5. Revolution

Like many other fellow journalists, Manuel Chaves Nogales rushed to Asturias to report on the revolutionary insurrection. Chaves Nogales, a liberal Republican and the deputy editor of Ahora who was famed for his reports from Soviet Russia, criticized the revolutionary violence which he claimed ‘ha[d] nothing to envy, in terms of cruelty, the triumphant Bolshevik revolution’. Yet he was also careful to note that ‘a great mass’ of Asturian revolutionaries had ‘halt[ed] on the threshold of bestiality’. He was critical of the unproven lurid reports of revolutionary brutality that circulated in the right-wing press, and informed his readers that even fascists from the coalfields were indignant at the fabrications.¹ Chaves Nogales was one of the few voices to venture a more nuanced interpretation of the Asturian October. His reports grappled with the contradictions and limits of the realization and destructiveness of the revolution. Such concerns lie at the heart of this chapter’s focus on the struggles to define and construct the revolution.

The extent to which the insurrection was revolutionary has long been debated and is usually framed in terms of whether the movement was ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’ towards the Republic.² Yet reducing October 1934 to a single adjective does little to convey the reality of a complex and heterogeneous event, in which there were different ideas and objectives of what the movement should be. The socialist hierarchy in Madrid had not planned a social revolution. They had ordered a ‘general strike’, as Belarmino Tomás, socialist councillor in Langreo and a revolutionary leader, later admitted to the French press.³ For all Largo Caballero’s revolutionary rhetoric, it is likely that he envisaged a combination of general strikes and armed actions by socialist militias that together would paralyse the country. This would precipitate a political crisis in order to prevent CEDA’s accession to government, sparking the fall of the government or even ending the legislature itself. The limited aims of such a ‘revolution’, in which strikes and insurrections were an auxiliary strategy, would have resembled the failed Republican-socialist plot of December 1930 that had sought to bring down the monarchy, rather than an attempt to establish a socialist regime. In contrast, Asturian Young Socialists complained in 1936 that they had believed the 1934 revolution ‘totalitarian’ in its pretensions. They had expected a profound change in Spanish political, social and economic life akin to a social revolution.⁴ Instead of adopting a retrospective or macro-level approach to the insurrection, it is more useful to examine the revolutionary process from the perspective of the committees and militias as the situation unfolded before them.⁵ The process was necessarily ambiguous, contested and improvised, as militants struggled to define what a revolution was, who was to be included, the fate of those excluded and how a revolutionary should act.

Revolutions are often described as having a ‘Janus’ face in that the dream of forging a new emancipated society is undercut by a darker side – that of revolutionary violence.⁶ But there is a further way of understanding the Janus-faced nature of revolution: in this case, namely, as a liminal moment caught between looking to the future and the past. The Asturian October was a time of flux and transition (though not an ‘interregnum’), as revolutionaries attempted to delineate the limits of a new revolutionary ‘community’ in the midst of a situation in which there were ‘radical processes of dissolution and reconstruction, and where guiding symbols and previous markers of certainty are crushed and reconstituted’.⁷ The revolutionaries confronted what Hannah Arendt described as the problem of ‘beginning’ as they decreed a rupture in historical time and tried to conjure a revolutionary future into being in the present.⁸ Yet even as the revolution opened up a horizon of possibilities, revolutionaries also desired to preserve existing social links and an idea of community. As an insurrection October 1934 failed, and as a revolution it was caught between past and future, preservation and creative destruction.

Taking control

On 4 October 1934, the announcement of the CEDA’s entry into government prompted the socialist leadership in Madrid to issue the order for the revolutionary movement to begin. The Spanish socialist leadership had laid preparations for a national revolutionary movement, and strikes and skirmishes occurred across Spain. The Basque Country was the scene of the fiercest clashes outside of Asturias, particularly in industrial areas. Militants in most city neighbourhoods and towns in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa joined a week-long general strike, punctuated by shootouts with the police, widespread sabotage of the railway network and some requisitioning and redistribution of foodstuffs.⁹ The strike was successful in shutting down Madrid, but failed to develop into an insurrection. Strikes also occurred in the south, including in Badajoz, Malaga, Jaén and Cáceres.¹⁰ Events in Barcelona responded to a different dynamic. Lluís Companys, leader of the Catalan government, proclaimed a Catalan state within a federal republic on the evening of 6 October, although this barely lasted twelve hours before Companys and his government were arrested.¹¹

