Barcelona May Days - Communist Party of Spain Perspective

Communist Party of Spain Perspective

The PCE was the most powerful faction in the crumbling Republican government and was bitter enemy of the anarchists. Their perspective is expressed in the memoirs of leading Communist Party figure Dolores Ibárruri (more commonly known as La Pasionaria).

Ibárruri ascribed the events to an "anarchotrotskyist" attempt at shutting down the Republican government on orders from General Francisco Franco, acting in tandem with Adolf Hitler. According to her, the violence was the culmination of an anarchist plot which included plans to stop the movement of trains and cut all telegraph and telephone lines; she cites an "order to its forces to control the telephone building and disarm all people whom they encounter in the streets without proper authorization" as the aim of the anarchist plan. She did not provide any evidence to support these claims, which were widely held by fellow Party members at the time but have since been discredited.

The Communist party alleged the anarchist "putsch" to be motivated by their resentment of the centralized military command sought by the Communists and their allies the Catalan government under Lluis Companys, and desire to seize political power.