The Praxis Centre in Russia has recently published a Russian translation of the POUM veteran Wilebaldo Solano’s book “The POUM: Revolution in the Spanish Civil War”. It contains a preface by Dan Gallin, ‘The Party of the Last Chance’, which we publish below.

“Everything begins with consciousness which gives validity to everything.” — Albert Camus

The Praxis Centre has performed a great service by translating and publishing Wilebaldo Solano’s book “The POUM: Revolution in the Spanish Civil War”. This war was a key turning-point in the history of the working-class movement. It was the first and last pitched battle of the European proletariat against fascism. Among the various resistances, it was the greatest, the longest, and the one which demanded the biggest sacrifices.

It is surrounded by myths which obscure its meaning, and the most pernicious of these myths concerns the role of the USSR and the Communist International, the Comintern. According to myth, the USSR, by its support for the Spanish Republic, is said to have been the main bulwark against fascism. The reality is quite different: this is the hidden history of the Spanish Revolution, the strangling of which was made possible by the USSR’s support for the Republic, thus opening the way for fascism. Solano’s book documents this reality. It was particularly important to make this history available to Russian readers, and it is a revenge of history that this book should appear in Moscow, from where, in 1936, the murderers of the Revolution came.

It is just as important to remember the international political context, which is that of the independent revolutionary socialist movement in Europe and beyond. In fact the POUM (Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista, or the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was part of a broader movement, which was trying to go beyond the limits of Social Democracy and Stalinist Communism. The continuations of this movement still exist in different forms, partly in socialist parties, partly in independent organizations which pass on the historical memory so that it may assist future struggles. In Spain, it is the Andreu Nin Foundation, in Russia the Praxis Centre. They are not alone.

The POUM made its historical appearance at a time when, in Europe, the international working-class movement had just suffered its most serious defeats. In 1935, when the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC) and the Communist Left of Spain (ICE) merged to form a new revolutionary party in Spain, fascism had already been victorious in Italy, Portugal, Germany and Austria.

In Italy, as early as 1925, Mussolini had broken the democratic opposition, the left and the unions and created the prototype of the fascist state. In Portugal, the insurrectionary general strike called by the CGT in 1934 against Salazar’s ‘estado novo’ was crushed by the army. In Germany Hitler took power in 1933 without meeting any resistance. The workers’ parties, both Social Democrats and Communists, had paramilitary militias which remained passive. The Communist Party gave priority to fighting the Social Democrats, while the latter clutched on to a legality which was in process of disappearing. By March 1933 they were meeting up again in the Nazi concentration camps. In February 1934 the Austrian Socialist militia, the Schutzbund, fought against Dollfuss’ coup d’etat without having received any order, by refusing to let itself be disarmed. It was crushed when the army intervened with artillery alongside the fascist militia.

In Spain too the general strike of October 1934 and the Asturian revolt, crushed by troops led — already — by General Franco, was a part of the revolutionary workers’ struggles of the 1930s against the authoritarian right and the rise of fascism.

The workers’ movement of the 1930s was divided into two main blocs, the Social Democrats and the Communists, but they were not the only ones. Independent revolutionary socialist currents had already appeared at the end of the First World War. In part they originated from the anti-militarist and internationalist socialist oppositions to the 1914-18 war which, however, had refused to join the Comintern, founded in March 1919, in most cases because of a refusal to accept the “Twenty-One Conditions” for affiliation. Subsequently the conservatism and legalism of the mass Social Democratic parties in face of the fascist threat led to new breakaways on their left.

Among these first regroupings of left socialists, we should note the role played by Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian socialist organizations, already forced into exile. These included various currents of Menshevism, notably Martov’s internationalists, the Jewish Workers Bund, the left Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs from Ukraine and Subcarpathian Ukraine, the Georgians with Tsereteli, Zhordania and Ramishvili, murdered in Paris in 1950 by an agent of the NKVD (Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

The revolutionary syndicalists in Spain (El Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT), who had joined the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) when it was formed in 1921, left it by 1922 to re-establish the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) as an anarcho-syndicalism trade-union international. Andreu Nin, who had taken part in the founding congress of the RILU as a CNT delegate, joined the Communist Party of the USSR, and became the Deputy General Secretary of the RILU from 1921 to 1927, when he joined the Left Opposition. In France, revolutionary syndicalists who had joined the Communist Party, notably Pierre Monatte and Alfred Rosmer, were expelled in 1924 and founded La Révolution prolétarienne, breaking with the Comintern.

