the head of the police Vicente Girauta Linares. Girauta was under the orders of Serrano Poncela, Muñoz’s successor for Madrid. On 22 November, he followed Muñoz to Valencia. Thereafter, the orders were signed either by Serrano Poncela himself or by Girauta’s successor as head of the Madrid police, Bruno Carreras Villanueva.100 In the Causa General, there are several documents signed by Serrano Poncela. The anthology of this colossal archive, published in 1945, reproduces two. The one dated 26 November 1936 read, ‘I request that you release the individuals listed on the back of this page,’ and carried twenty-six names. The document dated 27 November read, ‘Please release the prisoners mentioned on the two attached sheets,’ which listed 106 names. All those on these two lists were assassinated.101 Explicit orders for the execution, as opposed to the ‘liberation’ or ‘transfer’ of prisoners, have not been found.

While the sacas were taking place, Carrillo had started to issue a series of decrees that would ensure Communist control of the security forces within the capital and put an end to the myriad parallel police forces that had sprung up in the first weeks of the war. On 9 November, he issued two decrees that constituted a significant step towards the centralized control of the police and security forces. The first required the surrender of all arms not in authorized hands. The second stated that the internal security of the capital would be the exclusive responsibility of forces organized by the Council for Public Order. This signified the dissolution, on paper at least, of all checas.102 Under the conditions of the siege, Carrillo was thus able to impose, by emergency decree, measures that had been beyond the government. Nevertheless, there was a considerable delay between the announcement of the decree and its successful implementation. The anarchists resisted as long as they could and the Communists never relinquished some of their own checas. Nevertheless, by his decree of 9 November, Carrillo returned the services of security and investigation to the now reformed police and suppressed all those groups run by political parties or trade unions, although many of their militants were given positions in Serrano Poncela’s Public Order Delegation.103

Explicitly included within these reformed services was ‘everything relative to the administration of the arrest and release of prisoners, as well as the movement, transfer etc of those under arrest’. They were under the control of the Public Order Delegation.104 All functions of the Dirección General de Seguridad were controlled by Serrano Poncela. However, he followed the instructions of Carrillo or his deputy José Cazorla. Carrillo’s measures constituted the institutionalization of the repression under the Public Order Delegation in the Dirección General de Seguridad.105

Within Serrano Poncela’s Delegation, there were three sub-sections. The first dealt with investigation, interrogations and petitions for release. This was headed by Manuel Rascón Ramírez of the CNT. After interrogations had been carried out, this section made recommendations to the Delegation and final decisions were taken by Carrillo. This function was entirely compatible with the decisions taken at the meeting between JSU and CNT members on the evening of 7 November. The second sub-section, headed by Serrano Poncela himself, dealt with prisons, prisoners and prison transfers. It used small tribunals of militiamen set up in each prison to go through the file-cards of the prisoners. The third sub-section dealt with the personnel of the police and other more or less official armed groups in the rearguard.106

The procedures that would be applied to prisoners between 18 November and 6 December were established on 10 November at a meeting of the Public Order Delegation. Serrano Poncela laid down three categories: army officers with the rank of captain and above; Falangists; other rightists. This was roughly similar to what had been agreed at the meeting on 7 November between members of the CNT–FAI and representatives of the JSU, one of whom had almost certainly been Serrano Poncela himself. When lists of prisoners were compiled, they were passed to Serrano Poncela. He then signed orders for their ‘release’, which meant their execution. It seems that those expeditions of prisoners that arrived safely at their destination consisted of men not listed for execution by the prison tribunals. Serrano Poncela had to report every day to Carrillo in his office in the Junta de Defensa (in the Palace of Juan March in Calle Núñez de Balboa in the Barrio de Salamanca). Carrillo also often visited the office of Serrano Poncela at Number 37 in nearby Calle Serrano.107

The procedure was that agents would arrive at each prison late at night with a general order signed by Serrano Poncela for the ‘liberation’ of the prisoners whose names were listed on the back or on separate sheets. The director of the prison would hand them over and they would then be taken to wherever Serrano Poncela had indicated orally to the agents. The subsequent phase of the process, the transportation and execution of the prisoners in the early hours of the following morning, was carried out each day by different groups of militiamen, sometimes anarchists, sometimes Communists and sometimes from the Fifth Regiment. The prisoners were obliged to leave all their belongings, and were then tied together in pairs and loaded on to buses.108

