‘UHP. Swear on these letters, brothers, death before tyranny’ read the words daubed in white paint on the side of a railway carriage departing from Barcelona for the Republican front during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Above the slogan, smiling men leaned out of the windows and raised their clenched fists in an antifascist salute towards Robert Capa, the Hungarian photographer who captured the moment in an iconic image.1 During the months prior to the war, ‘UHP’ was often seen scrawled across walls, on the labels of cognac bottles and as a decorative motif on pottery.2 The letters – shorthand for ‘unite, proletarian brothers’ (Uníos, hermanos proletarios!) – had been coined two years previously during a two-week revolutionary insurrection in the northern region of Asturias. In October 1934, the Spanish socialist movement triggered plans for a hazily defined and poorly prepared ‘revolutionary movement’ in response to the ascent to government of a right-wing party that professed little respect for the young Second Republic (1931–6). Envisaged as a nationwide revolt, only in Asturias did the October rebellion take the form of a prolonged assault on state power and an experiment in revolution.
While the Asturian capital, Oviedo, reverberated with the sound of gunfire and exploding dynamite as government forces and left-wing militias fought for control of the streets, revolutionary patrols performed the clenched fist salute and demanded the password of ‘UHP’ in the coalfields that constituted the heartland of the insurrection. The towns and villages of the narrow, steep-sided coal valleys lay in the hands of revolutionary committees staffed by local politicians and trade unionists drawn from the ranks of the socialists, anarchists and communists. The committees undertook a range of self-consciously revolutionary acts, from banning money to centralizing the distribution of requisitioned goods and foodstuffs, while also reconfiguring the local economy for the needs of a rudimentary war effort, including retooling steel plants to armour-plate vehicles. Patrols detained alleged enemies of the revolution, including rightists, employers and, in particular, members of the Catholic Church, who accounted for nearly two-thirds of the approximately fifty victims of the revolutionary ‘furies’ who were either murdered or died in unclear circumstances during the insurrection.3 After two weeks, the movement was defeated by the Spanish army. The total number of dead approached 1,500, which translated into more than half of the deaths caused by political violence during the Second Republic.4
The revolutionary insurrection was not the only episode of mass left-wing mobilization in Europe in 1934. Austrian socialists rebelled when Chancellor Dollfuss strengthened his authoritarian grip on the developing Catholic, corporatist state while almost simultaneously rank-and-file French socialists and communists united in a massive protest against the threat posed by extreme right-wing leagues to the French Third Republic.5 The episodes were rooted in the particular period of crisis between 1933 and 1935 as the left grappled with the continued growth of fascism and the authoritarian right, and the effects of the Great Depression.6 But these defensive reactions did not match the scale and revolutionary pretensions of the Asturian insurrection. Not only was this the most important episode of revolutionary upheaval in Europe between the early 1920s and the Spanish Civil War, it was also the last attempt at the seizure of state power via a mass armed insurrection by the working class in Europe.7
How and why thousands of inhabitants of the coalfields became willing to take up arms against the government and participate in the revolt are the questions at the heart of this study, which examines the origins, unfolding and ramifications of the Asturian October within the context of the Second Republic. On a superficial level, the insurrection was sparked by an order from the socialist leadership, yet socialist conspiring does not explain the force of the revolt in Asturias. Nor do existing explanations of the ‘radicalization’ process – which is central to histories of the Republic – capture the breadth, nature and dynamism of conflict and militancy in the coalfields during the 1930s. This book re-evaluates radicalism as a confrontational mode of politics – as defined in more detail below – that emerged from cleavages and conflicts at the local level and the lived experience of politics. It frees radicalization from the strictures of union and party politics and the conventional timeframe of 1933–4 by examining how inhabitants of the coalfields claimed to speak for and ‘police’ the community. The ideas and actions of these activists were moulded by social relations and the experience of politics and state power at the local level, yet imagined and understood in relation to a wider national and international context.8
Radicalization is a touchstone in histories of the Second Republic. It is central to the long-running debate as to who was responsible for delivering Spain to the threshold of civil war five years after the proclamation of the Republic promised its supporters a new beginning of democracy, freedom, secularism and social justice.9 Historians have either emphasized the unwillingness of sectors of the right, Church, landowners and businesses to accept the reforming intentions of Republican-socialist governments, which radicalized supporters of the government, or else accused the left of ‘excluding’ the right and adopting a possessive attitude towards the Republic.10 Accordingly, the Asturian October was either a gesture aimed at stemming the rise of a radicalizing right or confirmation of the left’s undemocratic values and methods. Such visions neglect the view from the coalfields and the revolutionary pretensions of Asturian militants and reify a particular idea of the Republic that overlooks the shifting, disputed understandings of the regime between 1931 and 1936.