The third source of revolutionary socialism was the Communist oppositions, especially after the “Bolshevisation” launched by Stalin in 1924 which led to the total subordination of the Communist parties to the Soviet party-state, and brought about successive waves of expulsions.

The political resistance to Stalin’s seizure of power in the Communist Party of the USSR produced two main tendencies which developed on an international level. The “Left Opposition”, which appeared as early as 1923, led by Trotsky, became an international tendency in 1930, of which the ICE (Izquierda Comunista de España, or Communist Left) was a part. It became the Fourth International in 1938. At the same time the “Right Opposition”, which supported Bukharin, became in turn an international tendency in 1930, well rooted in Germany, Sweden and the USA. The BOC (Bloque Obrero y Campesino, or Workers and Peasants’ Bloc) did not join it, but was sympathetic.

From 1923 to 1932 the international regrouping of the socialist left and its revolutionary currents consisted of successive splits and fusions as the crisis of the mass Social Democratic and Communist parties deepened; no way out of these crises was possible within the framework of the parties. After the failure of the attempts to achieve a reconstruction of working-class unity, the question of a new International was posed.

The International Revolutionary Marxist Centre was set up ill 1932 on the initiative of the British Independent Labour Party (ILP), which took responsibility for the secretariat. It was subsequently known as the International Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Unity but has remained better known under the name of the London Bureau. It brought together parties from 13 countries, which had emerged on the one hand from left splits from Social Democracy, such as the German Socialist Workers Party (SAP) or, in France, the revolutionary left of the SFIO (Socialist Party) which in 1938 became the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (PSOP); and on the other hand from splits from Communist parties, such as the Socialist Party of Sweden or the Communist Opposition (KPO) in Germany. The POUM became a member at the time of its formation in 1935. The Norwegian Labour Party was the only workers’ party that was very much in a majority in its country to affiliate as an organisation, but it returned to the Socialist International in 1933.

Edo Fimmen, General Secretary of the International Federation of Transport Workers (ITF), was a member of the Independent Socialist Party (OSP) of the Netherlands, affiliated to the Bureau. Under his leadership, the ITF chartered ships which broke the blockade on Asturias during the Spanish Civil War.

The panics affiliated to the London Bureau were divided over the question of the Popular Front or the Workers’ United Front. They called for unity of Socialist and Communist parties in face of the rise of fascism, thus taking the same position as Trotsky, but a rapprochement with the Trotskyist movement fell through: the majority of the parties in the London Bureau, including the POUM, were opposed to the creation of a new International. The majority of these parties, whose origins and politics were diverse, considered that the founding of such an international would be premature, and that in any case it could not be based on the small Trotskyist groups. Trotsky launched polemics against the “centrism” of the Bureau, and in particular against Andreu Nin and the leadership of the ICE for having preferred fusion with the BOC to the Trotskyist option.

The fascist generals’ coup in Spain in July 1936, which unleashed revolution in Catalonia and civil war throughout the country, brought about a radical change in the political situation of the revolutionary left. After defeats in the face of fascism throughout Europe, a new front was being opened, a battle which the working-class movement could win.

For the POUM, and to some extent for the CNT and the left of the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or Spanish Socialist Party), war and revolution were indissolubly linked: without revolution, the war could not be won. From that point onwards, the POUM became the party around which the activity of the London Bureau and its affiliated parties was organised. As early as July, volunteers were pouring in from all over Europe and beyond in order to fight: revolutionary socialists, dissident Communists in the POUM militias, anarchists in the CNT militias. Even Communist Party members joined these militias, which were the first to fight, since the International Brigades would only be organised by the Comintern from October, when Stalin realised that a revolution was possible in Spain and that there was a danger it could escape his control.

