Controversy: The Socialist Forum, 1vol. I, no. 11, August 1937
This article was published as ‘J’ai été témoin à Barcelone…’, translated by Yvonne Davet, in La Révolution Prolétarienne: Revue Bimensuelle Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire, no. 255, 25 September 1937. It was this article that the New Statesman refused to publish; see Orwell’s letter to Rayner Heppenstall, 31 July 1937, above. Yvonne Davet (born c. 1895) was for many years secretary to André Gide. She and Orwell corresponded before and after World War II, and she translated several of his books into French in the hope that she could find a publisher for them in France. Her translation of Homage to Catalonia, completed before the outbreak of war and read by Orwell, was not published until 1955. At the time it had notes by Orwell not found in English editions until 1986. She also translated Jean Rhys, Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch. She and Orwell never met.
Orwell’s article was preceded in Controversy by this note:
George Orwell, author of The Road to Wigan Pier, has been fighting with the ILP Contingent on the Aragón front. Here he contributes a personal account of events in Barcelona during the May Days and of the suppression of the POUM in the following month.
Much has already been written about the May riots in Barcelona, and the major events have been carefully tabulated in Fenner Brockway’s pamphlet, The Truth About Barcelona, which so far as my own knowledge goes is entirely accurate. I think, therefore, that the most useful thing I can do here, in my capacity as eye-witness, is to add a few footnotes upon several of the most-disputed points.
First of all, as to the purpose, if any, of the so-called rising. It has been asserted in the Communist press that the whole thing was a carefully-prepared effort to overthrow the Government and even to hand Catalonia over to the Fascists by provoking foreign intervention in Barcelona. The second part of this suggestion is almost too ridiculous to need refuting. If the P.O.U.M. and the left-wing Anarchists were really in league with the Fascists, why did not the militias at the front walk out and leave a hole in the line? And why did the C.N.T.2 transport-workers, in spite of the strike, continue sending supplies to the front? I cannot, however, say with certainty that a definite revolutionary intention was not in the minds of a few extremists, especially the Bolshevik Leninists (usually called Trotskyists) whose pamphlets were handed round the barricades. What I can say is that the ordinary rank and file behind the barricades never for an instant thought of themselves as taking part in a revolution. We thought, all of us, that we were simply defending ourselves against an attempted coup d’état by the Civil Guards,3 who had forcibly seized the Telephone Exchange and might seize some more of the workers’ buildings if we did not show ourselves willing to fight. My reading of the situation, derived from what people were actually doing and saying at the time, is this:–
The workers came into the streets in a spontaneous defensive movement, and they only consciously wanted two things: the handing-back of the Telephone Exchange and the disarming of the hated Civil Guards. In addition there was the resentment caused by the growing poverty in Barcelona and the luxurious life lived by the bourgeoisie. But it is probable that the opportunity to overthrow the Catalan Government existed if there had been a leader to take advantage of it. It seems to be widely agreed that on the third day the workers were in a position to take control of the city; certainly the Civil Guards were greatly demoralised and were surrendering in large numbers. And though the Valencia Government could send fresh troops to crush the workers (they did send 6,000 Assault Guards when the fighting was over), they could not maintain those troops in Barcelona if the transport-workers chose not to supply them. But in fact no resolute revolutionary leadership existed. The Anarchist leaders disowned the whole thing and said ‘Go back to work’, and the P.O.U.M. leaders took an uncertain line. The orders sent to us at the P.O.U.M. barricades, direct from the P.O.U.M. leadership, were to stand by the C.N.T., but not to fire unless we were fired on ourselves or our buildings attacked. (I personally was fired at a number of times, but never fired back.) Consequently, as food ran short, the workers began to trickle back to work; and, of course, once they were safely dispersed, the reprisals began. Whether the revolutionary opportunity ought to have been taken advantage of is another question. Speaking solely for myself, I should answer ‘No’. To begin with it is doubtful whether the workers could have maintained power for more than a few weeks; and, secondly, it might well have meant losing the war against Franco. On the other hand the essentially defensive action taken by the workers was perfectly correct; war or no war, they had a right to defend what they had won in July, 1936. It may be, of course, that the revolution was finally lost in those few days in May. But I still think it was a little better, though only a very little, to lose the revolution than to lose the war.
