The years 1917–20 were characterized by political instability and revolutionary effervescence across Europe. In the eyes of many, the Bolshevik Revolution heralded the downfall of the capitalist system, and Soviet Russia became a beacon flare for revolutionaries everywhere. One of the countries where the impact of the Russian Revolution was felt the most was Spain. On the opposite side of Europe, it was often labeled as “the Russia of the West,” a country characterized by its backwardness and underdevelopment.Footnote 1 An increasingly restless labor movement, an impoverished landless peasantry, and daunting national and colonial questions combined into an explosive tinderbox that threatened to sweep away the Bourbon Restoration regime. Like Russia, Spain would also be gripped by social revolution in the early decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 2 It is therefore no surprise that the news of the Russian Revolution arrived in Spain as a bombshell. Indeed, the years 1917–20 are remembered in Spain as the Trienio Bolchevista (three Bolshevik years).
The early months of 1917 saw an increase in strike activity, stimulated by the news coming from Russia of the overthrow of the Tsar. The plight of the Restoration Regime was aggravated by an army mutiny and by an attempt by liberal politicians to hold a constituent assembly. The upswing in labor militancy culminated in a violent general strike in August 1917, which was bloodily suppressed after days of barricade fighting. It took several months for the labor movement to recover from this blow.Footnote 3 In the meantime, however, the peasant agitations in the latifundista regions of Andalusia and Extremadura were spreading like wildfire, as landless laborers, dazzled by the Russian example, began to revolt. Indefinite general strikes paralyzed the rural economy; uprisings were staged where entire villages were taken over by the rebels, who declared anarchy; manor houses and churches were set ablaze and crops destroyed. The peasant rebellions were only subdued after a twenty-thousand-strong army was dispatched in Andalusia in the spring of 1919.Footnote 4
However, at this point the urban labor movement was making a vigorous comeback. In April 1919, a dispute in the La Canadiense hydroelectricity company of Barcelona spiraled into a citywide general strike that lasted for several weeks, which concluded with far-reaching concessions for the workers. Strike activity intensified across industrial centers in the following months. The militancy of Spanish workers evoked the specter of Bolshevik Revolution among the country's propertied classes, and impelled an increasingly violent response from the authorities.Footnote 5
Whereas in other European countries the revolutionary appeal of the Bolsheviks was often taken up by left-wing tendencies from within Social Democracy, in Spain the most important harbingers of social revolution came from the Bakuninist tradition. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour) (CNT), a revolutionary syndicalist trade union federation that was strongly influenced by anarchist ideas, became an enthusiastic champion of Soviet Russia. In Spain's Trienio Bolchevista, the CNT was able to grow significantly, boasting almost eight hundred thousand members in 1919 and displacing the socialists from the helm of the country's labor movement. In this period, it also became the largest anarcho-syndicalist organization in the world. The generalized optimism and enthusiasm of these years, as well as the scarcity of reliable news from Russia, clouded the ideological divergences between the Bolsheviks and the cenetistas (CNT militants). Consequently, the confederation affiliated to the Third International in 1919. It sent two official delegations to Moscow, one in 1920 and another in 1921.Footnote 6
By late 1920, the revolutionary tide in Spain and the rest of Europe began to ebb, tempering the enthusiasm about the Russian Revolution. Repression against the labor movement stiffened, and Spanish anarcho-syndicalists were dragged into an attrition war with the authorities and with right-wing gunmen. Thousands of activists were murdered, imprisoned, or driven into exile. This repressive wave culminated with the staging of a military coup d’état by General Primo de Rivera in September 1923. The confederation's trade unions emptied out, and decisive strikes were lost. At the same time, more news about the authoritarian character of the Bolsheviks were reaching Spain. The crushing of Makhno's army and the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising were particularly unsettling for the cenetistas. Moreover, the Bolsheviks’ official associate in Spain became the Partido Comunista de España (Spanish Communist Party) (PCE), a small, sectarian organization that amalgamated several split groupings from the Socialist Party. In Moscow, the CNT was treated as an underdog and relegated to the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), the trade union front of the Third International.
In this dire context, the majority of the CNT rapidly turned against the Russian communists, reasserting their anarcho-syndicalist traditions. They began to rail against the statism and authoritarianism of Lenin and his followers, to decry the repression levied against the Russian anarchists, and to denounce that capitalist tyranny had been replaced with the despotism of the commissars. By June 1922, the anarcho-syndicalists managed to secure the disaffiliation of the CNT from the Third International, reaffirming its libertarian, anti-statist character.Footnote 7
Much of the historiography has tended to brush off the anarchists’ initial infatuation with the Bolsheviks as the product of a mere misunderstanding, made possible by the dearth of reliable news from Russia.Footnote 8 It is true that the muddled and contradictory information coming from Eastern Europe made it easier to lionize the Bolsheviks. However, this explanation is too simplistic, and overlooks the optimism and euphoria awakened by the Bolshevik victory, the mutability of ideologies in the stormy years that followed the Russian Revolution and the First World War, and the possibility to capitalize politically on the period's revolutionary effervescence.
There was a genuine ideological rapprochement between anarchists and Bolsheviks, of which the endorsement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by most Spanish anarchists is probably the most remarkable aspect. While the anarchists’ understanding of the Soviet regime was patchy, some important facts became evident from the outset. The Bolsheviks had not destroyed the state, but had established a new, revolutionary regime. Very soon, it also became clear that this new government was organizing itself militarily to wage a ruthless war on counterrevolution, and that this form of government went by the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concept had been anathema for libertarians since the rift between Marx and Bakunin in the First International (1864–1876), and yet most cenetistas came to accept it.
