This blog post discusses the Spanish Revolution (1936–37), focusing on the suppression anarchists faced in their efforts to overcome the state during the turmoil of Spain’s civil war (1936–39).
The three opposing forces considered are: counterrevolutionary inhibition by Soviet communists, state reconstruction and anarchist involvement in it, and the exterminating fascist force that was waging a conquest of ‘annihilation’ in the civil war. For the latter point, the case study of the repression of Seville under General Queipo de Llano is considered.
To preface, the revolution’s inability to completely overcome the Spanish state does not make it a ‘failed’ revolution. I do not mean to downplay the monumental significance, influence, and inspiration of the anarchist and libertarian socialist revolution that occurred in twentieth-century Spain; indeed, the Spanish Revolution has been considered the first, and only, major social movement in Europe that has seriously posed a threat to the state — and occurred during the civil war, being the first large-scale conflict against emerging fascism. To compare it to a ‘successful’ revolution, such as that which occurred in Russia two decades earlier, for example, is myopic and disingenuous, owing to how markedly different their circumstances were (not least because that revolution did not dismantle the state, but in fact reconstituted it and suppressed further revolutionary activity).
As mentioned in my blog post ‘On Spain’s “Memory Wars” and Franco’s Peculiar Legacy,’ I cannot deny a somewhat personal connection to this period. But another reason is that when I first read about the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, I was struck by how ‘intensely political’ it was — this being how I phrased it to myself. This is interesting to think about, for isn’t all history intensely political, and to imply otherwise is… political in itself. Nonetheless, I meant this because I was subconsciously comparing the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War, the giant that stomps around in our collective memory. This is, of course, because of where I’ve grown up; here, the Second World War is so ubiquitously valorised as a fight of ‘good’ versus ‘evil,’ that even having to say so is entirely pointless because we all know it was, we were all told it was. But what is this ‘good’ side? What’s ‘good’ about it? What better life were its people sent to die for? What was life like for its people? These questions don’t provide satisfying answers (besides ‘Not fascism,’ perhaps, but is that a satisfying answer? And is fascism really so unfamiliar in these parts?). This is why I was drawn to the civil war and revolution, for it wasn’t just a fight against fascism’s spread, but a fight for a better world — regardless of one’s exact politics, surely some inspiration must be found here — one of equality and community, of liberation and play and coexistence with nature, of freedom of personal expression, a world free from exploitation and oppression: a world of ‘beautiful, radiant things,’ to quote Emma Goldman.
Before beginning, I’d just like to say this won’t be an exhaustive account of the revolution, not least because just as there’s always more reading to be done, there are never enough hours in the day — days that, to me now, are drastically different to how they once were. I’ve had some rudimentary notes on this ‘shelved’ — to portray myself as far more knowledgeable than I actually am — for the better part of a year now, so if for nothing else, I’ve felt the need to get this out there. I hope it’s of benefit to more than just me.
Edit: Several quotes used here, from both older and more contemporary sources, refer to ‘workers’ as the revolutionaries of this movement, as does much of the literature focusing on other revolutions. I had also used ‘worker’ throughout out of ignorance, and I apologise for this. I hope the corrections I’ve made to my own words go towards correcting this blatant ableism and reflect a true revolutionary movement.
A ‘Psychological Transformation’: The Spanish Revolution
The Nationalist rebel coup of 17–18 July 1936, instigated throughout mainland Spain and its islands, sparked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In response to this coup, and the state’s inability to face it, a general strike was called on 19 July, thus marking the start of the Spanish Revolution. This illustrates how the revolution was contextualised by the civil war, which is essential in considering answers to this blog post’s question. (Of course radical and revolutionary sentiment existed long before the civil war in Spain, but the conflict, and the state’s inadequacy in responding to the fascist threat, served as a catalyst for the social revolution.)
The general strike was organised by the National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo; CNT), an organisation of anarcho-syndicalist labour unions — which considered the horizontal organisation of workers through general strikes as an effective means of achieving liberation from capitalism — and the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores; UGT), a major socialist trade union. Of upmost significance were the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica; FAI), an organisation of anarchist militants central to the revolution and its collectivisation effort. They were in close association with the CNT, so both are often collectively referred to as the CNT-FAI.