Only in Asturias did the events take the form of a sustained insurrection. Teodomiro Menéndez, the envoy destined for Asturias, transported the coded message tucked into his hatband to Oviedo by train. The offices of Avance dispatched the order to local socialist sections, which were already on the alert and, in Sama at least, undertaking guard duties.¹² The sound of dynamite exploding in the coal valleys in the early hours of 5 October signalled the beginning of the revolt. On hearing the explosions, anarchists in La Felguera sent a delegate across the river to Sama to investigate and decided subsequently to join the insurrection.¹³ Stockpiled arms were unearthed, and attention turned to ensuring military control of the coal valleys by defeating the state security forces.

Preparations for the movement were nevertheless incomplete. Despite the gunrunning over the previous months, the revolutionaries were not well armed. Only half of the socialist militias had weapons.¹⁴ Not every member of the socialist ranks had been drilled in preparation for the insurrection. Arturo Vázquez, a socialist, later recounted that although he expected 10,000 participants from Mieres, only 1,300 reliable individuals had been entrusted with training and knowledge of the future rising. Trained militants in Langreo and San Martín del Rey Aurelio numbered approximately 400 and 500 respectively.¹⁵ Even so, the socialist paramilitary organizations were much more developed than that of the Communists, whose MAOC (Antifascist Workers’ and Peasants’ Militias) had only started to organize shortly before the insurrection.¹⁶ When Communists in Sama were invited to join the movement, they admitted to not possessing weapons.¹⁷ Anarchist groups in Gijón had repeatedly requested the socialists share their stockpiles of weapons over the previous months, but the socialists had stalled, meaning that revolutionaries in the port city were poorly armed.¹⁸ The lack of arms would never be resolved satisfactorily despite the capture of arms factories in Trubia and Oviedo and the improvisation of a rudimentary armaments industry in the coalfields. To remedy the shortfall, revolutionaries employed dynamite, whose destructive power became an emblem of the insurrection.

The trained militias were a small proportion of the working-class left, yet they vastly outnumbered the state security forces in the coalfields. The revolutionaries’ first objective was to attack Civil Guard posts and garrisons. In most areas, the battle was relatively short, but in Sama the guards resisted for thirty-six hours, which slowed the revolutionaries’ advance.¹⁹ In Aller, SCOM members barricaded themselves in their union centre in the only armed resistance to the revolutionaries undertaken by fellow civilians. Several died or were captured, while others managed to escape.²⁰ After the revolutionaries secured the coalfields, attention turned to Oviedo. The failure to sabotage the power supply – the signal to revolt – meant the uprising had failed to materialize on 5 October as planned. Instead, the streets were deserted and the atmosphere was tense, due to a general strike.²¹ The following day militia columns entered the provincial capital and managed to gain control of most of the city. Over the next few days fighting raged in the city centre, but the revolutionaries were unable to dislodge government forces from key buildings, including the Santa Clara barracks and the cathedral.

The uprising resulted in a sizeable amount of Asturian territory coming under the revolutionaries’ control. The insurrection reached beyond the coal valleys and Oviedo to Cangas de Onís in the east and Grado in the west, to the coast to the north and south to the border with the province of León. The revolutionaries held the upper hand for the first six days of the revolt, but during the final week, the momentum shifted to the military reinforcements that had arrived by sea and land. The army slowly eroded the area under revolutionary control until only the coalfields were left.

The armed forces were under the command of General Eduardo López Ochoa, a liberal and freemason who had been appointed as commander-in-chief of the 15,000-strong armed forces after Prime Minister Lerroux rejected Minister of Defence Diego Hidalgo’s preferred candidate, General Francisco Franco. Franco was instead assigned an advisory role. General López Ochoa led a regiment of infantry, which descended on Asturias from the west; Colonel José Solchaga approached from the east; and General Carlos Bosch (later replaced by General Amadeo Balmes) advanced north from León, but soon became bogged down by revolutionary resistance in the mountain passes. Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe led a detachment of the battle-hardened Army of Africa formed by units of the Foreign Legion and indigenous Moroccan troops – the Regulares. The air force provided aerial support through bombing, which was a particularly terrifying experience for residents of the coalfields.²²

