[We publish here our translation of an important writing by Grandizo Munis about the Stalinist persecution of genuine communist revolutionaries within Spain. Newly republished in its original Spanish by our comrades in Barbaria and available here.]
After the fall of Catalonia, the reactionary press devoted itself to publishing photographs and glowing accounts of persecution and torture by the “reds”. All the flavour of sensationalist pamphleteering, fed by the venality of bourgeois journalism, was expressed in thick headlines and clichés to consecrate Franco’s victory with a storm of slander. The same press spoke of the “French generosity” and the “welcoming treatment” reserved for the Spanish refugees, who were dying daily of hunger and cold, by the dozens!
For its part, the Stalinist and reformist press, when commenting on the persecutions unleashed by the fascists, is auspiciously silent about the character of the anti-proletarian repression of the Popular Front, which preceded and made possible Franco’s present work. There are very many militants condemned or shot after the fall of Barcelona, who were caught by the fascist armies in the prisons of the Popular Front.
Neither the pro-Franco press nor the Popular Front press is capable of telling the truth about the nature and methods of state repression. The red legend, thanks to which the former hides its own bourgeois ferocity, obliges the newspapers to serve up a profusion of terrifying, unheard-of fables. As for the latter, Stalinism wants desperately to prevent knowledge of its own crimes against the revolutionary movement. But we have no interests apart from those of the proletariat, which enables us and, therefore, obliges us to denounce the reactionary nature of state repression.
From the days of May 1937 onwards, political repression was directed mainly against the revolutionary vanguard and the workers’ movement in general. From the words of Irujo, a Catholic and former Minister of Justice, who testified at the trial against the POUM, which followed the May Days, one can judge the type of repression and the methods practised: “repression against revolutionaries in the Republican zone was more violent than in the Franco zone”; “revolutionaries were murdered on street corners”. The names of the most internationally known victims have often been published: Nin, Berneri, Wolf, Landau, Moulin; but it is impossible to list, or even to know, all the militants killed by the hand of Stalinist state terrorism, by the apolitical discipline of the barracks and the army, or in the labour camps.
The war provided Stalinism with a suitable means of hiding its crimes, just as a beetle hides in shit. One corpse too many on the front line, or abandoned a few kilometres away, could not provoke an investigation by the authorities, who were also predisposed to protect those who perpetrated the murder of revolutionaries. When the victim was at the front, it was enough to inform their family of their “disappearance” or “death”, after this or that operation, to consign them to oblivion. In the event of an arrest, the loss of any trace, both of the detainee and of the arresting officers, made any further investigation dangerous and useless.
Stalinism has conducted its criminal and counter-revolutionary work by various means. For example, abduction at home or in the street was perhaps the least used. This procedure was used above all with known militants, whom it was necessary to suppress before the beginning of any investigation, however weak and artificial it might be. The most common method was official arrest by the State, the Generalitat, or SIM agents, and detention in one of their prisons.
The SIM (Military Investigation Service) was a cover for the GPU (Soviet political police). It legalised Stalinism’s illegal “chekas”. It was staffed from top to bottom by Stalinist officials. The mere mention of its name provoked terror among the revolutionaries. According to various unanimous testimonies, taken among the workers’ organisations in Barcelona, and among detainees belonging to these organisations in the various prisons, torture was used with considerable frequency. Workers arrested during the May barricade struggles were horribly tortured to force them to “give up” arms caches, which in most cases did not exist. Among them, there were many who were said to have been “found murdered on street corners”. But torture was the SIM’s only technical resource. Everyone who has passed by them has a story of torment to tell.
Including cases of minor importance, in which the detainees were released after interrogation, having only been beaten, at best. Possession of a CNT or FAI membership card meant a deluge of insults or physical abuse; membership of the POUM, or the Bolshevik-Leninists, or any of the anarchist groups opposed to the policies of the Popular Front meant certain martyrdom, even if there was no serious accusation. However, some Stalinist militants, who allowed themselves to disagree with their “beloved bosses” or criticise scandalous abuses, were also tortured by the SIM. Fighters of the International Brigades who were dissatisfied with the disciplinary methods or who refused to join the communist party; military experts unwilling to adopt without reservation the procedures and provisions of the Russian experts; workers who had been found with a clandestine newspaper or manifesto (always revolutionary, since the illegal fascist press never existed); all found their place in the Stalinist “chekas”.[1]
After long interrogations and torture, and a few weeks, sometimes even several months, in the dungeons, came the accusation: “Trotskyism, espionage, arms caches, selling plans to the enemy”. The detainee was sent to the Model Prison, the State Prison or Montjuic, and a fantastic trial was fabricated which in 98% of the cases did not succeed, because of a total lack of basis. There were an infinite number of such trials. Stalinism was constantly accusing workers loyal to its class or experts who rebelled against its dictatorship of espionage, while its military chiefs, the state bureaucracy or its own political ranks were producing swarms of actual spies.