This article will trace and historicize the Spanish libertarians’ engagement with the Bolshevik dictatorship of the proletariat in 1917–22, grounding it in the broader intellectual history of Spanish anarchism and in the tempestuous context of pan-European revolution and counterrevolution that emerged after 1917. To do this, it will rely on a variety of sources (some of them previously unknown to the historiography), drawn from archives in Barcelona, Madrid, Alcoy, Amsterdam, and Moscow, ranging from the contemporary anarchist press, including lesser-known local publications; CNT minutes; documents from the Third International; Spanish government and police reports; and published and unpublished memoirs.
The article will contend that by 1917 the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not central to Spanish anarchist ideology. The movement had evolved over the years in opposition to the reformist politics of the Spanish Socialist Party, which had eschewed the more violent and authoritarian tenets of Marxism. The question of the dictatorship fell by the wayside in the polemics between socialists and anarchists.
The wave of revolutionary optimism inaugurated by the Russian Revolution further clouded the ideological divergences between the Spanish anarchists and the Russian communists. Moreover, the victory of the Bolsheviks’ ruthless methods in seizing power and combating counterrevolution seemed attractive to Spanish labor activists in a context of virulent social struggle. In these years, the divide between revolutionaries and reformists became more important than formal ideological affinities.
Furthermore, the anarchist infatuation with the Bolsheviks cannot be grasped without analyzing the contemporary dynamics of political competition. The Russian Revolution became an irresistible political weapon. It was used by the CNT against the socialists, and its capacity to pose as the Russian counterpart of Spanish anarchism greatly increased its appeal. The Russian Revolution also served as a potent weapon in the hands of the extremist factions of the confederation in the infighting against the moderates.
Conversely, the ebb in labor mobilization after 1920 changed the situation drastically. Enthusiasm gave way to demoralization and pessimism. The CNT was decimated, and was faced with the unwelcome competition of the Moscow-sponsored PCE. This laid the groundwork for the break with the Third International in 1922.
This article has been influenced by recent innovations in the literature on international anarchism. Historians such as Reiner Tosstorff, Santi Fedele, Ralph Darlington, Francisco Romero Salvadó, or Chris Ealham place less emphasis on empirical questions of anarchist knowledge of Bolshevik repression, and are paying more attention to the context of the violent social struggle that existed in much of Europe, to the fluidity and open-endedness of revolutionary politics at the time, and to the possibilities for the anarchists to capitalize on the euphoria aroused by the Russian Revolution among many workers.Footnote 9
The Evolution of a Controversial Concept
In the days of the First International, one of the most divisive bones of contention between the followers of Karl Marx and those of Mikhail Bakunin was the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than abolish the state altogether, Marx envisaged the substitution of bourgeois government by a proletarian regime that, staffed by working-class activists, would guide the socialist transformation of society. Most importantly, this new state would guard the revolution, if necessary by force and dictatorial means, against the subversive schemes of the bourgeoisie and its allies.Footnote 10 Bakunin scoffed at this notion, prophesizing that the leaders of the new state would soon become entrenched in power and establish a new form of tyranny over the people. Ever an opponent of all authority, he also regarded any form of dictatorship as incompatible with the emancipatory spirit of revolution.Footnote 11 These disagreements were at the heart of the split in the First International that lastingly divided the Marxist and the anarchist movements.
The debate over the dictatorship of the proletariat was again revived after 1917, no longer as the theoretical polemic between two thinkers but as a discussion over the meaning and nature of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state. Many historians of Spanish anarchism, especially those with libertarian proclivities, have been wont to present the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as absolutely incompatible with the libertarian movement.Footnote 12 Bakunin, the seminal figure of anarchism, had built his philosophy and his movement in opposition to this idea, and his followers in 1917 could not possibly be won over to it. However, in the early twentieth century, Marxism and anarchism were no longer simple sets of theories and principles in the heads of an exiled Russian firebrand and a German savant, but real political movements that had to be organized, mobilized, and held together in adverse conditions, and which had to compete with one another for a constituency.
In Spain, the largest anarchist movement in the world fought for the hearts and minds of workers with the Socialist Party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) (PSOE), guided by the ideas of Marxism. In this respect, Spain, with its mass anarchist organizations, was different from other European countries, where anarchism was either a minority tendency in the labor movement, as in Italy, Russia, or France, or a fringe, largely intellectual phenomenon, as in most of Germanic Europe and the Balkans. The schism in the Spanish left between anarchists and socialists had a long history and went back to the days of the First International.Footnote 13
Bakunin, vesting his hopes in the freedom-loving character of the Latin peoples, had, in 1868, sent his talented Italian agitator Giuseppe Fanelli to spread his movement south of the Pyrenees. Making up for his ignorance of the Spanish language with an unbreakable faith in anarchy and with a lot of gesticulation, Fanelli was able to win over several youths in Madrid and Barcelona, leaving behind a few copies of the seminal texts of his Russian mentor. The seeds had been sown for a mass movement. The creed spread like wildfire, especially to rural Andalusia and industrial Catalonia.Footnote 14 Concerned with the success of his rival in the Iberian Peninsula, Marx dispatched his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, a communard outlaw, to Spain in 1871. Having grown up in Cuba, Lafargue spoke good Spanish, and was able to create a Marxist group in Madrid based around the typographers’ association. This was the germ of the PSOE. The socialists soon became strong in the bureaucratic capital Madrid and in the rural areas of central Spain, as well as in the industrial regions of Asturias and Biscay.Footnote 15