Government troops reached the outskirts of Oviedo on 11 October, which constituted a turning point. The army had already retaken Gijón and the insurrectionists in Oviedo had lost momentum. A final push to seize the arms factory had not remedied the lack of weapons and it had become increasingly clear that the Asturians were on their own, although the provincial revolutionary committee felt the need to send someone across the lines and all the way to León to read newspapers in order to confirm it.²³ Regarding the situation to be hopeless, the provincial revolutionary committee ordered a retreat on 11 October and distributed 14 million pesetas stolen from a bank vault to aid the flight of leading revolutionaries.²⁴ Even as town and village revolutionary committees fled, the militias did not disintegrate. A second provincial committee, formed by younger and more radical activists, took the place of the first. This second committee lasted a day at most before the revolutionaries regrouped under the leadership of a third wave of committees.²⁵ Fighting continued for a further week until the government troops entered the coal valleys on 19 October.

Revolutionary authority was articulated through a network of committees. The provincial revolutionary committee functioned as a figurehead, but the real dynamism behind revolutionary action lay in the committees that managed the revolutionary process at the local level. These committees formed in towns or villages, which constituted the logical geographical unit for the organization of the insurrection and the locus of community-based networks. The composition of the committees reflected these solidarities and embodied both the spirit of the Workers’ Alliance and previous strike and unity committees. Members of the committees were not just prominent local socialists, but also anarchists and communists of different stripes. There was a careful commitment to plurality. Political groups and unions were allotted proportionately greater influence on the committees than their numerical strength to ensure representation for all left-wing voices. In ‘eminently socialist’ Mieres, the committee included two representatives each from the socialists, anarchists and official Communist Party, and one from the dissident communist BOC.²⁶ While there were some internal frictions, particularly between dissident communists and the PCE, the overall tendency during the insurrection was towards local-level co-operation rather than conflict.²⁷

Between re-empowerment and revolution

The seizing of power was depicted as a moment of cathartic release. It alleviated the anger and frustration at the harassment of the working class caused by the security forces over the previous months. Disarming the security forces and occupying the streets asserted left-wing hegemony and expressed a particular conception of the social order; the working class was now back in control. Carlos Vega, in his report to the PCE, remarked that ‘reactionary elements’ in Oviedo hid, while ‘workers and women’ appeared in the streets and raised their voices to say ‘now it’s our time’ and ‘come out, let’s see your faces’.²⁸ A sentimental description of militias departing Pola de Laviana enthused that they left ‘the capital of their municipality, the whole municipality, in the hands of the representatives of the revolution, in many of whom they had placed their confidence and mandate of popular revolutionary will through their votes’ in the municipal elections of 1931.²⁹ The revolution thereby signified the re-empowerment of the left at local level. In a similar way, rather than destroying the local seat of political power, the new revolutionary committees simply assumed political and administrative direction of towns and villages. Militants burned some official documents, but did not torch town halls. The local revolutionary committee wrapped itself in the cloak of existing authority, to the extent that municipal seals were used to validate committee-issued vouchers.³⁰

The relative normality of life – ‘much more normal than many hastily written accounts have suggested’ – similarly reveals a certain continuity in the coalfields during the insurrection under the reasserted power of the local left.³¹ In Mieres, as elsewhere, ‘normal life carried on as always [except] a bit disturbed by the fear of the aeroplanes’.³² Revolutionaries had no desire for the destruction of the economic foundations of coalfield society. Foremen were charged with conserving the mines and metalworkers made sure to keep the blast furnaces functioning so that they did not cool and crack.³³ Even as goods and cash were pilfered from shops in Siero and Bimenes, there was little physical damage to the establishments themselves and in areas like Laviana and Allande ‘losses [we]re not worth mentioning’.³⁴ The relative normality of life in the coalfields contrasted with that in Oviedo, for the capital constituted the frontline. Looting and destruction were more common.³⁵ Alfredo Mendizábal, a professor at the University of Oviedo, described his ordeal in the midst of the fighting in Oviedo as consisting of ‘nine interminable days, with their terrible nights. We could only hear gunfire … and the incessant thunder of dynamite’, although he only had ‘praise’ for the miners who risked their lives to look after them.³⁶