These cases were actually the most serious. Getting out of the “cheka” was a guarantee, albeit incomplete, that you would survive. But there are hundreds, even thousands of workers and activists, who went in and never came out. They cannot inform us, because the dead do not speak.
The bourgeoisie would have us believe that the activity of the SIM was directed against reactionary elements, which is true only in a very small number of cases, compared with that of militant workers or neutral persons who had accidentally come into contact with the Stalinist apparatus. All legal guarantees were assured to the fascists; for the revolutionaries the opposite was true. Justice was meted out to the fascists, in the first months of the revolution, by the armed workers, their committees and their class organisations. From the May Days onwards, the government regarded any such activity as criminal. The members of the workers’ committees were subjected to the Court of High Treason and Espionage for having arrested notoriously fascist individuals. The simple possession of a pistol, which had been used to defeat the military insurrection, led to many months of imprisonment for workers.
During the last months, there were still “chekas” about whose work and location the government remained unaware. Among the workers arrested in Barcelona, there was talk of secret concentration camps, which seemed to be confirmed by the existence of a semi-secret anarcho-syndicalist commission to locate missing persons. It only managed to discover the place of detention of some CNT bureaucrats, whose “disappearance” was no longer of interest to the Stalinists.
It will be necessary to write for a long time before we ever find out even some of those revolutionary militants who were killed in the army by the Stalinist venom. In many cases, comrades who had been imprisoned for long months, and released because of the absence of any basis for the accusation, had been sent directly to the front under Stalinist commanders with a secret report. Shortly afterwards, they were killed.
I limit myself to the case of Jaime Fernández[2] and José Rodríguez[3], POUM militants, the former a Bolshevik-Leninist and the latter who had assimilated the hard lessons of the Spanish experience. Both were transferred from the labour camp to the military front.[4] When legal pretexts were lacking, the hired thugs of the GPU found ways to satisfy their bloody desires. But there are many others who suffered such a fate, whose names have not been preserved by memory, without counting all those rank-and-file workers whose names will never be known—victims of a discipline which defended privileges, gave careers to careerists, and eliminated all freedom and all political rights for the soldiers, without succeeding in giving the army any kind of real organisation.
In this domain, it is indispensable to denounce the criminal work of Líster and “El Campesino”, proclaimed every day as heroes by Stalinism, and the former army officers recovered by the latter, such as Burillo and Pozas, qualified enemies of the proletariat, but of dubious military usefulness, even for the government itself. The army corps of Líster and “El Campesino” were the janissaries of the counter-revolution. Their heroism was that of Cavaignac or Martinez Campos.[5] The peasants of Aragon and Castile remembered their passage with the hatred that one professes towards an enemy.
The government, for its part, actively supported, law in hand, the extra-legal work of Stalinism, and abandoned the reins to it. After the formation of the Negrín government, following the defeat of May 1937, the President responded to a question about the rumours of an armistice: “Before talking about an armistice, we must disarm and pacify the rearguard”. Then began the bloody wave of repression which filled all the prisons of Spain with revolutionaries. The POUM, the Bolshevik-Leninists, and the “Friends of Durruti” were automatically outlawed, without any prior decree of dissolution. The workers’ premises, wrested from the fascists with weapons in their hands, were invaded by the Assault Guards armed with machine guns, tanks and artillery which the fighters lacked. The most important assault was the one against the Defence Committee installed in the former convent of Los Escolapios.[6] About twenty tanks surrounded the building at night. The occupants resisted. The artillery began to fire. In the morning several factories abandoned work in protest. The irritation of the proletariat was so great that a new May Day could be foreseen… but the intervention of the regional committee of the CNT broke the movement and forced the besieged to surrender. From that moment on, all those who had belonged to the original committees, to the Control Patrols, or to the Rearguard Militias, were assured of being sent before a court of High Treason and Espionage.
This semi-military tribunal, secret and summary in character, had been legally given the power of life and death over the accused. Mere disagreement with government policy gave legal status to the charge of high treason, which was a fatal verdict of the Tribunal. Sentences of ten- or twenty-years’ imprisonment have been handed out to those workers who had read an underground manifesto. The trials of the Bolshevik-Leninists and the POUM have established the obvious reactionary character which was hidden under the words “espionage and treason”.
The illegal terror of the Stalinists and the state-sanctioned terror complemented each other. The former served as a shock force and a guide for the latter. The aim was the same: to crush the revolutionaries, to liquidate any proletarian nucleus or any nucleus faithful to the conception of social revolution. Even if they were subjected to the terrorist procedure prescribed by law, they were no longer protected from sudden assassination. In the Model Prison or in Montjuic, comrades who had remained for months in the underground of the “chekas” were frequently called in for new “interrogations”. Some did not return. The insecurity for revolutionaries was such in prison that, when you entered the so-called “state” prison, the director felt obliged to assure you that you could be calm at home.
