On the afternoon of 19 November 1936, shortly after lunch, a group of leading anarchists left their headquarters in Madrid to drive to the front lines on the outskirts of the city for a tour of inspection. Franco’s troops were in the middle of a concerted but frustrated bid to take the capital by force. With determination and a certain amount of luck, the Republican defenders were holding them back. ¡No pasarán! – They shall not pass – went the defiant cry, and in Madrid, at last, the rebels’ seemingly inexorable advance was encountering its first serious setback. Despite claims by Nationalist generals that they would be drinking coffee in the city’s bars by the following day, Franco wouldn’t take Madrid until the very end of the war, almost two and a half years later.
On that afternoon, the anarchists drove towards the University City, the large campus district to the northwest of the centre, built only a decade before and now the focal point of the war. Among the heavily damaged faculty buildings, General Millán Astray’s battle cry ‘Death to Intelligence’ must have had a particular resonance. It was a sunny autumn day and the large black car sped through the streets until it reached the area near the Hospital Clínico, at that point the scene of fierce fighting against Moroccan Regulares. Near the Dentistry Faculty, the anarchists in the car saw a group of their own militiamen walking in the opposite direction, away from the front line. The vehicle stopped and the occupants got out. One of them, a large man with a barrel chest, powerful neck and delicate, almost deer-like features, with small almond-shaped eyes, started haranguing the men in his typically direct way. They shouldn’t be deserting their positions, but fighting the enemy. The forces of fascism were on the attack. Here in Madrid they would be defeated and buried for good.
His words seemed to have an effect, and the weary men turned round and started trudging back towards the front. But then a shot rang out. The anarchist leader fell, wounded and bleeding. His companions, seeing what had happened, quickly hauled him back into the car and raced off towards the Ritz Hotel, now being used as a hospital for the Catalan militias. There, doctors examined the wounded man and deliberated. After a while, another doctor was called over from the Hotel Palace nearby, at that point an anarchist hospital. After he had performed an examination, the medics decided there was nothing to be done. The man was seriously wounded – a nine-millimetre bullet had entered his body just below the left nipple and passed out through the back. He would almost certainly not survive. He was also an important man. Better he die from the bullet wound than under the knife of a surgeon trying to save his life.
A few hours later, in room twenty-seven, situated on the first floor of the hotel, at around four o’clock in the morning, the anarchist leader breathed his last.17 Two days later, in Barcelona, hundred of thousands of people attended his funeral. One of the most popular and charismatic leaders of the forces lined up against Franco had gone. His name was Buenaventura Durruti.
Spain is the only country in the modern Western world where anarchism has ever had mass appeal and where something approaching an anarchist revolution has ever taken place, leading many to speculate on an inherently ‘anarchist’ aspect to the Spanish psyche. This, combined with a strong and sometimes violent reaction to the strictly authoritarian and hierarchical regimes that have ruled the country for so much of its history, can perhaps explain some of anarchism’s appeal.
The movement’s beginnings in Spain had not been particularly auspicious. Anarchism was introduced by the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868, on a trip organized by Mikhail Bakunin to recruit Spanish members to the First International. Fanelli was a deputy in the Italian parliament who was officially domiciled on the state railway system, taking advantage of the free train pass that came with his job. After he had failed to meet anyone in Barcelona, a group of radicals in Madrid eventually arranged for him to give a lecture to some members of a printing organization. Fanelli spoke in French, not having any Spanish. Only one member of the audience understood anything he was saying.
Nonetheless anarchism subsequently spread rapidly across the country, finding a natural constituency among Andalusian peasants living in oppressed, semi-feudal conditions who were attracted to the ideas of a stateless society and redistribution of wealth. Intellectual anarchists would spend time with them to propagate their ideas, teaching them to read and write, and, reflecting a common puritanical streak in the early days of the movement, converting them to vegetarianism, weaning them off alcohol and tobacco, and preaching the virtues of being faithful to their wives.
Anarchism in Spain never lost a certain quasi-religious romanticism, but by the outbreak of the Civil War it had moved on. The movement had its own trade union – the CNT – with about a million members, and had become particularly strong in Catalonia and Aragon. The CNT was the largest single workers’ group at the time, larger in number than the socialists or the communists. The communists were still a tiny minority, but were soon to grow rapidly in number and importance. General strikes had been the anarchists’ main weapon in their struggle for better working conditions, and, more importantly, in trying to bring down the apparatus of the state. But faced with the prospect of a fascist government being set up, they had chosen the lesser evil of supporting the more mainstream left-wing parties involved in the Popular Front coalition that won the February 1936 elections.