The case of Laviana provides insight into how revolutionaries sought to reconcile the competing aims of preserving social cohesion and re-founding the social and economic order in the name of revolution. As in other areas under revolutionary control, the use of money was prohibited, but the revolutionary authorities developed a novel system that circumvented their own ban: the socialist mayor and his deputy organized a monetary collection for local shopkeepers. The measure intended to compensate businesses – albeit indirectly – for their goods ‘so that small business owners [did] not suffer losses’ and the funds continued to grow even after the insurrection.³⁷ The improvised system attempted to preserve the fragile bonds of community and safeguard the livelihoods of local members of the petty bourgeoisie. The initiative in Laviana was unique. Food distribution in Pola de Lena had a much sharper revolutionary edge for it divided society along class lines: the working classes could use vouchers to obtain food while the middle class had to pay with money.³⁸

Replacing money with a voucher system aimed at more than a return to the status quo before 5 October or even the elections of November 1933. By abolishing money, revolutionaries aimed to strike a blow against the socioeconomic underpinnings of society itself. Inhabitants of Oviedo took vouchers to shops where staff were forbidden from accepting money, while in Mieres a sophisticated system was organized with each family-assigned cards allotting them a daily allowance of food. This quota was nevertheless calculated using monetary values.³⁹ A similar system was introduced in La Felguera after the committee blamed the ‘few scruples of some people’ for the need to reorganize the allocation of foodstuffs halfway through the insurrection. The value of food allowances was calculated in pesetas.⁴⁰ What mattered for revolutionaries was banning the circulation of money as the physical symbol and tangible manifestation of capitalism in the daily lives of coalfield residents.

Banning the use of money was the clearest example of a revolutionary measure undertaken during the insurrection. In doing so, the revolutionaries acted according to what they believed to be the revolutionary script for social revolutions, as defined by previous examples of revolution, the teachings of political doctrine and their fantasies of revolutionary utopia.⁴¹ Requisitioning foodstuffs, clothing and transport and reorganizing their distribution for the needs of the local population and the insurrectionary forces was less clear-cut.⁴² The measures blended left-wing revolutionary dreams with the exigencies of waging war on the state. Reorganizing healthcare and controlling the food supply fused radical left ideas with the urgent need for committees to pursue greater control over local resources in what was developing into a mini civil war.

The language that framed the measures was much less ambiguous. The proclamations produced by revolutionary committees and pasted up on walls or read out by revolutionary patrols declared that a new world was dawning. In separate proclamations issued in Sama and La Felguera, the ‘revolutionary movement’ and ‘social revolution’ were announced to have ‘triumphed’.⁴³ An eloquent proclamation attributed to libertarian influences from the market town of Grado framed the moment slightly differently. It declared that a ‘new society’ was emerging from the death of the old in a process governed by ‘natural laws’. With power in the hands of revolutionaries, the revolution had succeeded, but the fruits of victory remained just beyond their grasp: ‘a few hours – no longer – and there will be more bread on every table and joy in every heart’.⁴⁴

The proclamations announced the revolution as a rupture in historical time that constituted a new beginning. Yet the imagined re-founding of the social, economic and political order was nevertheless tied to the community as the source of legitimacy. In Sama, the revolution was ‘triumphant’ thanks to ‘the community [pueblo]’; in Mieres, the committee was the ‘interpreter of the popular will’; and in Valdesoto (Siero) money was banned by ‘agreement of the assembled community [pueblo reunido]’.⁴⁵ The committee in Grado imagined itself to be channelling the community’s desires and called on the community to ‘feel intense satisfaction at seeing their ideal realized’.⁴⁶

The revolutionary enthusiasm, the falsehoods they peddled and their unclear authorship mean that historians have been critical of the proclamations.⁴⁷ Certainly the proclamations cannot be read as representative of all revolutionaries, still less the communities under their control. Yet the proclamations are the only surviving documents produced in the heat of the revolutionary process and served to articulate the revolution, announce a radical rupture and open up ‘the realm of the possible’.⁴⁸ The documents framed the situation as revolutionary and individual actors as revolutionaries. The socialist Alberto Fernández recognized forty years after the events that the propaganda produced was ‘absurd’, yet it was ‘effective in accordance with the enthusiasm of the moment’.⁴⁹ The proclamations were not a reflection of reality, but an attempt to call a new revolutionary reality into being by encouraging local residents to perceive themselves as experiencing a revolutionary beginning.

