The Spanish Civil War

Revolution and Counterrevolution

Burnett Bolloten

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469624471
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This monumental book offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Republican political life during the Spanish Civil War. Completed by Burnett Bolloten just before his death in 1987 and first published in English in 1991, The Spanish Civil War is the culmination of fifty years of dedicated and painstaking research and is the most exhaustive study on the subject in any language. It has been regarded as the authoritative political history of the war and an indispensable encyclopedic guide to Republican affairs during the Spanish conflict. This new edition includes a new introduction by Spanish Civil War scholar George Esenwein, an updated bibliography featuring books on the Spanish Civil War published since 1987, and seventy-three photos of the war's participants.

Part I
Civil War, Revolution, and the Collapse of the 1931–1936 Republic

Although the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp—more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages—millions of discerning people outside Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range but even of its existence, by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history.

—Burnett Bolloten,
The Grand Camouflage, 1961

1 The Brewing Upheaval

The enmities that gave rise to the Civil War were not of sudden growth. They had been steadily developing since the fall of the Monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931 and, with increasing intensity, since the victory of the Popular Front—the left coalition—in the February 1936 elections.

In the months between the elections and the Civil War, the Republic had experienced, both in town and country, a series of labor disturbances without precedent in its history, disturbances that were partly a reaction to the policies of the governments of the center-right that had ruled Spain from December 1933. In that two-year period—named el bienio negro, the black biennium, by the Spanish left—not only had the laws fixing wages and conditions of employment been revoked, modified, or allowed to lapse,¹ but much of the other work of the Republic had been undone. The labor courts, writes Salvador de Madariaga, a moderate Republican and onetime minister of justice, who, according to his own testimony, remained equidistant from both sides during the Civil War, assumed a different political complexion, and their awards were as injurious to the workers as they had previously been to the employers. “Simultaneously, the Institute of Agrarian Reform was deprived of funds. Viewed from the standpoint of the countryside and in terms of practical experience, of the bread on the peasant’s table, these changes were disastrous. There were many, too many, landowners who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing and who behaved themselves in such an inhuman and outrageous fashion toward their working folk—perhaps out of revenge for the insults and injuries suffered during the period of left rule—that the situation became worse not only in a material but also in a moral sense. The wages of the land workers again fell to a starvation level; the guarantee of employment vanished, and the hope of receiving land disappeared altogether.”²

Speaking in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, on 23 July 1935, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the Falange Española, the fascist party, founded in October 1933, described life in the countryside as “absolutely intolerable.” “Yesterday,” he declared, “I was in the province of Seville. In that province there is a village called Vadolatosa, where the women leave their homes at three in the morning to gather chick-peas. They end their work at noon, after a ninehour day, which cannot be prolonged for technical reasons. And for this labor these women receive one peseta.”³

Especially illuminating was the moderate Republican newspaper El Sol. “Since the advent of the Republic,” it stated on 9 June 1936, “we have been oscillating dangerously between two extremes, particularly in the countryside. During the first biennium [1931–33] agriculture was burdened with a ridiculous working day, and the wave of idleness and indiscipline through which it passed ended by ruining it. The farm laborers received high wages and worked as little as possible.⁴ . . . During the second biennium [1933–35] we fell into the other extreme. Within a few months wages declined sharply from ten and twelve pesetas a day to four, three, and even two. Property took revenge on labor, and did not realize that it was piling up fuel for the social bonfire of the near future. At the same time many landlords who had been forced on government orders to reduce rents devoted themselves to evicting tenant farmers. . . . These errors prepared the triumph of the Popular Front, a triumph that was due less to the real strength of the left, considerable though it was, than to the lack of political understanding of the right.”⁵

And, under the influence of the mounting social ferment that followed the victory of the Popular Front, José María Gil Robles, leader of the Catholic Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas—a loose federation of rightwing parties, known by its initials as the CEDA, whose nucleus was Acción Popular⁶—declared: “Without showing any indulgence of any kind we must give a social character to the CEDA. At first, certain groups will withdraw, but this does not bother me; it even makes me happy. The conservative classes in Spain must understand either that they make voluntary sacrifices by giving up a large part of what they have or that they will disappear for ever.”⁷

On another occasion, he stated: “There are many, very many [employers and landowners] who know how to fulfill their obligations with justice and charity, but there are also many who, with suicidal egotism, as soon as the right entered the government, lowered wages, raised rents, tried to carry out unjust evictions, and forgot the sad experience of the years 1931–33. As a result, in many provinces the left increased its votes among the small cultivators and agricultural workers, who would have remained with us had a just social policy been followed.”⁸

It was largely for the above-mentioned reasons that the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936 was followed by a grave crisis in the countryside that found expression in the strikes of land workers for higher wages and shorter hours; employers often replied by allowing the grain to burn or rot in the field. Two versions of this aspect of the agrarian crisis that complement rather than contradict each other were given by the Republican press: “Every day,” said El Sol on 14 June 1936, “we receive letters telling us the same thing. The harvest is less than the average, but the laborers, without worrying about it, demand ridiculous conditions for reaping and threshing. In some villages, these conditions are such that the tenant farmers, landowners, small peasant proprietors, and colonos [peasants settled on the land under the Agrarian Reform Law] . . . affirm that they will have to let the grain rot or burn, because if they were to accede to the imperious and menacing demands of the unions they would have to sell every bushel at a price that would scandalize the purchasers. . . . Not only powerful landowners and comfortable absentee landlords cultivate the Spanish soil. There are hundreds of thousands of small proprietors and colonos for whom an equitable solution of the present agricultural strikes is a question of life and death.”⁹

On the other hand, the left-wing Republican La Libertad stated on 26 June 1936: “In the countryside . . . there clearly exists a definite aim on the part of reactionary elements to boycott the regime, to drive the peasant masses to desperation, and place the government in a very difficult position. Otherwise, how can it be explained that there are entire provinces where employers intend leaving the harvest in the fields . . ., using it exclusively as fodder, whereas it would be far more profitable to pay the wages they should pay and gather the crop? How, too, can cases like that of Almendralejo be explained, where the employers swore not to offer a single day’s work, threatening to kill any proprietor who did?”