That Carrillo was fully aware of this is demonstrated by the minutes of the meeting of the Junta de Defensa on the night of 11 November 1936. One of the anarchist consejeros asked if the Cárcel Modelo had been evacuated. Carrillo responded by saying that the necessary measures had been taken to organize the evacuations of prisoners but that the operation had had to be suspended. At this, the Communist Isidoro Diéguez Dueñas, second-in-command to Antonio Mije at the War Council, declared that the evacuations had to continue, given the seriousness of the problem of the prisoners. Carrillo responded that the suspension had been necessary because of protests emanating from the diplomatic corps, presumably a reference to his meeting with Schlayer. Although the minutes are extremely brief, they make it indisputably clear that Carrillo knew what was happening to the prisoners if only as a result of the complaints by Schlayer.109

In fact, after the mass executions of 7–8 November, there were no more sacas until 18 November, after which they continued on a lesser scale until 6 December. The sacas and the executions have come to be known collectively as ‘Paracuellos’, the name of the village where a high proportion of the executions took place. Those executions constituted the greatest single atrocity perpetrated in Republican territory during the war. Its scale is explained but not justified as a response to the fear that rebel forces were about to take Madrid. Whereas previous sacas had been triggered by spontaneous mass outrage provoked by bombing raids or by news brought by refugees of rebel atrocities, the extra-judicial murders carried out at Paracuellos were the result of political-military decisions. The evacuations and subsequent executions were organized by the Council for Public Order but could not have been implemented without help from other, largely anarchist elements in the rearguard militias.

The brief interlude after the mass sacas of 7 and 8 November was thanks to Mariano Sánchez Roca, the under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice who arranged for the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez to be named Special Inspector of Prisons.110 The first initiative taken by Melchor Rodríguez on the night of 9 November was decisive. Hearing that a saca of 400 prisoners was planned, he went to the prison at midnight and ordered that all sacas cease and that the militiamen who had been freely moving within the prison remain outside. He forbade the release of any prisoners between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m., to prevent them being shot. He also insisted on accompanying any prisoners being transferred to other prisons. In consequence there were no sacas between 10 and 17 November, when Melchor Rodríguez was forced to resign his post by Juan García Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice. His offence was to have demanded that those responsible for the killings be punished.111 After his resignation, the sacas started again.112

Manuel Azaña, who had succeeded Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, and at least two government ministers in Valencia (Manuel Irujo and José Giral) had learned about the sacas.113 Indeed, a speech made on 12 November by Carrillo suggests that, at the time, secrecy was not a major priority. Speaking before the microphones of Unión Radio, he boasted about the measures being taken against the prisoners:

it is guaranteed that there will be no resistance to the Junta de Defensa from within. No such resistance will emerge because absolutely every possible measure has been taken to prevent any conflict or alteration of order in Madrid that could favour the enemy’s plans. The ‘Fifth Column’ is on the way to being crushed. Its last remnants in the depths of Madrid are being hunted down and cornered according to the law, but above all with the energy necessary to ensure that this ‘Fifth Column’ cannot interfere with the plans of the legitimate government and the Junta de Defensa.114

On 1 December 1936, the Junta de Defensa was renamed the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid by order of Largo Caballero. Having led the government to Valencia, the Prime Minister was deeply resentful of the aureole of heroism that had accumulated around Miaja as he led the capital’s population in resisting Franco’s siege. Thus Largo Caballero wished to restrain what he considered the Junta’s excessive independence.115 Serrano Poncela had already left the Public Order Delegation at some point in early December and his responsibilities were taken over by José Cazorla.