The proclamations and measures pursued by the committees were one way of trying to give shape to the revolution. Another means of defining the revolution was through violence. Behind the frontline, the violence that accompanied the birth of the new order overwhelmingly targeted the Church. As part of the initial wave of violence, church buildings and religious images were destroyed across the coalfields.⁵⁰ As on previous occasions, such as the ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909 when convents and churches were burned in Barcelona, and as would occur during the Civil War, the Church was the institution singled out to ‘bear the sins of the old order’.⁵¹ During the Asturian October, to detain the priest and wreak destruction in the parish church formed part of the revolutionary ritual – it was ‘to do something revolutionary’.⁵² In Tuilla, images were publicly burned and vestments worn in the street in a public expunging of religion from the community.⁵³ Not only was Catholicism the most visible and widespread symbol that could be identified with the right, but anticlericalism was also an important way of showing one’s radical mettle.

The revolution would therefore be anticlerical and the majority of the victims of the revolutionary ‘furies’ were religious personnel. Thirty-three priests, seminarians and religious were killed during the insurrection. Either they were murdered, or they died in unclear circumstances, while many more were arrested and imprisoned. The victims were male. Just as female religious would suffer much less violence during the Civil War, in 1934, female religious were not only spared the furies, but also escorted away from danger in Oviedo. This reflected the ‘taboo’ of killing nuns and a chauvinistic attitude that women were not a threat to the revolutionary process, which extended to female religious even being asked to provide food and medical care.⁵⁴ A further eleven civilians including well-known rightists, company bosses, a magistrate, and a student, also died at the hands of revolutionaries, as well as ten civil and assault guards who died or were killed away from the frontline.⁵⁵ Revolutionary violence targeted those identified as political enemies of the working class left.

These killings cannot be reduced to a simple logic, chronology or geographical area, but there was a degree of patterning to the violence. Several fatalities occurred in an initial settling of scores as revolutionaries seized control of the coalfields. In this context, revolutionary violence could either subsume or offer a veneer of justification for the extrajudicial exaction of popular justice or personal vendettas. The parish priest of Valdecuna (Mieres) and Rafael Rodríguez Arango, director of the Carbones La Nueva mining company, were both killed on the first day of the insurrection in separate incidents. The latter, who had previously been attacked in September 1934, was targeted in a case of revenge over a labour dispute.⁵⁶ Adolfo Suárez, a magistrate, was shot by a militiaman in Oviedo after being implicated in the Sanjurjo coup.⁵⁷ The lethal use of violence was not just a demonstration of proletarian power and the righting of perceived past wrongs. One explanation for the murder of the director of the Manjoya dynamite factory posits that the attack was an attempt by someone to ingratiate himself with the revolutionary militias.⁵⁸ In this case, the lethal performance of class hatred served to bind the individual to the revolutionary community with blood.

Score-settling was curbed by the rapid assertion of revolutionary authority. Once an area was under the control of the committees or militias such instances were less common. The most infamous killings occurred in two separate episodes in Turón that stand out for taking place in an area firmly under revolutionary control, rather than on the fringes of revolutionary authority or at the beginning of the insurrection. Eight de la Salle brothers who worked at the school owned by Hulleras del Turón, their Passionist confessor and two carabineros (customs guards) were taken from their prison on the night of 8–9 October and executed in the cemetery. The local parish priest and coadjutor shared their prison but were spared this fate. Probing into why they survived may shed light on the deaths of their former fellow prisoners. The coadjutor later explained that the two of them were saved because ‘only eleven prisoners could fit’ in the lorry.⁵⁹ According to a martyrological account, when the revolutionaries came to collect the religious brothers, they questioned the parish priest and coadjutor about ‘the amount of time they had been imprisoned, their names, etc.’, before deciding they could stay.⁶⁰ Any explanation of the deaths is necessarily speculative, but in saving the parish clergy while sending the de la Salle brothers and a Passionist confessor to their deaths, the revolutionaries singled out the individuals with fewer established links to the local community. The de la Salle brothers taught children from the valley, but they were outsiders: none was Asturian, they lived a life relatively isolated from the community and several had only recently arrived in Turón. The confessor was only in the valley to confess the children. The de la Salle brothers worked in a school funded by Hulleras del Turón and they could have symbolized the local structures of capitalism.