Seeking answers to the alleged failure of democratic politics in the interwar period was a principal concern for historians during the 1970s and 1980s, as was writing the history of the revolutions and politics of the European working class left between the wars.11 The latter largely fell out of fashion at the end of the Cold War.12 More recent histories of political cultures during the interwar period have eroded the previous tendency to make stark distinctions between left and right in favour of uncovering crossovers, interaction and mimicry. For example, Timothy Brown examined why some left-wing radicals in the late Weimar period switched to the Nazi Party, something he attributed to their holding common assumptions regarding a radical approach to politics.13 Nadine Rossol and Joan Tumblety questioned the existence of a distinctive fascist aesthetic by revealing an emphasis on mass spectacle and aesthetics across the political spectrum, while Jessica Wardhaugh showed that shared symbols and language constituted a key political battleground between different groups as France underwent a crisis of representation of the ‘people’ between 1934 and 1938.14 An emphasis on how politics is waged in an interactional, relational way at the level of the community is central to this book, which examines how political differences were understood and negotiated in the context of a local social order dominated by the left. As Joachim Häberlen recently highlighted regarding Weimar Germany, a focus on the interplay between the understanding of politics and political action may provide a way of writing a new social and cultural history of radical politics.15 Such an approach could be applied more widely, and this book seeks to provide an example of how this may be achieved in the context of Spain.
Radicalism in Europe and Spain
The European interwar period is often depicted as a ‘radical era’.16 This radicalism can refer to the construction of the world’s first socialist state in Russia, the waves of strike action in the aftermath of the First World War, the acuteness of social and political conflict, or the emergence of the new ideologies of fascism and Communism or new ways of waging politics, particularly street-fighting between paramilitary groups.
One way of approaching left-wing radicalism is to focus on ‘red cities’ or ‘little Moscows’: localities or neighbourhoods with distinctive left-wing traditions, which pursued projects of ‘municipal socialism’ or were particular hotbeds of activism.17 Vienna is the iconic example.18 Examinations of conflict and radicalism in these areas have often paid close attention to the degree of political and social homogeneity of the locality or district in question, although fragmentation and rivalry have also been used to explain radicalism. In the context of provincial Austria, for example, socialist strongholds were isolated and surrounded by antagonistic political forces, and their sense of weakness was channelled into a militant hostility to Catholic conservatism.19 Other cases similarly argue for the importance of local rivalries and disputed territory in the development of radical politics. The ‘radical’ districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg in Weimar Berlin harboured important levels of support for both Communism and Nazism.20 While not an area where municipal socialism operated, the Asturian coalfields have nevertheless long been identified as a red area that was underpinned by a number of political cultures, including socialism, anarchism and communism. These movements shared an idiom and certain political values, but were separated by rivalry and at times hatred. The right, although a minority force in the valleys, continued to attract support. The situation of left-wing hegemony – which was assumed by left-wing activists to mean a political monopoly – undercut by a significant right-wing presence is vital to understanding the conflict and resultant radicalism in the coalfields in the 1930s.
A different yet complimentary approach to interwar radicalism is evident in studies of the explosion of ‘working-class unrest and revolutionary potential … unparalleled in the twentieth century’ that followed the First World War.21 The pressures of total war loom large in such interpretations of post-war radicalism. The disciplining of labour for the needs of total war, shortages of basic goods and price rises led to growing strikes towards the end of the conflict. The perceived opening of a new horizon of revolutionary possibility in the wake of the collapse of Tsarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia further stimulated militancy. Post-war radicalism manifested itself in a combination of strike waves across Europe, the council movement in Italy and the proclamation of ‘soviets’ in areas like Hungary and Munich, where radicalized sections of the left attempted to press beyond the replacement of the collapsed imperial order with new republics.22 However, even as Europe appeared to be on the threshold of social revolution, workers’ demands tended to centre on wage increases and improvements to working conditions rather than overturning the social order.23 The Asturian insurrection of 1934 shared the pretensions of some of these post-war attempts at revolution, although the context of the 1930s was significantly different and Spain was not emerging from an international armed conflict. The insurrection was nevertheless shaped by the particular political dynamics of the 1930s and how international developments were interpreted at a local level.
Spain did not participate in the First World War, yet was not immune to the effects of the conflict.24 An economic boom fuelled rising inflation and widespread discontent, which added to the pressures on the corrupt, controlled parliamentary regime of the Restoration monarchy (1875–1923). In 1917, the government faced three interlocking crises: a conspiracy among army officers, a revolutionary strike and demands for greater autonomy for Catalonia. The government ceded to the pressures from sectors of the army while resisting the other challenges. The nationwide revolutionary strike in August, which lasted longest in the Asturian coal valleys, was not well prepared for, and easily suppressed by the army. As a revolutionary movement organized by socialists, it appears to show parallels with October 1934, yet it has differing characteristics. In contrast to the insurrectionary and revolutionary character of 1934, the 1917 movement was envisaged as an auxiliary action to support Republican-socialist demands for a new parliament that would construct a new regime.25 Like the rest of Europe, Spain saw waves of strikes in industrial areas over the following years with the red city of Barcelona a particular hotspot, while peasants undertook land occupations in the south. Although termed the Spanish ‘Bolshevik triennium’, the degree to which the strikers desired revolutionary change is questionable.