In Madrid, under the authority of Lafargue's right-hand man, the typographer Pablo Iglesias, the PSOE evolved into a “cold, schematic, formulaic” party, as Spanish revolutionary Joaquín Maurín put it, which, mimicking the reformist drift of the Second International, had silently eschewed the more radical tenets of Marxism to adopt a gradualist, reformist strategy to socialism.Footnote 16 It doggedly involved itself in Spanish parliamentary politics, which were notoriously corrupt, and, to little avail, demanded reforms from an inefficient, authoritarian, and backward state.Footnote 17
The Spanish libertarians, on the contrary, adopted a quixotic vision of immediate, sweeping revolution. They were always prepared to stage revolutionary uprisings, to call general strikes, and to proclaim the coming of anarchy. Reforms could not be won by polite appeals but wrested from the capitalists through direct action. The libertarians’ involvement in the trade union movement in the 1900s with the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism was predicated upon an uncompromising approach to industrial conflict. Many anarchists were also ready to lead the revolution by force of the revolver, and an underworld of anarchist terrorism flourished. They completely rejected the state and the political system as the ultimate source of evil and oppression, and (not without reason in Restoration Spain) attacked party politics as an absolute sham.Footnote 18
Under these conditions, the fundamental appeal of anarcho-syndicalism over the moderate socialism of the PSOE lay in its radicalism. “Syndicalism,” observed conservative Prime Minister Romanones in his personal notes, “represents a rebellion against political and parliamentary socialism.”Footnote 19 It was not so much its ideas of freedom and its rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat that made it more popular than official Marxism, but its blanket opposition to bourgeois politics, its militant approach to the class struggle, and its promise of immediate emancipation.Footnote 20
The Spanish anarchists’ understanding of Marxism as a reformist, bureaucratized movement was based on their engagement with the PSOE. Internal life in the Socialist Party was notoriously flat, and, unlike in other European socialist parties, there were no major left-wing tendencies within the movement. The experience of the First World War strengthened this gray outlook. Although Spain remained neutral in the conflagration, the PSOE came out for intervention on the side of the Allies. Most anarchists, except a small minority, were adamantly opposed to the war and campaigned throughout for peace through pan-European revolution. The wavering of the Socialist leadership during the general strike of August 1917 and their pandering to the liberals and republicans deepened the chasm between the PSOE and the CNT and reinforced the class-collaborationist guise of the Spanish Marxists.Footnote 21
When news of the Russian Revolution struck Spain in 1917, the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat that had divided Marx and Bakunin was all but forgotten. Most Socialists had dropped the term, which was unpalatable to their conciliatory temperament. The debates and clashes between anarchists and Marxists revolved around questions of parliamentary participation, reformism, and the problem of party bureaucracies. The question of the dictatorship, observed historian Álvarez Junco, was “secondary” and only “flared up occasionally” in the debates with the Socialists.Footnote 22
The libertarians’ engagement with the Marxism of the PSOE made it difficult to come to grips with the very different revolutionary strand of Socialism that came from the East. Bolshevism seemed to do everything the anarchists had stood for, and everything the PSOE had consistently opposed: doing away with a moderate republican government in the name of social revolution, empowering the workers’ Soviets, calling for the peoples of Europe to stop the war through revolution, giving the land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, etc.Footnote 23 As cenetista Francisco Jordán, one of the first Spanish libertarians to have critically assessed the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, commented in 1921:
Karl Marx was the first to have propounded the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this idea was forgotten by his disciples, who, quite on the contrary, were always in favor of legality and were hostile to the violent transformation of society. The Third International has the honor of having dusted off this “text!”Footnote 24
This is not to say that the ideal of absolute freedom and dignity was unimportant for Spanish anarchists; it was one of the mainstays of their worldview. But it latently went against the radical, violent spirit of the movement. Chris Ealham has observed that there was a fundamental contradiction in Iberian anarchist philosophy. On the one hand, it rejected all authority and defended the dignity and autonomy of all individuals, while at the same time it preached, gun in hand, the violent destruction of the bourgeoisie. Like the Bible, Spanish anarchism preached love for thy neighbor while bringing not peace but the sword.Footnote 25 This contradiction in the libertarian movement was not readily apparent. In fact, before 1917 its radicalism and militant tactics were complemented with its love for freedom. Both souls could be reconciled as long as the revolution was imagined as a single, sweeping act where the bourgeoisie would be rapidly disarmed and give way to classless, stateless society.Footnote 26
The Russian Revolution and Civil War complicated the anarchist views of revolution. The revolution would not be painless and rapid, but would be a drawn-out struggle against the propertied classes that would require discipline and coercion.Footnote 27 The dissonance between the defense of absolute freedom and the need for violence and compulsion was, under the light of the Russian Revolution and the social convulsions that soon began to shake Spain, resolved in favor of violence.Footnote 28
An Early Assessment of the Bolshevik Dictatorship
The CNT, especially the more radical tendencies within it, received the news of the Bolshevik uprising with enthusiasm. On November 14, 1917, the Barcelona-based anarcho-syndicalist weekly Tierra y Libertad welcomed the revolution in raptures in a front-page article. For them, the overthrow of capitalism in Russia heralded world revolution. “The old world has started to fall apart in Russia, and it will soon collapse everywhere, because examples are contagious and the Russian success emboldens us.” The revolution was characterized in vague terms as anarchist: “the ideals of justice and equality of anarchist communism have been implemented.”Footnote 29 This ebullience was present in most of the anarcho-syndicalist press.Footnote 30 As contemporary witness Díaz del Moral noted, in the wake of the Bolshevik victory it was difficult to find a libertarian publication “that did not fill its columns with news and fervent panegyrics about the great revolution.”Footnote 31 Manuel Buenacasa, an anarcho-syndicalist and a member of the national committee of the CNT, described the atmosphere at the time: “Who in Spain, being an anarchist, did not call himself a Bolshevik?”Footnote 32
