Пол Престон – The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (страница 20)

No Socialist organizations had participated in the CNT action, although a few individual militants had done so, believing it to be the ‘defensive action’ agreed on 26 November.¹⁴ In the Cortes, Prieto condemned ‘this damaging movement’. Yet, when both Gil Robles and the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea enthusiastically offered to help the government crush subversion, Prieto reacted angrily. It disturbed him that the ‘enemies of the Republic’ supported the regime only when the proposal was for the repression of the working class. By their determination to silence the workers’ organizations, Prieto perceptively told the deputies of the right, ‘you are closing all exits to us and inviting us to a bloody conflict’.¹⁵

On 16 December, Lerroux formed a government with the parliamentary support of the CEDA. Three days later, Gil Robles made a policy statement in the Cortes which explained that, in return for CEDA votes, he expected an amnesty for those imprisoned for Sanjurjo’s coup of August 1932 and a thorough revision of the religious legislation of the Constituent Cortes (so called because it was the parliament that elaborated and approved the Republican Constitution). Most alarming for the left were his demands for the repeal of the reforms which had most benefited the landless peasantry – the laws of municipal boundaries and of obligatory cultivation, and the introduction of the eight-hour day and of mixed juries (arbitration committees). He also demanded a reduction of the area of land subject to expropriation under the agrarian reform bill and denounced the socializing concept of settling peasants on the land. Most alarming for the left was his statement that his ambition was to lead a government and change the Constitution: ‘We are in no hurry, we want other proposals to fail so that experience will show the Spanish people that there can only be one solution, an unequivocally right-wing solution.’ Behind the measured tone, there lay a dramatic threat that, if events showed that a right-wing evolution was not possible, the Republic would pay the consequences. Not surprisingly, the Socialists regarded this as a fascist speech.¹⁶ In reply, Indalecio Prieto made it clear that, for the Socialists, the legislation that Gil Robles aimed to repeal was what made the Republic worth defending. He threatened that the Socialists would defend the Republic against Gil Robles’s dictatorial ambitions by unleashing the revolution.¹⁷ In the exchange could be seen the seeds of the violent events of October 1934.

The appalling dilemma faced by the PSOE executive was revealed by Fernando de los Ríos when he visited the ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azaña on 2 January 1934. Azaña noted in his diary:

He recounted to me the incredible and cruel persecutions that the workers’ political and union organizations were suffering at the hands of the authorities and the employers. The Civil Guard was daring to do things it had never dared do before. It was impossible to restrain the exasperation of the masses. The Socialist leaders were being overwhelmed. Where would it all end? In a great misfortune, probably. I was aware of the barbaric policy followed by the government and of the way the landowners were reducing the rural labourers to hunger and of the retaliations and reprisals against other workers. I know the slogan ‘Let the Republic feed you’ [Comed República]. But all of this and much more that De los Ríos told me, and the government’s measures, and the policy of the Radical–CEDA majority in the Cortes, which aimed only to undo the work of the Constituent Cortes, did not make it advisable, nor justifiable, for the Socialist Party and the UGT to launch themselves into a movement of force.

Azaña told De los Ríos categorically that it was the duty of the Socialist leadership, even at the risk of their own popularity, to make their followers see that an insurrection would be madness. His reason was that ‘there was no reason to expect the right to react calmly or even to limit their reaction to the re-establishment of law and order. In fact, they would abuse their victory and would go far beyond what was happening already and what they were announcing.’ Shortly afterwards, De los Ríos reported Azaña’s prophetic words to the PSOE executive committee. However, given the employers’ intransigence, it was impossible for them to tell their rank and file to be patient.¹⁸

PSOE offices received reports from all over Andalusia and Extremadura about provocations from owners and Civil Guards alike. The new government appointed several conservative provincial governors in the south, a move which was soon reflected in the law being flouted with impunity and an increase in the ‘preventive brutality’ of the Civil Guard. In El Real de la Jara, in the sierra to the north of the province of Seville, the local landowners had refused to employ union labour. A subsequent strike lasted several months and, in December 1933, some starving workers found with acorns stolen from pig troughs were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor suspended the village Mayor when he protested to the local Civil Guard commander about these abuses. In Venta de Baúl (Granada) the armed guards of the cacique, a member of the CEDA, beat up local union leaders.¹⁹