It is estimated that nearly 700 international volunteers from at least 28 countries joined the POUM units, coming from most of the parties in the Bureau, but also from others, in particular from the Trotskyist organisations in various countries. More than half the international volunteers were Germans, mainly from the KPO and the SAP. About a hundred British volunteers from the ILP fought in Spain, half of them in the POUM militias (George Orwell was the best known of them), and others with the International Brigades or CNT units. Some 20 Italians (maximalist socialists, Bordigists and Trotskyists) fought with the POUM.

From August and September 1936 revolutionary socialists also joined the CNT militias. The Mattcotti battalion, commanded by Carlo Rosselli, leader of the socialist movement Giustizia e libertà (GL), and by the anarchist Camillo Berneri, fought alongside the CNT’s Ascaso Column on the Aragon Front. It was made up of Italians of different tendencies (anarchists, republicans, maximalists, GL and Communists), and won an important battle at Monte Pelado in August 1936. On Barcelona Radio, Rosselli declared: “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy”.

However, Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) which followed his orders were determined to destroy the revolutionary forces which had the potential to take the leadership of a workers’ revolution, and which could consequently play an exemplary role at a time when Stalin was in process of liquidating what remained of the Russian Revolution. The first Moscow Trial took place in August 1936. From October onwards, the Stalinists began their assaults against the POUM’s supporters, together with a campaign of slander and monstrous defamation.

The USSR was in a position of strength. While the Western democracies refused to give any assistance to the Republic, the USSR remained the only country, along with Mexico, to give it military aid, accompanied by political conditions which ended up paralysing the institutions of the state. The PCE, insignificant at the beginning of the Civil War, took control of the levers of power, the police and the army, assisted by specialists sent by the USSR. The trial of strength came with the May Days in 1937 in Barcelona, to which Solano devotes a chapter of his book. A police unit under Communist command attempted to take control of the telephone exchange run by the CNT. The CNT supporters defended themselves and the whole city rose up. The POUM joined the CNT supporters but the national leadership of the CNT, which had joined the government of the Republic, enforced an end to the fighting. From then onwards the relation of forces were changed, the Stalinists regained the initiative, obtained the resignation of Largo Caballero and his replacement by Negrin, a Socialist but a collaborator with the Communists. There was now nothing to block repression.

Robert Louzon, a French syndicalist and supporter of La Révolution prolétarienne, in his study of the May Days, quoted by Pierre Broué, says he was struck by the crushing superiority of the armed workers, who controlled nine-tenths of the city, without effectively having had to fight for it. But he stresses that this strength was used only defensively. Broué concludes:

“It is certainly reasonable to think that the spontaneous reaction of the Barcelona workers could have opened up a new revolutionary momentum, and that this was the opportunity to change direction. An historian can merely observe that the anarchist leaders did not wish to do so and that the POUM’s leaders did not believe it was possible.”

It was the last chance for the revolution.

The repression unleashed by the NKVD and the Spanish Communists from May 1937, against the POUM and the anti-Stalinist left, was a violent blow against the international volunteers. The NKVD killers murdered the Austrian revolutionary Marxist Kurt Landau—an adviser to the POUM; Bob Smillie of the ILP; the socialist Marc Rhein, son of the Menshevik leader Rafael Abramovitch; the Trotskyists Erwin Wolf, Hans Freund and Goffredo Rossini—a close associate of Gramsci exiled in Brazil; George Tioloi—a Comintern agent who had become a dissident; Alberto Besouchet—a Brazilian soldier who was close to the Trotskyists and a volunteer in the International Brigades; and the anarchists Camillo Berneri and Francesco Barbieri, among others.

Numerous international volunteers were arrested and held in the NKVD’s private prisons, the “chekas”. Some were able to escape, others were freed thanks to international campaigns run by the London Bureau and its member parties which sent several delegations, by the parties of the Socialist International, and by solidarity committees which drew together intellectuals, trade unionists and political leaders from various sections of the left, notably in France, Great Britain and the United States. Other prisoners were rescued from the “chekas” by socialist and anarchist squads. The situation of exiles—Germans, Austrians, Italians and others— who could not claim any diplomatic protection, even of a very limited nature, was particularly difficult.