As more detailed reports on the Russian Revolution began to make their way into Spain in early 1918, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were not anarchists, but radical socialists. Despite the fact that they claimed to be Marxists, the Russian Bolsheviks stood out as a rare animal for the Spanish anarchists, who found it hard to situate them ideologically. Their Marxism was very different from that of the PSOE. The term “Bolshevik” was translated (as in most of Europe) as “maximalist,” muddying the waters. “The Russian maximalists (the bolcheviqui),” said Tierra y Libertad, “form a party of millions of anarchists, although in reality not all of them are anarchists, there are also some socialists […] who are truly revolutionary.”Footnote 33
At the same time, the Spanish Socialist leadership received the news of the October Revolution with hardly-veiled hostility. The opposition of the Spanish “socialist politicians” to Lenin's government reinforced the idea that the Bolsheviks were the Russian equivalent of the Spanish anarchists, and that the reformist Mensheviks were the Russian counterpart of the PSOE.Footnote 34
The anti-Bolshevik tirades that abounded in the Spanish conservative and liberal press helped to inflame the anarchists. The debate on Russia became extremely polarized and left little room for nuance.Footnote 35 Reports on the despotism of the Soviet authorities were disregarded as propaganda. Libertarian Eusebio Carbó commented years later:
We were convinced that what the press referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat, combating it by sword and fire, was nothing more than the Russian people, fully in control of its own destiny, making decisions in mass assemblies.Footnote 36
In light of this it is not surprising that most anarchists began to accept the Bolshevik concept of the workers’ dictatorship, along with other measures of Lenin's government such as the “black repartition” of land to the peasants, the socialization of industry, or the attempts to end the world war.Footnote 37
Moreover, while the Bolsheviks had not done away with political power, the new state they established was not a conventional government, but a radically new, revolutionary regime based on the Soviets. The latter were envisaged as loci of mass democracy. In the eyes of the Spanish libertarians, the Soviets dovetailed with the Bakuninist commune or with the anarcho-syndicalist trade union. Many cenetistas were tempted to insinuate the CNT was the Spanish personification of the Soviet. Manuel Buenacasa affirmed that “the Soviets are the Russian equivalent of the Spanish workers’ federations.”Footnote 38
The Russian Civil War
The intensification of the Russian Civil War, which was reported with much interest both by the bourgeois and the working-class press in Spain, and was followed “day by day, hour by hour,” only reinforced the persuasiveness of the communist dictatorship in the eyes of the cenetistas.Footnote 39 The revolution was in danger and it had to be defended by force.
The anarchists launched a campaign against foreign intervention in the war, and an avalanche of manifestoes and resolutions in solidarity with the Bolsheviks filled the libertarian press. For instance, Barcelona's Solidaridad Obrera, the official organ of the CNT, made a call to “all the defenders of Red Russia” to “unite and fend off the wave of mud that wants to drown the former empire that has now been liberated.”Footnote 40 The rural anarcho-syndicalists of the Federación Nacional de Agricultores (National Federation of Agricultural Workers) (FNA) issued a declaration in their national congress of December 1918 threatening “a violent rebellion” if the Spanish government dared to send troops to Russia.Footnote 41 The national congress of the CNT of December 1919 passed a lengthy resolution announcing a boycott of all weapons sent from Spain to the counterrevolutionary White armies of Russia: “not one bullet, not one rifle destined to fight the Russian Revolution can leave the Spanish ports.”Footnote 42 This resolution was mostly symbolic, since Spain did not offer direct support to the White armies, but its tone and conviction are telling of the passions awakened by the Russian Civil War.
The threat of counterrevolution seemed to vindicate the need for authority and discipline. In the heat of the virulent struggle taking place in Russia, the editorials of Tierra y Libertad announced that the establishment of genuine anarchy:
Will require a long revolutionary period of several years in which the anarchists will have to become the Authority and act as bosses to ensure the triumph of the revolution, which will be decided in a war between the old world and the new world, and doubtless all wars need bosses and authority.Footnote 43
These passages (mutatis mutandis) could well have been extracted from Lenin's The State and Revolution, which was translated into Spanish in March 1920 and became, in the words of a leading cenetista, the “doctrinal bridge” between anarchism and Bolshevism.Footnote 44
The Russian Revolution was discussed at length in the national congress of December 1919 held in Madrid's Comedia Theatre. It was there that the CNT officially affiliated to the Third International and proclaimed its support for Soviet Russia. One of the theses of the congress dealt with the dictatorship of the proletariat:
The Russian Revolution, in principle, incarnates the ideals of revolutionary syndicalism. It abolished class and caste privileges giving power to the proletariat, so that the workers themselves can provide for their own happiness and wellbeing to which they are indisputably entitled, implanting a transitional proletarian dictatorship to ensure the conquest of the revolution. This gathering declares: That the Second Congress of the CNT should unconditionally unite with the Russian Revolution.Footnote 45
This thesis stimulated a heated debate, to the effect that it was followed by a less categorical resolution announcing the CNT's conditional endorsement of the Third International, and reasserting the libertarian credentials of the organization. However, the mere fact that the presidium of a national gathering of the CNT tabled a thesis embracing the dictatorship of the proletariat is of extraordinary significance. Several delegates spoke in favor of the thesis. One of the attendants commented: “I've always been an anarchist […] but, concretely speaking, we need to accept violence, because it is a necessary part of the society we live in; we need to accept the class dictatorship, even while being libertarians.”Footnote 46 The aforementioned Carbó also took the floor to proclaim his love for the dictatorship: “We justify the dictatorship; we admire the dictatorship; we desire that the dictatorship should come.”Footnote 47
As late as April 1921, a national plenum of the CNT attended by delegates from most of the country upheld “the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by the trade unions of the CNT.”Footnote 48 This came at a time when the anarchists’ mood towards the Russian Revolution was beginning to change, and the agreements of the April plenum were vehemently disavowed a year later. Nevertheless, it reveals that as late as the spring of 1921 the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat continued to hold sway among many cenetistas.