In September 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera, captain general of Barcelona, removed parliamentary rule via a military coup sanctioned by King Alfonso XIII. Primo de Rivera aimed to put an end to labour conflict, resolve the protracted crisis of the political system and restore Spain’s honour after an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Moroccan forces in North Africa. His seven-year experiment in constructing an authoritarian, Catholic, corporatist regime combined massive investment in public works and a nationalizing project that cracked down on the anarchist movement and Catalan and Basque nationalism. While anarchists faced persecution, the socialist movement adopted a neutral position towards the dictatorship and participated in the corporatist mechanisms of the regime to protect its members and increase its influence. Towards the end of the 1920s, Primo de Rivera’s project lost momentum, funding for public works disappeared after the Wall Street Crash and the socialists joined Republican parties in conspiring against the regime. Primo de Rivera resigned in January 1930 and municipal elections fifteen months later delivered a pro-Republican result that caused King Alfonso XIII to flee into exile.26
Spain’s experience of authoritarian right-wing dictatorship under Primo de Rivera was far from distinctive in the context of interwar Europe, but the attempt to construct a democratic Republic after an experiment in dictatorship set Spain apart. The establishment of the Second Republic in April 1931 constituted the last breaker of the democratizing wave that had surged through Europe at the end of the First World War. The rollback of restrictions on democratic rule began in Hungary and Italy and gathered pace in central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s as European states battled the consequences of the Great Depression, including the linked problems of mass unemployment and disaffected voters, along with renewed radicalism and scenes of political violence on the streets. Even as the prevailing political winds shifted away from the advance of liberal democracy, in Spain a Republican-socialist coalition (1931–3) attempted to implement its vision of a secular, liberal, democratic state.
The bulwark of the new Republic was the socialist movement. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) joined European counterparts in gaining its first experience of government office after the war in a situation ‘unimaginable before 1914’.27 The Spanish socialist movement formed the backbone of the new democracy insofar as it provided the mass membership that the Republican parties lacked.28 The social and political influence of the socialist movement on a national level during the Republic – and as the principal political and trade union force in the Asturian coalfields – has ensured that no history of the Second Republic would be complete without the ‘phenomenon known as the radicalization of the socialists’.29
‘Radicalization’ serves to describe the shift in the socialist movement from participating in government in 1931–3 to planning a revolutionary movement in 1933–4. The crucial turning point is usually held to be the summer of 1933, when socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero responded to developing rank-and-file frustration by adopting a more radical rhetoric. This is the standard portrayal of radicalization, yet it has long been bemoaned as underexplored and little understood.30 There are also a number of problems with how the process is traditionally described. First, the lack of clarity as to the definition of radicalization and its usage means it lacks analytical purchase, for it has become shorthand for a period as much as a process.31 Second, so closely linked is the term to the socialists that it is much less commonly used in the context of anarchism or the political right, even if the term does provide insight into these movements.32 Third, the desire to explain October 1934 through radicalization encourages teleology at the expense of contingency and dynamism. Fourth, the measurement and description of socialist radicalization is often reduced to the figure of Largo Caballero, who laid the plans for the ‘revolutionary movement’ in 1934. His adoption of radical rhetoric and ascent to presiding over both the socialist trade union federation (UGT) and the PSOE are deployed as evidence for radicalization. This is founded on Largo Caballero’s reputation as a bellwether of the rank-and-file mood. Even so, scholars have long noted that his radical rhetoric is subtler than simple appeals for revolution.33 Finally, as regards the rank and file, strikes and unemployment figures have been the usual indicator of the mood of the working class and peasantry, although by 1982 José Manuel Macarro Vera had rightly questioned the use of strike figures.34 As he pointed out, strikes were often ‘moderate’ and aimed at defending the Republic and social legislation.35 Conflict was not coterminous with radicalism.
More convincing explanations of radicalization have tended to combine economic and political factors. Marta Bizcarrondo argued that the radicalization resulted from the ‘intensification of class struggle’ due to the rightist ‘counteroffensive against reformism’, the economic context, the ascent of fascism and the ‘rapid deterioration of the political situation’ in early 1933.36 Nevertheless, these arguments are inevitably anchored in the assumptions of 1970s and 1980s labour history, allowing little room for engagement with cultural approaches. Where the threat of fascism is recognized, it is a contextual, international factor rather than present in the thoughts, ideas and experiences of citizens in everyday life.
