The Comintern Fiasco in Spain:
The Borodin Mission and the
Birth of the Spanish Communist Party
In the aftermath of the First World War, Spain appeared to be ripe for the Communist gospel preached by Lenin. Governed by a discredited Liberal order
The Restoration or Liberal Monarchy began with the return of the Bourbons to the throne in December 1874. It ushered in a period of political stability and introduced a modicum of significant civil liberties. However, it was far from being a genuine democracy. A governing oligarchy monopolized real power as two monarchist parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, succeeded each other in office in a practice known as the turno pacífico (peaceful rotation). They were groups of notables closely connected with agrarian and financial interests, whose political hegemony was based on nepotism and the ballot rigging carried out by local bosses or caciques who ensured the fabrication of working majorities in parliament. and affected by galloping inflation and shortages of staple products, the countryside was in open revolt and the cities shaken by food riots and massive industrial strikes. Such was the upsurge of revolutionary agitation that from late 1918 Moscow’s hand was perceived behind every social dispute. Indeed, amidst a mood verging on paranoia, all kinds of alarmist rumours and wild fantasies involving Soviet gold and subversive conspiracies circulated freely. For instance, the leading Catholic mouthpiece, El Debate, after noting the dangerous advance of Communism across Europe, warned that there were 100,000 hard-core Bolsheviks in Barcelona. Even the normally sober El Sol claimed that none other than Lenin had landed in the Catalan capital to lead a revolution! A colonel of the Civil Guard stationed there reported to the Director General of that corps that foreign agents had already distributed the extraordinary sum of 4 million pesetas to finance a revolution. Amidst this bourgeois hysteria, the Catalan Monarchist Joaquín María Nadal wrote in his memoirs that the horror caused by Bolshevism was such that it appeared as if the Russians had already taken control of sections of Barcelona.
El Debate (2 February and 1 March 1919); El Sol (16 January 1919), cited by E. González Calleja, El Máuser y el sufragio: Orden público, subversión y violencia política en la crisis de la Restauración, 1917-1931 (Madrid: CSIC, 1999), p. 68; Archivo Histórico Nacional, Serie A, Ministerio de la Gobernación (hereafter AHN), Leg. 17A, Exp. 1, letter from Colonel of the Civil Guard (5 January 1919); J. M. Nadal, Memóries (Barcelona: 2nd ed., Aedos, 1965), p. 295. For a global view of this moment of bourgeois fear see A. Elorza, Sesenta años en la historia del Partido Comunista de España (Madrid: Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas, 1980), pp. 20-2.
The British Embassy observed, in January 1920, that although there was no reason to suppose that any travellers to Spain would be molested, it would be certainly inadvisable to go there at present.
National Archives, Foreign Office Papers (hereafter FO) 371-4120, Report on the current situation in Spain (17 January 1920). Communism, however, turned out to be an utter failure in Spain. It did not make any significant inroad in either of the two traditional organised working class forces in the country: the Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and its trade union the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Given the initial encouraging signs, the Communist debacle in Spain was a particularly striking setback. Questions of luck and fate cannot be used to explain it.
See, for instance, the American scholar Gerald Meaker’s contention that purely contingent causes explain largely the Communist failure in Spain. See his otherwise excellent monograph, The Revolutionary Left in Spain 1914-23 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 478-9. It is also academically fallacious to lay emphasis on the `hot temper’ of the Spaniards to justify the failure of Communism. The Communist fiasco cannot be put down to the absence of objective revolutionary conditions. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) was founded in April 1920 - earlier than in France or Italy -, and at the peak of social unrest in Spain. This article will focus on the circumstances surrounding the PCE’s birth and argue that the ignorance and impatience of the Comintern agents who, after arriving in Spain in December 1919, and founding the Spanish Communist Party a few months later, were largely responsible for the utter and surprising shambles of Spanish Communism.
The News that Came in from the Cold
Separated by a continent devastated by war and with deficient communication channels, news arriving in Spain from Russia was mostly late and often confusing. However, the impact of the 1917 Russia’s revolutionary events proved to be colossal.
With living standards dramatically hurt by the galloping inflation and shortages brought about by the Great War, the two rival workers’ organizations - the Socialist UGT-PSOE and the Anarcho-Syndicalist CNT - sealed, for the first time in history, a Labour Pact in July 1916 in order to force the government to implement urgent measures to solve the unfolding social crisis.
Fundación Pablo Iglesias (hereafter FPI), Archivo Amaro del Rosal. Records of the UGT's Executive Committee (July 1916). See also A. Saborit, Julián Besteiro (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967), pp. 85-92. Knowledge of the fall of the hitherto mighty tsarist regime in March 1917 strengthened the belief that a similar event could take place in Spain. Thus, on 26 March, Socialists and Anarcho-Syndicalists subscribed to a manifesto in which the ruling system was accused of being the cause of the widespread popular distress and was threatened with being overthrown by means of a general strike.
El Socialista (28 March 1917). Finally, under pressure from their own restless rank and file and the calls for action from the more militant CNT, the Socialists, on 13 August 1917, confident that the Spanish monarchy would collapse as easily as its Russian counterpart, abandoned their traditional caution and led a revolutionary strike. However, hopes that the troops would desert the regime and fraternise with the masses as in Petrograd soon were dashed: Spanish soldiers obeyed their officers and after a week had crushed the revolutionary movement everywhere but Asturias.
In fact, the government used an unsolved transport dispute to provoke the labour movement into an ill-timed revolutionary strike. The extent of the administration manipulation of events can be seen by the instructions given by the Minister of the Interior, José Sánchez Guerra, to the local civil governors: AHN, Leg. 42A. Exp.1 (8 August 1917). Rumours spread by the government that foreign gold was behind the disturbances appeared plausible to army officers given the sympathy of Socialists and Republicans for the Allies. The military therefore concluded that it was better to shoot workers in Spain than to dig trenches in France: FO 185-1346/433 and 371-3034/175803, Dispatches from British Ambassador Arthur Hardinge on the claim that the revolution was the work of foreign gold (24 and 31 August 1917). For the August 1917 events see J. Buxadé, España en crisis (Barcelona: Bauzá, 1917), pp. 251-96; F. Soldevilla, El año político de 1917 (Madrid: Julio Cosano, 1918), pp. 370-98; A. Saborit, La huelga de agosto de 1917 (México: Pablo Iglesias, 1967), pp. 67-74; J.A. Lacomba, La crisis española de 1917 (Málaga: Ciencia Nueva, 1970), pp. 257-72; Joan Serrallonga, `Motines y revolución: España, 1917 ' in Francesc Bonamusa (ed.), Ayer, 4, (Madrid 1991), pp. 181-91; and the works by F. J. Romero Salvadó, Spain 1914-1918, Between War and Revolution (London: Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies, 1999), pp. 120-34, and Foundations of Civil War. Revolution, Social Conflict and Reaction in Liberal Spain, 1916-1923 (London: Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies, 2008), pp. 86-92.
Soon after the defeat of the August revolutionary strike, news of the seizure of power in Russia by the relatively unknown Bolsheviks arrived in Spain. The reaction to such a crucial event was determined to a large extent by poor intellectual analysis and attitude towards the Great War.
The openly pro-Allied Socialists could not conceal their disappointment at an event that clearly jeopardised the Entente’s victory.
The Socialist leadership embraced enthusiastically the Allied cause. This position was defended by Pablo Iglesias in parliament in November 1914, and won the official support of the PSOE at its 10th Congress held in Madrid on 24-31 October 1915. See X Congreso del PSOE (Madrid: UGT, 1915), pp. 88-95. See also C. Forcadell, Parlamentarismo y bolchevización (Barcelona: Crítica, 1978), pp. 87-93, 123-35. Thus, the editorial of their mouthpiece, El Socialista, on 10 November 1917, argued with undisguised bitterness:
We regret the news we have received from Russia. We believe that for the time being the mission of that great country is to devote all its energy to the task of crushing German imperialism...If the events we contemplate today with fear and pain were to give rise to a separate peace, to a desertion from the ranks of the Western Alliance which is faced with the enemy of all liberties and popular rights [Germany], what will then be left of that proud revolution?
Furthermore, the PSOE’s pursuit of parliamentarian practices and belief in the need for an initial stage of bourgeois democracy aligned them with Russian Menshevism. Consequently, the Bolshevik’s forceful take-over was regarded as an ill-fated adventure bound to end in disaster. The UGT-PSOE’s founding father-figure, Pablo Iglesias, forecast that the existing `Russian annoyance’ would not last long.