Revolutionaries armed themselves and began to defend one another from the fascist violence that was spreading across the country. In Catalonia, for instance — the farthest north-eastern community on the peninsula — the Republican state was even weaker in the face of the Nationalist uprising, largely collapsing amidst all the chaos, leaving it effectively independent and controlled by the revolutionaries. Here, they erected barricades and stood their ground, defeating the rebels. This gave them the chance to build their new society — with the revolutionary movement most notable in Catalonia and, for example, in the north and east in Aragon and Valencia — amidst the chaos and bloodshed that had erupted across the Iberian Peninsula in the summer of 1936.
This society was one of egalitarianism, having an organisational structure that was horizontal rather than vertical/hierarchical, with factories becoming cooperatives and farms being collectivised and transformed into communes, where money was abolished. In revolutionary Catalonia, as much as 75 per cent of the economy was people-controlled. It has been considered that impressive ‘ecological insight’ was present, with each commune designed to be autonomous, which also maximised freedom for the individual. This was in an effort to recognise and accommodate for all types of anarchist practice, both collectivist and individual, and any with differing views were free to express themselves. This personal freedom was expressed in the approaches to education, with its focus being to end illiteracy and allow for the individual to think for themselves.
All aspects of life were changed — ‘overnight,’ as academic Danny Evans considers it. Gender relations shifted, proclamations of free love were widespread, the hierarchical structures of class and Catholicism were dismantled, coercive institutions like courts and prisons were no longer used; organised groups were established to consider justice on a case-by-case basis, holding the belief that injustice is the cause of societal ills rather than appealing to a Hobbesian view of human nature.
The substantial involvement of women in the revolution cannot be overstated. Many organisations were formed, such as the influential Mujeres Libres (Free Women). Many advocated for ‘free unions’ based on trust and shared responsibility to overcome oppressive institutions like marriage. Such active organising was invaluable — and required — for the liberation of all people, by challenging the deeply entrenched patriarchal and conservative religious norms of Spanish society.
(I’ve since changed the above depiction of the Mujeres Libres from one of rifle-wielding women to one of organising and community. This is because a single picture may incidentally appear to create a one-dimensional representation of the Mujeres Libres, and one depicting simply armed women is inaccurate, as esteemed scholar Martha Ackelsberg has said.)
People even spoke differently during this revolutionary movement, with the neutral ‘Comrade’ replacing formal or gendered words like ‘Usted’ and ‘Señor,’ and presumably ‘Señora.’ These subtle changes that occurred so suddenly during the revolution in the summer of 1936 seem to be what was referred to as the ‘psychological transformation[s]’ of the revolution, discussed by the CNT during a conference in May of that year, before the coup and civil war began. This was where discussions were taking place which aimed to establish the nature of a possible people’s revolution, with the resolutions of this ten-day congress representing ‘one of the most eloquent and incisive statements of libertarian communism [comunismo libertario],’ according to anarchist historian and philosopher Peter Marshall. These resolutions were not, however, a blueprint, but were a broad guide, to be followed or revised at one’s will.
Change could be felt in the air. George Orwell, who went to fight against the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War between December 1936 and June 1937 — recounting his experiences in his famous Homage to Catalonia (1938) — describes revolutionary Barcelona as ‘startling,’ with red and black anarcho-syndicalist flags being flown from collectivised shops and cafes (for all such areas of the economy were controlled by the people, including barbershops and hotels) and revolutionary posters glowing bright in reds and blues from the walls of buildings. Particularly ‘queer and moving’ to him was seeing that all around were equal in how they dressed, another manifestation of the revolutionary ideals being able to flourish. (Though personal expression is also a good thing…) In total, eight million were involved in this rebellion of their own; in the face of the intensifying fascist rebellion — one the state was inadequate to defend itself against — people turned to each other for aid and camaraderie.
As mentioned, the Spanish Revolution is contextualised by the civil war (the ideals seen within in it, however, of course stretch back through human history, manifesting in endless ways across many peoples and cultures) and I hope I’ve made this clear when considering answers to this post’s title. I think, perhaps, Orwell’s presence provides a helpful link between the revolution and the war — in addition to the three considerations in this post, that is. But it goes without saying, of course, that I don’t mean to venerate Orwell here, knowing all the terrible things he’s said and done, and the same with Chomsky. (For more on Orwell and his relationship with Spain and the revolution, I’d recommend this really great podcast episode by academics Danny Evans and Jim Yeoman.)