Explanations as to why the Asturian mineworkers rebelled have tended to mirror the broader narrative of socialist radicalization. David Ruiz’s early interpretation emphasized the importance of unemployment, but the number of layoffs in the coal industry was small and cannot be easily mapped onto surges in militancy.37 Ruiz later revised his argument to incorporate the influence of culture, highlighting that the revolutionaries’ ideas were the result of their accumulated experiences, while still emphasizing socialist conspiring and the achievement of working class unity via the Asturian Workers’ Alliance.38 However, the much lauded and mythologized Workers’ Alliance does not explain the origins of the insurrection.
Adrian Shubert’s pre-history of the Asturian October consisted of an examination of the long-term formation of the Asturian mining working class. His reconstruction of the living conditions, work experience and conflicts that served to shape the local working class remains a valuable classic social history. Only one chapter is devoted to the Republic, in which he argued that working-class hopes were frustrated by the failure of Republican reform. This bred radicalism, which translated into a politicization of strikes hitherto focused on economic issues. Such an approach neglects the wider struggles within the coalfields beyond trade union politics and pays less attention to the language of frustration, fear and radicalism, which is understandable given that The Road to Revolution is rooted in the tradition of 1960s and 1970s social histories.39 The politics of labour were a fundamental aspect of conflict in the coalfields, but the net needs to be cast wider to consider other points of friction and cleavages at the local level. From rent activism, to struggles over the role of Catholicism in Spanish society, to fears over the emergence of fascism, a wide range of factors combined to fuel militancy. Understanding them requires close attention to political language and imaginaries, and how social, political and cultural boundaries were policed at the local level.
The meaning of radicalism
Little attempt is made to define the concept of ‘radicalism’ or ‘radicalization’ in studies of Republican Spain. This could reflect a wider lack of interest in theorizing about radicalism, particularly compared to associated concepts like revolution. The meaning of radicalism is instead assumed to be self-evident. Scholars who have meditated on the concept of radicalism have tended to take an etymological approach, according to which radicalism has its origins in the Latin term radicalis (root).40 Yet defining radicalism as seeking the root of a problem fails to shed much light on radicalism as a historical phenomenon and neither does it distinguish between radicalism and revolutionary politics.
It is more useful to reframe the history of radicalism in terms of shifting, myriad challenges as to what constituted the realm of politics.41 This encompasses different historical moments in which individuals and groups have contested the place it occupies in private and public spheres, who is permitted to participate in political processes and how political struggle should be waged. Such an understanding of radicalism allows similarities, contrasts and continuities to be drawn between episodes like the struggles by nineteenth-century radicals to extend boundaries or citizenship; the ‘politicization of aspects of daily life once considered outside the political realm’ that Pamela Swett noted in Weimar Berlin; and attempts by 1970s radicals to embody a new way of being and feeling that challenged the capitalist order.42 The character of radicalism thus changed in accordance with the evolving nature of politics. This can also be applied to the use of radicalism as a term. Shifts in meaning could be abrupt. Zsuzsa Nagy’s examination of the background to the Hungarian Soviet pinpoints a sudden change in the meaning of radicalism: whereas previously it designated bourgeois opposition to feudalism, in early 1919 the term was refashioned to signify support for Bolshevism and opposition to the young Hungarian Republic.43
Rooting the meaning of radicalism in its historical context is therefore important. This study employs radicalism to characterize a way of doing politics defined by a confrontational, militant style that corresponds with the interwar period. This mode of politics manifested itself in an assertive, even aggressive policing of political and geographical communities. By extension, ‘radicalization’ was the dynamic, unstable and contingent process by which this confrontational style of radicalism was adopted.44 Radicalization signified growing militancy and confrontation rather than the pursuit or defence of a ‘fixed’ radical position. Radicalism often slid into revolutionary politics, yet did not simply equate to exhibiting Communist sympathies or a lurch to the left, as some have argued.45 It was quite possible for Communist parties to be conservative in their mode of action. As a contingent way of doing politics, radicalism could be inflected with particular qualities, as the following chapters will show. For example, Spanish socialists unsuccessfully tried to harness the radical impulse among the rank and file and reorient it towards moderation in 1932, while four years later radicalism would be inflected with fragility as boycotts and political purges in the coalfields revealed a crisis of community in the wake of the insurrection and government repression. This book traces radicalism on a collective level by weaving together episodes of conflict, the experiences of individuals and the shifting nature of political language at the local level.
This book roots radicalism within the context of the interwar period, rather than defining it against the backdrop of mining. This marks a departure from the long-running debate in the literature regarding the alleged correlation between coalfields and radical politics. Since the Kerr-Siegel hypothesis predicated on mineworkers living in isolated, homogenous communities, scholars have proposed contrasting theories as to why this group of workers was more likely to strike than any other. Recent scholarly attention paid to figures who do not fit the archetype of the combative miner and to mining areas lacking in militancy have revealed this debate to rest on shaky foundations.46 The industrial environment of the Asturian coalfields was an important factor in conditioning the political dynamics and social and economic relationships in the Asturian coalfields, particularly because of its high levels of union membership and dense network of political and cultural institutions. However, radicalism needs to be seen as emerging from the interaction of this particular political and social order and the wider national and international context of the 1930s.
