Santiago Carrillo - Second Republic and Civil War

Second Republic and Civil War

In 1932, he joined the Executive Commission of the Socialist Youth and became editor of its newspaper, Renovación. Carrillo was on the left wing of the organisation. In 1933, as the Socialist Youth was becoming more radical, Carrillo was elected as General Secretary. From October 1934 to February 1936 he was jailed, due to his participation in the failed 1934 leftist coup (Carrillo was a member of the National Revolutionary Committee).

After his release, in March 1936, Carrillo and the executive of the Socialist Youth travelled to Moscow to meet the leaders of the Young Communist International and prepare the unification of Socialist and Communist youth leagues. The outcome of the process was the creation of the Unified Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas).

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he decided to join the Communist Party and did so on the day the government left Madrid in November. During the war, he showed an intense pro-Soviet approach. On 7 November 1936 Carrillo was elected Councillor for Public Order in the Defence Council of Madrid, which was given supreme power in besieged Madrid, after the government left the city.

During his term, several thousand military and civilian prisoners, including many women and children, were killed by communist groups in the Paracuellos massacres at Paracuellos del Jarama and Torrejón de Ardoz (the biggest mass killings by the Republican side during the Civil War). The dead were buried in common graves. Carrillo denied any knowledge of the massacres in his memoirs but some right-wing historians like César Vidal or Pío Moa still maintain that Carrillo was involved. In an interview with the historian Ian Gibson, Carrillo set out his version of events concerning the massacre.

In March 1939 Madrid surrendered after an internal coup against the Negrín administration and its close supporter, the Communist Party, which wished to continue the resistance until the expected outbreak of the World War. Carrillo's father, Wenceslao, a member of the PSOE, was among those who led the coup and was a member of Casado's Junta. Some weeks before, Carrillo's mother had died. Carrillo then wrote an open letter to his father describing the coup as counter-revolutionary and as a betrayal, reproaching him for his anti-communism, and renouncing any further communication with him. In his memoirs, Carrillo states that the letter was written on 7 March. However, journalist and historian Carlos Fernández published the letter in 1983, as it had been published in Correspondance International; it was dated 15 May.

After the military collapse of the Republican Government, he fled to Paris and tried to reorganise the party. Carrillo spent 38 years in exile, most of the time in France, but also in the USSR and other countries.