Secondly, as to the people involved. The Communist press took the line, almost from the start, of pretending that the ‘rising’ was wholly or almost wholly the work of the P.O.U.M. (aided by ‘a few irresponsible hooligans’, according to the New York Daily Worker). Anyone who was in Barcelona at the time knows that this is an absurdity. The enormous majority of the people behind the barricades were ordinary C.N.T. workers. And this point is of importance, for it was as a scapegoat for the May riots that the P.O.U.M. was recently suppressed; the four hundred or more P.O.U.M. supporters who are in the filthy, verminous Barcelona jails at this moment, are there ostensibly for their share in the May riots. It is worth pointing, therefore, to two good reasons why the P.O.U.M. were not and could not have been the prime movers. In the first place, the P.O.U.M. was a very small party. If one throws in Party members, militiamen on leave, and helpers and sympathisers of all kinds, the number of P.O.U.M. supporters on the streets could not have been anywhere near ten thousand – probably not five thousand; but the disturbances manifestly involved scores of thousands of people. Secondly, there was a general or nearly general strike for several days; but the P.O.U.M., as such, had no power to call a strike, and the strike could not have happened if the rank and file of the C.N.T. had not wanted it. As to those involved on the other side, the London Daily Worker had the impudence to suggest in one issue that the ‘rising’ was suppressed by the Popular Army. Everyone in Barcelona knew, and the Daily Worker must have known as well, that the Popular Army remained neutral and the troops stayed in their barracks throughout the disturbances. A few soldiers, however, did take part as individuals; I saw a couple at one of the P.O.U.M. barricades.
Thirdly, as to the stores of arms which the P.O.U.M. are supposed to have been hoarding in Barcelona. This story has been repeated so often that even a normally critical observer like H. N. Brailsford accepts it without any investigation and speaks of the ‘tanks and guns’ which the P.O.U.M. had ‘stolen from Government arsenals’ (New Statesman, May 22).4 As a matter of fact the P.O.U.M. possessed pitifully few weapons, either at the front or in the rear. During the street-fighting I was at all three of the principal strongholds of the P.O.U.M., the Executive Building, the Comité Local and the Hotel Falcón. It is worth recording in detail what armaments these buildings contained. There were in all about 80 rifles, some of them defective, besides a few obsolete guns of various patterns, all useless because there were no cartridges for them. Of rifle ammunition there was about 50 rounds for each weapon. There were no machine-guns, no pistols and no pistol ammunition. There were a few cases of hand-grenades, but these were sent to us by the C.N.T. after the fighting started. A highly-placed militia officer afterwards gave me his opinion that in the whole of Barcelona the P.O.U.M. possessed about a hundred and fifty rifles and one machine-gun. This, it will be seen, was barely sufficient for the armed guards which at that time all parties, P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., and C.N.T.-F.A.I. alike, placed on their principal buildings. Possibly it may be said that even in the May riots the P.O.U.M. were still hiding their weapons. But in that case what becomes of the claim that the May riots were a P.O.U.M. rising intended to overthrow the Government?
In reality, by far the worst offenders in this matter of keeping weapons from the front, were the Government themselves. The infantry on the Aragón front were far worse-armed than an English public school O.T.C.5 but the rear-line troops, the Civil Guards, Assault Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front, but were used to ‘preserve order’ (i.e., overawe the workers) in the rear, were armed to the teeth. The troops on the Aragón front had worn-out Mauser rifles, which usually jammed after five shots, approximately one machine-gun to fifty men, and one pistol or revolver to about thirty men. These weapons, so necessary in trench warfare, were not issued by the Government and could only be bought illegally and with the greatest difficulty. The Assault Guards were armed with brand-new Russian rifles; in addition, every man was issued with an automatic pistol, and there was one sub-machine-gun between ten or a dozen men. These facts speak for themselves. A Government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old, and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear, is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. Hence the feeble war-policy of the past six months, and hence the compromise with which the war will almost certainly end.
When the P.O.U.M., the Left Opposition (so-called Trotskyist) off-shoot of Spanish Communism, was suppressed on June 16–17, the fact in itself surprised nobody. Ever since May, or even since February, it had been obvious that the P.O.U.M. would be ‘liquidated’ if the Communists could bring it about. Nevertheless, the suddenness of the suppressive action, and the mixture of treachery and brutality with which it was carried out, took everyone, even the leaders, completely unaware.