The trade unions were mass organizations that remained central to the dynamics of economic and political struggle in the coalfields, but society in the valleys cannot be reduced to the unions. Instead, a focus on ‘community’ provides an opportunity to capture a wider range of conflicts beyond strike action and avoids approaching local politics through the institutional lens of the union. The concept of community has long been criticized, often for its haziness and positive connotations, to the extent of appeals for it to be jettisoned completely as an analytical category.47 However, the term ‘community’ encapsulates the meaning of the Spanish term ‘pueblo’, which signifies both people and town or village. It blurs the distinction between geography and collective identity as well as resonating with affective power. This duality makes ‘community’ an evocative and productive concept for examining local politics in the 1930s. In the context of this study, community is an imagined collective group that overlays or is associated with a given geographical area. The group has no fixed boundaries, but is at once fluid, and subject to a constant process of delineation and contestation through informal and formal ‘policing’ by individuals and collective groups.48
During the interwar period, the governance of town, village or neighbourhood continued to be the space in which many people engaged with politics. It provided a reference point for understanding the wider political world and was a ‘common source of grievance and a common medium of political expression’, whether in Spain, interwar Berlin or the Durham coalfields.49 In Spain, the locality has traditionally played a prominent role in identities and as a source for political action, whether in rural areas or industrial zones, although how ideas of the local community were projected and mobilized is not a common object of study, with the exception of the important work of Pamela Radcliff, Temma Kaplan and Chris Ealham.50 Ideas of who and what constituted the local community, how the Republic was to be constructed at the local level, and claims to represent and embody the local community were all ways in which community was a fundamental component of political action and conflict, and fed into radicalism. It is therefore a mistake to label community-rooted protest as a decidedly less ‘modern’ form of collective action.51
The following chapters will show how the idea of community was disputed at a local level, from leftists identifying the working class with the community or rejecting Catholicism as a legitimate expression of local identity, to community-based defence against the alleged invasion of state police forces into ‘their’ communities.52 The first two chapters introduce themes and provide a framework for understanding the mechanics of radicalism in the rest of the book. Chapter 1 surveys the industrial, social and political environment of the coalfields prior to 1931. An examination of politics and how conflict was waged in 1931 and 1932 follows in chapter 2, where the focus is on the construction of the Republic. The next two chapters reveal the development of radicalism between 1932 and 1934 through an analysis of a range of factors, from rivalries over anticlericalism and Catholicism to local imaginings of fascism. After chapter 5 examines the revolution as a liminal moment in which revolutionaries were caught between reasserting control over their communities and re-founding the social order, chapters 6 and 7 explore the effects of the insurrection and the repression. In 1936, these last led to a crisis of community that was particularly evident in boycotts and purges. These mechanisms were an attempt to remake community even as they simultaneously fuelled a fragile radicalism that underpinned the identities of those who would set out to resist the military coup of July 1936 that plunged Spain into a three-year civil war.
Sources
In order to reconstruct the lived experience of politics in the Asturian coalfields during the 1930s, this study rests principally on three complimentary source bases, which provide a kaleidoscopic lens through which to observe the period: the press, municipal records and court files. All three are incomplete due to the loss of documentation during the 1934 insurrection, Civil War and Francoist dictatorship.
The provincial press provides the best overarching vision of local politics and is often the only surviving source for what occurred in certain localities during the Republic. The titles that form the basis of this study are Región, El Noroeste and the Asturian socialist press, all surviving editions of which were consulted for the entire period between April 1931 and July 1936. In late 1931 the Asturian socialist daily Avance replaced the veteran weekly La Aurora Social. Avance enjoyed a wide readership under the editorship of Javier Bueno and reached a print run of 25,000 in 1934.53 So important was the perceived role of Avance in inciting the revolutionary insurrection that police arrested Bueno when it began, and government troops destroyed the printing presses. Some limited socialist publications were permitted in 1935 ( La Tarde and Asturias), but these were smaller operations which faced censorship and the threat of sequestration. Together, the pre-eminent right-wing daily Región, Gijón-based liberal Republican El Noroeste and the socialist press provide panoramic, contrasting visions of the coalfields and wider Asturias during the 1930s.