But to get back on track: In the latter half of 1936 in Barcelona, for example, the revolutionary movement seemed strong, swelling the hearts of those who were building a new, free society. It appeared that the ‘bourgeois [Republican] nation-state’ had ‘evaporated,’ and individual and collective possibility was boundless. But it did not last. Evans marks late October 1936 as the beginning of the end of the ‘short summer of anarchy’ — though the movement did still triumph somewhat in the opening months of 1937 — when anarchists paradoxically accepted ministerial positions in government, thus beginning anarchist involvement in state reconstruction. This illustrates that the state and its power had not entirely waned. The other death knell for the revolution was that of communist inhibition, which was manifested by force in the street fighting that erupted in May 1937.
‘The Spanish Kronstadt’: Communist Inhibition
To begin this section, it’s necessary to quickly outline the various political parties and organisations during this period. Within the Second Spanish Republican state (1931–39), the Spanish and Catalan governments were controlled by left-wing political parties, both with a communist presence; in the Spanish coalition government was the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España; PCE) and closely allied to the Catalan government was the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya; PSUC), the Catalan referent to the PCE. Following the party line from the communists in the Soviet Union, they have been considered right-wing in nature owing to their aggressive suppression of the Spanish Revolution; this was because they prioritised the war against fascism over the left-wing revolution that was occurring throughout many regions of Spain. The PSUC were a party partly for the people but also for the so-called petite bourgeoisie like shopkeepers and wealthier peasants. This explained their prioritisation of the war over revolution: advocating for collectivisation and revolutionary change risked alienating the middle classes, whose support they relied on.
The other political organisation to consider is that of the CNT-FAI, mentioned above. Nuance exists here owing to schisms amongst anarchists: between those more ‘radical,’ as Evans terms them, and those considering themselves pragmatic, focusing on state reconstruction in the war effort — which is discussed below. Those of the ‘radical’ stance prioritised the revolution, in fact viewing it inseparable from the war (this stance was shared with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; POUM), which was the anti-Stalinist communist party Orwell was affiliated with during his time there). The opposition by ‘radical anarchists’ to centralised authority proved a thorn in the side of the communists, who sought for the centralisation of government in the war effort.
Others have considered different motives for this counterrevolutionary inhibition by Soviet communists. German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, in his 1937 book The Tragedy of Spain, writes:
For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of the counter-revolution and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism in Italy, Germany and Austria by causing millions of people to forget that dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people. […] What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted “necessity of a dictatorship” is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and peasants.
Combining Orwell’s interpretation, of the communists seeking to maintain the status quo so as not to alienate their supporters, with Rocker’s — which suggests a violent malice on the Soviet Union’s part in wishing to crush a revolution which is achieving what a dictatorship never could — provides an explanation for communist inhibition, this being one of the key reasons the Spanish Revolution was unable to prevail over the state.
This communist inhibition was present early in the Spanish Civil War. One instance of this was that Russian military aid to the Republic went via the communist parties — granting them increasing political power — and because of their ideological differences with anarchist organisations, it was in their interests to see that as little of this aid went to them as possible. Further, the communist appeal to the status quo enabled them to rally the wealthier peasants against the collectivisation that was occurring within the revolutionary movement. Orwell succinctly described this process as follows:
The war was essentially a triangular struggle. The fight against Franco had to continue, but the simultaneous aim of the Government was to recover such power as remained in the hands of the trade unions. It was done by a series of small moves — a policy of pin-pricks, as somebody called it — and on the whole very cleverly. There was no general and obvious counter-revolutionary move, and until May 1937 it was scarcely necessary to use force.
Communist inhibition was insidious. By fiercely advocating for the war over the revolution, counterrevolutionary action flourished: collectivisation was hindered, local committees were destroyed, with conventional, heavily armed police forces re-established; the social and economic system of revolution was increasingly reversed, brutally reimposing the status quo. This is expressed by Pravda — the Soviet Union’s mouthpiece — writing in the final days of 1936, ‘As for Catalunya, the purging of the Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.’
Noam Chomsky writes of these implementations as stages of counterrevolution, which finally culminated in a violent ‘attack on the working class in Barcelona.’ These were the May Days, and represented a death knell for the revolution. This is demonstrated by this event being termed ‘the Spanish Kronstadt’: this is in reference to the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 — which featured a large anarchist presence — in which, with the approval of Lenin and Trotsky, this final, significant rebellion against the authoritarian Bolsheviks was violently crushed by the new regime.