El Socialista (28 March 1918).
By contrast, Libertarian quarters greeted the Bolshevik triumph with unrestrained enthusiasm. The CNT’s main newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera, praised it as the path to follow and an example from which to learn.
Solidaridad Obrera (11 November 1917). The then CNT Secretary, Manuel Buenacasa, wrote years later that, for most of them, the Bolshevik was almost a God, the bearer of freedom and popular happiness.
M. Buenacasa, El movimiento obrero español, 1886-1926 (Gijón: Júcar, 1977), p. 50. Ironically, the exaltés and the pure Anarchists became Communism’s most passionate supporters. Blinded partly by revolutionary optimism and partly by ideological ignorance, the Bolshevik victory appeared to them as the final vindication of their own vision of revolutionary spontaneity. Of course, they were unaware of the vital role played by a vanguard revolutionary party in seizing power in Petrograd and instead looked with admiration upon the destruction of bourgeois democracy and the accomplishments of Soviet power: peace and land redistribution.
See editorials praising Bolshevism in Solidaridad Obrera (12, 25-6 November 1917; 11 January and 30 May 1918); and in the Anarchist newspaper Tierra y Libertad (5 and 26 December 1917, 2 January 1918). See also Forcadell, op.cit. pp. 259-64; A. Bar, La CNT en los años rojos, 1910-26 (Madrid: Akal, 1981), pp. 438-46; J. Avilés Farré, La fe que vino de Rusia: la revolución bolchevique y los españoles, 1917-1931 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999), pp. 57-9; and Meaker, op.cit., pp. 101-8. In their simplistic approach, they believed that if Spanish Socialists identified with the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks ought to be the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalists. Their confusion was actually matched by leading Spanish diplomats stationed in Russia: the Spanish Ambassador, the Marquis of Villasinda, had actually reported in the spring of 1917 that Lenin was a leading anarchist agitator.
Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (hereafter AMAE), H 2760 (17 May 1917).
The Bolshevik Attraction
Between 1918 and 1920, Spain seemed a fertile ground for the spread of Bolshevism. This period marked the peak of the inflationary cycle and acute worsening living standards as the population was hit by shortages of staple products and galloping prices while wages lagged far behind.
Instituto de Reformas Sociales, Movimiento de los precios al por menor durante la guerra y la posguerra, 1914-1922 (Madrid: Sobrinos de la Sociedad de M. Minuesa, 1923), pp. 10-11. Amidst these dire social circumstances, the country experienced an explosive situation that possessed a rural as well as an urban dimension.
Such was the stunning impact of the Bolshevik Revolution amongst the ever-restless braceros (literally those landless peasants working with their arms or brazos) that the period 1918-20 was known as the Trienio Bolchevique: three years of huge revolutionary euphoria in the southern countryside. With a high percentage of the population treated as merely a pool of cheap labour subject to the whims of managers and landowners of the large estates, the rural south was traditionally a region of bitter class struggle. In addition to their usual grievances, the rural proletariat had been also dramatically hurt by the social and economic impact of the Great War.
The wages earned by the Andalusian worker were abysmally low and out of touch with the spiralling prices of staple products: Instituto de Reformas Sociales, Información sobre el problema agrario de la provincia de Córdoba (Madrid: Sobrinos de la Sociedad de M. Minuesa, 1921), p. 11. However, contemporaries of the events stressed that news of the Bolshevik take-over and the subsequent land expropriation was the catalyst that aroused the impoverished rural labourers:
Chatting with workers I could notice their enthusiasm…All conversations led towards Russia…If we talked about harvest, the question arose: What is sown in Russia? If we talked about the weather, we were interrupted suddenly: In Russia is it warm or cold? And for any motive: Where is Russia? How long would it take me to get there on foot? Russia was an obsession.
J. Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), p. 343.
Indeed, news of the Bolshevik Revolution began to filter through slowly from village to village as native Anarchists as well as some Socialists travelled spreading the encouraging news coming from the east: Russian workers and peasants had seized power and the land was being redistributed.
The lawyer and small landowner Juan Díaz del Moral (op.cit., pp. 266-73) and the criminologist Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós (El Espartaquismo agrario Andaluz, Madrid: Tuner, 1974, pp. 78-9, 86-8) agreed that the rural explosion was mainly the product of rising expectations spurred by the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. As the southern ruling classes appeared to lose control of the situation, the workers’ organisations, for a short time, became the only source of authority, exercising (in all but name) a kind of dictatorship of the proletariat.
Bernaldo de Quirós, op.cit., p. 86; FO 425/138, Hardinge to Curzon (23 March 1919). However, it was the upheaval shaking the cities and not events in the relatively isolated southern countryside that generated massive bourgeois hysteria.
The Red Spectre
From 1918, the number of strikes shot up while food riots, assaults on shops and bakeries and fistfights in the markets became a common feature in many provincial capitals. Barcelona, above all, became the centre of the revolutionary effervescence. As Spain’s economic powerhouse, the Catalan capital contained the critical combination of a large and radicalised proletariat, an intransigent employer class, a restless officer corps and a widespread mistrust of the central administration. Moreover, the Great War contributed dramatically to fuelling existing class hatred: while Catalan industrial barons enjoyed extraordinary profits that were often frittered away on new property or extravagant life styles, the proletariat suffered from shortages, rising prices and long factory shifts. In addition, the workers’ appalling conditions of overcrowding and poor sanitation were worsened even further by the massive inflow of immigrants that arrived lured by the economic boom.
For the impact of the war on the Catalan bourgeoisie see P. Gual Villalbi, Memorias de un industrial de nuestro tiempo (Barcelona: Sociedad General de Publicaciones, 1923), pp. 103-7, 110-21; Nadal, op.cit., pp. 256-7; A. Jutglar, Historia crítica de la burguesía en Cataluña (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1984), pp. 366-81. On the labour movement see A. Pérez Baró, Els feliços anys vint: Memories d’un militant obrer, 1918-28 (Palma de Mallorca: Moll, 1974), pp. 10-11; C. Ealham, `Class and the City: Spatial Memories of Pleasure and Danger in Barcelona, 1914-23’, Oral History, Vol. 29, 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 39-41. See A. Balcells, El Sindicalisme a Barcelona, 1916-23 (Barcelona: Nova Terra, 1965), p. 11: the average annual immigration for 1900-10, of 3,400 people increased during the following decade to 20,000 per annum.
However, it was not the Socialists, still traumatised by the repressive events of August 1917, but the CNT that rode the crest of the existing popular turmoil. Rather than the Socialists’ distant objective of conquering the state through gradual demands and the ballot box, the CNT local committees were more in tune with the aggrieved working classes, tapping into the largely spontaneous street mobilisations and riots and therefore consolidating their grass-roots popularity and neighbourhood strength.
C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (London: Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies, 2005), pp. 39-42. A new generation of Anarcho-Syndicalist leaders emerged in Barcelona during the war years whose main objective was to re-build the organization. Their efforts culminated in the Congress of Sants (Barcelona) - 28 June-1 July 1918 - with the establishment of local industrial trade unions, Sindicatos Únicos (Single Trade Unions), to replace the old craft federations whose rivalries had hitherto characterised the Catalan proletariat.
Confederación Regional del Trabajo, Memoria del Congreso celebrado en Barcelona los días 28, 29, 30 de Junio y el 1 de Julio de 1918 (Barcelona: CRT, 1918), pp. 17-20, 77-9. A good analysis of the growth of the CNT in Barcelona during these years is in P. Gabriel, `Red Barcelona in the Europe of War and Revolution’, in A. Smith (ed.), Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 46-53; and A. Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction. Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898-1923 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), pp. 232-50. The Sindicato Único was adopted at a national level during the national congress of December 1919.
Solidaridad Obrera boasted that the proletariat enjoyed with the Sindicatos Únicos the ideal instrument to succeed in the class struggle.
Solidaridad Obrera (2 July 1918). This assertion was anything but a hollow claim. The CNT’s astonishing ability to mobilize the Catalan proletariat was clearly shown when an industrial dispute began in early February 1919 at Barcelona's Ebro Irrigation and Power Company, the city’s most important electricity supplier. The conflict lasted 44 days during which the usual array of repressive measures proved useless. Under the leadership of the Sindicato Único of Gas, Water and Electricity, the city was brought to a stand-still. The strike ended with a stunning victory for the workers: the company agreed to accept the re-hiring of its discharged employees (without penalties of any kind) and to raise salaries, while the government granted an amnesty for all those imprisoned and introduced an eight-hour working day in the construction sector (with a promise to extend this legislation to all industry).