Región, El Noroeste and Avance were all efficient, modern press operations. They had sections dedicated to local news that relied on a network of correspondents in towns and villages and contributions by readers and political groups.54 Each newspaper maintained its own editorial line, but the newspapers attempted to balance the editor’s position with providing a voice to the towns and villages, lending them a choral character. Different and even contradictory reports could be published in the same newspaper. El Noroeste’s liberal principles – and animosity towards the socialists – ensured that it provided a space for anarchist and Communist writers to announce meetings and publish reports. Even as different political groups maintained their own mouthpieces, rival newspapers were not always taboo for readers; the socialist press was a source of news and opinion for the wider left, particularly from 1934. The effect of the local news pages was to create a public sphere within the pages themselves and between newspapers. Local news sections thus constituted a voice of the local community, even if this did not represent the majority of the town or village in question, and was refracted through the opinions of the author.
Documents from local and provincial Asturian archives enrich the vision of the 1930s further. The minutes of municipal council meetings [actas municipales] have been underused by historians but show a different facet of local politics beyond the trade unions, particularly in terms of how councillors envisaged the Republic and attempted to balance the demands of administrating local affairs and pursuing a political agenda. The archive of the provincial authority in charge of public order, the office of the civil governor, has not survived, but court records from district and provincial tribunals allow for analysis of episodes of crime, in this case violence. The loss of records means that a comprehensive study is impossible, but individual cases – and particularly witness statements therein – allow an examination of how politics and community were imagined and policed in violent encounters, and offer a voice to those absent from other sources. Letters housed in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (CDMH) in Salamanca denouncing neighbours to military officials in the wake of the insurrection provide similar insight into how the local social and political order was imagined, as well as the effects of the repression on the coalfield communities.
Newspaper production ceased during the revolutionary insurrection. The committees that managed the revolutionary process produced a number of proclamations [bandos] that historians have disregarded for their fervour and falsehoods, yet used with care, they allow a glimpse into revolutionary dreams and ideas as the insurrection unfolded. The flood of reports published in the wake of October 1934 that related the terror wreaked by the revolutionary hordes, or else the deeds of the heroic revolutionaries, is similarly problematic: they include personal testimony, eyewitness statements or even novelized accounts. These left-wing texts formed part of a nationwide struggle to control the narrative of the insurrection in the high-stakes political context of 1935–6.55 They disseminated the lessons, names of the revolutionary martyrs and symbols of the insurrection, which cemented the place of ‘unite, proletarian brothers!’ as an antifascist slogan and battle cry for the Spanish left.56
Author’s note
Place names are spelled according to current conventions. Andalucía is anglicized to Andalusia, as is Sevilla to Seville, but Zaragoza is preferred to Saragossa and Navarra to Navarre. Villages in the Asturian coalfields that do not appear on the map are followed by the municipality in brackets. According to convention and in the interest of brevity, newspaper articles are referenced by the title and date of the publication only. The names of individuals whose identity is secondary to the information conveyed about the social and political context by their crime have been cited in a shortened form that reduces surnames to initials (for example, ‘Jaime C.’). The names of ideologies and parties are not capitalized, with the exception of Communism and Republicanism. Communism is capitalized to denote the ‘official’ Communist Party whereas communism in the lowercase refers to those estranged from Comintern orthodoxy. Republicanism, indicating support for the principles of the Second Republic, is capitalized. Anarchism is employed as an umbrella term to designate the broad, heterogeneous Spanish anarchist movement.
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1 See <https://pro.magnumphotos.com/image/PAR75398.html> [accessed 2 Aug. 2019]. Both Capa, who was born André Friedmann, and his partner Gerda Taro published photographs under the name of Robert Capa, but their images from the beginning of the Civil War can be distinguished thanks to their use of different equipment.
2 J. Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades (New York, 1936), pp. 4, 23; Avance, 11 July 1936.
3 For a comparative study of the ‘furies’ in the French and Russian Revolutions, see A. J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
4 For a discussion of the figures, see E. González Calleja, Cifras cruentas: las víctimas mortales de la violencia sociopolítica en la Segunda República española (1931–1936) (Granada, 2015), pp. 11, 175–6. Further discussion in ch. 5 of this volume. This book went to press before the publication of Pablo Gil Vico, Verdugos de Asturias. La violencia y sus relatos en la revolución de Asturias de 1934 (Gijón, 2019).
5 See A. Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: from Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927– 1934 (Chicago, Ill., 1983) and B. Jenkins and C. Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (Abingdon, 2015).
6 See G.-R. Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s (New York, 1996) and G. Eley, Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), ch. 17.
7 As highlighted by D. Ruiz, Octubre de 1934: revolución en la República española (Madrid, 2008).
8 I am influenced by narrative approaches to collective action. For an overview, see F. Polletta and B. G. Gardner, ‘Narrative and social movements’, in The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, ed. D. Della Porta and M. Diani (Oxford, 2015), pp. 534–48. See also M. R. Somers, ‘Narrativity, narrative identity, and social action: rethinking English working-class formation’, Social Science History, xvi (1992), 591–629.
9 For an extended discussion on the promise of the Republic, see R. Cruz, Una revolución elegante: España 1931 (Madrid, 2014), pp. 203–53.
