Revolutionary Catalonia - Repression of The CNT and POUM

Repression of The CNT and POUM

In the days following the fighting in Barcelona, various Communist newspapers engaged in a massive propaganda campaign against the anarchists and the POUM. Pravda and the American communist Daily Worker claimed that Trotskyists and Fascists were behind the uprising. The Spanish Communist party newspapers also viciously attacked the POUM, denouncing them as traitors and fascists. The Communists, supported by the centrist faction of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) under Indalecio Prieto now called for the POUM to be dissolved, but PM Largo Caballero resisted this move and the Communists along with their allies in the PSOE then left the government in protest. The following crisis led to the removal of Largo Caballero by President Manuel Azaña. Azaña then appointed Juan Negrín (a centrist socialist and ally of the Communists and the Kremlin) as the new premier. The new cabinet was dominated by the Communists, center socialists and republicans, the CNT and left wing of the PSOE were not represented. The Communist Party of Spain (PCE) had now come to the fore as the most influential force in the Republican government.

In Catalonia, now controlled by troops under the Command of Communist General Sebastián Pozas and newly appointed Barcelona chief of Police Ricardo Burillo, the CNT independent police patrols were dissolved and disarmed. Furthermore, the CNT were completely removed from their positions at the Franco-Spanish border posts. Another major blow to the CNT was the dissolution of countless revolutionary committees throughout Catalonia by the army and assault guards. When a new cabinet was formed by President Companys, the CNT decided not to participate. In the months that followed, the Communists carried out a campaign of arrests, tortures and assassinations against the CNT. The imprisonment of many Anarchists caused a wave of dissent in working class quarters. Meanwhile the Communists working with Soviet agents seized most the POUM leadership along with many of its members. The POUM secretary Andrés Nin was also arrested, send to a secret prison in Alcalá de Henares and eventually murdered. Nin's disappearance and the repression of the POUM caused an international outcry from various left wing organizations and further deepened the divisions within the Republic.

By the end of May 1937, the Communists were conducting a campaign to destroy the rural collectives. The PCE used the Popular army and the National Guard to dissolve CNT committees and aid tenant farmers and sharecroppers recover land lost in the revolution. On 11 August, the Eleventh popular army division dissolved the CNT dominated Regional Defense Council of Aragon by force. With the aid of the army and the assault guards, the tenant farmers and small owners who had lost their land in the beginning of the revolution now divided up the land confiscated from the collectives. Even those collectives that had been created voluntarily were raided. This caused widespread discontent amongst the peasants, the situation became so dire that the Communist party agrarian commission admitted that "agricultural work was paralyzed" and was forced to restore some of the collectives.