The conflict broke out in the early days of May 1937 when the Assault Guard — the police units during the Second Spanish Republic, and were under communist control — seized the Barcelona Telephone Exchange, the Telefónica Building. It had been in the hands of a joint CNT-UGT committee for nine months. It was the ‘site of the first great strike in Barcelona during the Second Republic, and which had only been taken in July [1936] at the cost of several lives,’ meaning it was of significance to the CNT, for it served as ‘a living symbol of how the revolution had delivered where the Republic had failed.’ A street battle broke out that lasted several days, with armed individuals erecting barricades and others scouting from rooftops. Youths and adults alike, with red and black (anarchist) handkerchiefs around their throats, crept up side streets and glanced around corners, rifles held tight in their hands, as were members of the POUM. Much was the same for those they were in conflict with, namely the armed forces of the Republican Popular Army and the Civil Guard, a gendarmerie that had gained power again following the stages of counterrevolution discussed above, who, according to the general impression picked up by Orwell, were ‘“after’ the CNT and the working class generally.’ They answered to the communist PSUC-controlled government of Catalonia, he writes.
Orwell described his experience throughout these days when sitting atop the roof of the Poliorama Theatre:
[Y]ou could see for miles around — vista after vista of tall slender buildings, glass domes and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea — the first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty. Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and sand-bagged windows. Not a vehicle was stirring in the streets; here and there along the Ramblas the trams stood motionless where the drivers had jumped out of them when the fighting started. And all the while the devilish noise, echoing from thousands of stone buildings, went on and on and on, like a tropical rainstorm.
(Evans goes into considerable detail on this event, an event regarded as a ‘civil war within a civil war’ — an expression that, once more, illustrates the overwhelming challenges the revolutionary movement faced.)
The Catalan flag flying over the Telefónica days later proclaimed the official end to the fighting; the government had gained control. This aggressive reclamation was expressed afterwards with the intimidating presence of the Assault Guard ‘walking the streets like conquerors.’ This display of force was simply that: a display of force, Orwell observed, for if there were genuine fears of another conflict with the people, the Assault Guard would be in barracks, not spread throughout the streets. In their hands they carried brand-new rifles, of Russian design: the sinister mark of communist influence. (Orwell believed these rifles to have been manufactured in the United States.) Overall, this bloody conflict resulted in the deaths of five hundred people.
This was a tragedy for the revolution, not least owing to the immense loss of life in such a short time, but also the communists’ hegemonic spread — now so brazen and viciously expressed in the May Days — reverberated across the peninsula. The government that replaced the one that fell in Spain, shortly after this bloody episode in Barcelona, ‘was even more strongly influenced by the Stalinists,’ writes Marshall. Opposition was crushed, and the state’s centralised authority grew. This was seen, for instance, when the anti-Stalinist POUM was declared illegal (Orwell and his wife then fled to France).
‘Anarchism Has Become Isolated’: Revolution or State Reconstruction
As mentioned above, anarchists’ involvement in government began in October 1936, which ‘put a break on the further development of the social revolution.’ Their collaboration in the Republican war effort was typified by the slogan ‘Sacrificamos a todo menos a la victoria’ (‘We sacrifice everything but victory’). This included the revolution.
This was seen immediately, for on 24 October 1936, the Catalan government issued a decree that legally recognised the collectivisation of industry in Catalonia. This was a regressive step, however, because it was restricted to enterprises that employed more than one hundred people, thus checking other, smaller collectives. Workers’ committees were established to monitor discipline and production. This decree was announced by a member of the CNT, and consequently represents an early instance of anarchist collaboration in the effort to centralise the bureaucratic state apparatus as collectives were brought under government control.
The May Days serve an important instance in understanding and representing the dire effects of not just communist inhibition on the Spanish Revolution, but also of internal divisions amongst anarchists. Those who prioritised the revolution have been termed ‘radical anarchists’ by Evans — who goes into staggering detail on this topic of anarchist collaboration in state reconstruction in his recent book Revolution and the State (2020) — to distinguish between them and those who considered state reconstruction the priority, to fight the war against fascism. The antithetical nature of anarchist collaboration in state reconstruction is evidence alone of the extreme and complicated politics of this period. Evans writes that, to fight back against the counterrevolution that instigated the May Days conflict, ‘radical anarchists’ mobilised in response to calls from a Regional Defence Committee that was set up by Julián Merino, Secretary of the Barcelona FAI at the time. Days into the fighting, however, four prominent CNT members were added to this Committee. These members were part of the comités superiores (‘higher committees’) of the CNT, a faction who, by the end of 1936, had become committed to state reconstruction. Here the Committee called for demobilisation.