At the end of the war, Serrano Poncela gave an implausible account of why he had left the Public Order Delegation. He told the Basque politician Jesús de Galíndez that he did not know that the words ‘transfer to Chinchilla’ or ‘release’ on the orders that he signed were code that meant the prisoners in question were to be executed. The use of such code could have been the method by which those responsible covered their guilt – as suggested by the phrase ‘with responsibility to be hidden’ in the minutes of the meeting of the evening of 7 November. Serrano Poncela told Galíndez the orders were passed to him by Santiago Carrillo and that all he did was sign them. He told Galíndez that, as soon he realized what was happening, he resigned from his post and not long afterwards left the Communist Party.116 This was not entirely true since he held the important post of JSU propaganda secretary until well into 1938. In an extraordinary letter to the Central Committee, written in March 1939, Serrano Poncela claimed that he had resigned from the Communist Party only after he had reached France the previous month, implying that previously he had feared for his life. He referred to the disgust he felt about his past in the Communist Party. He also claimed that the PCE had prevented his emigration to Mexico because he knew too much.117 Indeed, he even went so far as to assert that he had joined the PCE on 6 November 1936 only because Carrillo had browbeaten him into doing so.118

Subsequently, and presumably in reprisal for Serrano Poncela’s rejection of the Party, Carrillo denounced him. In a long interview given to Ian Gibson in September 1982, Carrillo claimed that he had had nothing to do with the activities of the Public Order Delegation and blamed everything on Serrano Poncela. He alleged that ‘my only involvement was, after about a fortnight, I got the impression that Serrano Poncela was doing bad things and so I sacked him’. Allegedly, Carrillo had discovered in late November that ‘outrages were being committed and this man was a thief’. He claimed that Serrano Poncela had in his possession jewels stolen from those arrested and that consideration had been given to having him shot.119 Serrano Poncela’s continued pre-eminence in the JSU belies this. Interestingly, neither in his memoirs of 1993 nor in Los viejos camaradas, a book published in 2010, does he repeat these detailed charges other than to say that it was during their time together in the Consejería de Orden Público that their differences began to emerge.120

The claim that he personally had nothing to do with the killings was repeated by Carrillo in his memoirs. He alleged that the classification and evacuation of prisoners was left entirely to the Public Order Delegation under Serrano Poncela. He went on to assert that the Delegation did not decide on death sentences but merely selected those who would be sent to Tribunales Populares (People’s Courts) and those who would be freed. His account is brief, vague and misleading, making no mention of executions and implying that the worst that happened to those judged to be dangerous was to be sent to work battalions building fortifications. The only unequivocal statement in Carrillo’s account is a declaration that he took part in none of the Public Order Delegation’s meetings.121 However, if Azaña, Irujo and Giral in Valencia knew about the killings and if, in Madrid, Melchor Rodríguez, the Ambassador of Chile, the Chargé d’Affaires of Argentina, the Chargé d’Affaires of the United Kingdom and Félix Schlayer knew about them, it is inconceivable that Carrillo, as the principal authority in the area of public order, could not know. After all, despite his later claims, he received daily reports from Serrano Poncela.122 Melchor Rodríguez’s success in stopping sacas raises questions about Santiago Carrillo’s inability to do the same.

Subsequently, Francoist propaganda built on the atrocity of Paracuellos to depict the Republic as a murderous Communist-dominated regime guilty of red barbarism. Despite the fact that Santiago Carrillo was just one of the key participants in the entire process, the Franco regime, and the Spanish right thereafter, never missed any opportunity to use Paracuellos to denigrate him during the years that he was secretary general of the Communist Party (1960–82) and especially in 1977 as part of the effort to prevent the legalization of the Communist Party. Carrillo himself inadvertently contributed to keeping himself in the spotlight by absurdly denying any knowledge of, let alone responsibility for, the killings. However, a weight of other evidence confirmed by some of his own partial revelations makes it clear that he was fully involved.123

For instance, in more than one interview in 1977, Carrillo claimed that, by the time he took over the Council for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa, the operation of transferring prisoners from Madrid to Valencia was ‘coming to an end and all I did, with General Miaja, was order the transfer of the last prisoners’. It is certainly true that there had been sacas before 7 November, but the bulk of the killings took place after that date while Carrillo was Consejero de Orden Público. Carrillo’s admission that he ordered the transfers of prisoners after 7 November clearly puts him in the frame.124 Elsewhere, he claimed that, after he had ordered an evacuation, the vehicles were ambushed and the prisoners murdered by uncontrolled elements. He stated, ‘I can take no responsibility other than having been unable to prevent it.’125 This would have been hardly credible under any circumstances, but especially so after the discovery of documentary proof of the CNT–JSU meeting of the night of 7 November.