Ostensibly the Party was suppressed on the charge, which has been repeated for months in the Communist press though not taken seriously by anyone inside Spain, that the P.O.U.M. leaders were in the pay of the Fascists. On June 16 Andrés Nin, the leader of the Party, was arrested in his office. The same night, before any proclamation had been made, the police raided the Hotel Falcón, a sort of boarding-house maintained by the P.O.U.M. and used chiefly by militiamen on leave, and arrested everybody in it on no particular charge. Next morning the P.O.U.M. was declared illegal and all P.O.U.M. buildings, not only offices, bookstalls, etc., but even libraries and sanatoriums for wounded men, were seized by the police. Within a few days all or almost all of the forty members of the Executive Committee were under arrest. One or two who succeeded in going into hiding were made to give themselves up by the device, borrowed from the Fascists, of seizing their wives as hostages. Nin was transferred to Valencia and thence to Madrid, and put on trial for selling military information to the enemy. Needless to say the usual ‘confessions’, mysterious letters written in invisible ink, and other ‘evidence’ were forthcoming in such profusion as to make it reasonably likely that they had been prepared beforehand. As early as June 19 the news reached Barcelona, via Valencia, that Nin had been shot. This report was, we hope, untrue, but it hardly needs pointing out that the Valencia Government will be obliged to shoot a number, perhaps a dozen, of the P.O.U.M. leaders if it expects its charges to be taken seriously.6
Meanwhile, the rank and file of the Party, not merely party members, but soldiers in the P.O.U.M. militia and sympathisers and helpers of all kinds, were being thrown into prison as fast as the police could lay hands on them. Probably it would be impossible to get hold of accurate figures, but there is reason to think that during the first week there were 400 arrests in Barcelona alone; certainly the jails were so full that large numbers of prisoners had to be confined in shops and other temporary dumps. So far as I could discover, no discrimination was made in the arrests between those who had been concerned in the May riots and those who had not. In effect, the outlawry of the P.O.U.M. was made retrospective; the P.O.U.M. was now illegal, and therefore one was breaking the law by having ever belonged to it. The police even went to the length of arresting the wounded men in the sanatoriums. Among the prisoners in one of the jails I saw, for instance, two men of my acquaintance with amputated legs; also a child of not more than twelve years of age.
One has got to remember, too, just what imprisonment means in Spain at this moment. Apart from the frightful overcrowding of the temporary jails, the insanitary conditions, the lack of light and air and the filthy food, there is the complete absence of anything that we should regard as legality. There is, for instance, no nonsense about Habeas Corpus. According to the present law, or at any rate the present practice, you can be imprisoned for an indefinite time not merely without being tried but even without being charged; and until you have been charged the authorities can, if they choose, keep you ‘incommunicado’ – that is, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else in the outside world. It is easy to see how much the ‘confessions’ obtained in such circumstances are worth. The situation is all the worse for the poorer prisoners because the P.O.U.M. Red Aid, which normally furnishes prisoners with legal advice, has been suppressed along with the other P.O.U.M. institutions.
But perhaps the most odious feature of the whole business was the fact that all news of what had happened was deliberately concealed, certainly for five days, and I believe for longer, from the troops on the Aragón front. As it happened, I was at the front from June 15 to 20. I had got to see a medical board and in doing so to visit various towns behind the front line, Siétamo, Barbastro, Monzón, etc. In all these places the P.O.U.M. militia headquarters, Red Aid centres and the like were functioning normally, and as far down the line as Lérida (only about 100 miles from Barcelona) and as late as June 20, not a soul had heard that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed. All word of it had been kept out of the Barcelona papers, although, of course, the Valencia papers (which do not get to the Aragón front) were flaming with the story of Nin’s ‘treachery’. Together with a number of others I had the disagreeable experience of getting back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence. Luckily I was warned just in time and managed to make myself scarce, but other[s] were not so fortunate. Every P.O.U.M. militiaman who came down the line at this period had the choice of going straight into hiding or into jail – a really pleasant reception after three or four months in the front line. The motive for all this is obvious: the attack on Huesca was just beginning, and presumably the Government feared that if the P.O.U.M. militia knew what was happening they might refuse to march. I do not, as a matter of fact, believe that the loyalty of the militia would have been affected; still, they had a right to know the truth. There is something unspeakably ugly in sending men into battle (when I left Siétamo the fight was beginning and the first wounded were jolting in the ambulances down the abominable roads) and at the same time concealing from them that behind their back their party was being suppressed, their leaders denounced as traitors and their friends and relatives thrown into prison.
