13. The Conquest of Catalonia¶
Core Argument¶
The conquest of Catalonia was not a military operation but a political counter-revolution, executed by the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc with devastating precision. On May 5, Catalan autonomy was abolished; within a week, the Ministries of Public Order and Defence were handed to Negrín’s Stalinist representatives, and the persecution began. The POUM was crushed with little resistance. The PSUC launched a campaign identical to the Soviet witch-hunts, accusing the POUM of organising insurrection on Gestapo orders. The POUM responded by suing the Stalinist editors for libel, but on May 28, La Batalla was permanently suppressed, the POUM radio seized, and the Friends of Durruti outlawed. Anarchist press was censored. The CNT and POUM offered no mass protest. The libel trial was dismissed on a technicality.
On June 3, Assault Guards exchanged fire with a workers’ patrol. The POUM failed to demand a united front for elementary workers’ rights, which would have forced the CNT leaders to defend free assembly, the press, and the patrols. The POUM had never called for a united front for concrete tasks, only currying favour with the CNT leadership. On June 16, Nin was arrested; almost all forty Executive Committee members were seized. The POUM was outlawed. The CNT Regional Committee did not defend it; the National Committee’s letter showed no understanding of the persecution’s significance. The anarchist press had remained silent about the Moscow trials. By mid-July, all POUM leaders and cadres were in jail. The working class remained passive. The Bolshevik-Leninists, expelled from the POUM, pointed the road: a united front for democratic rights and workers’ defence. By July, 800 CNT members in Barcelona were imprisoned, sixty had ‘disappeared’. Foreign revolutionists were persecuted; Georges Kopp was arrested and murdered by Stalinists. Nin was kidnapped and assassinated.
In late June, the CNT withdrew from the Catalan government after discovering that an arch-reactionary, Dr. Pedro Gimpera, had been added as a minister without their knowledge. The Stalinists then clashed with President Companys, publicly attacking Casanovas as a traitor despite having previously helped him escape prosecution for organising a coup. Companys was targeted because he had protested the transfer of prisoners and sent an envoy to expose the forgery of evidence against Nin. The Stalinists could not forgive an ally who exposed their frame-ups. More profoundly, Companys was a nationalist who desired a return to Catalan autonomy, whereas Stalinism was ready to sacrifice Spain and Catalonia to Anglo-French imperialism in return for a military alliance.
The economic counter-revolution advanced against the collectives. The Generalidad repudiated the October 1936 collectivisation decree. The GEPCI, a businessmen’s organisation taken into the UGT by the Stalinists, received preferential treatment over factory collectives. The PSUC attempted to municipalise public services to wrest them from workers’ control, but was temporarily beaten back by mass worker resistance. In food supplies, where the Stalinists held the Ministry of Supplies, hunger stalked Catalonia while the bourgeoisie ate luxuriously. The masses suffered not just privation but the inequality of seeing speculators and profiteers traffic in their hunger.