There were problems, though. By definition the anarchists were not a centralized, well-organized body, which goes some way to explaining their eventual eclipse by the communists and socialists. The Republic needed them to help defend itself against the military revolt, but at the same time was frightened of them. Much of the prevarication about handing weapons out to the masses at the start of the war – a move which might have stopped the rebellion in its tracks – came from the fear of what would happen once these radical groups took control. In the end the anarchists did take to the streets, and in Barcelona brought about a revolution once they’d put down the military coup there. But loath to have anything to do with governments and state organizations, they failed to ‘consolidate’ their power as other groups might have done. The anarchists were idealists and libertarians who believed that revolutions and change came from below, not from above, and that it was not their place to impose their will. More ruthless parties, particularly the communists, quickly took advantage of this political gap.
The romanticism of the anarchists was the cause of some of their greatest weaknesses. In battle they tended to rely heavily on passion and belief in the cause, with the result that many of their members were needlessly killed in ‘heroic’ charges against the enemy. This method had worked quite spectacularly in Barcelona, where the anarchists had played a major part in thwarting the military coup and keeping the city out of Nationalist hands. Afterwards, though, particularly during the siege of Madrid, it failed as an effective mode of attack. It is not entirely clear how much the anarchists’ image as a disorganized fighting force is due to subsequent communist propaganda aimed at discrediting them. Even before Durruti died in Madrid, the talk among Republicans had turned to ‘discipline’. The communists and socialists were all in favour. For the anarchists it was anathema. Durruti had led a group of some three thousand anarchist militiamen, the ‘Durruti column’, out of Barcelona in the early days of the war to help capture the rebelheld Saragossa, almost two hundred miles away. Flushed with success and flying their red and black flags, they had marched for over two hours before they realized they had forgotten to pick up even basic supplies. The anarchists had no formal officials or salutes, orders were often discussed by soldier councils before being acted upon, and men were theoretically free to leave and head back home at any time. Belief in their cause was what held them together. To have behaved in any other way would have been to lose their very identity. On what other basis could an anarchist fighting force be formed?
Another problem was the apparent cruelty of many in the anarchist ranks. One of their members, for example, murdered the postman in the coastal town of Altea with a hatchet for overcharging on stamps. Believing that the ‘crimes of society’ were responsible for people ending up in jail, on occasion anarchists released scores of murderers and thieves who then affiliated themselves with their liberators and carried on as they had before. Priests and nuns in particular bore the brunt of their rage. Although, in a strangely typical anecdote of the times, the French writer Saint-Exupéry told how he once saved the life of a monk who was about to be shot by the anarchists, by telling them it was a bad idea. The militiamen were convinced by his arguments and instead of shooting the monk went and shook him by the hand, congratulating him on his escape.
If everyone in Spain at that time had friends elsewhere, the anarchists had none. The socialists could look to similar parties in France and Britain, the communists to Moscow, Franco to Germany and Italy. Almost nobody, though, liked the anarchists, this uncontrollable rabble blamed for many of the atrocities carried out on the Republican side during the early months of the war. They were one of the reasons why assistance was not forthcoming from the other democracies around the world. Travellers to Barcelona at this time found a city where everyone wore workers’ overalls (el mono azul), tipping had been abolished and it was forbidden to utter the overtly religious Adiós when saying goodbye (the standard greeting became Salud). Abortions, divorce and ‘free love’ were all the norm. Meanwhile, in the countryside controlled by the anarchists, whole villages had been collectivized and private property and money abolished. The notion that the conservative-led governments of Baldwin or Chamberlain in Britain would support anything like this was absurd. The anarchists were well aware of this. The Republican government, though, was constantly hoping for London and Paris to help them in their struggle against Franco. One of the things that stood in their way, in their eyes, was the spread of anarchism.
Although a charismatic leader of the anarchists, Durruti was less an ideologue and thinker than a man of action and, for many, a terrorist. Born in León in 1896, he had trained as a metal-worker before being thrown out of the socialist UGT trade union for being too radical. He then embarked on a life as an anarchist agitator that saw him spend a great deal of his adult life behind bars. While free men, he and his best friend Francisco Ascaso had, among other things, managed to rob the Bank of Spain at Gijón – to give money to the workers; made an attempt on the life of King Alfonso XIII during a royal visit to France; and murdered the corrupt casino-owning Cardinal Soldevila of Saragossa. (Shortly before his death, Soldevila had made a promising young student in Saragossa, José María Escrivá, a prefect at the San Carlos Seminary. Escrivá would go on to form the secretive and controversial Opus Dei movement, which much later, in the 1960s, would play a significant role in Franco’s government.)