The P.O.U.M. was by far the smallest of the revolutionary parties, and its suppression affects comparatively few people. In all probability the sum total of punishments will be a score or so of people shot or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, a few hundreds ruined and a few thousands temporarily persecuted. Nevertheless, its suppression is symptomatically important. To begin with it should make clear to the outside world, what was already obvious to many observers in Spain, that the present Government has more points of resemblance to Fascism than points of difference. (This does not mean that it is not worth fighting for as against the more naked Fascism of Franco and Hitler. I myself had grasped by May the Fascist tendency of the Government, but I was willing to go back to the front and in fact did so.) Secondly, the elimination of the P.O.U.M. gives warning of the impending attack upon the Anarchists. These are the real enemy whom the Communists fear as they never feared the numerically insignificant P.O.U.M. The Anarchist leaders have now had a demonstration of the methods likely to be used against them; the only hope for the revolution, and probably for victory in the war, is that they will profit by the lesson and get ready to defend themselves in time.
1. Raymond Challinor, in Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 54 (Winter 1989), 40, states: ‘Originally, Controversy was begun after the Independent Labour Party disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932. At first, it functioned as the Party’s internal bulletin… In 1936, however, its character completely changed. From then onwards, Controversy sought to be – and largely was – a journal where the many diverse views held within the working-class movement could be openly discussed without rancour.’ To acknowledge that its readership was much wider than that of the ILP, it changed its name in 1939 to Left Forum and then to Left. It ceased publication in May 1950. Challinor attributes much of its success to the character of its editor, Dr C. A. Smith, a London headmaster and later a University of London lecturer. Among those writing for the journal he lists Frank Borkenau, Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, Jomo Kenyatta, Victor Serge, August Thalheimer, Jay Lovestone, George Padmore, Marceau Pivert and Simone Weil.
2. For the significance of the groups represented by initials, see Homage to Catalonia, pp. 179– 82 [VI/Appendix I, 201–5]. Relevant extracts and part of a letter from Hugh Thomas to the editors of CJEL are reprinted as a note to Orwell’s ‘Notes on the Spanish Militias’, below.
3. Orwell later realized that it was not the Civil Guards, but a local section of Assault Guards, who seized the Barcelona Telephone Exchange. Shortly before he died, he gave instructions that the text of Homage to Catalonia be changed; see pp. 29–30 [VI/Textual Note].
4. For Orwell’s later thoughts, see letters to H. N. Brailsford, 10 and 18 December 1937, below.
5. Officers’ Training Corps, associated with the public-school system in England.
6. Andrés Nin (1892–1973) was leader of the POUM. He had at one time been Trotsky’s secretary but broke with him when Trotsky spoke critically of the POUM (see Thomas, 523). He ‘underwent the customary Soviet interrogation’ suffered by those who were claimed to be ‘traitors to the cause’ and was then murdered, possibly in the royal park just north of Madrid. In later months the remaining POUM leaders were interrogated and tortured, some in the convent of Saint Ursula in Barcelona, ‘the Dachau of republican Spain’, as one POUM survivor described it. Nin was the only POUM leader to be murdered. However, Bob Smillie was thrown into jail in Valencia without just cause (see Homage to Catalonia, pp. 155–6 [VI/170–1]), where he died, according to his captors, of appendicitis. Thomas gives this account of Nin’s probable fate: ‘He… refused to sign documents admitting his guilt and that of his friends… What should they do?… the Italian Vidali (Carlos Contreras) suggested that a “nazi” attack to liberate Nin should be simulated. So, one dark night, probably 22 or 23 June, ten German members of the International Brigade assaulted the house in Alcalá where Nin was held… Nin was taken away and murdered… His refusal to admit his guilt probably saved the lives of his friends’ (705).