The agrarian crisis also expressed itself in the rebellious mood of landless peasants, who had grown impatient of the Agrarian Reform Law of the Republic and of what they regarded as dilatoriness by government officials in the matter of land distribution. “Time is passing and the land remains in the hands of the political bosses,” wrote a local peasant leader on 30 May in El Obrero de la Tierra, the organ of the left-wing Socialist Federación Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Tierra, the National Federation of Land Workers. “Disappointment is once again setting in, and we are on the same road as that of 1931. Is the Popular Front government going to destroy the illusions of the peasants? Are the peasants ready to see their hopes evaporate yet again? No. They want land, and those whose job it is to let them have it must not be surprised, should they fail to quicken their pace, if the peasants seize what the government does not give them and what they need so badly.”¹⁰

On 11 April, José Díaz, secretary of the small but rapidly expanding Communist party, had demanded that the government accelerate the distribution of land. The number of settlements was insufficient. The big landowners should be expropriated and their lands distributed among the peasants without delay. The government, he continued, was not treating the matter seriously enough. “This is one of the fundamental conquests of the democratic revolution, and we should put forth every effort to achieve it.”¹¹

But in many villages patience had already evaporated, the peasants refusing to wait until the government—which was composed entirely of liberal and moderate Republicans—might satisfy their needs. On 7 March, El Obrero de la Tierra reported:

The peasants of Cenicientos in the province of Madrid have occupied in a body the pasture land called “Encinar de la Parra,” covering an area of 1,317 hectares, and have begun to work it. When the occupation was completed, they sent the following letter to the minister of agriculture:

“In our village there is an extensive pasture land susceptible of cultivation, which in the past was actually cultivated, but which today is used for shooting and grazing. Our repeated requests to lease the land from the owner, who, together with two or three other landowners, possesses almost the entire municipal area—at one time communal property—have been in vain. As our hands and ploughs were idle and our children hungry, we had no course but to occupy the land. This we have done. With our labor it will yield what it did not yield before; our misery will end and the national wealth will increase. In doing this, we do not believe that we have prejudiced anyone, and the only thing we ask of Your Excellency is that you legalize this situation and grant us credits so that we can perform our labors in peace.”

On 17 March, La Libertad reported from Manasalbas in Toledo province: “Two thousand hungry peasants of this locality have just seized the estate ‘El Robledo’ which [Count] Romanones appropriated to himself twenty years ago without giving anything to the people.”

And an article in a Communist organ stated: “The agricultural workers of a small village near Madrid showed the way by taking over the land for themselves. Two weeks later the farm laborers of ninety villages in the province of Salamanca did the same thing.¹² A few days afterward this example was followed by the peasants of several villages in Toledo province; and at daybreak on 25 March, eighty thousand peasants of the provinces of Cáceres and Badajoz occupied the land and began to cultivate it. The revolutionary action of [these] peasants caused absolute panic in government circles. . . . [But] instead of using force, the government was obliged to send a large contingent of experts and officials from the Institute of Agrarian Reform to give an appearance of legality to the seizure of the land.”¹³

A Spanish Communist wrote that the peasant leaders “calculate that the agrarian law plans fifty thousand settlements a year, which means that it will take twenty years to settle a million peasants and more than a century to give land to all. Realizing this, the peasants just occupy the land.”¹⁴

The full extent of the social tension that gripped the Spanish countryside in the spring and early summer of 1936, writes Edward E. Malefakis, a leading authority on the agrarian situation before the Civil War, cannot be understood solely from a discussion of organized land seizures and strikes. “Just as the electoral victory of the center-right in 1933 had permitted the established classes to revenge themselves upon the workers in hundreds of small ways, most of them in defiance of the law, so, too, the victory of the Popular Front gave the workers license to impose their will with impunity. . . . Intimidation of all those who did not belong to the labor unions seems to have become the order of the day. Perhaps the most constant source of trouble was the gangs of workers who entered farms to force their managers to grant work. The stealing of animals and crops, and the cutting of trees for firewood or for lumber also became common.” Referring to the province of Badajoz, Malefakis says: “Thousands of peasants wandered around the province in a futile search for jobs; farm managers of any importance continued to be subjected to repeated alojamientos [the forced hiring of extra workers], and small owners lived in constant fear that they, too, would become victims of the workers’ aggression as the definition of the words ‘bourgeois’ and ‘fascist’ expanded to include property of every size.” Malefakis observes that El Sol—“as objective a source as we have for these troubled times”—was deeply preoccupied by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• Epigraph
• Introduction to the 2015 Edition
• Selected Works Published since 1987
• Photo Gallery
• Part I Civil War, Revolution, and the Collapse of the 1931–1936 Republic
• Part II The Rise Of the Communists
• Part III Curbing the Revolution
• Part IV From the Revolutionary Militia to a Regular Army
• Part V The Communist Triumph
• Part VI The Reflux of the Revolution
• Part VII The Eclipse of Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto
• Part VIII Communist Influence Crests
• Part IX Doubts, Divisions, and Disasters Proliferate. Communist Influence Wanes
• Part X The End of the Resistance Policy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index