Because it appears logically inconsistent for the Committee to call for a retaliation and then quickly order its end, it is clear that the comités superiores members held significant influence, power that was able to bring to an end the retaliatory response of the May Days, thus inhibiting the revolutionary movement. One does not need to consider the possibility of the ‘radical anarchists’’ success in regaining control of the Telefónica to see this instance of effectively counterrevolutionary action on behalf of other anarchists to be of significant consequence. (Though, of note, revolutionary sentiment was still high when demobilisation was called, with statements criticising these demands and the lack of support offered to ‘radical anarchists,’ who expressed that ‘[w]e were not defeated and we could have won, we had force and reason on our side, we had courage and the consciousness of a revolutionary duty.’)
This shift towards collaborating with the state appeared so staggering as to cause whiplash. ‘In an unparalleled bout of dissimulation’, writes Marshall, the CNT newspaper Solidaridad Obrera (Workers’ Solidarity) announced that the government, once anarchists had begun participating in it, ‘as a regulating instrument of the organisms of the State, has ceased to be an oppressive force against the working class, just as the State no longer represents the organism which divides society into classes.’
This apparent end of oppression, of course, did not materialise, and indeed anarchists were involved in its perpetuation. An example of this is that of Juan García Oliver — who it is said invented the red and black flag of the CNT — upon becoming the new Minister of Justice in the Spanish government in late 1936, beginning this process of state collaboration with three other CNT members (whom the newspaper announcement quoted above is referring to). García Oliver went so far as saying to the students of the new military school in 1937 — as popular militias were now being centralised into an army: ‘Officers of the Popular Army, you must observe an iron discipline and impose it on your men who, once they are under your command, must cease to be your comrades and be simply cogs in the military machine of our army.’ With speech like that, it’s hard to remember we’re talking about (ostensibly) anarchists. And even if these anarchist ministers wished to somehow change the oppression intrinsic to the state from within, in their way stood the counterrevolutionary bloc — including communists — which sought to, in their words, ‘normalise’ the Republic, to remove any revolutionary sentiment.
An important point to consider, one that is often overlooked during times of war, with men fighting and shouting rallying cries to other men, is that of gender relations and the patriarchy. (When I say ‘overlooked,’ I don’t so much mean ‘ignored,’ but instead ‘unquestioned.’ That during a discussion on war, for example, often — to stress — by and for men, patriarchal norms are often not considered, are unquestioned.) I have mentioned above some instances of women’s roles in the Spanish Revolution, but this liberation was only to an extent. Despite their presence in wider aspects of society, they were still expected to do the work associated with their gender, and within many revolutionary areas were still seen as objects to be protected, with men appealed to control the ‘“frivolous” displays of power and pleasure of their rifle-wielding sisters and daughters.’ It appears the advocations of equality were only theoretical to many male anarchists; one, it was reported, responded aggressively to a women’s demonstration that occurred in the changing air of revolution. Evidently, the principles of a system the male revolutionaries were attempting to dismantle were themselves not overcome. This is furthered by anarchist collaboration in the reconstruction of the state, for not only was the Republic being reconstituted as a national entity, but inherently as a patriarchal one too, leading to the ‘persistence of nationalist and sexist attitudes and tropes,’ writes Evans.
For many anarchists, the involvement in state reconstruction produced an overwhelming sense of defeatism. This, expressed through the defeat of the events of early May 1937, coupled with the perpetual repression and inhibition of the revolution, led to defeatism and fatalism, which was manifested, for example, by many radicals choosing to enlist in the army, to contribute to the violence of a state they had aimed to overcome. Nowhere is the frustration and desperation of this all better expressed than by ‘radical anarchist’ Julián Merino in November 1937:
I have read a letter addressed to the comrades from the [FAI] Secretary [now Alejandro Gilabert] who regrets that anarchism has become isolated, and I too am bitter that there isn’t a comrade to be found with the necessary perception and courage to defend the ideas. […] [H]ad we wanted to, we could have instituted our ideals on 19 July [the general strike following the coup]. Lamentably, we did not.’