10 The classic work on reform and reaction is P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London, 1978). For alleged socialist ‘intransigence’ and exclusion, see, e.g., S. Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933 – 1936: the Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 2006). See also Palabras como puños: la intransigencia política en la Segunda República, ed. F. del Rey (Madrid, 2011).
11 A landmark essay questioning the alleged failure of the Weimar Republic is P. Fritzsche, ‘Did Weimar fail?’, Journal of Modern History, lxviii (1996), 629–56.
12 As ever, there are exceptions, e.g., Horn, European Socialists and P. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: the Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge, 2004). One of the first of a new wave of studies of the German revolution of 1918–19 is Germany 1916–23: a Revolution in Context, ed. K. Weinhauer, A. McElligott and K. Heinsohn (Bielefeld, 2015). Classic earlier studies include F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Eastern Europe (London, 1972) and Rabinbach, Crisis. In contrast, debates on the right have remained rich, e.g., J. Wasserman’s study of interwar Austrian ‘radical’ politics: Black Vienna: the Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2014).
13 T. S. Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York, 2009).
14 N. Rossol, Performing the Nation: Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926–1936 (Basingstoke, 2010); J. Tumblety, ‘Rethinking the fascist aesthetic: mass gymnastics, political spectacle and the stadium in 1930s France’, European History Quarterly, xliii (2013), 707–30; J. Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–1939 (Basingstoke, 2009).
15 J. Häberlen, ‘Scope for agency and political options: the German working-class movement and the rise of Nazism’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, xiv (2013), 377–94.
16 D. Priestland, ‘The left and revolutions’, in The Oxford Handbook of European history, 1914–1945, ed. N. Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), p. 78.
17 The literature on these areas is extensive, e.g., J. Merriman, The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (New York, 1985); Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the Twentieth Century, ed. A. Smith (London, 2002); T. Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); T. Stovall, The Rise of the Parisian Red Belt (Berkeley, Calif., 1990); D. H. Bell, Sesto San Giovanni: Workers, Culture and Politics in an Italian Town, 1880–1922 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986); S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working Class Militancy in Interwar Britain (London, 1980); L. Boswell, Rural Communism in France, 1920–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). See also A. Knotter, ‘‘‘Little Moscows’’ in western Europe: the ecology of small-place communism’, International Review of Social History, lvi (2011), 475–510.
18 E.g., H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991).
19 C. Jeffery, Social Democracy in the Austrian Provinces, 1918–1934: Beyond Red Vienna (London, 1995), pp. 62ff.
20 Swett, Neighbors, pp. 54–5.
21 D. Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: the West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996), p. 32. See also Eley, Forging, pp. 131–8.
22 See Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917–1920, ed. C. Wrigley (London, 1993).
23 As argued in, e.g., R. Bessel, ‘Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, ed. J. Winter (3 vols, Cambridge, 2014), ii. 126–44 and Priestland, ‘The left’.
24 For a discussion of Spain within a European context, see J. Casanova, ‘Republic, civil war and dictatorship: the peculiarities of Spanish history’, Journal of Contemporary History, lii (2017), 148–56.
25 E.g., The Agony of Spanish Liberalism: from Revolution to Dictatorship 1913–23, ed. F. J. Romero Salvadó and A. Smith (Basingstoke, 2010).
26 On the dictatorship, see e.g., S. Ben-Ami, Fascism from Above: the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923–30 (Oxford, 1983); A. Quiroga, Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923–30 (Basingstoke, 2007).
27 S. Berman, The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe (Boston, Mass., 1998), p. 2.
28 P. Radcliff, ‘The political “left” in the interwar period, 1924–1939’, in The Oxford handbook of European history, 1914–1945, ed. N. Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), pp. 286–7.
29 S. Juliá, La izquierda del PSOE (1935–1936) (Madrid, 1977), p. 1. See also Payne, Collapse, p. 52.
30 For criticism that radicalization is not explained adequately, see e.g., Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil War, p. 2; J. M. Macarro Vera, ‘Causas de la radicalización socialista en la II República’, Revista de historia contemporánea, i (1982), 178–226, at p. 222; S. Souto Kustrín, ‘Taking the street: workers’ youth organizations and political conflict in the Spanish Second Republic’, European History Quarterly, xxxiv (2004), 131–56, at pp.132, 134.
31 Foundational accounts include A. de Blas Guerrero, El socialismo radical en la II República (Madrid, 1978) and M. Bizcarrondo, ‘Democracia y revolución en la estrategia socialista de la Segunda República’, Estudios de Historia Social, xvi–xvii (1981), 227–459.
32 Exceptions are C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Abingdon, 2005); E. González Calleja, Contrarrevolucionarios: radicalización violenta de las derechas durante la Segunda República, 1931–1936 (Madrid, 2011); S. Lowe, Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism (Eastbourne, 2010). ‘Fascistization’ serves a similar purpose, e.g., I. Saz, Fascismo y franquismo (Valencia, 2004) and E. González Calleja, ‘La violencia y sus discursos: los límites de la “fascistización” de la derecha española durante el régimen de la Segunda República’, Ayer, lxxi (2008), 85–116.