For several years Durruti travelled through Latin America and Europe, fomenting revolution where he could, often struggling to survive, and condemned to death in four separate countries. At one point he ended up in Paris, where he scraped a living as a musician and ran a bookshop.
When the military launched their rebellion and the Spanish Civil War started, Durruti was in Barcelona, at the heart of what turned into an anarchist revolution. The city was a major stronghold of anarchism, thanks in part to the immigration there over the years of Andalusian workers seeking employment in textile factories. The zeal of the anarchists along with the decision of the Civil Guard to remain loyal to the Republic were the main reasons for the Nationalist coup failing in the city. General Goded, who had flown in from the Balearics to lead the revolt, was arrested and later shot. Durruti at this time was a leading member of a secret organization within Spanish anarchism, the FAI – the Iberian Anarchist Federation – which campaigned to keep the movement ‘pure’ and truly revolutionary.
People who knew Durruti described him as a ‘primitive’ kind of man, passionate and a natural leader, but not one for complex or subtle thought.
‘From his elemental way of passing judgement on things,’ one former cellmate of his said, ‘what was good was good, and what wasn’t, wasn’t. There was no middle ground, no reasoning, no subtleties which might lead him to see things in another way. In his view, the world belonged to the workers and to no one else, although a minority had taken possession of what really belonged to others.’18
This prisoner, who shared a cell with Durruti for eight months, described him as ‘a man made out of a single piece of cast iron, with no air bubbles or fault lines in him: solid’. He was intelligent but had little ‘culture’.
‘There was no possibility of sexual relations with women in jail. Whenever his body demanded it, Durruti would suddenly walk up to the sink and, right in front of me, would simply turn on the tap and place his testicles under the cold water.’
This earthy man, with his steel will, proved to be one of the few great characters fighting Franco. While many Republican politicians were overweight intellectuals, Durruti had the combination of single-mindedness, violence, charisma and physical energy that was characteristic of some of the leaders on the Nationalist side.
The Durruti column grew in numbers as it marched across Aragon in the summer and autumn towards Saragossa, but the city stayed stubbornly in Nationalist hands. By November 1936, however, a more pressing situation had emerged in the Civil War. Having marched up the western flank of the country and relieved the Alcázar in Toledo, Franco’s Army of Africa was poised to take Madrid. All attention was focused on the capital. For the Nationalists, victory was in their grasp. For the Republicans, the enemy had to be kept back at all costs. The government of socialist prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero, in an act of bare-faced cowardice, abandoned Madrid and set up a new capital in Valencia. They almost didn’t make it, being stopped en route at the town of Tarancón by anarchist militiamen who wanted to shoot the lot of them for ‘desertion’. Manuel Azaña, meanwhile, now president of the Republic, had simply disappeared to Barcelona. Foreign dignitaries followed suit, reducing their staff in the capital or decamping altogether. The British ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, left the country for the French border town of Hendaye, where he set up a new embassy in a grocer’s shop.
The defence of Madrid was left in the hands of General José Miaja and his brilliant chief of staff, the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Rojo – the man who had previously tried to negotiate on behalf of the Republic with the defenders of the Alcázar in Toledo. Miaja and Rojo were left with a few soldiers who had stayed loyal to the Republic, along with thousands of militiamen belonging to various trade unions and political factions who until a few months previously had been trying to kill each other in a political turf war. They were facing the best troops in the entire Spanish Army. The odds were not looking good. A number of factors, though, were in their favour. First, Franco’s soldiers, despite their run of success, were beginning to tire after being on the go non-stop since July. Second, the Regulares were particularly good over open ground, but were weak in urban warfare. Third, most of the militiamen had nowhere to run to if they decided to abandon the front line – their wives and children were waiting at home only a short distance behind them. Their backs, as it were, were against the wall, and the Nationalist troops were already notorious for carrying out gang rapes and massacres of civilians.
The enemy was closing in and Miaja and Rojo were desperately trying to build up defensive lines. The question was, where would the attack come from? At this point there came a stroke of luck. During one of the early vanguard strikes on the city, Nationalist forces attempted to get across the Toledo bridge in a mini Italian Fiat Ansaldo tank. One of the Republican carabineros defending the crossing crept up to the machine, taking advantage of its blind spot, and disabled it with a grenade. When its two occupants got out to escape they were gunned down. In the pockets of one of them, Captain Vidal-Cuadras, the Republicans discovered the Nationalists’ attack plans.19 Within an hour they were in Rojo’s hands. The Nationalists were going to come in from across the Casa de Campo, a large park area to the west of the city.