Others were more forgiving of this involvement in state reconstruction. Anarchist Emma Goldman, for example, sought to excuse this involvement on pragmatic grounds: that any effort that fought towards defeating fascism was an effort of ‘great action.’ In her typical fiery language, she spoke of criticism towards Spanish anarchists as ‘acid’ being poured onto their ‘burned flesh,’ and said, typifying the tense and traumatic struggles anarchists faced during the revolution:
[T]hough I disagreed with much that our Spanish comrades had done I stood by them because they were fighting so heroically with their backs to the wall against the whole world […] Whatever verdict future historians will give the struggle of the CNT-FAI they will be forced to acknowledge two great actions of our people, their refusal to establish dictatorship when they had power, and having been the first to rise against Fascism.’
It is clear that, as has been discussed so far, the counterrevolutionary inhibition by Soviet communists and the reconstruction of the Republican state proved to be bloody and demanding challenges towards anarchist efforts to overcome the state and maintain the revolutionary movement. Hopefully I have also shown how it is clear that these formidable challenges were intrinsically linked with the civil war, and nowhere is this more apparent than with the third major threat.
‘Queipo’s Terror’: The Nationalist Force
The unified Nationalist forces of the Spanish Civil War — the rebels who instigated the military coup that started it — were viciously brutal and repressive. Their exterminative ‘slow war of annihilation’ of otherised civilians during the conflict led to the murder of, it is estimated, 150,000 people. This has been termed the ‘white terror.’ This is epitomised by Francisco Franco’s last words — the dictator who rose to unrivalled power during the war — when he died in 1975: ‘I believe that I had no enemies other than the enemies of Spain.’
For this section, I will use the case study of Nationalist General Queipo de Llano and the repression of the Andalusian city of Seville, and the autonomous community more widely, which historian Paul Preston has termed ‘Queipo’s terror.’
Gonzalo Queipo de Llano was one of the central figures of the Nationalist force in the civil war, leading a brutal attack on Seville as part of the coordinated coup. Socialist historian Chris Harman has written that Seville was, like others, a city where the Nationalist coup of mid-July was highly successful. This was because, he claimed, those there who had attempted to seize control — as was happening in many other parts of the peninsula — had trusted the army officers, thinking they were on the Republic’s side, only to be brutally crushed, revealing this deceit. Although this might appear that he was blaming them for the violence that followed, I assume he is instead implying that the huge disparity in power between the two groups explains their suppression. This seems the case, for what the people had to defend themselves with were ‘only eighty rifles and little ammunition and were armed, if at all, with hunting shotguns, ancient pistols and knives.’ This was in contrast to grandiose claims by Queipo de Llano himself of conquering the city with fewer and fewer men each time he mentioned his victory — once the number dwindled to ‘fourteen or fifteen men’ — against allegedly ‘100,000 well-armed “communists.”’
During the civil war, Queipo de Llano would make frequent incendiary, misogynistic, and homophobic radio broadcasts where he would delight in announcing what Republican women would face during his troops’ onslaught in the south, as well as justifying the executions of otherised groups owing to their sexual orientation, all through the most forceful exhibition of hegemonic masculinity.
The coup was carefully planned, and involved the Nationalist forces using women and children as human shields when entering the city. From here, a brutal repression of the city’s residents followed, where anybody — men, women, and children — who disobeyed orders was executed without trial. During this despotism, particular instances of barbarity truly expose the horrors of this subjugation: the murderers’ motives for their actions ranged from disturbing pleasure to boasts of being paid per execution, and on one occasion, where a hunted political opponent who was found ‘hiding under the floor of his parents’ shack, they burned down the dwelling with all three inside.’ This depravity extended into instances of sexual abuse and manipulation, where there occurred ‘cases of women who saved their loved ones by submitting to […] demands.’ This abuse was also manifest in dehumanising punishment, where women — as occurred in countless southern cities under Nationalist domination — had their heads shaved and were forced to ingest castor oil in malicious efforts to publicly humiliate them by causing them to soil themselves.
To attempt to express the scale of this terror — though statistics never do — historian Rúben Serém writes that the mass executions that occurred in Seville’s repression ‘claimed the lives of over 1 per cent of its population in only six months,’ (with a recent estimate by local historians determining that 12,507 were murdered behind rebel lines in the province of Seville between 1936–39, and a staggering 50,000 in Andalusia more widely) a statistic that does not do justice to the tyranny imposed on the city’s civilians, not least because it suggests the overlooking of the, as Serém writes, systematic ‘torture, rape, plunder, famine, social apartheid, slave labour, class war, public and collective humiliation, […] annihilation of trade unionism, [and] abduction and “re-education” of Republican orphans’ that was endemic to this repression.