Moreover, Carrillo’s post-1974 denials of knowledge of the Paracuellos killings were contradicted by the congratulations heaped on him at the time. Between 5 and 8 March 1937 the PCE celebrated an ‘amplified’ plenary meeting of its Central Committee in Valencia. Such a meeting, with additional invited participants, was midway between a normal meeting and a full Party congress. Francisco Antón, a rising figure in the Party and known to be Pasionaria’s lover, declared: ‘It is difficult to say that the fifth column in Madrid has been annihilated but it certainly has suffered the hardest blows there. This, it must be proclaimed loudly, is thanks to the concern of the Party and the selfless, ceaseless effort of two new comrades, as beloved as if they were veteran militants of our Party, Comrade Carrillo when he was the Consejero de Orden Público and Comrade Cazorla who holds the post now.’ When the applause that greeted these remarks had died down, Carrillo rose and spoke of the work done to ensure that the 60 per cent of the members of the JSU who were fighting at the front could do so ‘in the certain knowledge that the rearguard is safe, cleansed and free of traitors. It is not a crime, it is not a manoeuvre, but a duty to demand such a purge.’126

Comments made both at the time and later by Spanish Communists such as Pasionaria and Francisco Antón, by Comintern agents, by Gorev and by others show that prisoners were assumed to be fifth columnists and that Carrillo was to be praised for eliminating them. On 30 July 1937, the Bulgarian Stoyán Mínev, alias ‘Boris Stepanov’, from April 1937 one of the Comintern’s delegates in Spain, wrote indignantly to the head of the Comintern, Giorgi Dimitrov, of the ‘Jesuit and fascist’ Irujo that he had tried to arrest Carrillo simply because he had given ‘the order to shoot several arrested officers of the fascists’.127 In his final post-war report to Stalin, Stepanov wrote proudly that the Communists took note of the implications of Mola’s statement about his five columns and ‘in a couple of days carried out the operations necessary to cleanse Madrid of fifth columnists’. In this report, Stepanov explained how, in July 1937, shortly after becoming Minister of Justice, Manuel Irujo initiated investigations into what had happened at Paracuellos including a judicial inquiry into the role of Carrillo.128 Unfortunately, no trace of this inquiry has survived and it is possible that any evidence was among the papers burned by the Communist-dominated security services before the end of the war.129

What Carrillo himself said in his broadcast on Unión Radio and what Stepanov wrote in his report to Stalin were echoed years later in the Spanish Communist Party’s official history of its role in the Civil War. Published in Moscow, and commissioned by Carrillo when he became secretary general of the PCE, it declared proudly that ‘Santiago Carrillo and his deputy Cazorla took the measures necessary to maintain order in the rearguard, which was every bit as important as the fighting at the front. In two or three days, a serious blow was delivered against the snipers and fifth columnists.’130

Rather unexpectedly, at the meeting of the Junta Delegada de Defensa on 25 December 1936, Carrillo resigned as Consejero de Orden Público and was replaced by his deputy, José Cazorla Maure. He announced that he was leaving to devote himself totally to preparing the forthcoming congress which was intended to seal the unification of the Socialist and Communist youth movements. It was certainly true that a JSU congress was to be held, for which he was preparing an immensely long speech. However, it is very likely that the precipitate timing of his departure was also connected with an incident two days earlier.131 On 23 December, a Communist member of the Junta de Defensa, Pablo Yagüe, had been shot and seriously wounded at an anarchist control post when he was leaving the city on official business. The culprits then took refuge in the local anarchist headquarters, the Ateneo Libertario, of the Ventas district. Carrillo ordered their arrest, but the CNT Comité Regional refused to hand them over to the police. Carrillo then sent in a company of Assault Guards to seize them. At the meeting of the Junta at which this was discussed, he called for them to be shot.132 It was the prelude to a spate of revenge attacks and counter-reprisals. Ultimately, Carrillo failed in his demand for the Junta de Defensa to condemn to death the anarchists responsible for the attack on Yagüe, something which was beyond its jurisdiction. He was furious when the case was put in the hands of a state tribunal where the prosecutor refused to ask for the death penalty on the grounds that Yagüe had not shown his credentials to the CNT militiamen at the checkpoint.133