Full documentary narrative of events can be found in AHN, Leg. 57A, Exp. 10. See also Balcells, op.cit., pp. 68-78; and F. Madrid, Ocho meses y un día en el Gobierno Civil de Barcelona (Barcelona: La Flecha, 1932), pp. 13-24. The startling character of the CNT’s victory was recognised by Hardinge, in FO 371-4120/35476 (18 March 1919).
The CNT’s stunning success as well as the identification of many Anarcho-Syndicalists with Bolshevism set alarm bells ringing amongst the Spanish ruling classes. Disheartening reports of revolutionary turmoil across Europe confirmed their worst fears. The directors of Fomento del Trabajo Nacional, Catalonia’s powerful employers' association created in 1889, described the situation as a macabre film.
Archivo de la Federación del Trabajo Nacional, Memoria de la Junta Directiva del Fomento del Trabajo Nacional correspondiente a 1919-1920 (Barcelona: Hijos de Domingo Casanova, 1920), pp. 18-20.
The Spanish regime endeavoured to collaborate with the Western Powers in the containment and, hopefully, liquidation of the `Red Spectre’. For example, in 1919, they agreed to participate in the international blockade of the Soviet Union and to accept the deployment of a British agent, Captain Guy D. Williams, to help control revolutionary activities in Spain.
AHN, Leg. 17A, Exp. 1: Spain’s willingness to collaborate with the British government to fight Bolshevism (3-4 January 1919); order to stop the entry of foreigners (12 January 1919); appointment of Captain Williams (25 and 27 June 1919); blockade of the Soviet Union (16 and 21 October 1919). At the same time, with the excuse of rooting out Bolshevism, the authorities launched a shameful witch-hunt against foreign nationals: refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany, portrayed as international agents of revolution and as the bearers of lavish amounts of Soviet gold, were rounded up and deported. King Alfonso XIII was supportive of this initiative. Otherwise, as he confided to the British ambassador, the pernicious infection of Communism would spread throughout Spain.
Abundant archival evidence of the witch-hunt of foreign nationals is in AHN, Leg. 17A, Exp. 1 (February- March 1919); Leg. 42A, Exp. 3 and Exp. 4 (December 1918-March 1919); Leg. 3A, Exp. 15 (1919-20); Leg. 35A, Exp. 1 (1920-23); and AMAE, H2766 and H3024 (December 1919-April 1923). See also FO 371-4122/53218, report by Hardinge (5 April 1919); 371-4120/148793, report by Consul in Barcelona Arthur L. Rowley (30 October 1919). On king’s position see FO 371-4118/20803, dispatch by Hardinge (2 February 1919). For further analysis see Romero Salvadó, Foundations, pp. 188-92
Notwithstanding the all-out anti-Bolshevik campaign, the ruling politicians were perceived as increasingly unable to contain the revolutionary avalanche and defend the social order. Court and ruling classes gripped by fear and anxiety turned their eyes to the armed forces that also regarded the political class as corrupt and untrustworthy. Stunned by the CNT’s power, right-wing newspapers cried that the government had left decent Catalan citizens defenceless and began to argue that only a dictatorship could save the country.
El Debate (8 and 12 March 1919); La Acción (8 March 1919); and La Correspondencia Militar (8 and 10 March 1919). Soon thereafter, industrialists in collusion with army officers organized paramilitary formations that operated not only behind the back of governments but, when necessary, against them. Spain in general and Catalonia in particular descended into a chaotic period of social warfare. Leading Anarcho-Syndicalists were killed and thousands of militants arrested. Anarchist groups responded in kind, assassinating employers, overseers and strike-breakers. The reigning social conflict paved the way for the military coup of September 1923.
The crucial role played by the Catalan-centred reaction in bringing about a military coup is discussed in Romero Salvadó, Foundations, chapters, 8-9 and 11. Amongst the abundant narrative on the reigning social violence see L. Ignacio, Los años del pistolerismo (Madrid: Planeta, 1981); A. Balcells, `Violencia y terrorismo en la lucha de clases en Barcelona de 1913 a 1923' and F. del Rey Reguillo, `Ciudadanos honrados y somatenistas. El orden y la subversión en la España de los años 20', both in Estudios de Historia Social, 42-43 (July-December 1987), pp. 37-79, 97-150; and Calleja, op.cit., pp. 105-240.
Moscow Calling
On 24 December 1918, Moscow announced the forthcoming establishment of a new truly revolutionary Third International (Comintern) to replace the divided Second or Social-Democratic International (which had split on the outbreak of the war in 1914) and appealed to working class organisations to join. Celebrated, in March 1919, at the peak of the Russian Civil War and with the Great Powers erecting a massive cordon sanitaire around Soviet territory, the first congress was a relatively small affair in which the few attending international delegates were mostly representatives of the non-Russian provinces of the former tsarist empire and émigrés with little connection with their native countries.
J. Riddell (ed.), Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (London: Pathfinder Press, 1987). However its impact was formidable: an enterprise whose objective was to organise world revolution was up and running. Europe’s labour movement could no longer adopt an ambiguous stance towards the Soviet experiment. In the Spanish case, three nearly-simultaneous congresses held in Madrid in December 1919 revealed a low intellectual analysis and staggering ideological confusion.
First of all, the PSOE gathered at its headquarters of La Casa del Pueblo between 8-15 December to discuss whether to remain in the Second International or join the Comintern. This was a highly divisive decision for a party that hitherto had been marked by a lack of serious internal dissent.
Due to its identification with the views of its historic leader Pablo Iglesias, Spanish Socialism was dubbed `Pablismo’: an ambiguous stance that simultaneously contained a fierce revolutionary rhetoric while in practice adopting a gradualist approach, participating in the crooked electoral process and avoiding risking the safety of the organisation for the sake of ill-planned adventures. This strategy was derided by Moscow as Centrism. However, the old guard’s open support for the Allied cause followed by their initial hostility towards Bolshevism split this relatively coherent centre between a left- and a right-wing tendency.
This analysis follows that of Meaker (op.cit., pp. 195-6): a party dominated by a centrist tendency, with an acceptance of the synthesis of `revolutionary-reformism' that, as a consequence of the Russian Revolution, split between right-wing and left-wing centrists.
Iglesias’s lieutenant, the Madrid University Professor Julián Besteiro, was not entirely incorrect when he compared the PSOE’s leading supporters of the Comintern to sergeants staging a mutiny against the generals.
Congreso Extraordinario del PSOE en 1921 (Bilbao: Zero, 1921), p. 96. This was recognised by the leader of the Spanish Communists in the Basque Country, Oscar Pérez Solís, in his autobiography Memorias de mi amigo Oscar Perea (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1929), p. 276. Known as terceristas for their support for the Third International, they were mostly a combination of internationalists during the war and historical regional leaders who either had never quite made it to the party’s central elite or had lost their leading posts to younger upstarts. By 1919, disenchantment with the Versailles Treaty, Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War as well as growing social upheaval ensured the radicalization of the rank-and-file. The momentum began to shift towards the terceristas as their seizure of control of the powerful Madrid Socialist Branch in September 1919 revealed. With the old guard in charge of the Socialist press organ, El Socialista, the terceristas published their own newspapers such as Nuestra Palabra and La Internacional.
For instance, historical regional leaders such as Isidoro Acevedo and Facundo Perezagua who had been pushed from their positions in Asturias and Vizcaya respectively by upstarts such as Manuel Llaneza and Indalecio Prieto. Founded in August 1918, Nuestra Palabra (named after Trotsky's publication Nashe Slovo while exiled in Paris) was at the core of the tercerista cause. Many, like the paper's editors, Mariano García Cortés and Ramón Lamoneda, were internationalists who had opposed the party's pro-Allied position. See P. Heywood, Marxism and the Failure of Organized Socialism in Spain, 1876-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 56-7, 60-9; Forcadell, op.cit., pp. 253-7, 280-4; L. Arranz, `La ruptura del PSOE en la crisis de la Restauración: el peso del Octubre ruso', Estudios de Historia Social, 32-33 (January-June 1985), p. 7; Elorza, op.cit., p. 7; Meaker, op.cit., pp. 111-16. On Madrid Socialist branch see FPI, Assemblies and Minutes of Madrid's Socialist Party, 1918-26 (hereafter AASM-LXX-3), 2 and 4 September 1919.