The work camps[7] constituted the most horrible chapter of the legal terror. Thousands of labourers of all persuasions endured sufferings which only they could accurately narrate. Subjected to a regime of very hard labour for twelve or fourteen hours a day, with a hundred grams of bread and a hundred of lentils for every meal, the comrades who came out after two or three months to attend their trial were anemic to a degree that would seem unbearable to any man. The regime of these camps had nothing to envy to those of Hitler. Beatings with the butt or the club were commonplace. Shootings were so frequent that after two weeks they no longer impressed the interned comrades. In Camp No. 1, under the command of Major Astorga, a Stalinist who had been in prison living with the fascists in the fifth gallery, twenty men were shot on arrival, because they had been described as falsely ill and unfit for work. Theodore Sanz[8], a Bolshevik-Leninist among them, only escaped with difficulty when he could prove that his wounds had come from the war. The work teams consisted of squads of fifteen men. If one escaped, the other fourteen were shot immediately. Thus, a large number of the best militants of the Spanish proletariat met their death, legally assassinated by the Popular Front government.
The division of labour inside the prisons or in the labour camps is also an excellent index of where state repression was leaning. Thus, all positions that involved some comfort or privileges (clerks, cooks, crew leaders, etc.) were occupied by fascists. On the other hand, many of these fascists managed to free themselves for money.
The world bourgeois press feeds its public with terrifying stories, but the truth is that the government’s repression of the fascists was very moderate. The need to win the confidence of the national and international bourgeoisie, on which Negrín based his policy, forced him to be tolerant; he sought to win their favour. And at the time when the second power of the committees existed, repression was insufficient for lack of a centralised organisation.
This same strategic policy led the government into the crimes of legal repression, leaving the field open to the gangs of the GPU. If the Revolution has been defeated, if the war has ended in defeat and if Franco today subjects the workers to slavery and repression, the only responsible party and the forerunner of Franco is the government of the Popular Front and its main representative: Stalinism.
G. Munis (February 1939)
Notes
[1] On the repression of the SIM, see GUILLAMÓN, Agustín: “Algunos informes de “Pedro” sobre la Guerra de España, y otros documentos. The NKVD and the SIM in Barcelona”. Balance, notebook no. 22. Partially reproduced in http://www.red-libertaria: “El terror estalinista en Barcelona (1938)”.
[2] Jaime Fernández Rodríguez was transferred from the Omells camp to the camp for the punishment of SIM deserters on the beach of “La Pelosa”, in Rosas (Alt Empordà, province of Gerona). On 23 August 1938, he was summoned to stand trial for the murder of Narwicz, but due to a bureaucratic error he was sent to the courts of Gerona instead of Barcelona. On 5 September 1938, he was authorised to enlist in a military unit (Division 45), where he lived under constant surveillance by Stalinist guards. He managed to escape in October 1938, after being hospitalised following a gunshot wound to the leg in an action at the front. See his biography on the website kaosenlared: https://archivo.kaosenlared.net/biograf-a-de-jaime-fern-ndez/index.html
[3] José Rodríguez Arroyo, POUM militant, brother of Enrique Rodríguez Arroyo (“Quique”), also a POUM militant, and of Antonio Rodríguez Arroyo, a militant of the Fourth. He died in 2003. See the brief biographical notes on José Rodríguez published on the Nin Foundation website.
[4] Munis was imprisoned from 5 February 1938 until 26 January 1939, when the entry of the fascists into Barcelona forced the evacuation of the political prisoners to the French border. For this reason, in February 1939, he was unaware of the real fate of Jaime Fernández and José Rodríguez, whom he assumed had been executed by the Stalinists. See his biography in volume I of his Collected Works.
[5] Reactionary heroism. General Cavaiganc harshly repressed the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 and was invested with dictatorial powers until December, when he was defeated by Louis Napoleon in the elections for President of the Republic. General Martinez Campos’s pronunciamiento in favour of Alfonso XII led to the restoration of the Bourbons.
[6] The assault on Los Escolapios in September 1937 marked the end of the last remaining nucleus of revolutionary resistance in Barcelona. Los Escolapios housed the central Defence Committee and was the headquarters of the Food Union. During the May days, this central Defence Committee played a decisive role as the vanguard of the revolutionaries, which was pointed out by Gero (“Pedro”) in his reports to Moscow. See GUILLAMÓN, Agustín: Barricadas en Barcelona. Espartaco, Barcelona, 2007.
[7] On the labour camps, see the excellent book by BADIA, Francesc: Els camps de treball a Catalunya durant la guerra civil (1936-1939). Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2001.
[8] On 23 April 1938, Jaime Fernández and Teodoro Sanz were transferred from the Modelo Prison, where they were imprisoned on charges of murder, to labour camps. Jaime Fernández was interned, with “Quique” (Enrique Rodríguez Arroyo) and Teodoro Sanz, in Omells de Na Gaia, where they suffered and overcame the horrible conditions of this authentic Stalinist extermination camp of the SIM, run by the criminals Astorga and Mendoza.
League of Internationalist Communists 