As is clear from what is described, the Nationalist force was brutal and systematic in its approach to war. This was because of its extreme centralisation, argues Harman. He contrasted this to the fractured anti-fascist forces of Republicans, communists, socialists, and anarchists, suggesting that if they unified — the central motive of those who prioritised the war over revolution — they would stand a better chance. However, as seen in the above section that explores the Spanish Revolution, centralisation and the concomitant authority of one individual or group over another is antithetical to the lived experience of the revolutionary movement. Further — and not to sound defeatist but simply to express that the anti-fascist situation was too complex to be solved by a single suggestion — but to consider both sides as otherwise equal if the anti-fascists unified, is to ignore the overwhelming force of the Nationalist side and the incomparable military aid it received from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Republic did indeed receive military aid, but only from the Soviet Union and was unrivalled by the support the fascists received — and that’s not even to mention the policy of non-intervention the Western liberal democracies adopted upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Although this appears I’m straying too much from the revolution, because the Spanish Revolution is contextualised by the civil war, understanding the threat the fascist forces presented to the Republic necessarily demonstrates the threat it also posed towards the revolution.
Hopefully this post has shown how the fascist rebel force indirectly hindered the revolution by diverting anarchist prioritisation towards the war effort and providing a suitable landscape for counterrevolutionary inhibition by the Soviet Union, but it also hindered the revolution directly. For, if the liberatory movement was to thrive and be maintained, not only did the Republican state need to be overcome but so too would the emerging fascist state. Under such a state, any revolutionary movement would have been crushed — the people suppressed, unable to organise, as was the case in Seville — from the moment of the state’s emergence, as is seen in the repression and extermination of these so-called ‘enemies of Spain’ during the civil war and the decades-long persecution, exploitation, torture, and execution that occurred in Francoist Spain.
(This, by the way, explains the dating of the Spanish Revolution as between July 1936 and May 1937. This aligns with Evans’ analysis of Spanish anarchism between 1936 and 1939, the duration of the civil war; this analysis separates the two defeats of Spanish anarchism: the first being the eventual suppression in May 1937 discussed in this post, and the second — discussed more broadly in my post on Francoist Spain and contemporary ‘memory wars’ — being the post-war repression, execution, and exile of anarchists and anti-fascist forces after the victory of the Nationalists over the Republic in the civil war in April 1939.)
It appeared this marked the end for the Spanish Revolution’s social ideals. To quote Peter Marshall, writing on the state of anarchism in Europe before the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s:
The last great anarchist experiment on a large scale took place in the Spain of the 1930s, and the anarchists’ defeat by Franco’s forces destroyed libertarian activity in that country for a generation. The rise of fascism in Germany and Italy destroyed the movements there, while in Britain and France the small remaining bands of anarchists played only a minor role in the struggle against fascism during the Second World War. During the post-war reconstruction in Europe, capitalism not only failed to collapse as a result of its own inherent contradictions, as predicted by Marxists, but seemed to many workers to be delivering the goods. It appeared for a while that the “end of ideology” had come. The European anarchist movement had become so fragmented by the late fifties and early sixties that historians of anarchism were sounding its death knell, burying its valedictory tones.
Again, I do not mean to frame the Spanish Revolution as a ‘failure.’ All I have hoped to express in this post serves as explanation for why the revolutionary movement was unable to prevail over the state: internecine fracturing between anarchists owing to the civil war and the destructive fascist and counterrevolutionary forces that were erupting throughout Spain during this period of social and political turmoil.
To consider this the end, however, would be uncreative and without hope, exactly what is expected and enforced by the very systems such revolutionary movements aim to overcome. To finish with Rudolf Rocker’s final words in The Tragedy of Spain, written in August 1937:
Never has a people fought for its freedom more heroically. Never has a people been worse betrayed by open and secret enemies. It is Spain’s great tragedy that [it] has hitherto been so little understood: the story of the sufferings of a people that is bleeding from a thousand wounds and still will not give up the fight, because it knows that it carries in its breast the precious growth of freedom and human dignity on which the future of all of us depends.
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