Spanish Revolution 1936-7

In his 1947 essay, “Why I Write”, George Orwell explained: “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it…” Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell bore witness to the murder of the Spanish Revolution, was the product of this defining period of Orwell’s life, at least the literary and political equal of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the February 1936 Spanish...

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Andrew Coates reviews Lions Led By Jackals, Stalinism in the International Brigades by Dale Street. During Franco’s dictatorship “the defeated in Spain has no public right to historical memory” observed Paul Preston in The Spanish Holocaust (2012). The movement to recover these memories, beginning in the new millennium, continues to expose this past. The defeated side in the Spanish civil war, and those who fell during and after the Caudillo’s victory in the 1939, are honoured across the world as fighters against fascism. As Preston states, Franco’s war against the “Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic’...

Tear down the Glasgow waterfront statue of Stalinist sycophant Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”) and replace it by one of the Gorbals-born International Brigader Alexander Marcowich! This is the conclusion of a new Workers’ Liberty pamphlet: Lions Led by Jackals — Stalinism in the International Brigades. The pamphlet draws on the wealth of material — much of it previously unused — in the Communist International’s archives of the International Brigades, published online by the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in early 2015. An abyss separates the political reality of the...

D. A. Santillan has written a tragic, very significant book* to tell the “real role” of the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), the “only influential mass organization that remained incorruptible in the face of new loves” and to place the blame for the victory of Franco where he thinks it really falls – at the door of the “democracies,” Russia and the Popular Front government of Spain. Santillan, leader and chief of the Anarchist Federation of Iberia, was the organizer and active leader of the militias that crushed the fascists in Barcelona in July, 1936, and then marched on to Aragon. He...

M. Wilson D. A. Santillan has written a tragic, very significant book* to tell the “real role” of the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), the “only influential mass organization that remained incorruptible in the face of new loves” and to place the blame for the victory of Franco where he thinks it really falls – at the door of the “democracies,” Russia and the Popular Front government of Spain. Santillan, leader and chief of the Anarchist Federation of Iberia, was the organizer and active leader of the militias that crushed the fascists in Barcelona in July, 1936, and then marched on to...

Just as the main body of the Communist International came out of the Second International, so the roots of the Fourth International are to be traced to the beginnings of the crisis in the Third. Fifteen years have elapsed since the movement now organized under the banner of the Fourth International first took shape. It arose in the form of the Opposition in the Russian Communist Party, variously called the "Moscow" or "1923" or "Trotskyist" Opposition. Uniting the best elements of the Old Guard and of the youth of the Party, and led by Leon Trotsky, it was the first to sound the alarm against...

Grandizo Munis (1912-1989) was one of the earliest Spanish Trotskyists. Born Manuel Fernandez Grandizo in Larena, Estremadura, Munis joined Izquierda Comunista (ICE), the Spanish section of Trotsky’s International Left Opposition at its conference in Liege in Belgium in February 1930. The majority in ICE, led by Andrés Nin, soon came into conflict with Trotsky over the section’s semi-detached relationship with the rest of the International Left Opposition (ILO) and its positive attitude towards the “Right Oppositionist” Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC). These differences erupted into a full...

Liam McNulty concludes his article on the Trotskyists in the Spanish revolution of 1936/7. The first part appeared in Solidarity 242. In December 1936 the POUM was ejected from the Catalan Generalitat (provincial government) on the orders of the Soviet consul in Barcelona, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko (the man who led the Bolsheviks’ assault on the Winter Palace in 1917). At a party conference in February 1937 the POUM belatedly drew some of the same conclusions as Trotsky on the Popular Front. The POUM resolved to call for the formation of revolutionary workers’ democracy to consolidate the...

'There is nothing so destructive as illusion, whereas nothing can be of greater use to the revolution than naked truth.' Rosa Luxemburg, The Spartacus Programme. The Spanish Revolution was the last great confrontation in the Europe-wide class war sparked by the triumph of the Russian Revolution in 1917. It inspired workers from all over the world and its tragic defeat was a source of controversy for decades after the events. The writings of Leon Trotsky were important in that debate. The writings of other revolutionaries — such as Victor Serge — are less well known, though they were important...