Despite the Yagüe crisis, there can be little doubt that Carrillo needed to devote time to the JSU. The organization had expanded massively since July 1936 and its importance in every aspect of the war effort can scarcely be exaggerated. The PCE’s determination to consolidate its control of the JSU could be seen in Carrillo’s role in the national youth conference held in January 1937 in Valencia. It replaced the congress which had initially been scheduled to establish the structure and programme of the new organization. A congress had formal procedures that required the election of representative delegates, and wartime circumstances made that virtually impossible. A conference had the advantage of permitting Carrillo to choose the delegates himself. Thus he was able to pack the proceedings with hand-picked young Communists from the battle fronts and the factories. He then exploited that to perpetrate the sleight of hand whereby the conference made decisions corresponding to a congress. To the astonishment and chagrin of those FJS members who still harboured the illusion that the new organization was ‘Socialist’, the entire event was organized along totally Stalinist lines. All policy directives were pre-packaged, there was virtually no debate and there was no voting.134

One of the delegates from Alicante, Antonio Escribano, reflected later that ‘Ninety percent of the young Socialists present did not know that Carrillo, Laín, Melchor, Cabello, Aurora Arnaiz, etc had gone over lock, stock and barrel to the Communist Party. We thought that they were still young Socialists and they were acting in agreement with Largo Caballero and the PSOE. If we had known that these deserters had betrayed us, something else would have happened.’135 The impression that the proceedings were carried out under the auspices of Largo Caballero was shamelessly given by Carrillo, who declared, ‘It is necessary to say that Comrade Lar­go Caballero has, as ever, or more than ever, the support of the Spanish youth fighting at the front and working in the factories. It is necessary to say here that Comrade Lar­go Caballero is for us the same as before: the man who helped our unification, the man from whom we expect much excellent advice so that, in defence of the common cause, the unity of Spanish youth may be a reality.’136

As newsreel footage revealed, apart from Julio Álvarez del Vayo and Antonio Machado, the poet and alcalde (mayor) of Valencia, the stage party was made up of Communists headed by Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri. Carrillo opened his long speech with thanks to the Communist Youth International, the KIM, for its support. He made especially fulsome reference to the KIM representative, Mihály Farkas, introduced as ‘Michael Wolf’, with whom his relationship was growing closer. No longer the revolutionary firebrand of the Cárcel Modelo, Carrillo explained that, while the Socialist Youth, the FJS, had tried to undermine the government in 1934, now the JSU supported the Republican government’s war effort. According to Carrillo’s close collaborator Fernando Claudín, Farkas/Wolf had considerable input into Carrillo’s speech. Thus the Comintern line was paramount in Carrillo’s talk of broad national unity against a foreign invader. Central to his rhetoric was the defence of the smallholding peasants and the small businessmen with some bitter criticisms of anarchist collectives. There was also the ritual denunciation of the POUM (the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) as a subversive Trotskyist outfit. With the guidance of Codovila and Farkas/Wolf, Carrillo had already started down the road of linking the POUM to the Francoists. The primary function of the JSU was no longer the fomenting of revolution but the education of the masses – the basic reformist aspiration of the Republican–Socialist coalition for which he had previously excoriated Prieto and the PSOE centrists. This was Comintern policy, although it also made perfect sense in the wartime context.137

Carrillo boasted that the new organization had had 40,000 members immediately after its creation but now had 250,000. He placed special emphasis on the fact that the JSU was a completely new organization entirely independent of both the PSOE and the PCE, in which neither component had the right to demand its leadership. This was a sophistry to neutralize Socialist annoyance about the fact that, since Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela had formally joined the PCE, the JSU executive now had eleven Communists to four Socialists.138 It was hardly surprising, given the primordial role of the Soviet Union in helping the Republic, that Carrillo should express such enthusiasm for the Communist Party. It would not be long before he would clinch his betrayal of his erstwhile patron.