The example of Russia not only showed that capitalist resistance to revolution would be ferocious, it also revealed that in the conditions of poverty, ignorance, and economic ruin that seemed to reign in Russia, the immediate implementation of anarchy was out of the question. Tierra y Libertad noted that “of course, the social regime implemented by the Russian revolutionaries is not anarchy, because anarchy cannot exist without a high level of culture and morality which the Russian people lack.”Footnote 49
Violence, Repression, and Dictatorship
The crushing of the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the civil war in Finland, and the war against Béla Kun's communist regime in Hungary all seemed to vindicate the need for coercive authority after capitalism was overthrown. These events also heightened the revolutionary expectations of the Spaniards: the wave of transformation was not simply a Russian particularity but a worldwide phenomenon that could be replicated in Spain.Footnote 50
The continuation of the First World War until November 1918 also shaped the anarchists’ perception of violence. The ruling classes that had thrown millions of men to their deaths in the trenches would surely be ready to go to extremes to protect their privileges. El Libertario, from Barcelona, commented: “during the war, some neutral countries were able to escape the immense conflagration, although the post-war period will be different, because all countries, neutral or not, will face ordeals and the violence will continue—it is just that the battling camps will have changed.”Footnote 51
Most importantly, however, the need for a workers’ dictatorship seemed to be substantiated by the intense repression that the CNT began to endure in Spain. In 1919, a wave of arrests, torture, and assassinations was unleashed against the anarcho-syndicalist movement. The repression was strongest in Barcelona, where Governor Martínez Anido operated with virtual autonomy from the central government. He suspended constitutional guarantees and, aided by a thieves’ kitchen of right-wing terrorists, set about to crush the labor movement. Hundreds of activists were killed and thousands imprisoned.Footnote 52
This violence was often paralleled to the instances of White Terror seen in Central and Eastern Europe. The national committee of the CNT, in its appeal to the international proletariat, compared the Spaniards’ plight to the White Terror of Finland and Hungary: “Comrades, you see that the Spanish bourgeoisie has nothing to envy from the ignominious and bloody bourgeoisies of Hungary and Finland.”Footnote 53
These comparisons between counterrevolution in Central and Eastern Europe and in Spain were also made abroad. The Parisian syndicalist weekly La Vie Ouvrière observed that “now that Tsarist Russia is no longer, Catholic Spain is trying hard to take its place.”Footnote 54 The executive committee of the Red International of Labour Unions, the trade union front of the Third International, recognized that “the counterrevolution in Spain has largely surpassed the darkest years of Russian absolutism.”Footnote 55
In these virulent conditions, it is not surprising that the idea of workers’ dictatorship should have held water among many militants. As anarchist Gaston Leval critically reflected in his memoirs, “the CNT was dominated by the immediate class struggle […]. It did not occupy itself with questions of theory or doctrine, which attenuated the critical awareness of the militant masses towards Bolshevism.”Footnote 56 The Bolsheviks’ ruthless methods in combating counterrevolution seemed expedient. Andreu Nin, the national secretary of the CNT in 1921, recalled that “while in prison in early 1920, I was presented with the plans of several anarchist groups to create a Spanish Red Army.”Footnote 57 Perhaps following up on these schemes, the 1921 CNT delegation to Russia avowedly carried the mandate of “trying to secure Soviet weapons for the confederation.”Footnote 58
The authoritarian attitudes and the language of class odium that proliferated in the CNT in this period were undoubtedly conditioned by these years’ violent social struggles. As Stephen Smith elucidated in his comparative study of revolutionary Russia and China, “a polarization of society produced a polarization of political language.”Footnote 59 Such was the case in Spain, too. Anarchist militant F. Barthe, writing for Zaragoza's El Comunista, the regional organ of the CNT in Aragón, movingly connected “the ferocious hatred, the macabre language” of the workers with the “criminal attacks” by the “privileged classes.” He was writing in the aftermath of the murder of striking worker Ramón Tarragó by right-wing terrorists, which had “shocked” Barthe and produced “an intense explosion of hatred.”Footnote 60
Euphoria and Caution
Until late 1920, support for the Russian Revolution in the Spanish anarchist movement was virtually unanimous. However, some voices were more enthusiastic than others. The syndicalist old guard, particularly those based in Barcelona, rang the most cautious chord. This tendency, grouped around the pope of the Catalan labor movement Salvador Seguí, was above all concerned with turning the CNT into a strong, unified organization. It was wary of the revolutionary adventurism that the Russian events could inspire.Footnote 61 “Something has happened in Russia that we cannot wish happens to the Spaniards or to any other people” warned Seguí, “which is the clear incapacity, the lack of preparation […] for the socialist orientation of production.”Footnote 62
This old guard was also more learned in anarcho-syndicalist doctrine, and was suspicious of the centralizing drive of the Bolsheviks and of their fixation with setting up communist parties abroad. “We cannot see in the Russian Revolution the practical concretization of our ideological aspirations,” affirmed Asturian cenetista Eleuterio Quintanilla in 1919, because it had been carried out by a political party and the trade unions had been “subordinated to the needs of power.”Footnote 63
It is important to note that, despite their criticisms, both Salvador Seguí and Eleuterio Quintanilla claimed to admire the Bolshevik Revolution, referring to it as an “astonishing, gigantic feat” and as “the most fundamental, transcendental event of our times.” Interestingly, neither of them frontally challenged the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.Footnote 64
In this period of revolutionary optimism, the CNT grew dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of new members flooded its ranks, and a new generation of anarcho-syndicalist activists was steeled in these years. The new, younger elements, extremely radicalized by the events in Russia and by the upswing in labor mobilization in Spain, on the frontlines of the violent struggles of the period, and less steeped in anarchist ideology than the veterans, became the most impulsive enthusiasts of the Soviet regime. “The youth,” observed cenetista Pere Foix, “intoxicated by our own excitability, were drawn towards the magnet of the revolution of 1917.”Footnote 65