Despite the rising pro-Soviet tide in the Socialist movement, the old guard's cunning and experience outmanoeuvred the terceristas. Throughout 1919 they played their centrist strategy very smartly: solidarity with the embattled Soviets in Russia that included constant praise for Bolshevism and its deeds while simultaneously emphasizing that Lenin’s principles could not be implemented universally (let alone in Spain, where the political and economic conditions were radically different).
Avilés, op.cit., p. 106. By contrast, the terceristas, even though reenergized by the advent of Bolshevism, still identified whole-heartedly with the Pablista emphasis on the unity of the Socialist family. They were therefore reluctant to endorse any initiative that could split the party. Thus, many of them accepted the formula endorsed by the old guard at the Congress of December 1919, a compromise devised to gain time. Indeed, the final poll supported a half-way formula by which the PSOE would remain, for the time being, in the Second International, pending the outcome of that body's forthcoming Geneva Congress. Meanwhile, the Spanish delegates would work for the merger of both Internationals. If their efforts were rejected, the PSOE would then consider joining the Comintern.
The Congress can be followed in El Socialista (9-15 December 1919).
On 14-18 December, the Congress of the Spanish Socialist Youth Federation (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas Españolas, FJSE) presented a very different picture. With their idealism sparked by Russian events, the Socialist youngsters not only departed radically from the line maintained by the old guard but also rejected the type of compromising formulas accepted by the senior terceristas. They first ousted their executive and appointed a radical new one dominated by Madrid-based young revolutionaries such as the new Secretary General Ramón Merino Gracia and then voted for unconditional adherence to the Comintern. On 31 December 1919, they duly sent a letter to Angelica Balabanova, the Comintern's executive committee Secretary, announcing their decision to join that body.
The resolutions of the FJSE’s Fifth Congress are in Renovación (20 January 1920); and the letter in FPI, Ex-Instituto de Marxismo Leninismo (hereafter AAVV-CV), The Communist International, The Socialist Youth (17-21). See also the memoirs of two original members of the FJSE and later of the central committee of the Communist Party: J. Andrade, Apuntes para la historia del PCE (Barcelona: Fontana, 1979), p. 22; and L. Portela, `El nacimiento y los primeros pasos del movimiento comunista en España', Estudios de Historia Social, 14 (July-September 1980), p. 199.
Almost simultaneously (10-18 December), the third labour congress, that of the CNT, took place at the Teatro de la Comedia. The choice of Madrid, a vital Socialist stronghold, for their venue embodied the undisguised confidence of the Cenetistas, who were then at the height of their power and membership: some 700,000 militants (the UGT had then some 200,000 members). Amidst revolutionary euphoria, the Anarcho-Syndicalists passed baffling resolutions. None was more confusing though than the decision, for the first time, to abandon their neutral apolitical stance and openly embrace anarchist principles while paradoxically voting by an overwhelming majority to join the Communist International and send delegates to the forthcoming Comintern Congress in the summer. Again, poor intellectual analysis and, certainly, knowledge of the painful divisions emanating from the Socialist Congress next door were crucial in perpetuating the love affair with Bolshevism.
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, Memoria del Congreso celebrado en el Teatro de la Comedia de Madrid, los días 10 al 18 de Diciembre de 1919 (Toulouse: Portes & San José, 1948), pp. 341-74.
By the end of 1919, the level of ideological confusion within the Spanish labour movement was stunning. The CNT, and in particular its Anarchist hard core, was joining the Comintern in the belief that the Bolsheviks were their Russian soul mates. In turn, the Socialist leadership while rivalling the Anarcho-Syndicalists in verbal radicalism had managed to postpone any decisions. Finally, the Socialist Youth had split with its elders and was embracing Communism whole-heartedly.
The Soviet Mission in Spain
The Comintern agents arrived in Spain soon after the closing of the congresses. Their timing could not have been more fortunate. It coincided with the peak of rural and urban strife as well as grass-root enthusiasm for Bolshevism. Extraordinarily though at this stage of bourgeois panic and deportation of hundreds of innocent foreigners, they went largely undetected although this was not due to the Soviet operatives’ skills or those of their Spanish acolytes. If anything, the opposite was true: in a proud yet naïve editorial on 12 February 1920, Nuestra Palabra even gave away the presence of the Soviet Mission in Spain.
The editorial, titled `Declarations of Borodin, the Comintern’s delegate’, revealed how Borodin had been in Madrid organizing the leading pro-Soviet elements. It noted that no information had been forthcoming earlier for reasons of `discretion’ but now it could be disclosed since comrade Borodin was safely abroad. This editorial was actually a mixture of childish boasting and indiscretion. Soon the Spanish terceristas were gripped by anger and fear at their own audacity of having dared published it. See FPI, AAVV-CV, The Communist International, Reports from Spain (16), 14 February 1920. Their going undetected was due to the glaring inefficiency and poor intelligence of Spain’s security services. Indeed, the then upcoming Socialist Member of Parliament, Indalecio Prieto, at the outset of the rounding up of foreigners had warned militants `not to wear furs, regardless of the inclemency of the weather, or the brilliant Spanish police might arrest them believing them to be Russians’.
Biblioteca de la Real Academia Española, Count Romanones’s Papers, Leg. 10, Exp. 14 (19 January 1919).
The Soviet leaders’ main concern during these years was to emerge victorious in their bitter civil war. Certainly, the spread of Bolshevism was regarded as a vital weapon not only for the goal of world revolution but also for the survival of the Soviet regime. However, Moscow’s main target was Germany. Spain, clearly not a priority, remained largely ignored. Indeed, the first Comintern agents appeared in Spain by accident: they were instructed to stop there on their journey from Mexico to Russia. Hitherto, the only contact with foreign Communists had been that between some young Socialists and the Dutch correspondent of the Niewe Rotterdamsche, G.I. Geers, who belonged to the ultra-leftist Bureau of Amsterdam, a Comintern continental offshoot charged with recruitment and propaganda.
The Comintern envoys did not fit the image portrayed by the bourgeois press of Soviet agents: expert and wicked characters always loaded with gold. In fact, they were penniless and behaved very amateurishly: ignorant about the country, blinded by orthodox purism and let down by impatience that reflected the revolutionary confidence and delusions of the times. The combination of these short-comings proved disastrous for the well-being of Spanish Communism.
The Comintern agents who landed in Spain were a picturesque group, to say the least. The leader, the Russian Mikhail Gruzenberg, known as Borodin, had firstly belonged to the Jewish Socialist organisation, the Bund. Due to tsarist persecution, he had fled to the United States in 1905 where he returned in 1919 with contraband jewels to raise funds. After bungling this commission, he crossed the border and founded the Mexican Communist Party. He would achieve greatest notoriety for his activities in 1920s China where he engineered the ill-fated alliance between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalist Kuomintang. Two other colourful characters accompanied him. The first was Charles Phillips, a young American who had participated in the left-wing Bohemian circles centred in Greenwich Village and in anti-war activities in Columbia University. He had fled the United States in order to avoid the draft. Phillips was to use many different aliases (such as Frank Seaman, Manuel Gómez and Charles Shipman) in his adventurous career. In Spain, he carried a Mexican passport under the name of Jesús Ramírez. His good knowledge of Spanish placed him in the key position of interpreter and Borodin’s early departure left him in charge. The other was an Indian nationalist revolutionary, Narendranath Bhattacharya, known as M.N. Roy. A veteran of the struggle against the British Empire, he had participated during the Great War in all sort of hapless adventures in Indonesia, China, Japan, United States, etc. He ended up in Mexico where he enjoyed a comfortable life due to his ability to take advantage of that country’s political intrigues and with cash from the seemingly endless funds of his prodigal German spy-masters. Not that he ever managed to accomplish successfully any operation. Converted to Bolshevism by Borodin in Mexico, Roy and Phillips collaborated in the foundation of the Mexican Communist Party and even were appointed `Mexican’ delegates to the next Comintern Congress! In those Mexican revolutionary days, Communism counted on the sympathy of the existing President, Venustiano Carranza. In an ideological misunderstanding reminiscent of that committed by the CNT, Carranza had even told Roy that he was a Bolshevik, like all patriotic Mexicans: `The Yankees, who are our enemies, do not like the Bolsheviks. Therefore the Bolsheviks must be our friends’. Roy’s contacts were useful in providing him with semi-diplomatic cover and a Mexican passport under the name of Roberto Alleny Villa García. He arrived in Spain nearly a month after the other two.