The fate of the POUM militants was scarcely any easier. About a thousand POUM militants were arrested, and about 50 murdered, including Andreu Nin, who was kidnapped and tortured to death on 20 June 1937. After the disbanding of the POUM’s military units, its militiamen who were transferred into units under Communist command were murdered or sent to the front on suicide missions, but others were welcomed into units commanded by CNT supporters or left socialists, where they could survive. A trial of POUM leaders organised by the NKVD in 1938, which was to be a “Moscow Trial in Spain” and which aimed to confirm their “complicity with the Francoists”, came to a sudden end. Andreu Nin had died under torture without signing “confessions”, the accused resisted and became accusers, socialist and anarchist leaders testified in their favour and a campaign of solidarity throughout Europe and the United States ended up by discrediting the plot hatched by the NKVD.

CNT and anarchist militants were also victims of the repression on the part of the NKVD and the Spanish Communists. Thus, 12 members of the Libertarian Youth were found murdered by the roadside, including Alfredo Martinez, secretary of the Revolutionary Youth Front, formed from the Iberian Communist Youth (whose secretary was Wilebaldo Solano) and the Libertarian Youth.

The repression against the POUM, the anarchists and their international comrades took place outside the control of the Republican authorities, who were powerless. In August a delegation led by James Maxton, an ILP Member of the British Parliament, investigated the charges against the POUM and the disappearance of Andreu Nin. Manuel Irujo, the Minister of Justice (Basque Nationalist), told them that the police had become “quasi-independent” and that in reality it was under the control of foreign Communist elements. Another delegation headed by John McGovern, also an ILP MP, in December got the same response from Julián Zugozagortia, the (Socialist) Minister of the Interior: “We have received assistance from Russia and we have had to allow certain acts which do not please us”.

In 1939 Juan Negrin’s “government of victory” lost the war. Barcelona fell on 26 January and armed resistance in Catalonia ended on 9 February. The POUM prisoners feared they would fall into the hands of Franco’s supporters, but the Minister of Justice, the Socialist González Peña, released them two days before the fall of Barcelona. They managed to make their way into France where they were welcomed by PSOP militants.

While the Republican Front was collapsing, Negrin and the Communists called for resistance to the death. On 12 March, Negrin, his Soviet advisers and the Communist headquarters staff fled by plane. Franco declared the war was over on 1 April 1939.

This was just five months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The USSR had progressively reduced its military aid to the Republic from the summer of 1938, beginning the shift in its foreign policy which would culminate in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939. The German army invaded Poland on 1 September, followed by the Soviet army on 17 September.

The London Bureau was wound up in 1939. It had made the struggle against war a major theme of its politics. The Spanish Revolution had clarified what was at stake and had given it a new dimension.

At the Brussels Congress of the Bureau in October 1936 Fenner Brockway of the ILP had stated:

“The Spanish Revolution will become the European revolution. That may seem utopian but, following the development of the situation in Spain, while Soviet Russia is threatening to tear up the Non-Intervention Pact, it is necessary for us to be ready for a social revolution which will spread across frontiers.”

Brockway went on:

“In the working class, as a result of the heroic struggle of our Spanish comrades, there has been a rebirth of the revolutionary spirit… At this very moment, from events, from the historical process, from the general movement of the working class, are arising forces which will create a new revolutionary International… I say to this congress that it may also be the case that what the social revolution in Russia was for the birth of the Third International, the social revolution in Spain will be for the birth of a new revolutionary International.”

This was also the POUM’s perspective. As Solano wrote later, in more sober terms:

“We had to arm ourselves ideologically, politically and organizationally in order to win in Spain and thus to prevent any development of fascism in Europe by avoiding a second world war and by opening up perspectives of liberation for the European working-class movement.”