In these years, the extremists of the CNT repeatedly clashed with the moderates. Hotheads such as Manuel Buenacasa or Evelio Boal rose to the confederation's leading bodies in 1918–19, and shaped the outcome of the December 1919 national congress, to the detriment of pragmatists such as Salvador Seguí, Ángel Pestaña, and Eleuterio Quintanilla. The radicals scuttled collaboration with the socialist unions, condemned participation in government-sponsored arbitration boards, and, indeed, secured affiliation to the Third International. The Russian Revolution was a useful battering ram against the doves of the CNT, spurring further the pro-Bolshevik proclamations.Footnote 66
The intransigent sectors of the organization were paradoxically the most pro-Bolshevik, but also the most ferociously Bakuninist. But, as Gerald Meaker clarified, “the deeper issue here was one of revolution versus reform: the Anarcho-syndicalists favored the Bolsheviks […] because they were themselves revolutionaries; the Syndicalists were cooler towards Moscow because the reverse was true.”Footnote 67 The key dividing line was one of temperament, and not of formal ideological affinities. The anarchist weekly El Comunista, organ of the libertarian communist federation of Asturias, thundered: “Maximalists, Bolsheviks, Libertarian-Communists, Spartacists—what does the name matter if the important thing is the principles! We were the first to support the Russian Revolution, to worship it in its beginnings.”Footnote 68
Repression, combined with the movement's anti-bureaucratic ethos, elicited frequent reshufflings of the organization's upper echelons, which propelled new recruits to leading bodies.Footnote 69 Neophytes enamored with Soviet Russia such as Andreu Nin or Joaquín Maurín rose to prominence in this context, respectively becoming the CNT's national and Catalan secretaries in early 1921. However, it would be wrong to hold Nin and Maurín liable for the CNT's continued adherence to the Third International, as has been suggested by some authors.Footnote 70 Support for the Russian Revolution was generalized, and predated their rise in the ranks of the movement. Moreover, Nin and Maurín were not atypical: They represented the most salient expression of the widespread support for the Russian Revolution that existed among many young cenetistas.Footnote 71
The extraordinary growth of the CNT in these years was not unrelated to its ability to pose as the Spanish counterpart of the Bolsheviks and as the harbinger of the social revolution many anticipated, a fact that has been alluded to, but not sufficiently explained in the existing literature.Footnote 72 A police report from Barcelona sent to Prime Minister Romanones in the aftermath of the La Canadiense strike affirmed that:
Total Syndicalism is a fact. It is not true that the workers are being cajoled into joining the unions. […] One has to acknowledge that behind this force hides a revolutionary passion, which will become increasingly bold depending on what happens in Russia.Footnote 73
A myriad of minor pro-Bolshevik papers cropped up within the libertarian movement in these years. Launched by small circles of younger activists, these were often fleeting publications, which mostly disappeared with the wave of repression of 1920. The existing literature has tended to focus on the flagship newspapers of the movement, Solidaridad Obrera and Tierra y Libertad, disregarding local publications and possibly helping underrate the CNT's penchant for the Bolshevik dictatorship.Footnote 74 These papers reflected the fantastic expectations awakened by the Bolshevik revolution and the appeal of the communist dictatorship among much of the embattled cadre of the CNT. Reflecting on the events in Russia in the heat of the war with Poland, El Comunista, the organ of the libertarian communist federation of Asturias, commented:
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Armenia are being shaken by a great social storm, by the sweeping hurricane that is toppling monarchies and stock markets, palaces and powerful banks. […] We must not hold any illusions. The bourgeoisie is powerful and the struggle will be long and hard. The reaction defends itself with might.Footnote 75
A similar note was struck a year later by Vida Obrera, the organ of the CNT in Asturias:
Despite our idealism and the fact that we dream of a society with no violence or coercion, without injustice, it is through violence, using it pitilessly, unapologetically, accepting the responsibility of exploiting it to the full, how we are to struggle today. […] We will do the revolution violently, there is no other way.Footnote 76
A correspondent in the regional organ of the CNT in Aragón similarly propounded ruthless revolutionary violence and coercion:
For every eye, thousands of eyes. For every tooth, we shall smash hundreds of teeth. […] He who does not reject the ethics and the dealings of conservative society will become our enemy, even if they are passive and appear to be indolent. In war, you shoot the traitor, the deserter, the defector, and the idle […]. We should do the same thing. Those who do not pick sides will be considered our enemies.Footnote 77
The most messianic chord was probably struck by Bandera Roja, from Barcelona, which described itself as a “revolutionary anarchist paper.” It waxed lyrical about the violent destruction of capitalist civilization:
If to conquer our rights we need to break skulls, to rip open the fat bellies of the greedy tyrants, if in order to free the age-old slaves we are pushed to the extreme of setting up barricades with corpses torn to pieces by the shrapnel of their cannon and the shells of our bombs, and the flames of our fires fill the skies, we will do so, not wavering for a second in our mission, not giving up an inch of conquered ground to the enemies of freedom. […] Worker save your energy for the battles of the future, the battles that the workers of liberated Russia are waging today, worker, do not be sad about the murder of those that always oppressed you.Footnote 78
Even the first news of a Soviet clampdown on the Russian anarchist movement did not dampen the conviction of the extremists. Peter Kropotkin's opposition to the October Revolution and his protests against Bolshevik authoritarianism were initially given a cold shoulder by the hotheads of the CNT. Manuel Buenacasa, the most authoritative voice in the extremist camp of the organization, accused Kropotkin of making unconstructive criticisms and of contributing “to bring back the worst form of bourgeois regime.”Footnote 79
There was, nonetheless, a discrepancy with the Bolshevik dictatorship that was shared by most cenetistas, both extremists and moderates. While the dictatorship of the proletariat was accepted, it should not be exerted by a political party but by the trade unions, the genuine expression of the will of the working class. Quintanilla criticized the Soviet dictatorship for being exercised by “a political party,” rather than being “a true people's dictatorship.”Footnote 80 Similarly, Seguí noted: “the dictatorship, accepting that it is necessary […], has to be exerted by the trade unions, because they harness the strength of the whole class.”Footnote 81 The extremists made a similar analysis:
Once the revolution succeeds and the dictatorship of the proletariat is implemented […] the first measure to organize productive life should be the general socialization of all goods that should be put under the administration of the respective trade unions. […] No one can gather detailed statistics of production better than the trade unions.Footnote 82
This caveat about political parties was significant. As explained above, Spanish anarchists had historically presented themselves as the revolutionary alternative to the reformist Marxism of the PSOE. The opposition to party politics had become a keystone of Spanish libertarian ideology. Although anarchists could come to accept the notion of the proletarian dictatorship, the Bolshevik summons to create communist parties was a hard pill to swallow. Years later, communist activist Pérez Solís complained that his comrades in the PCE who hailed from the CNT “cannot fully stomach the political character of the party—especially its parliamentary aspect.”Footnote 83
The CNT displayed some of the features of the European radical left in the turbulent juncture created after 1917, which, in a context of volatility, grassroots mobilization and radicalization, and dramatic political realignments, opened possibilities for rapid expansion of revolutionary organizations, but also posed tremendous difficulties to consolidate advances in the medium term when the revolutionary high tide ebbed.Footnote 84
The rise of the CNT can arguably be seen as the Spanish expression of a European process of radicalization that took a multiplicity of forms but that was closely associated everywhere to the influence of the Russian Revolution. It is unsurprising that these extremist tendencies should have appeared under the guise of anarcho-syndicalism in Spain, a country where the divide between revolutionism and reformism broadly overlapped with the boundary between libertarians and socialists. Therefore, paradoxically, the most ardent defense of the Soviet regime, and the impulse to replicate the Russian deed in Spain, came from anarcho-syndicalist quarters, particularly from the youngest and most radicalized sectors of the movement. Indeed, the CNT's infatuation with Soviet Russia in 1917–21 coincided with the reinforcement of its anarchist identity.Footnote 85
The Turn Against the Bolshevik Dictatorship
There is evidence that by the autumn of 1920 the enthusiastic mood of the CNT vis-à-vis the Russian Revolution had begun to subside. Yet this coincided with a period of intense persecution, which side-lined the question of Bolshevism.Footnote 86 Indeed, two national plenums held in Barcelona in April and October 1921 continued to proclaim the CNT's “firm and decided” support for the Moscow International.Footnote 87 In the summer of 1921, repression abated somewhat and the CNT was able to catch its breath. Regional groupings such as those of Zaragoza, Madrid, Alcoy, and Biscay, less affected by the crackdown from the authorities than the Catalan section, were reorganized. They were under the control of the hardline anarcho-syndicalists headed by Manuel Buenacasa and Galo Díez, who, after having initially become infatuated with the Soviet regime, were now fiercely anti-Bolshevik. The weeklies Nueva Senda, from Madrid, and Redención, from Alcoy, became the mouthpieces for the newfound anti-Bolshevism of these anarchists.Footnote 88
The reasons for this sharp turn against the Russian Revolution are manifold. Critical reports about the arbitrariness of the Bolsheviks, and especially their treatment of the Russian anarchists, made their way to Spain in 1920–21. Syndicalist organizations were visibly marginalized and mauled in the Third International. The damning account made public in the autumn of 1921 by Ángel Pestaña, the first CNT delegate to Soviet Russia, made a deep impression among the cenetistas. Importantly, these accounts were arriving at a time of exhaustion and demoralization for the Spanish labor movement, which dissipated the heedless optimism of previous years. The emergence of Moscow-sponsored communist parties competing for the same constituency as the anarchists increased tensions between anarchists and Bolsheviks internationally.Footnote 89
By the summer of 1921 the hardline anarchist sectors of the CNT began to recognize that “an abyss separates us from the Soviet regime […], an abyss of philosophical principles.”Footnote 90 In the autumn, the extremists pushed for a “syndicalist prophylaxis” to expunge the pro-Bolshevik elements from the confederation.Footnote 91 They launched a campaign for the CNT's disaffiliation from the Third International, which formally took place in June 1922 during the Zaragoza national conference. The early enthusiasm that Spanish anarcho-syndicalism had felt towards the Russian Revolution was glossed over, as Chris Ealham put it, as a “bad dream,” conjured by the general revolutionary fervor and by the lack of knowledge about the real situation in Russia.Footnote 92 The Bolshevik heresy that had gripped the movement had to be exorcised.
The critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat became an important element in the polemic with the Bolsheviks. Many anarchists categorically rejected the workers’ dictatorship as an authoritarian notion contrary to the emancipatory spirit of anarchism. “We do not want a dictatorship, down with the tyrants, whatever their names!” exclaimed the editors of Redención. They argued the dictatorship was not necessary to fend off counterrevolution, since “if we dispossess the bourgeoisie of capital and authority, which are the sources of its power, […] they will be rendered impotent.”Footnote 93 The schism between Marx and Bakunin was reappraised: “We do not agree with Marx and his followers, because they want to socialize production under the rule of the state.”Footnote 94
However, not all anti-Bolshevik libertarians were so categorical. Some continued to accept that, in light of events in Europe and Russia, a transitional workers’ dictatorship might be necessary to defend the revolution. Renowned cenetista Galo Díez, for instance, hypothetically recognized the need for a “transitional dictatorship in the wake of the revolution,” but it should be led by “men educated […] in the principles of Anarchism.”Footnote 95
For Galo Díez, the problem with the Soviet dictatorship was its control by a bureaucratized political party. A transitory dictatorship was acceptable as long as it was directly organized by the working class through the trade unions. Indeed, the thorniest bone of contention with the Bolsheviks did not lie with the workers’ dictatorship as such, but the question of political parties. In Soviet Russia, the communist party and its army of functionaries were in the saddle, exerting their dictatorship “over the proletariat.” The repression levied against the Russian anarchists and the dissident left seemed to vindicate this impression.Footnote 96
In the Third International, the Bolsheviks prescribed the creation of communist parties in all countries. This was at odds with the traditional anti-politicism of the Spanish anarchists and their historical opposition to the parliamentary tactics of the PSOE. In Moscow, Spanish delegate Ángel Pestaña reminded Zinoviev that the “legendary struggle” of the CNT against political parties was “one of our most glorious hallmarks.”Footnote 97
