Revolutionary Catalonia - The May Events

The May Events

During the Civil War, the Spanish Communist Party gained considerable influence due to the Republican force's reliance on weapons, supplies and military advisers from the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the Communist party (now working as the dominant force within the PSUC) constantly proclaimed that it was promoting "bourgeois democracy" and was fighting in defense of the Republic, not for proletarian revolution. Opposition to collectivization and the camouflaging of the true nature of the Spanish revolution by the Communist party was mainly due to the fear that the establishment of a revolutionary socialist state would antagonize Western Democracies. The PSUC had also become the major defender of the Catalan middle classes against collectivization, organizing 18,000 tradesmen and artisans into the Catalan Federation of Small Businessmen and Manufacturers (GEPCI).

The party's attacks on the revolution, particularly the replacement of revolutionary committees with regular organs of state power brought it into conflict with the CNT-FAI, a major supporter of the revolutionary committees and the most powerful working class organization in Catalonia. The revolutionary Boletín de Información declared that: "The thousands of proletarian combatants at the battle fronts are not fighting for the 'democratic Republic.' They are proletarian revolutionaries, who have taken up arms in order to make the Revolution. To postpone the triumph of the latter until after we win the war would weaken considerably the fighting spirit of the working class.... The Revolution and the war are inseparable. Everything that is said to the contrary is reformist counterrevolution." In spite of this, CNT ministers in the government also acquiesced to decrees which dissolved revolutionary committees, largely because they believed this would lead to closer ties with Britain and France.

In the Catalan Generalitat, power was divided between the CNT, PSUC and Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC). Another influential party in Barcelona was the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which espoused an anti-Stalinist far left ideology, and was thus denounced by the PSUC as Trotskyist and Fascist. In turn, the POUM newspaper La Batalla accused the Communists of being counterrevolutionary. On December 1936 the CNT and PSUC agreed to remove the POUM from the Catalan government. This was possibly influenced by Soviet consul Vladimir A. Antonov-Ovseenko who threatened to withdraw arm shipments. The PSUC now sought to weaken the CNT committees through an alliance with the urban middle classes and the rural tenant farmers in the Unió de Rabassaires. They passed a decree banning the committees, but could not effectively enforce it. This was because police power in Barcelona was divided between the CNT controlled patrols under the Junta de seguridad and the Assault and National Republican guards, under police commissioner Rodríguez Salas, a PSUC member. The PSUC and ERC then passed a set of decrees to dissolve the patrols and create a single unified security corps. CNT representatives in the Generalitat did not object, but there was widespread discontent among Anarchists and the POUM. Further decrees by the Generalitat which called up conscripts, dissolved military committees and provided for the integration of the militias into a regular army caused a crisis in which CNT ministers walked out of the government in protest. The POUM also opposed the decrees. Tensions where only exacerbated following the well publicized murders of PSUC secretary Roldán Cortada and Anarchist committee president Antonio Martín. Armed raids and attempts by the Republican guards to disarm the Anarchists and the seizure of towns along the French border from revolutionary committees led the CNT to mobilize and arm its workers.

In what became known as the Barcelona May Days of 1937, fighting broke out after civil guards attempted to take over a CNT-run telephone building in Barcelona's Plaça de Catalunya. George Orwell who was in the POUM militia at the time described the events leading up to the fighting:

The immediate cause of friction was the Government's order to surrender all private weapons, coinciding with the decision to build up a heavily-armed 'non-political' police-force from which trade union members were to be excluded. The meaning of this was obvious to everyone; and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over of some of the key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a certain amount of resentment among the working classes because of the growing contrast of wealth and poverty and a general vague feeling that the revolution had been sabotaged. Many people were agreeably surprised when there was no rioting on I May. On 3 May the Government decided to take over the Telephone Exchange, which had been operated since the beginning of the war mainly by C.N.T. workers; it was alleged that it was badly run and that official calls were being tapped. Salas, the Chief of Police (who may or may not have been exceeding his orders), sent three lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards to seize the building, while the streets outside were cleared by armed police in civilian clothes. At about the same time bands of Civil Guards seized various other buildings in strategic spots. Whatever the real intention may have been, there was a widespread belief that this was the signal for a general attack on the C.N.T. by the Civil Guards and the P.S.U.C. (Communists and Socialists). The word flew round the town that the workers' buildings were being attacked, armed Anarchists appeared on the streets, work ceased, and fighting broke out immediately.

— George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia, ch. 11'

The Civil guards took the ground floor of the telephone building, but were prevented from taking the upper levels. Soon, trucks carrying armed anarchists arrived. CNT councilors demanded the removal of police commissioner Rodríguez Salas, but Lluís Companys refused. The POUM stood by the CNT and advised them to take control of the city, but the CNT appealed to the workers to cease fighting. With the situation deteriorating, a meeting of CNT delegates from Valencia and the Generalitat under Companys agreed on a ceasefire and a new provisional government, but despite of this, the fighting continued. Dissenting anarchists such as the "Friends of Durruti" and radical members of the POUM along with Bolshevik Leninists spread propaganda to continue to the fighting. On Wednesday, May 5, prime minister Largo Caballero, under constant pressure from the PSUC to take control of public order in Catalonia, appointed Colonel Antonio Escobar of the Republican Guard as delegate of public order, but on his arrival in Barcelona, Escobar was shot and seriously wounded. After constant appeals by the CNT, POUM and UGT for a ceasefire, the fighting abated on the morning of May 6. In the evening, news reached Barcelona that 1,500 assault guards were approaching the city. The CNT agreed on a truce after negotiations with the minister of interior back in Valencia. They agreed that the assault guards would not be attacked as long as they refrained from violence and that the CNT would order its members to abandon the barricades and go back to work. On May 7, the assault guards entered Barcelona unopposed, and soon there were twelve thousand government troops in the city.