In the light of Largo Caballero’s incompetence as a war leader, the PCE was increasingly determined to see his removal as Prime Minister. Within barely a month of the JSU conference, the opportunity arose with the disastrous fall of Málaga to rebel forces on 8 February. The disaster could be attributed to Largo Caballero’s mistakes as Minister of War and those of his under-secretary, General José Asensio Torrado. By mid-May, mounting criticism had forced Largo Caballero to resign and he was replaced by the Treasury Minister, Dr Juan Negrín. An internationally renowned physiologist, the moderate Socialist Negrín shared the Communist view that priority should be given to the war effort rather than to revolutionary aspirations. An early contribution to the process of undermining Largo Caballero’s reputation was made by Carrillo when, in early March 1937, he headed a delegation from the JSU to an amplified plenum of the Central Committee of the PCE. In his speech, he was especially savage in his criticism of the POUM. What entirely undermined his constant claims about the JSU’s independence was his hymn of praise to the Communist Party. Moreover, the way he referred to his pride in leaving past mistakes behind must have galled Largo Caballero: ‘Finally, we found this party and this revolutionary line for which we have fought all our life, our short life. We are not ashamed of our past, in our past there is nothing deserving of reproach, but we are proud to have overcome all the mistakes of the past and to be today militants of the glorious Communist Party of Spain.’ His remarks on his reasons for joining the PCE were even more devastating for Largo Caballero. He referred to ‘those who, when the rebels were nearing Madrid, set off for Valencia’. He went on to say that ‘many of those who today are attacking the JSU were among those who fled’.139

Despite the prominence that came with his earlier position in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid and now as leader of the JSU, Carrillo’s role within the Spanish Communist hierarchy was a subordinate one. He accepted this, doing as he was told with relish. At that March 1937 meeting, he was made a non-voting member of the PCE’s politburo. He attended and listened but took little part in the discussions – being, as Claudín put it, ‘simply the man whose job it was to make sure that the JSU implemented party policy. He did not belong in the inner circles where the important issues were discussed and debated by the delegates of the Comintern (Palmiro Togliatti, Boris Stepanov, Ernst Gerö, Vittorio Codovila), by the top Soviet diplomatic, military and security staff and by the most prominent leaders of the PCE (José Díaz, Pasionaria, Pedro Checa, Jesús Hernández, Vicente Uribe and Antonio Mije).’ Carrillo himself believed at this stage that he was simply not trusted enough to be admitted to these top-secret meetings and was determined to achieve that trust. Accordingly, he was careful to maintain excellent relations with the Comintern representatives, especially with Togliatti and Codovila, the man he regarded as his mentor. Codovila was certainly satisfied with the progress made by his pupil.140

The extent to which Carrillo had transformed himself into ‘his master’s voice’ was confirmed at the JSU National Committee meeting on 15–16 May 1937 – just as Largo Caballero was being removed from the government. Carrillo roundly criticized Largo Caballero’s supporters within the organization and called for their expulsion. Indeed, throughout 1937 and 1938, together with Claudín, Carrillo presided over the systematic elimination of his erstwhile Caballerista allies from the JSU. Claudín’s efforts earned him the nickname of ‘the Jack the Ripper of the JSU’ (el destripador de las juventudes). This process would return to haunt the PCE leadership at the end of the war.141

The importance of Carrillo’s position derived from the fact that the mobilization of the male population, in which the PCE played a key role beginning with the creation of the Fifth Regiment, relied on the continued expansion of the JSU. Its members filled the ranks of the Fifth Regiment and then of the newly created Popular Army as well as those of the Republic’s rearguard security forces. For most of the time during 1937 and 1938, Carrillo devoted himself to building up the PCE’s most valuable asset. However, because he was of military age and should have been in a fighting unit, it was arranged for him to meet his obligations by spending brief periods attached to the General Staff of the commander of Fifth Army Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto. He claimed later to have witnessed parts of the battles of Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. This later provoked outraged jibes by General Enrique Líster. It is almost certainly the case that any visits to the battle front were made in order to check on the JSU’s many political commissars. However, Carrillo’s subsequent attempts to fabricate an heroic military career in response to Líster’s accusations of cowardice were perhaps unnecessary. He could legitimately have argued that he had made a substantial contribution to the Republican war effort through his work in terms of the political education of the great influx of new recruits.142