With only twenty-eight thousand fighters at his disposal – including one women’s battalion – Rojo went about fortifying the positions of the defenders. There weren’t enough to close up any breaches in the lines, but one other factor was in his favour: at that point the attackers only numbered eighteen thousand men.
Behind the trenches the city braced itself for the onslaught with a growing spirit of defiance. Posters were daubed on the walls urging men to fight and wives to take their husbands’ lunches to them at the front line rather than at the factory.
‘We will not abandon the trenches!’ declared La Pasionaria, the great communist orator. ‘We will resist until the last man, until the last drop of blood!’ Dressed in her widow’s black, she would become something of a mother figure for soldiers on the Republican side.
They were tense times, though. Many feared that hidden anti-Republican sympathizers within the city might rise up to assist the attackers. General Mola, when asked which of the four Nationalist columns bearing down on the capital he thought might eventually take Madrid, declared that a ‘fifth column’ of supporters from within would emerge victorious, thus, according to some, coining the phrase.
But such talk possibly did his side more harm than good. Paranoia took hold and, in the power vacuum left by the rapidly departing government, the communists and their newly arrived Soviet advisers – some posing as correspondents for Pravda – took control of much of the running of the city. They were ruthless in their dealings with perceived opponents. Unofficial chekas had already been set up around the city since the start of the war, where suspected Nationalist sympathizers were hauled in for questioning and later ‘taken for a ride’ – a short car journey accompanied by a bullet to the head. These acts of violence now increased, however. One pressing issue was what to do with political prisoners in the city’s jails who had declared their support for the rebellion. If they were liberated they would greatly strengthen the enemy. The communists decided to have them killed. As Franco’s troops moved closer to the city, hundreds of army officers, right-wing politicians and priests were loaded into double-decker buses and driven to the village of Paracuellos, some twenty miles up the Barcelona road. There they were shot and buried in mass graves. In total around 2,400 people were killed in this way. It became the most notorious single act of repression carried out by the Republican side during the war.
The Nationalists were still supremely confident, though, not least because of the recent arrival in the country of some 6,500 German soldiers in the newly formed Condor Legion. Although mostly airmen and technicians, they would play a decisive role as the war dragged on.
The main Nationalist assault on Madrid began on 7 November 1936, and came, as expected, from across the Casa de Campo. The defenders, travelling up to the front lines on trams, were able to hold the attackers off. Aerial bombardments continued as the Nationalists hoped to spread panic among the populace. There was particular interest in the effect incendiary bombs might have. Then, on 8 November, the first of the International Brigades arrived. Responding to a cry around the world to halt the rise of fascism, thousands of volunteers were arriving in Spain from France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the United States, Britain, and a host of other countries – even some from China. The majority of these were formed into the communist-dominated International Brigades, and they were to suffer some of the heaviest casualties of the war: around a third of the forty thousand who saw action were killed. Their arrival in Madrid at this time gave a massive morale boost to the defenders as they marched up the Gran Vía towards the trenches, singing the ‘Internationale’ to the cheers of onlookers.
As the days passed and still the city didn’t fall, the Nationalists began to realize that the conquest of Madrid would not be as easy as they had expected. After numerous attempts had been beaten back, they eventually managed to get a foothold across the River Manzanares and take the Garabitas hill, from which they could bombard the rest of the capital. But the main fighting was now taking place in the University City, where the faculty buildings were being fought over floor by floor. Enterprising soldiers would place grenades in the lifts to explode when the doors opened on the enemy on the level above, while some of the Regulares fell ill after eating laboratory animals which had been inoculated with typhus for experiments.20 From his headquarters, General Miaja urgently wired the government in Valencia for more ammunition. In reply he received a counter-order from the prime minister telling him to send down the cabinet’s table silver, which had been left behind in the rush to get away.
It was at this point that the Durruti column, now with some four thousand men, arrived in Madrid, having left the Aragon front. Durruti immediately asked to be given the most difficult sector of the Madrid fighting in order to show the bravery of his men. Miaja assigned him to the Casa de Campo and the recapture of the Garabitas hill. But armed with Swiss rifles dating from 1886, and in the face of the enemy machine-gun fire, the anarchist lines collapsed.
The Nationalists inched forward again. The anarchists were ordered to hold them back, but faced with an attack by Regulares and legionaries, they once again turned to run. General Miaja himself had to harangue them to return.
‘Cowards! Come and die with an old man! Come and die with your General Miaja.’
The militiamen returned to the fray, but Rojo had to lead the general away lest he get killed too. Back at headquarters, they seriously considered disarming the anarchists: they were too liable to give in. Durruti was adamant. His men, he assured them, would show what cojones they had.