33 S. Juliá, ‘Los socialistas y el escenario de la futura revolución’, in Octubre 1934: cincuenta años para la reflexión, ed. G. Jackson et al. (Madrid, 1985), pp. 103–30. For Largo Caballero responding to the grassroots, see e.g., H. Graham, Socialism and War: the Spanish Socialist Party in Power and Crisis, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 44–7 and J. Aróstegui, Largo Caballero: el tesón y la quimera (Barcelona, 2013), p. 297.
34 Blas Guerrero, El socialismo, pp. 20–1.
35 Macarro Vera, ‘Causas’, pp. 183–6.
36 Bizcarrondo, ‘Democracia’.
37 D. Ruiz, Insurrección defensiva y revolución obrera: el octubre español de 1934 (Barcelona, 1988), especially p. 63.
38 Ruiz, Octubre.
39 A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: the Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana, Ill., 1987).
40 E.g., P. McLaughlin, Radicalism: a Philosophical Study (Basingstoke, 2012).
41 Accordingly, radicalism has tended to be associated with the left, even if scholars argue that the two are not coterminous. For an important critique, see C. Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (Chicago, Ill., 2012).
42 E.g., Swett, Neighbors, quotation at p. 139; J. Häberlen, The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left: West Germany, 1968–1984 (Cambridge, 2018). For 19th-century radicals, see G. Claeys and C. Lattek, ‘Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism: from the principles of ’89 to the origins of modern terrorism’, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. G. Claeys and G. Stedman Jones (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 200–54.
43 Z. Nagy, ‘Budapest and the revolutions of 1918–19’, in Wrigley, Challenges, p. 78.
44 Some sociological perspectives have begun to move in a similar direction, e.g., E. Y. Alimi, L. Bosi and C. Demetriou, The Dynamics of Radicalization: a Relational and Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 2015).
45 See Souto Kustrín, ‘Taking’, pp. 134–5 and J. Uría, ‘Asturias 1920–1937, el espacio cultural comunista y la cultura de la izquierda: historia de un diálogo entre dos décadas’, in Los comunistas en Asturias (1920–1982), ed. F. Erice (Gijón, 1996), pp. 271–5.
46 For the original theory, see C. Kerr and A. Siegel, ‘The interindustry propensity to strike – an international comparison’, in Industrial Conflict, ed. A. Kornhauser, R. Kubin and A. Ross (New York, 1954), pp. 189–212. For a skewering of the link between mining and radicalism, see D. Geary, ‘The myth of the radical miner’, in Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies, ed. S. Berger, A. Croll and N. LaPorte (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 43–64.
47 E.g., Macfarlane, ‘History, anthropology and the study of communities’, cited in H. Barron, The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield (Oxford, 2009), p. 6.
48 My thinking on community is influenced by A. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London, 1985). See also G. Delanty, Community (London, 2003).
49 E. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communist Party and Political Violence, 1929 – 1933 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 11. Similar arguments appear in e.g., Swett, Neighbors; Barron, 1926, p. 271; Ealham, Class, p. 21.
50 E.g. as noted by observers, including R. Ford, in A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (2 vols, Cambridge, 2011 [1845]), i. 2; G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (London, 1966 [1943]), ix; and J. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1954), e.g. pp. 28–30. Scholarly approaches are in P. Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War: the Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900– 1937 (Cambridge, 1996); Kaplan, Red City; Ealham, Class. See also discussion in A. Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London, 1990), pp. 190–2. Classic anthropological studies often made the community an object of study, but tended to focus on rural areas, e.g., C. Lisón Tolosana, Belmonte de los Caballeros: Anthropology and History in an Aragonese Community (Princeton, N.J., 1983); W. A. Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York, 1972).
51 E.g., R. Cruz, who builds on Tilly in Protestar en España (Madrid, 2015).
52 Similar approaches are found in Rosenhaft, Beating and C. Millington, ‘Street-fighting men: political violence in interwar France’, English Historical Review, cxxix (2014), 606–38.
53 Shubert, Road, p. 151.
54 J. Uría, ‘Cultura y comunicación de masas en Asturias (1931–1934): aproximación a su estudio’, Estudios de Historia Social, xxxi (1984), 145–60, at p. 147.
55 See B. D. Bunk, Ghosts of Passion: Martyrdom, Gender, and the origins of the Spanish Civil War (Durham, N.C., 2007).
56 UHP was even incorporated into book titles, e.g., M. Álvarez Suárez, Sangre de octubre: U.H.P. Episodios de la revolución en Asturias (Madrid, 1936); N. Molins i Fábrega, UHP: la insurrección proletaria en Asturias (Gijón, 1977 [1935]).