The brothers were not the only figures connected to Hulleras del Turón to be killed. Rafael del Riego, director of Hulleras del Turón, and two others figures linked to the company and the local political right were also murdered days later. Different explanations have been offered, including revenge for blacklisting during labour conflicts or for the killings of civilians on the outskirts of Oviedo by government forces, or a desire to silence Riego because of what he could later testify about the revolutionaries.⁶¹ While the latter is much less plausible, citizens in Mieres and Sama did clamour for reprisals against prisoners in response to reports of killings by government forces, and guard duties had to be increased. At the time of the second wave of murders in Turón, the revolution was on the retreat, and bombing by government forces was taking its toll. It is possible that killing Riego and two other representatives of the political right in Turón was a vengeful, symbolic act of revolutionary justice. Similar reprisals would also be seen after air raids during the Spanish Civil War.⁶²

The overall tally of approximately fifty deaths, while significant, is remarkably low – and much lower than revolutionary violence in the central and eastern European soviets at the end of the First World War, which itself paled in comparison to the brutality of the wave of counter-revolutionary revenge.⁶³ The proliferation of arms, increasing disillusionment during the last days of the Asturian insurrection and strain of fighting the army, along with a population of tens of thousands under their control begs the question as to why vengeful revolutionary violence did not claim more victims. Scholars of other revolutionary contexts have underlined that areas experiencing a power vacuum or disputes between rival groups for control of a given area often see a greater prevalence of violence.⁶⁴ There was no real interregnum or power vacuum in the coalfields, nor were there warring revolutionary factions. Revolutionary authority was constituted quickly and generally curtailed the use of violence, with the notable exception of the killings in Turón. Militias respected the authority and decisions of the committees rather than operating independently as marauding bands. Those arrested were taken straight to the local revolutionary committee. In the case of two Jesuits murdered at the roadside in Mieres, the two clerics had first been arrested and taken before the revolutionary committee in Mieres. Their captors only executed them when the committee refused to take charge of them.⁶⁵

Revolutionaries in Mieres and Sama protected civil guards from the ‘mob’ and refused to cede to a popular desire for cathartic violence. When the hiding place of the leader of FE-JONS in Mieres was discovered, revolutionaries protected him and Belarmino Tomás is said to have sworn ‘bloody hell, I’ll strangle whoever shoots. They belong to the revolution; they’re not yours or mine’ as he shepherded a civil guard through a crowd in Sama.⁶⁶ Tomás distinguished between just and illegitimate uses of violence for revolutionary ends. The violence of the revolution was envisaged as grander and nobler than the murdering of prisoners. For the revolution’s supporters, delineating the boundaries of violence served to define the limits of the revolution itself. Young women interceded on behalf of a priest, shouting ‘blood, no. Blood, no. Revolution, only revolution’, when some wanted to kill him.⁶⁷ Revolution was distinguished from bloodletting. Even though professing anticlericalism was an important marker of left-wing identity, there was not universal approval of the use of violence against the Church. Socialists on the provincial revolutionary committee firmly opposed using dynamite against the cathedral, whose tower was an important strategic position for the government forces. Militiamen ignored their opposition and destroyed an ancient chapel in an attempt to breach the cathedral walls.⁶⁸

The fate of the vast majority of the perceived enemies or threats to the revolution was to be remanded in prison. The arrest of engineers, business owners and members of clergy were widespread, and other detainees included a judge and pharmacists.⁶⁹ The bosses at Duro-Felguera, despite having engaged in a long and bitter dispute with the CNT in 1933, were kept confined in the company offices for their own safety. They were denied freedom, but were not physically harmed.⁷⁰ Preventative arrests of those perceived as potential enemies merged with taking advantage of the insurrection to settle political scores. Given that revolutionaries drew on their own experiences in the towns and villages when making arrests, the two were virtually consubstantial. A later account of the events in Olloniego attributed many of the arrests to the fractious relationship between the PRLD and the socialists.⁷¹ Unsurprisingly, those arrested were often defined as fascists, whether they were members of the Catholic Youth, CEDA or priests.⁷² The term was used flexibly to designate enemies of the revolution.

Even as the patrols made dozens of arrests, many rightists remained free or in hiding. If the voting figures from the 1933 elections were an indication of political leanings, to arrest all rightists would have been impossible. When conducting arrests, revolutionaries targeted significant representative figures of the right and middle class in an attempt to intimidate right-leaning citizens. Arrests were thus a symbolic move that underlined the forging of a new revolutionary society, while also serving as a warning to opponents. The symbolic nature of revolutionary justice extended to the revolutionaries’ own ranks. In Oviedo, Teodomiro Menéndez, the veteran Asturian socialist leader and a reluctant revolutionary, was responsible for those detained by revolutionary patrols in Oviedo. He imprisoned some of those brought before him, but released many more. Although some younger revolutionaries criticized him, in general there was satisfaction that he was going through the motions of implementing revolutionary justice.⁷³ The performance of authority was sufficient to satisfy the militias. Just as arresting the priest and abolishing the use of money was a fundamental part of the revolutionary process, so was hauling the detainees before a committee or improvised tribunal in order to enact a new form of justice. Implicit in reshaping the social order was the understanding that the principles underpinning justice had changed.