To make matters worse, the communist parties were to stand in parliamentary elections: “while we wait for the orders of the Communist Party to carry out the revolution,” complained anarchist Bruno Lladó, “We are meant to vote for them like flock of sheep.”Footnote 98 The RILU was denounced as a “false organization” destined to “serve the interests of the communist party.”Footnote 99 Matters were made worse by the exhortations made to the sections of the Third International after 1921 to create united fronts with Social Democracy. In Spain, this meant joining forces with the PSOE and its trade union front, the UGT, “which have adopted an openly counterrevolutionary attitude of collaboration with bourgeois governments.”Footnote 100
The ideological unpalatability of political parties was combined with the rivalry with the PCE, created as a unified body in November 1921. Although this remained a small, divided organization throughout the 1920s, it managed to make some modest inroads into the labor movement. Rivalry with the PCE, which posed as the Spanish counterpart of the victorious Russian communists, must have increased the sense of insecurity of libertarian activists at a time of difficulty.Footnote 101
Most of the historiography on the Spanish and the European anarcho-syndicalist movement has affirmed that the central bone of contention with the Bolsheviks were questions of principle relating to the dictatorial drift of the Soviet regime.Footnote 102 Reiner Tosstorff, in his commanding study of the RILU, has contended that although matters of principle were important, the key factor in souring relations between anarchists and Bolsheviks was the emergence of communist parties across Europe in 1919–21. These new organizations tended to compete with the anarcho-syndicalists for a similar constituency, and were privileged by Moscow as their official counterparts abroad.Footnote 103
For the CNT, which had capitalized on the allure of the Russian Revolution in 1917–20, the appearance of a small communist party that posed as the legitimate associate of the Bolsheviks in Spain was a discomfiting experience. The emergence of the PCE, noted Joaquín Maurín, “generated a fatal rupture” between the CNT and the Third International.Footnote 104 The PCE became a bête noire for the libertarians. Many of the traditional accusations levied against the PSOE of reformism and bureaucratization were now directed against the communists. The Spanish communists were referred to as a “pseudo-revolutionary” continuation of the socialist party: “they [communists and socialists] are united and attracted to one another by their common lust for power.”Footnote 105 The proposals of collaboration with the communists were harshly rebuffed: “we will fight the PCE and we will not be seduced by its hysteric ladylike flirtatiousness.”Footnote 106
The presence of Joaquín Maurín's pro-Bolshevik minority within the CNT, seen as a Trojan horse of the communist party within the confederation, increased the sense of besiegement. Neither the PCE nor Maurín's faction were ever able to genuinely challenge the anarcho-syndicalists’ hold over the CNT. But the context of defeat and stagnation for the labor movement, and the success of the communists in other countries in displacing anarcho-syndicalists from important unions, such as the French CGTU, exacerbated the libertarians’ insecurities and magnified the communist threat in their eyes.Footnote 107 Maurín's ally in Valencia, Hilario Arlandis, lamented that the anarchists “want to kill me. Here we have to carry a gun at all times.”Footnote 108
The feeling of uncertainty of the libertarians was compounded by the impression that the rank-and-file of the CNT was ideologically deviant and vulnerable to the spell of the communists. Although it is hard to gauge to what extent this was the case, it seems likely that ordinary workers remained sympathetic to the Bolshevik dictatorship longer than seasoned cenetistas. Galo Díez appraised, “we should not be absorbed or led astray by the prejudices of the masses,” since “it is true that a large number of members of the CNT do not fully share its doctrines.”Footnote 109 Even more tellingly, anarchist Teresa Mañé i Miravet (alias Soledad Gustavo) admitted bitterly:
The majority [of the CNT] is closer to the dictatorship of Lenin than to the concepts of Kropotkin or Reclus […]. To simple minds, the Russian Revolution is above all else a revolution […] they answer you that the laws and statutes which we, the anarchists, want to destroy, have already been destroyed in Russia.Footnote 110
Conclusion
In order to understand the uncanny honeymoon between the Spanish anarchists and the Bolshevik dictatorship of the proletariat, the libertarian movement has to be thoroughly historicized. A mass movement pitted against the reformist Marxism of the PSOE, Spanish anarchism had presented itself as a radical alternative to the socialists. The Marxism of Lenin and his followers appeared to be very different from that of the PSOE, and seemed to dovetail in many ways with the ideas of the CNT. The Bolshevik notion of the workers’ dictatorship chimed with the militant temperament of the anarchists, and the ferocious assault of counterrevolution during the Russian Civil War seemed to vindicate the need for coercion. The dramatic intensification of repression against the Spanish labor movement in 1919–20 further substantiated this impression. More importantly, the mood of extreme optimism that prevailed in these years clouded ideological divergences and facilitated a rapprochement between radical Marxists and anarchists. This association was also politically profitable, since the CNT's connection with the victorious Russian Bolsheviks raised its appeal in the eyes of radicalized workers.
These conditions changed sharply in 1921–22. Optimism gave way to demoralization as labor militancy ebbed and the revolutionary movement was crushed by repression, in Spain and abroad. Detailed reports from Russia revealed that the communist dictatorship was not only exerted against the counterrevolution but also against dissident sectors of the left, most notably against the anarchists. A central bone of contention with the Bolsheviks became the question of the Communist Party. Although the dictatorship of the proletariat had not usually featured in the anarchists’ polemics with the PSOE, the issue of party politics and parliamentary participation had been a heated point of controversy. The involvement in political parties exhorted by the Bolsheviks was hard to stomach for the Iberian anarchists. The mushrooming of communist parties across Europe in 1919–21, including in Spain, created unwelcome competitors for the libertarians. The Spanish anarchists began to campaign vociferously against the dictatorship of the Communist Party that was prescribed from Moscow, adapting their traditional critique of the PSOE to the PCE and the Russian Bolsheviks, and reaffirming their traditional libertarian worldview.