In Fuente del Maestre, Fuente de Cantos, Carmonita and Alconchel (Badajoz), it was the Civil Guard which did the beating when hungry workers were caught collecting windfall olives and acorns. Elsewhere in Badajoz, to prevent labourers being able to alleviate their hunger in this way, the owners took pigs into the fields to eat the fallen crops. Some yunteros (ploughmen) who had started to plough an abandoned estate were imprisoned and the Civil Guard occupied the Casa del Pueblo in nearby Hornachos. In contrast, nothing had been done about the deaths in the same town nine months earlier. In many pueblos, especially in Badajoz, Jaén and Córdoba, landowners ignored regulations about rotating jobs among those registered at the local labour exchange. They would give work only to those who had voted for the right and systematically refused jobs to members of the FNTT. In Almendralejo, during the grape and olive harvests, despite massive local unemployment, two thousand outside labourers were brought in. In Orellana la Vieja and Olivenza, the owners employed only women and children, who were paid a fraction of the wage normally paid to men.²⁰

Wages had dropped by 60 per cent. Hunger was breeding desperation and hatred was building up on both sides of the social divide. In Priego de Córdoba, a delegation of union members who had had no work for four months asked the Mayor to intervene. He replied that he could not oblige anyone to give them work and advised them to go on their knees to beg the landowners for jobs. And the problem was not confined to the south. A union official from Villanueva del Rebollar in the Castilian province of Palencia wrote, ‘The caciques should be careful about their foolhardiness. Our patience is wearing thin.’ The FNTT executive made several appeals to the new Minister of Labour, Ricardo Samper, for the implementation of existing social legislation but it was to no avail.²¹

In late December 1933, a draft law had already been presented to the Cortes for the expulsion of peasants who had occupied land in Extremadura the previous year. In January 1934, the law of municipal boundaries was provisionally repealed. The CEDA also presented projects for the emasculation of the 1932 agrarian reform, by reducing the amount of land subject to expropriation, and for the return of land confiscated from those involved in the August 1932 military rising. Clashes between the Civil Guard and the braceros increased daily.²²

Throughout January, long and often bitter discussions between the PSOE and the UGT leaderships about a possible revolutionary action in defence of the Republic culminated in the defeat of the cautious line. The leadership of the UGT passed to Largo Caballero and the younger elements who supported his ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric. With the PSOE, its youth movement – the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas – and now the UGT all in the hands of those advocating a radical line, a joint committee was immediately established to make preparations for a revolutionary movement. PSOE, UGT and FJS organizations in each province were sent seventy-three naive instructions for the creation of militias, the acquisition of arms, the establishment of links with sympathetic members of the army and the Civil Guard and the organization of technicians to run basic services. The replies received made clear the absurdly optimistic nature of these goals and, apart from the flurry of communications generated by the committee, little or no practical action was taken.²³

However, the various communications were anything but clandestine. Indeed, revolutionary rhetoric from the self-proclaimed ‘Bolshevizers’ was loudly indiscreet and provided ample evidence for right-wing exaggeration about the dangers of revolutionary socialism. The raucous radicalism of the younger Socialists would be used throughout the spring and summer of 1934 to justify harsh repression of strikes that were far from revolutionary in intent. The anything but secret plan was for the revolutionary movement to be launched in the event of the CEDA being invited to participate in government. There was no link between the vaguely discussed ‘revolutionary moment’ and the needs and activities of the workers’ movement. Indeed, no thought was given to ways of harnessing the energies of organized labour for the projected revolution. Rather, the trade unionist habits of a lifetime saw Largo Caballero persuade the new UGT executive on 3 February to do nothing to stop any conventional strike action which was then treated by the authorities as subversive.²⁴