Would-be revolutionaries turned to reference points from their political culture in order to orientate and understand their actions. They fell back on revolutionary ‘scripts’ by invoking or imitating pre-existing models, though through their own interpretation. Unsurprisingly, Asturian revolutionaries turned in part to the example set by the most recent reference point: the Bolshevik Revolution. The intention of creating a ‘Red Army’ is the clearest example of seeking to emulate the Russian revolutionary ‘script’ and indeed it followed, intentionally or otherwise, the advice in the Comintern-produced handbook for revolutionaries, Armed Insurrection.⁷⁴ Militias dubbed ‘Red Guards’ already policed the rear-guard of the revolution through patrols that stopped and questioned residents, conducted arrests and read out proclamations.⁷⁵ The Red Army, meanwhile, would exhibit ‘iron discipline’ and impose severe punishments for desertion and disobedience.⁷⁶ Not all agreed with the prospect of a Red Army, particularly the anarchists, although a wall poster in an anarchist district of Gijón that spoke of a ‘Red Army’ reveals the issue to be more complicated than the clear-cut distinctions made by accounts in the aftermath of the insurrection.⁷⁷ The Red Army did not materialize; instead, it remained limited to a desire printed on the proclamations. But even as a rhetorical device, declaring that a Red Army was the missing ingredient for a ‘total triumph’ indicates that the revolutionary process was understood and measured according to the Russian precedent.⁷⁸ As the militias retreated from the advancing army, forming a ruthless, disciplined Red Army would be the way to success.

Referencing Russia in the proclamations also elevated the Asturian insurrection into a longer narrative of epic revolutionary struggles, both geographically and temporally. Invoking the Red Army and the Bastille in the revolutionary proclamations staked the Asturians’ claim to the importance of the insurrection. They were heirs to a longer tradition of European revolutions and now the ‘world [was] watching’ them. The revolutionaries had to fulfil their historical duty and the expectations of the workers of the world, although they could rely on the assistance of the ‘fatherland of the proletariat’ to help them construct ‘the solid Marxist edifice on the ashes of all that is rotten’.⁷⁹ Fernando Solano Palacio, an anarchist, reported that ‘Bolsheviks’ even spread rumours that there were Soviet warships located off the Spanish coast poised to come to the Asturians’ aid.⁸⁰

More common than international references was the publication of domestic ‘news’ in the proclamations. Proclamations reported on alleged victories by columns of left-wing militias across Spain, from the capturing of provincial capitals to the arrest of leading politicians. The news was a complete fabrication. The news – or propaganda – functioned on one level to encourage local citizens to contribute to the revolutionaries’ war effort and increase collective confidence in victory. On another, the fake news was a means of constructing revolutionary authority and legitimacy. The authors employed relatively sophisticated techniques to convince local inhabitants of the veracity of the reports. A proclamation issued in Grado presented news via a list consisting of two curt, informative sentences per province, which evoked the style of telegrams and lent it an air of authenticity.⁸¹ In Turón, the committee had taken control of a radio station and broadcasted to the local population using loudspeakers. Revolutionary programming included ‘imaginary talks’ in French between the Asturian aristocrat Pedro Pidal and the French president, at least according to the right-wing journalist Luis Bolín.⁸²

Stress, uncertainty and rumour abounded, and so these reports preyed on a local population hungry for reliable information.⁸³ Residents of the coalfields could only access the revolutionaries’ version of events or the newspapers and flyers dropped by the Spanish air force that encouraged the insurrectionaries to surrender. The government-produced flyers denied there was any upheaval in Asturias, which residents in the grip of the insurrection could see was a patent lie. One revolutionary proclamation played on the evident untruth to cast doubt on the government’s claim that the rest of Spain was calm.⁸⁴ Few revolutionaries believed the reports that did filter through. A captured mineworker told government forces that the revolutionaries thought the radio reports were lies.⁸⁵