Ramírez produced a rich collection of reports written in English (AAVV-CV-16). See the biographical works by M. N. Roy, Memoirs (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1964), pp. 109, 178-212, 234-5; and C. Shipman, It had to be Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 75-97. Brief accounts of the Borodin mission are in M. Caballero, La Internacional Comunista y la Revolución Latinoamericana, 1919-43 (Caracas: Nueva Sociedad, 1987), pp. 60-1, 81-2; L. Arranz, `Los primeros pasos de la Internacional Comunista en España', in J. Tusell et al., La política exterior de España en el Siglo XX (Madrid: UNED, 1997), pp. 41-51; and A. Elorza and M. Bizcarrondo, Queridos Camaradas (Madrid: Planeta, 1999), pp. 19-29.
From the start, the initiatives of the Comintern agents revealed a total lack of knowledge of Spanish politics. Their arrival, coinciding as it did with the peak of labour agitation, seemed ideal for their aims. However, after landing in north-western Spain, in La Coruña, they quickly proceeded to the relatively tranquil Madrid, the state capital. Anyone slightly-informed would have gone instead to Barcelona, the key industrial centre and main stronghold of the CNT (with some 400,000 militants), the by far Spain’s largest and only genuine revolutionary organisation (and one that had just voted to affiliate to the Comintern). The only mention of the CNT in Ramírez’s reports was telling: at a gathering at la Casa del Pueblo, he met a Cenetista who stood out amongst the crowd for applauding the loudest any mention of the Russian Revolution and confirmed that his organisation had been from the start in favour of the Comintern. Yet Ramírez dismissively wrote that nothing could be done with Anarcho-Syndicalists. Their leaders believed in their own self-sufficiency and would never accept Communism. However, he added, the masses would come gradually over to our party. He did not elaborate how.
AAVV-CV-16 (19 March 1920). Roy (op.cit., pp. 234-5) noted that a visit to Barcelona was sure to be fruitful and then he added that it was wiser nevertheless to find `more reliable’ recruits in the PSOE in Madrid.
Ignorance and hurried improvisation landed the Borodin mission in some farcical situations. For instance, just-arrived and at a complete loss in Madrid, Ramírez decided to `investigate’ the Ateneo, the city’s cultural centre. There, he approached someone who could speak English - the American author, John Dos Passos - in order to help him find someone in the Socialist movement. Dos Passos then introduced him to two party members. One was Fernando de los Ríos, a Professor from Granada and one of the most arch-reformist PSOE members. Following his initial shock, the professor, told Ramírez that he was more a humanist than a socialist. The second, Mariano García Cortés, a Socialist councillor in Madrid, was fortunately a leading exponent of the tercerista cause and obviously in touch with representatives of that tendency. Soon Ramírez and Borodin began organising gatherings of terceristas at some of the latter’s private homes.
Shipman, op.cit., pp. 92-5.
Borodin and Ramírez held their first meeting with the FJSE President José López y López. They must have been baffled when López told them that it did not matter that the PSOE and FJSE congresses had ended with contradictory conclusions since everyone was `heart and soul’ with the Comintern. More astonishing were still his remarks about the FJSE’s precarious economic situation. According to López, although the Socialist Youth could not even afford to send a delegate to Moscow, the FJSE was prepared to show that its admiration for the Comintern was not platonic by paying regular fees!
AAVV-CV-16 (23 December 1919).
Roy’s claim that he had met the `veteran liberal’ Iglesias before the terceristas, annoying them in the process, seemed a ludicrous statement for which there is no corroboration.
Roy (op.cit, pp. 234-5) added that Iglesias proved a hard case that could not be cracked by his youthful enthusiasm. In fact, Roy did not arrive in Spain until February and only participated in 3 meetings (14, 18 and 23 February 1920). It is likely that he was merely exaggerating his minimal role. In fact, the PSOE old guard was regularly informed of these gatherings by some of its attendants. César González, a youngster whose mother Virginia González was one of the few female PSOE leaders, confessed.
AAVV-CV-16 (8-9 February 1920). He would become PCE’s secretary in 1923! If initially prepared to turn a blind eye, Iglesias surely failed to see the comical side to an incident that took place in March 1920. The tercerista Daniel Anguiano, member of the PSOE’s executive committee, was chosen together with Besteiro to be the party’s delegates to a meeting of the Second International in Holland. The trip turned into a major embarrassment when both were detained at the Dutch border. The police seized fifteen secret documents that Anguiano had agreed to deliver to members of the Bureau of Amsterdam on behalf of Ramírez. Besteiro was far from pleased when he was shown papers where he was described as a deceitful and inveterate right-winger. Funds were also requested to help overthrow the current PSOE leadership.
AAVV-CV-16 (24 February, 22-3, 27 March and 7 April 1920). AMAE, H2760, Dutch police report accompanied by letter of Spain’s Diplomatic Legation in The Hague (22 and 29 March 1920).
Before the `Dutch Incident’, Borodin’s initiatives had amounted to fairly modest measures which nevertheless could have led to a sizeable price: the PSOE joining the Comintern and the terceristas seizing control of the party’s executive. With the collaboration of the youngsters Merino Gracia and José López and the senior terceristas García Cortés and Anguiano, an Information Bureau and Press Service to print and send news of Soviet activities known as Agencía Verdad, Servicio Internacional de Noticias (The Truth Agency, International News Service), was established.
AAVV-CV-16 (24, 26 and 28 December 1919). In early January 1920, they created a left-wing bloc formed by the leading Madrid terceristas (consisting of 11 members, with García Cortés as its secretary). The goal was to campaign on behalf of a party referendum on affiliation to the Comintern. Additionally, the left-wing bloc was also to work for the fusion of all Spain’s revolutionary elements, the rejection of bourgeois reforms and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
AAVV-CV-16 (28 December 1919, 1, 2 and 4 January 1920). However, blinded by revolutionary zeal and filled with impatience, the initial cautious approach was abandoned. A new and more uncompromising strategy ultimately produced a rapid but disappointing result.
The Birth of Spanish Communism
The Soviet delegation soon became disappointed and in turn grew critical of the terceristas. Of course, measured by Russian Bolshevik benchmarks, complaints about the weak revolutionary credentials of most terceristas were not far off the mark. After all, they were not professional revolutionaries with years of exile behind them but politicians and trade unionists who, even if dazzled by Bolshevism, had been imbued in the Pablista philosophy of party unity, the need to fight for minimum reforms and participation in bourgeois bodies and politics. Already in January 1920, Borodin was shocked by the half-hearted support for the publication of a manifesto expressing openly Communist views. Only after long discussions was a statement advocating an immediate referendum to join the Comintern endorsed.
AAVV-CV-16 (11 January 1920).
The tercerista’s priority of avoiding a schism annoyed Borodin. However, based on the balance of forces in early 1920, the terceristas were right in their belief that they could sooner rather than later wrest control of the party instead of splitting it. In fact, the Borodin mission, far from helping the tercerista agenda, effectively left the senior left-wing bloc members trapped between the impetuosity of the FJSE and the craftiness of the PSOE leaders. On 8 February 1920, Borodin departed leaving Ramírez in charge.
Ramírez fully shared the Russian’s frustration with the terceristas. During a meeting of the left-wing bloc Anguiano criticised the just elected councillors for Madrid, Mariano García Cortés and Ramón Lamoneda, for fully subscribing to the PSOE’s reformist programme (housing problems, bread prices, etc.). An upset Ramírez wrote that Anguiano’s observation that there was not much difference between their ideas and Besteiro’s was like the explosion of a bomb in the midst of the group.
AAVV-CV-16 (9 February 1920). García Cortés proudly boasted of the PSOE standing for 600 municipalities in La Internacional (6 February 1920). Despair turned into anger when Ramírez heard that, during a meeting of the PSOE’s national committee, the demand of the Asturian delegate, Isidoro Acevedo, for an immediate referendum on the question of adhesion to the Comintern had been rejected and the terceristas had agreed to attend first a gathering of the Second International in Rotterdam in March.
AAVV-CV-16 (23 February 1920). Ramírez wrote:
It is all rather astounding. I was dumbfounded…our fellows had been so completely fooled by the old crowd as to unanimously endorse their proposition for fear of being called `passionalists’…I consider it as intensely significant of the simplicity of the left-wingers and the tenacious craftiness of the party bosses. I now think that you [Borodin] are right. There must be a split in the party as soon as possible. As long as our people remain in the same organisation with the politicians they will be duped by their endless trickery.
AAVV-CV-16 (24 February 1920).