In reality the Spanish Resolution was isolated. In France the great strikes of June 1936 had made a revolutionary perspective look plausible, but the Popular Front government had put an end to them. To the revolutionary socialist Marceau Pivert, a member of the London Bureau, who had declared in June 1936 that “everything was possible”, Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the French Communist Party, had replied that not everything was possible, and that it was necessary “to know how to end a strike”. In the rest of Europe nothing moved. In the USA there was certainly a revival of the working-class movement with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, but this had no immediate consequences on the international level.

If it is nonetheless true that the Spanish Revolution could have been the last chance for a European revolution, that would have required the CNT to commit itself fully alongside the POUM. As we have seen this was not the case. On this subject, Solano’s account of the meeting between the POUM leaders and those of the CNT on 3 May 1937 (in Chapter 4) is very illuminating.

But above all in the Bureau’s policy there was a fatal failure to recognise a new factor, the counter-revolutionary power of the USSR. And that was the decisive factor explaining why the relations of forces on a world scale were far from being as favourable to the Spanish Revolution in 1936 as they had been for the Russian Revolution in 1917-19.

The Brussels Congress, where Julián Gorkin represented the POUM. welcomed Soviet military aid, while warning of the danger of  “the colonisation of the Spanish working class in exchange for arms’. We know what happened. The Congress also adopted, against the views of a minority, the slogan “defence of the USSR” its being the only country “whose economic system is based on the collectivity of society and which thereby represents a considerable obstacle to the stabilisation of world imperialism”.

Finally, the Congress did not manage it take a position on the Moscow Trial of August 1936, despite the intervention of the delegate from L’École émancipée (a French teachers’ organization), a woman who also noted that there was not much left of the “gains of the October Revolution” which was worth defending. The discussion on the “Russian question” was postponed till the next congress which was due to meet, at the POUM’s invitation, in Barcelona in the spring of 1937.

Parties such as the German KPO of Brandler and Thalheimer, whose members were nevertheless fighting in the POUM militias, refused to condemn the Moscow Trials until the fourth one [sic — RH] in March 1938 when the chief accused was their comrade Bukharin.

By achieving as early as 1935 a fusion of the “left” and “right” Communist oppositions, the POUM had anticipated what was to be a reality which finally imposed itself on revolutionaries in the 1940s and 1950s: the “left” and “right” oppositions in fact represented jointly a left in the Marxist tradition against Stalinism which, far from representing a “centre”, was in fact building a political and economic system in the hands of a new class which no longer had anything in common with socialism. Movements, like people, learn only from experience, and the experience of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Spain was a decisive lesson for the socialist movement, but one which cost a high price.

The defeat of the Spanish Revolution, which led to that of the Republic, marked the end of a period in the history of revolutionary socialism, a period which had begun with the political repercussions of the First World War.

We can leave the epilogue to Willy Buschak, the historian of the London Bureau:

“The fact that the Civil War in Spain could not lead to the new revival hoped for by left socialists in Europe was in large part due to factors outside their control. In the end the outcome of the Civil War was decided in London, Paris and Moscow; only the concentrated weight of the whole of the European working-class movement could have tipped the scales. But the great trade-union and political Internationals of the working-class movement were not up to the job. The Comintern and its Spanish section bore the responsibility for a policy which had broken the momentum of the anti-fascist resistance by violently suppressing the social revolutionary currents. From a Spain where the Revolution lay strangled, no renewal of the European movement, such as the left socialists hoped for, could emerge.

“After that all that the London Bureau could now do was to preserve its cadres, to train and prepare them for the long deep night of the Second World War which was awaiting them, by trying to enable the socialist spirit to survive as much as possible during the war.”

References: Willy Buschak, Das Londoner Büro —Europäische Linkssozialisten in der Zwischenkriegszeit, (Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam, 1985); Andy Durgan, International Volunteers in the POUM Militias, (Fundacion Andreu Nin, Edición digital, 2004); Reiner Tosstorft, Die POUM in der spanischen Revolution, (ISP, Köln, 2006); Stefanie Prezioso, Jean Batou, Ami-Jacques Rapin (eds), Tant pis si la lutte est cruelle —Volontaires intemationaux contre Franco, (Editions Syllepse, Paris, 2008).