Indeed, he worked hard to bring both Republican and anarchist youth organizations under the umbrella of the JSU. At every turn, his loyalty to the Spanish Party and the Comintern was unquestionable, symbolized by the large portrait of Stalin that dominated his office. In April 1937, he drafted and presented in Paris an application for the entry of the JSU into the International Union of Socialist Youth, from which, three years earlier, he had removed the Spanish Socialist Youth (FJS). In Britain, France and other democratic countries, the Socialist youth organizations were putting pressure on their respective governments to support the Spanish Republic. It made perfect sense in terms of the Republican quest for international support for Carrillo to try to take JSU into the organization. He later claimed that the idea for this initiative was entirely his own. Since, as he later admitted, a key element of his initiative was to work towards the unity of the Socialist and Communist Youth Internationals, the idea received the approval of the KIM hierarchy. As the creation of the JSU showed, this would be the first step to a Communist take-over of the larger Socialist organization. The initiative led to the JSU being provisionally admitted to the International Union of Socialist Youth and generated the expected increase in support for the Republic.143

He was rewarded for his loyalty by being made the object of a carefully constructed personality cult. He was referred to as the ‘undisputed leader of the youth of Spain’ and as ‘the rudder and great guide of our great Youth Federation’. On the first page of the JSU journal Espartaco, there was a photograph of Carrillo accompanied by a description of him as ‘the leader beloved of all the young masses of Spain, the solid creator of, and the key to, the unity of the JSU. He, along with the executive committee, channels with a safe and steady hand the enormous strength of the young generation that is fighting for the independence of Spain.’ In July 1938, the JSU newspaper Ahora carried a photograph under which the caption was ‘Our secretary general … beloved leader of Spanish youth, whose intelligent and selfless efforts have enabled him to lead the struggle and the labour of our country’s youth in the fight for the independence of the motherland.’ Not long afterwards, Claudín was to be found referring to Carrillo in identical terms. There was some ribaldry in other organizations about the interruptions to the war effort constituted by great public meetings in which it was not clear if the purpose was to raise the morale of the young militants or to massage Carrillo’s ego.144

In April 1938, Franco’s forces had reached the Mediterranean and split the Republican zone in two. By the summer, the Republic was edging to defeat, with Valencia under direct threat. The Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, decided to mount a spectacular counter-offensive to stem the continual erosion of territory. To restore contact between the central zone and Catalonia, an assault across the River Ebro was planned by his chief of staff General Vicente Rojo. In the most hard-fought battle of the entire war, Franco poured in massive reinforcements in reaction to the initial Republican success in advancing to Gandesa. For over three months, he pounded the Republicans with air and artillery attacks in an effort to turn Gandesa into the graveyard of the Republican army. Negrín hoped that the Western democracies would finally see the dangers facing them from the Axis. Before that could happen the Republic was virtually sentenced to death by the British reaction to the Czechoslovakian crisis. The Munich agreement destroyed the Republic’s last hope of salvation in a European war. By mid-November, the decimated remnants of the Republican army, led by Manuel Tagüeña, abandoned the right bank of the Ebro. The Republic had lost the bulk of its army and would never recover.