The Borodin group correctly stressed the superiority of the PSOE old guard at political cunning. As Ramírez observed, it was a ludicrous waste of time to go all the way to Rotterdam to find out whether the Second International had the same spirit as the Third.
AAVV-CV-16 (23 February 1920). Utterly disillusioned, the American’s patience finally ran out when he attended deliberations of senior terceristas in the Madrid Socialist Association. Then and there he concluded that they were `reformists who would never accomplish any useful work’. Consequently, he turned his attention to the FJSE, the real bulwark of revolutionary fervour. In particular, he was impressed by its secretary, Merino Gracia, whom he described as `the only one who seemed to have a grasp of the situation, has never wavered and has maintained a revolutionary stand from the beginning.’
AAVV-CV-16 (27 February and 5 March 1920). Shipman, op.cit., pp. 93-4.
Ramírez with Geers’s help carried out the split advocated by Borodin. Behind the backs of the senior left-wing terceristas, they persuaded leading FJSE figures such as Juan Andrade, Eduardo Ugarte and Merino Gracia, to stage a coup and transform the FJSE into the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). On 6 March 1920, the FJSE executive committee, save for its President, José López (who then resigned), voted in favour of that proposal. Anguiano was singled out from the old left-wing bloc to be the new leader. He declined citing his current position of secretary-treasurer in the PSOE executive but claimed to be morally with them.
AAVV-CV-16 (5, 6-8, 10 and 12 March 1920).
Fully supportive of the course of events, Borodin wrote from Holland: `those in the left-wing bloc are a motley crew with neither conviction nor sufficient backbone to carry through a policy in favour of the Third International.’
AAVV-CV-16 (28 March 1920). In the meantime, in absolute secrecy, the youngsters and Ramírez planned the final details. The coup was finally completed on 15 April. That day, all the FJSE provincial federations were instructed to summon extraordinary meetings during which they would open a sealed envelope in which the national executive committee announced its decision to turn the organisation into the PCE and asked them to follow suit at a provincial level. The organ of the FJSE, Renovación, published a two-page editorial explaining the historical necessity of taking that step and a letter from the Bureau of Amsterdam greeting the initiative. It proudly noted that henceforth it would adopt the new name of El Comunista and then in a manner, as idealist as naïve, called workers both in the Socialist and Anarcho-Syndicalist movements to join.
AAVV-CV-16 (3 April 1920). Renovación (15 April 1920). Archivo del PCE (hereafter APCE), Carp. 1, Doc. 12, letters from the Bureau of Amsterdam (May 1920); and Carp. 1, Doc. 2, pamphlets to UGT and CNT members (April-May 1920). See also Andrade, Apuntes, pp. 24-6; and Portela, op.cit., pp. 200-1.
Assessment of the Communist Debacle
Thus was born the Spanish Communist Party. Even Ramírez, inexplicably absent from Spain for the PCE’s birth, conceded that the outcome was poor: less than 2,000 out of the 7,000 FJSE members followed its leaders.
AAVV-CV-16 (24 May 1920). It could not have presented a more different image from the Communist parties in other western European countries such as Italy, Germany and France. Here, although failing to displace the established Socialist movements from their hegemonic position in the labour movement, they became important political forces in their own right.
In the Italian case, the uncompromising attitude of the Bolshevik leaders during the sessions of the Second Comintern Congress (19 July-7 August 1920) helped alienate key Italian delegates such as Giacinto Serrati, the leader of the Maximalist directorate then in control of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and, Armando Borgui, the head of the Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union Unione Sindacale Italiana. The PSI’s split took place in January 1921 at Livorno. The ambiguous Maximalist stance proved able to keep the majority in the PSI. However, the break-away minority that formed the Italian Communist Party (PCI) contained important sections such as the so-called abstentionist faction from Naples led by Amadeo Bordiga and, even more crucially, the working class stronghold of Turin led by the intellectuals of the journal Ordine Nuovo (including Antonio Gramsci, Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Toggliatti), the future PCI’s directing nucleus. Unfortunately for Italian Communists, the Fascists seized power in October 1922 although it was not until 1926 that all-out repressive measures were launched. The PCI was outlawed and leading militants including its then General Secretary Antonio Gramsci were arrested.
The Maximalists seized the direction of the PSI at the Congress of Reggio Emilia in 1912. They pursued the maximum programme of the party - including revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat - and thus opposed those moderates in the PSI ready to negotiate with the regime and achieve a `minimalist’ series of reforms. However, despite their fierce rhetoric, the Maximalists were, above all, centrists, who sought to maintain the unity of the Socialist movement and were unwilling, despite the huge political turmoil of the post-war years, to organize a revolution. Hailed initially as the `Italian Lenin’, Serrati himself was the embodiment of Maximalist paralysis: his heart was with the Comintern (he had led the overwhelming vote in favour of adherence to the Comintern in the Bologna Congress of October 1919) and Bolshevism but was reluctant to expel those deemed as reformists (strong in the parliamentary section and the trade union, Confederazione Generale del Lavoro) and so split the PSI. The party’s paralysis under the Maximalists became glaring during the factory occupations in September 1920 led to a large extent by the Turin Ordine Nuovo group that sought to turn the `internal commissions’, created during the war as grievance committees, into factory councils. Ironically, the moderates left the PSI in October 1922 to form the Unitary Socialist Party and soon thereafter Serrati joined the PCI. The Communists were initially led by the abstentionist faction (named after its fierce opposition to participate in bourgeois electoral politics) and Bordiga became the PCI’s first general secretary. With the right-wing u-turn of the Comintern in 1922, Bordiga’s position became gradually untenable. Gramsci took over that post in 1924. See J. M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); G. A. Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Italian Communism 1911-1921 (London: Pluto Press, 1975); A. de Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Up to the outbreak of the Great War, the German Social Democrats (SPD) was by far the largest and best organized working class party in Europe. Germany’s Communist Party (KPD) had been one of the first to be founded outside Russia in December 1918 out from the merger of some radical groups with the so-called Spartakus League (the left-wing of the USPD, the party founded in April 1917 by Social Democrats opposed to the SPD’s policy of tacit collaboration with the regime during the war). It was one of the scarce non-Russian parties represented (by the delegate Hugo Eberlein) in the establishment of the Comintern in March 1919. Following ill-fated uprisings, the KPD lost some of its historic leaders: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (assassinated in January 1919) and Paul Levi (expelled after the revolutionary fiasco of March 1921). However, the KPD reached a membership of nearly half a million militants following the USPD Halle Congress in December 1920 when a majority decided to merge with the Communists and only a minority opted for going back to the main-stream Social Democrats. The strategy of collaboration in bourgeois governments and prudent gradualism of the SPD leadership ensured steady and significant support for the KPD. This increased even further with the onset of the Great Depression (the share of the vote went from 13.1 percent in September 1930 to a record 16.9 percent in November 1932). Of course, after the Nazis gained power in January 1933, the KPD was outlawed and its leaders arrested.
Hugo Eberlein was one of the few foreign Communists that under the pseudonym of Max Albrecht managed to break the international blockade and arrive in time for the founding congress of the Comintern (2-6 March 1919). Ironically, the leaders of the KPD opposed the creation of a Communist International in such a hasty manner since as they correctly feared it would succumb to Russian control. See J. Ryder, The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of German Socialism in War and Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); S. Haffner, Failure of a Revolution. Germany 1918-1919 (New York: Library Press, 1972); F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918-1919 (Aldershot: Wilwood House, 1988); C. Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-1923 (London: Bookmarks, 1997); E. Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
French Communism was exceptionally for a short while stronger than its Socialist rivals and absorbed an important Anarcho-Syndicalist current. In fact, French Socialists constituted a hugely fragmented force, having not formed a united party until 1905, the French Section of the Workers’ International (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO). As in the case of its German counterparts, internal tensions were exacerbated by the collaborationist role adopted by the SFIO leaders during the Great War. In the vital Tours Congress (December 1920), a majority voted in favour of joining the Comintern. Crucial to that decision was the enthusiastic support for the Communist International adopted by the two delegates to the Second Comintern Congress, Marcel Cachin and Ludovic Oscar Frossard. Also a number of leading French Anarcho-Syndicalists from the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) such as Alfred Rosmer who had been in Moscow in the summer of 1920 endorsed Communism. They went on to form the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire in 1922. The subsequent French Communist Party (PCF) emerged with 110,000 members while those who remained in the French Socialist Party were only 30,000. However, that balance of forces did not last long. Following internal rifts and purges, the PCF was reduced to 60,000 militants by 1924 while the SFIO stood at 110,000. Still, the PCF remained a steady force in key labour sectors such as metallurgy. The impact of the Great Depression and the adoption of the Popular Front strategy in 1934 marked a golden era for French Communism: the PCF possessed over 350,000 members in 1937.
