Time and Tide, 20 January 1940
Although not many people outside Spain had heard of him before the beginning of 1939. Colonel Casado’s name1 will always be among those that are remembered in connection with the Spanish Civil War. He it was who overthrew the Negrín Government2 and negotiated the surrender of Madrid – and, considering the actual military situation and the sufferings of the Spanish people, it is difficult not to feel that he was right. The truly disgraceful thing, as Mr. Croft-Cooke says forcibly in his introduction, was that the war was ever allowed to continue so long. Colonel Casado and those associated with him were denounced all over the world in the left-wing press as traitors, crypto-Fascists, etc., etc., but these accusations came very badly from people who had saved their own skins long before Franco entered Madrid. Besteiro,3 who took part in the Casado administration and afterwards stayed behind to face the Fascists, was also denounced as ‘pro-Franco’. Besteiro was given thirty years’ imprisonment! The Fascists certainly have a strange way of treating their friends.
Perhaps the chief interest of Colonel Casado’s book is the light it throws on the Russian intervention in Spain and the Spanish reaction to it. Although well-meaning people denied it at the time, there is little doubt that from the middle of 1937 until nearly the end of the war the Spanish Government was directly under the control of Moscow. The ultimate motives of the Russians are uncertain, but at any rate they aimed at setting up in Spain a Government obedient to their own orders, and in the Negrín Government they had one. But the bid that they had made for middle-class support produced unforeseen complications. In the earlier part of the war the main adversaries of the Communists in their fight for power had been the Anarchists and left-wing Socialists, and the emphasis of Communist propaganda was therefore on a ‘moderate’ policy. The effect of this was to put power into the hands of ‘bourgeois Republican’ officers and officials, of whom Colonel Casado became the leader. But these people were first and foremost Spaniards and resented the Russian interference almost as much as that of the Germans and Italians. Consequently the Communist-Anarchist struggle was followed by another struggle of Communists against Republicans, in which the Negrín Government was finally overthrown and many Communists lost their lives.
The very important question that this raises is whether a western country can in practice be controlled by Communists acting under Russian orders. It is a question that will probably come to the front again in the event of a revolution of the Left in Germany. The inference from Colonel Casado’s book seems to be that a western or westernized people will not for any length of time allow itself to be governed from Moscow. Making all allowance for the prejudice he undoubtedly feels against the Russians and their local Communist agents, his account leaves very little doubt that the Russian domination was widely and deeply resented in Spain. He also suggests that it was the knowledge of the Russian intervention that decided Britain and France to leave the Spanish Government to its fate. This seems more doubtful. If the British and French Governments had really wanted to counter the Russian influence, by far the quickest way was to supply the Spanish Government with arms, for it had been obvious from the start that any country that supplied arms could control Spanish policy. One must conclude that the British and French Governments not only wanted Franco to win, but would in any case have preferred a Russian-controlled Government to a Socialist-Anarchist combination under some such leader as Caballero.4
Colonel Casado’s book gives a detailed account of all the events leading up to the capitulation, and it is one of those documents that will always have to be studied by future historians of the Spanish War. As a book it is not and does not pretend to be anything very remarkable. Mr. Worsley’s book5 is better written, by a more practised hand; but the subject-matter is more familiar – air-raids, Barcelona politics, etc., etc. The story begins with a singularly amateurish attempt at intelligence-work on behalf of the Spanish Government by the author and Mr. Stephen Spender. Later Mr. Worsley found more useful and congenial work with an ambulance and had some interesting experiences, which included being mixed up in the retreat from Málaga. But I think it is very nearly the close-season for this class of Spanish war-book.
1. Colonel Sigismundo Casado López (1893-1968), commander of the Republican Army of the Centre. He organized a campaign against Dr Juan Negrin, the Republican Prime Minister, and attempted, towards the end of the civil war, to gain better terms from Franco. He failed and took refuge in Britain; he later returned to Spain.
2. Dr Juan Negrin (1889-1956) was Socialist Prime Minister of Spain, September 1936-March 1938. He fled to France in 1939 and set up a Spanish Government in Exile; he resigned from its premiership in 1945 in the hope of uniting all exiled Spaniards. He died in exile. See Thomas, 949-50.
3. Julián Besteiro (1870-1940), President of the UGT (Socialist Trade Union) to 1931, Speaker of the Cortes (the Spanish Parliament) and temporarily President of Spain in 1931. He died in prison in 1940 while serving a thirty-year prison sentence imposed by Franco’s government.
4. See p. 223, n. 6.
5. T. C. Worsley (1907-77) was an author and critic. He taught at Wellington (where Orwell spent a term in 1917). Orwell reviewed his Philistines and Barbarians: Democracy and the Public Schools in Time and Tide, 14 September 1940 (see Orwell and the Dispossessed), and he wrote the foreword to his The End of the ‘Old School Tie’, May 1941 (XII/793). With W. H. Auden Worsley wrote Education Today – and Tomorrow (1939). He took part in a BBC broadcast to India on education with N. G. Fisher (1910-72), which was directed by Orwell, 1 September 1942 (see XIII/1415).