Two days later, when he stepped out of a car in the campus area to persuade fleeing anarchists to return to the front line, he was shot, dying in the early hours of the following day in the Ritz Hotel. He was forty years old. Not long afterwards, direct assaults on Madrid ceased as the two sides reached a stalemate. From now on most of the fighting for the capital would take place around the city in various outflanking manoeuvres.
The mystery surrounding Durruti’s death has never been cleared up. There are many theories regarding what happened. One is that the bullet that killed him came from the Hospital Clínico, where Nationalist troops had been fighting the anarchists through the day, gradually working their way up the building. This is doubtful, as the hospital was about a kilometre away from where Durruti was standing at the time and the nine-millimetre bullet that hit him couldn’t have been fired that far. The other main theories centre on either a conspiracy or an accident. The conspiracy theories are that he was shot by the communists as a political rival, or deliberately shot by one of his own anarchists, who felt he was getting too close to the communists. The accident theories are that one of his colleagues inadvertently shot him with a sub-machine-gun that went off when he placed the butt on the ground or when it hit the side of the car; or that Durruti accidentally shot himself with an automatic rifle.
Little evidence has emerged to support either of the conspiracy theories, and an accident seems more likely – possibly the first suggestion, as Durruti, according to some, was more in the habit of carrying an Astra pistol than an automatic rifle or naranjero, which had no safety catch.
The only possessions Durruti had with him at the time of his death were a notebook, a pair of glasses and some dirty clothes. They were handed to his widow, Emilienne Morin, a ticket girl at the Goya Cinema in Barcelona. He also left behind a five-yearold daughter, Colette.
Two hours after Durruti died, in an unrelated incident, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dapper, aristocratic founder of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, was executed in an Alicante jail. Imprisoned the previous March during the violent build-up to the war, he had been transported to Alicante shortly before the coup for fear that he might try to escape from his Madrid cell. Found guilty by a jury of rebellion against the state, he was led out at six-thirty in the morning of 20 November and, standing with his arms crossed, was shot by a Republican firing squad. His last request was for the patio to be wiped clean afterwards, so that his brother Miguel, also being held prisoner, would not have to walk in his blood. Attempts by leading members of the Republican government to spare him and commute the sentence came to nothing: the local left-wing authorities had taken matters into their own hands and would not be dictated to by central government. Ironically the anarchists were against his execution, regarding José Antonio as a ‘Spanish patriot in search of solutions for his country’.21
With José Antonio’s death, Franco lost a potential rival as leader of the Nationalist movement, and was simultaneously handed a martyr figure around whom he could develop a cult of devotion. The Falangist ranks had swollen enormously over the previous months, in some cases with men joining as a means of saving their skin when caught up in Nationalist-controlled areas. Franco, however, did not agree with many of the policies of the party, which, despite being authoritarian and nationalistic, called for radical social reforms. Franco needed the Falange’s support, but was himself a conservative, trying to stop change in the country and even push it back. Now, with the leader of the Falange dead, Franco could bring the party under his direct control, while at the same time turning José Antonio into a mythical and symbolic figure at the head of the Nationalist cause, a martyred saint of the ‘crusade’ against the Reds. The fact was that on the few occasions they had ever met, Franco and José Antonio had not got on.
Durruti and José Antonio are two of the great ‘what-if’ characters of the Spanish Civil War. What if neither of them had died when and as they did? It’s tempting to think the whole war might have changed. Durruti might have been the only man capable of preventing the eventual eclipse of the anarchists by the communists, and the stifling of the revolutionary spirit of the war’s early days as the Republic tried to put on a more respectable and bourgeois face to the rest of the world. Based on his writings from jail during the last months of his life, some have speculated that José Antonio might have been able to curb some of the violence of his followers had he lived and escaped jail, as well as acting as a brake on Franco’s rise to supreme power within the Nationalist ranks.
It is doubtful, though, if either man would have made such a great impact had they lived. The world was changing very quickly around them and they were both being left behind. With its leader behind bars, and with thousands of new members, the Falange had turned into something larger than and quite different from the small group of fascists that José Antonio had originally created. Had he been back in charge, he might have reformed it more to his own liking, but it is probable that Franco would have marginalized and neutralized him as he did so successfully with his other potential political opponents. As for Durruti, with the Soviet Union being the only serious backer for the Republican side, the communists were in the ascendant and becoming increasingly powerful. Stalin, in his attempts to increase his appeal in London and Paris, would have had little patience with a genuine revolutionary like Durruti having a leading role in the war. Again, as with José Antonio, you feel he would either have been absorbed or removed. As it was, both men were destined to become semi-mythological characters for their respective sides.