The PCF experienced as its Communist counterparts constant internal purges. By 1924, some of the early leading figures such as its first secretary general Ludovic Oscar Frossard, the former Anarcho-Syndicalists Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte and the historic left-winger Boris Souvarine had left the PCF. See M. Adereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History, 1920-1984 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 21-27, 32-33. A. Rosmer, Lenin's Moscow (London: Bookmarks, 1971).
In comparison to France, Italy and Germany, despite the existing labour yearning for Bolshevism, the Communist progress in Spain could not have been poorer. This fiasco was to a certain extent confirmed in one of Ramírez’s final and most baffling reports. Spain enjoyed, he said, the objective conditions for a revolutionary process. However, he admitted, although the workers possessed class solidarity, they were not educated to the point of revolution and lacked class-consciousness.
AAVV-CV-16 (27 May 1920). Indeed, his own creature, the PCE, was a small, sectarian and anti-parliamentarian group that barely disguised its lack of political importance with revolutionary enthusiasm and voluntarism. But their fierce radicalism made them an obvious target of state repression. Their press organ, El Comunista, was systematically censored and leading PCE members suffered constant police harassment, preventive arrests and economic penury as they were denied steady employment.
A. del Rosal, Sesenta años en la historia del Partido Comunista de España (Madrid: Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas, n.d.), pp. 72-3. Consequently, El Comunista, had a circulation of less than 5,000 copies and was constantly in financial straits. It barely survived with handouts from friends, such as the two hundred pesetas donated by the playwright Gregorio Martínez Sierra. In late 1920, it was temporarily suspended, when (as its editor the fiery Juan Andrade sarcastically commented) they ran out of people to sponge from.
J. Andrade, Recuerdos Personales (Barcelona, Serbal, 1983), Andrade to Geers (25 December 1920), p. 170.
The PCE was definitely not the expression of the proletariat’s revolutionary enthusiasm but the hurried and ill-conceived product of a conspiracy devised by foreign Communists with the support of a small group of radicalised youngsters.
Elorza and Bizcarrondo, op.cit., p. 27. Apart from in the capital, the new party hardly had any significant following nor did it possess any important intellectual or labour leader. Most Communists were students and young manual workers, with scarce links to the trade union movement (except for in the Madrid woodworking sector). The PSOE leadership derided it as the `party of the 100 children’ and treated it more as a nuisance than as a serious threat.
El Socialista (21 April 1920).
In fact, the PCE’s youngsters belonged to the ultra-leftist tendency that was criticised by Lenin in the spring of 1920 in his pamphlet Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder. According to the Bolshevik leader, Leftism was imprudently and foolishly argued by `doctrinaire revolutionaries who have never taken part in a revolution, or who have never pondered over the history of revolutions’.
V. I Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975), pp. 44-6, 55-6. The main target of Lenin’s criticism was German Communists. The Bureau of Amsterdam, the ideological guide to the PCE, was even dissolved. The PCE’s national executive member, Vicente Arroyo, noted how they genuinely believed that revolution was round the corner.
APCE, Sig. 29/13, p. 5. Proud of this extremism, Andrade even confided to Geers that leading figures in the Comintern were mere opportunists and Lenin’s ideas were `an aberration that could only fuel the hopes of our centrists’.
Andrade, Recuerdos, Andrade to Geers (28 August 1920), p. 164. Arroyo commented (APCE, Sig. 29/13, pp. 5-6) that Lenin’s pamphlet made them drop their idea of advocating the violent dissolution of trade unions and their replacement by armed workers’ councils. Arroyo never discussed how a few isolated youngsters were planning to accomplish that.
Albert Pérez Baró, a leading member of the PCE’s Catalan section recognised that their influence over CNT or UGT members was negligible.
Pérez Baró, op.cit, p. 49. Statements of `no compromise’ in the class struggle, descriptions of parliaments and elections as a `bourgeois charade’ and emphasis on direct action, were close to anarcho-syndicalist rhetoric. Yet they also called the CNT leaders `bourgeois reformists’ and anarcho-traitors, insisting that trade unions were not organs of emancipation and should be tightly controlled by the vanguard party.
El Comunista (16 October, 6 and 26 November 1920 and 4 June 1921). In regards to Socialism, the main targets of their vitriolic attacks were not `traitors' such as Besteiro and Iglesias, but their former left-wing bloc partners who were denounced as false revolutionaries that should be exposed.
Andrade, Recuerdos, Andrade to Geers (11 and 20 May 1920), pp. 153-6; El Comunista (1 and 26 June, 16 October 1920).
Due to the ongoing repression borne by the CNT, its flirtation with Communism lasted longer than would otherwise have been the case.
By spring 1921, the organisation was headless and, with Barcelona no longer safe, the leadership fell into the hands of a group of newcomers based in the more peaceful Catalan city of Lleida. So, almost by accident, Andreu Nin and Joaquín Maurín, who were identified with the Communist cause, became the secretaries of the national and regional committees respectively. Their objective was to turn the CNT into a disciplined revolutionary movement, freed from the old individualism and the emphasis on the economic struggle. See Meaker, op.cit., pp. 385-90; and Bar, op.cit., pp. 613-15. Angel Pestaña, its only delegate to attend the second Comintern Congress in Moscow, in the summer of 1920, could not have been more disappointed by his experience. Arrested and held in Italy for two months on his return journey and then imprisoned in Barcelona for fifteen more months, he was prevented for a long time from sharing his conclusions with his comrades but his stay in prison was largely used to prepare his report on Communism.
AMAE, H2760 (22 October 1920), Pestaña’s arrest in Milan carrying a passport under the false name of Antonio Sulla Bellero. FO 371-5493/834, Report on Pestaña's detention when arriving in Spain by Mr. Deakin, Press Attaché to the British Embassy (23 December 1920). Pestaña wrote two accounts, one descriptive and one analytical: Informe de mi estancia en la Unión Soviética (Madrid: Zix, 1968) and Mis juicios acerca de la Tercera Internacional (Madrid: Zero, 1970). For an analysis and translation into English see F. J. Romero Salvadó, `The Views of an Anarcho-Syndicalist on the Soviet Union: The Defeat of the Third International in Spain', Revolutionary Russia, 8, 1 (June 1995), pp. 26-103. In 1924 Pestaña wrote two more elaborated texts: 70 días en Rusia. Lo que yo ví (Barcelona: Cosmos, 1924) and 70 días en Rusia. Lo que yo pienso (Barcelona: Antonio López, 1924). At last, Pestaña could put forward his views in a national gathering celebrated in Zaragoza in June 1922 wherein, by an overwhelming majority that only excluded the delegates from Lleida and Gijón, the CNT duly broke its links with the Comintern.
The negative report of the French Anarchist Gaston Leval was also important. He had been chosen by Anarchists within the CNT to form part of the delegation led by Andreu Nin to attend the Third Comintern Congress (22 June-12 July 1921). See X. Paniagua, `La visió de Gaston Leval de la Rússia Soviètica el 1921’, Recerques 3 (1974), pp. 199-208. For the CNT’s rejection of the Comintern in Zaragoza see Buenacasa, op.cit., p. 87; Bar, op.cit., pp. 621-5. It was ludicrous to expect that a federalist mass organisation would be prepared to subordinate its initiatives to the small PCE that itself was blindly following Moscow’s dictates. Furthermore, Anarcho-Syndicalists were by then aware of the bitter attacks levelled against the Bolsheviks by leading European Anarchists and the growing frustration of many leftists with the authoritarian and repressive character of the Soviet state. The CNT's, the largest working-class force in Spain, brief romance with the Comintern thus ended.
The minority of Communist-Syndicalists (led by Maurín) formed an organised faction within the CNT in December 1922 called Comités Sindicalistas Revolucionarios. They lacked any real presence outside of Lleida and Bilbao and eventually joined the PCE in late 1924. See Bar, op.cit, pp. 572-3.
In regards to Socialism, the Communist cause fared slightly better. In his memoirs, even Andrade admitted that the establishment of the PCE in the spring of 1920 was a premature tactical error and recognised that with control of the PSOE at stake, the youngsters could have shifted the balance.