In response to food shortages and conscription of ever younger recruits, demoralization was rife. The deteriorating conditions saw a growth of anti-communism. One symptom of this was the effort being made from the autumn of 1938 by the Socialist Party executive to re-establish a separate Socialist Youth. The JSU organizations of Valencia, Alicante, Albacete, Murcia, Jaen and Ciudad Real were in favour of returning to the old FJS model. Carrillo’s knee-jerk, and futile, response was to denounce the dissidents as Trotskyists. His alarm was understandable since JSU members made up a high proportion of the Republican armed forces. The fact that Serrano Poncela played a key role in this crisis, writing a critical report on the JSU passed to the PSOE executive in 1938, perhaps explains Carrillo’s long-term resentment of him.145 When the JSU headquarters in Alicante were taken over by supporters of Largo Caballero, the FJS was reconstituted. Busts of Lenin and large portraits of Carrillo were destroyed in an iconoclastic venting of rage.146

After the Ebro, and the end of any reasonable hope of victory, war-weariness overwhelmed the Republican zone. Hunger, privation and the scale of casualties took their toll and much of the frustration was visited on the PCE and the JSU. In October, Carrillo and Pedro Checa were sent to Madrid in an attempt to reverse the process whereby anti-communism was undermining what remained of a war effort. They found not only a generalized fatigue but the determined hostility of the leadership of both the PSOE and the CNT. When the Francoists bombed Madrid with loaves of fresh white bread, JSU militants burned them in the streets. Given the scale of hunger suffered by the Madrileños, this was a less successful gesture than Carrillo later claimed. While in the capital, Santiago heard that his father was actively working with the anti-Negrín elements in the PSOE. They had a monumental row over Wenceslao’s claim that the only solution was to seek an honourable surrender.147

Just before Christmas 1938, Franco launched a final offensive armed with new German equipment. His reserves were sufficient for his troops to be relieved every two days. Carrillo and others were sent to Barcelona in the vain hope that they might be able to organize the kind of popular resistance that had saved Madrid in November 1936. His days were spent commuting to the front trying to keep up morale, but the shattered Republican army of the Ebro could barely fight on. He also worked with militants of the Catalan JSU in an effort to organize popular resistance. Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939. Carrillo claimed later that he was still in the Catalan capital as the Francoists approached and did not leave until they were near the city centre. His own accounts are the only source for his claims that, as he headed north, he was nearly captured by Francoist troops in Girona on 4 February. Shortly afterwards, he crossed the French frontier.148 The same is true of his assertion that he was anxious to return to Madrid not only to continue the fight but to be reunited with his wife, Asunción ‘Chon’ Sánchez Tudela, and their one-year-old daughter, Aurora. They had married shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. He was particularly anxious since Chon had heart problems and Aurora was weak as a result of consistently poor nutrition in the first year of her life.149 Why Carrillo did not go back to Madrid and what happened to Chon and Aurora at the end of the war are issues clouded in mystery, as will be explained in the next chapter.

Hundreds of thousands of hungry and terrified refugees from all over Spain left the Catalan capital and began to trek towards France. A huge area of about 30 per cent of Spanish territory still remained to the Republic, but the population was afflicted with ever deepening war-weariness. Although further military resistance was virtually impossible, the Communists were determined to hold on to the bitter end. On the one hand, this was important to their Russian masters as a way of delaying inevitable fascist aggression against the Soviet Union.150 It would also allow them to derive political capital out of the ‘desertion’ of their rivals. In fact, they were far from alone in the belief that, given the determination of Franco to carry out a savage repression, it was crucial to resist in the hope of the Western Powers waking up to the fascist threat. However, the Communists were seen as the main advocates of dogged resistance, and they thereby became the target of the popular resentment, frustration and war-weariness. In contrast, the determination of non-Communist elements to make peace on the best possible terms was immensely attractive to the starving populations of most cities in the Republican zone.

In France, Carrillo missed the coup launched on 5 March by Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre. Casado thought that he could put a stop to the increasingly senseless slaughter. Together with Wenceslao Carrillo and Julián Besteiro, and with anarchist leaders, Casado formed an anti-Communist National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General Miaja. Casado wrongly believed that this would facilitate negotiation with Franco, with whose representatives he had been in touch. In fact, he sparked off a disastrous civil war within the Republican zone, ensured the deaths of many Communists and undermined the evacuation plans for hundreds of thousands of Republicans. In Paris on 7 March, a Party comrade, Luis Cabo Giorla, gave Carrillo two pieces of bad news. He told him about the coup and his father’s role therein and also that his mother had died some weeks before. Carrillo’s reaction, a virulent denunciation of his own father, would be among the most revealing episodes of his life.151