Andrade, Apuntes, p. 29. An anonymous undated and unsigned Communist analysis (APCE, Sig. 34/12, p. 104) also concluded that the impatience of the youngsters proved harmful and played into the hands of the PSOE old guard. Things might have been very different if they had not broken away from the senior party and then spent most of their energies vilifying their former allies in the left-wing bloc. In fact, confronted with an internal avalanche in favour of a referendum, the PSOE leadership was forced to call a second extraordinary congress (20-25 June 1920).
This congress can be followed in El Socialista (22-5 June 1920). However, although the grass-roots were overwhelmingly in favour of affiliation to the Comintern, the old guard proved its tactical cunning. It snatched a very positive victory from the jaws of utter defeat when a majority, largely influenced by the vitriolic disqualifications of the youngsters, rejected unconditional adherence to the Comintern and instead voted for a compromise formula: the PSOE agreed to immediate entry but with crucial conditions attached that included autonomy on the question of internal politics, avoidance of internal purges, continuation in efforts to unify both Internationals and, most shocking of all, the right to revise resolutions taken by the Comintern. In all but name, the PSOE’s conditions meant that, regardless of international affiliation, it would remain free to carry on with business as usual.
For disturbances orchestrated by the youngsters during the congress see Andrade, Recuerdos, Andrade to Geers (3 July 1920), pp. 158-9. El Comunista in an editorial tellingly titled, `War to the Centrists' (26 June 1920), called the PSOE a corpse and the participants in the congress a bunch of dilettantes and opportunists.
The terceristas now controlled the party’s executive committee but the hollowness of that victory became apparent a few days later when the 14th UGT Congress took place. Here with a paid bureaucracy devoutly loyal to the traditional leadership, there was no need to search for compromises and the union overwhelmingly voted in favour of the Amsterdam body affiliated to the Second International.
S. Castillo, Historia de la Unión General de Trabajadores, Vol. 2 (Madrid: Unión, 1998), pp. 72-4. The best contemporary analysis of the contrasting stance between UGT and PSOE is in FPI, Gabinete Albert Thomas (AAVV-C I-II), report from José Villalonga (28 August 1920). With the exception of Pablo Iglesias, still president of both the UGT and the PSOE, the Socialist movement, for the first time in its history, contained two radically divorced leaderships.
If one week is a long time in politics, one year proved crucial in the fortunes of world revolution and Communism. Indeed, revolutionary debacles - the latest example being the March 1921 insurrection in Germany - cooled past expectations. Even the Comintern Third Congress (22 June-12 July 1921) had to concede that the revolutionary cycle was exhausted. The aim of international revolution, though not disavowed, was allowed quietly to recede into the distant future. Furthermore, with workers exhausted by years of industrial action and with an economic recession breaking out, safeguarding jobs and living standards rather than revolutionary adventures now became the priority.
As the tide turned dramatically, Spain’s Socialist old guard found itself back in the driving seat. Falling productivity diminished the proletariat’s bargaining power and pushed it towards a less militant position: strikes decreased from a peak of 1,060 in 1920 to 373 in 1921.
Castillo, op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 45. Additionally, the PSOE possessed now first-hand accounts of the Soviet regime from its two delegates to the Second Comintern Congress: Daniel Anguiano and Fernando de los Ríos.
They arrived in Moscow in late October 1920, by then the Congress had long since finished, and stayed in Russia until December. Anguiano only left testimony of his findings in a series of brief articles in El Socialista (8, 10-11, 17-18 January 1921). De los Ríos produced a scholarly dissertation of his Soviet experience, full of figures and tables: Mi viaje a la Rusia Sovietista (Madrid: 2nd edn., Calpe, 1922). Anguiano still supported affiliation to the Comintern but with his previously strong convictions now undermined, he presented a vacillating case. By contrast, for the arch-reformist professor the journey to Russia had confirmed his negative views and thus he put forth a convincing case against the Third International.
Two years later, Zinoviev still commented on the naïve frankness of the Spanish professor who never pretended to be anything other than a reformist and who was there only because the Spanish workers had sent him. With his academic style, immaculate dress, pince-nez and trimmed beard, de los Ríos stood out in revolutionary Moscow. Cited by Meaker, op.cit., p. 302. A convinced democrat appalled by the terror perpetrated by the secret police and the absence of civil rights, de los Ríos was shocked when in his meeting with Lenin, on 10 December, he naively enquired when a regime of full liberties would be restored and the Bolshevik leader replied that he had never spoken of liberties but of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
de los Ríos, op.cit., pp. 60-5.
Two further realities tilted the balance in the favour of the old guard. Firstly, after reaching a compromise based on joining the Comintern but with conditions, the PSOE was left in an extremely awkward position when confronted with the Comintern’s own 21 Conditions for all adhering parties. Their harshness - with no proviso for national peculiarities, demanding regular purges of reformist and centrist militants and total subordination to the Third International Executive Commission - proved impossible for many to accept. Secondly, the establishment under the auspices of the Austrian Socialists of the so-called Vienna or Second and a Half International offered a valid alternative to centrist parties like the PSOE apart from the reformist Second and the intransigent Third.
Avilés, op.cit., p. 209.
On the eve of the final extraordinary congress (held on 9-14 April 1921) to decide on international affiliation, a bedridden Iglesias made a passionate plea in favour of the Vienna International. He emphasized that the Comintern would demand the expulsion of the party’s historic veterans like him and also lead them towards insurrectionary strategies of all or nothing, similar to those endorsed by Anarchists.
El Socialista (4 April 1921). When the final vote gave a majority to the supporters of the Vienna International, those in favour of Moscow (at a pre-arranged signal) abandoned the chamber and formed the Communist Labour Party (PCOE).
Ominously for the terceristas, a few days earlier they had lost the vote and thus control of the powerful Madrid Socialist Branch: AASM-LXX-3 (3 April 1921). Congreso Extraordinario del PSOE en 1921, pp. 116-17.
By the spring of 1921, neither of the two Communist parties represented a significant political force. While the PCE remained a tiny sectarian party of radicalised youth, the PCOE possessed some seasoned local leaders and vital footholds in Vizcaya and Asturias but less than 5,000 members of the 52,000 PSOE militants embraced Communism. The best-known parliamentarians, trade union leaders and activists remained in the old party.
AAVV-CII-6, report of the Socialist Fabra Ribas to the Bureau International du Travail (15 December 1921), pp. 53-5. For months the PCE and PCOE engaged in a bitter campaign of mutual disqualification until the Comintern send a delegate, the Italian Antonio Grazidei, in November 1921, to force their merger.
S. Bahne, Archives de Jules Humbert-Droz (Amsterdam: D. Reidel, 1970), Graziadei’s report to the Comintern (18 January 1922), pp. 92-7, 113-31. But chronic tensions and disqualifications continued to tear apart the united PCE, a minuscule force targeted constantly by police repression.
Pérez Baró, op.cit., p. 129. By the time of its second congress in July 1923, the PCE was, with only 1,200 members, on the fringes of both state politics and the labour movement. In all but name, it had ceased to exist as a national force and its influence was limited to some capitals like Bilbao and Madrid, where the party could still publish some papers with Russian money.
Number of militants and recognition of shrinking power is in APCE, Sig. 34/12, p. 124. AAVV-CII-8, Fabra to Thomas (17 April 1923).
The Comintern’s imposition of harsh conditions on potential allies, in the summer of 1920, led to the establishment of dogmatic parties based on the Russian model that hindered rather than aided the cause of revolution. Henceforth, blind subordination to tactical about-turns dependent on Russian interests spurred internal purges and weakened the prospects of strong Communist Parties. However, given the initial widespread and positive reception of Bolshevism as well as the existing moment of social agitation, the emergence of such a small, irrelevant and impotent Spanish Communist Party was both striking and baffling. One can only speculate what the outcome would have been if the first Comintern agents to arrive in Spain had been more pragmatic as well as better acquainted with the country’s politics. They might then not have ignored Barcelona at this time of huge social struggle nor dismissed in such a cavalier manner, the CNT, the largest and most revolutionary force in the country that furthermore was filled with Bolshevik enthusiasm. Also at such a favourable moment to wrest control of the PSOE, they might not have broken the tercerista front in order to establish a party with a few radicalised youngsters.
The Borodin mission was marked by a compendium of errors; errors whose foundations could be traced to Engel’s statement borrowed by Lenin to criticise ultra-leftism: `What childish innocence it is to present impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!’
Lenin, op.cit., p. 63. Consequently, Spanish Communism would have to wait for peculiar circumstances, the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, to become a real mass movement.
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