The news reports were also an expression of exuberant revolutionary creativity. Revolutionaries imagined and projected possible, plausible futures. Ceferino Álvarez later wrote that ‘we kept people informed about everything that was going on, of how we arrived in Oviedo, of how things were going’ and ‘we were always objective and limited ourselves to what was really happening, to what was true and to what we were hoping for’.⁸⁶ He allowed for a creative interpretation of reality. This revolutionary creativity was also patent in expressions of revolutionary identity across walls and vehicles, in what was one of the most striking features of the coal valleys noted by journalists who visited in the aftermath. Journalists observed that ‘all of the armour-plated vehicles had big red letters which read: “¡viva la revolución!” [and] “Asturias is under our control. UHP!”’ and that there were ‘no walls in Asturias in which there is not a viva to Russia scrawled or inscriptions like “Let’s save Russia!”’.⁸⁷ The Belgian Mathieu Corman, who made a detour on his motorcycle journey to the region for some revolutionary tourism, saw a road sign that read ‘Gijón 60km’ and under which someone had scrawled, ‘Moscow, just a step away’.⁸⁸

A revolutionary community

The awkward synthesis of restoring perceived lost left hegemony and the revolutionary re-founding of the social order was also evident in how a revolutionary community was mobilized. This collective subject was constructed partly through violence, which served to cement the brotherhood of militiamen and exclude those identified as enemies, but also through the symbols and strategies to regulate access to the revolutionary community. The requirements of armed struggle meant the mobilization of local society and provided an opportunity for people to be protagonists in armed struggle and actively participate in reshaping the local social, political and economic order.

The insurrection provided a particular opportunity for young people, who played a key role in the militias and the wider revolutionary insurrection. The author of a later account of the insurrection in Olloniego was scandalized at the involvement of the ‘maddened youth’ who were the protagonists of the revolt: ‘sixteen-year-old rascals armed with dynamite and a rifle slung over their shoulders’.⁸⁹ Female protagonism in the insurrection scandalized some commentators. There are some limited vignettes of women’s participation in the insurrection as fighters. According to the authorities, eighteen year-old Dolores Vázquez dressed as a man and carried two pistols on the frontline.⁹⁰ But in general, fighting remained a male preserve, reflecting patterns of political violence in wider interwar Europe.⁹¹ Grossi, a committee member in Mieres, claimed that women did fight, yet provides no further evidence, while a socialist recounted that women in Mieres were refused arms and had to accompany the militias as nurses.⁹²

Although opportunities for frontline militia service were limited, young women did take advantage of the situation provided by the insurrection to play an active role in the revolutionary process, even if they were obliged to adopt roles less challenging of traditional gender norms. Women’s active participation in the insurrection tended to be in similar auxiliary tasks, such as medical care or food preparation, as was common during the Civil War.⁹³ In September 1935, a female member of the Communist Youth was arrested near Madrid. She confessed to having participated in the insurrection as a stretcher-bearer and by transporting dynamite, before hiding in the mountains.⁹⁴ The parents of a young woman arrested in the mountains after the insurrection lamented their ‘double disgrace’ in that she had besmirched her family’s honour by participating in the revolution and accompanying a man to whom she was not married.⁹⁵ Even Aida Lafuente, the most celebrated female revolutionary martyr who is represented as dying with a machine gun in her hands, had spent her time working in food preparation, or as a messenger or a nurse before Oviedo came under attack.⁹⁶ Women’s participation in violence was much easier to eulogize retrospectively.

The revolutionary community adapted existing symbols and created new ones to help forge a sense of collective identity and cohesion. The Internationale was no longer simply a song of ‘hope’ expressing a desire for emancipation; it was now linked to armed action and victory.⁹⁷ It was sung after defeating the civil guards in Olloniego, as militias departed for the front and when the arms factory in Trubia was captured.⁹⁸ Singing The Internationale was a conscious collective performance of the working class as a revolutionary subject. The raised clenched fist became the ubiquitous revolutionary gesture. It had originated in the German Communist Party in the 1920s and would be the quintessential symbol of antifascism during Spanish Civil War.⁹⁹ When individuals or groups met in the street, they raised their clenched fists and uttered the passwords of ‘salud, comrade’ or ‘UHP’.¹⁰⁰ Requisitioned vehicles with ‘UHP’ daubed in red on their windscreens sounded their horns three times, once for each letter of the password.¹⁰¹

These symbols and gestures were not simply public performances of revolutionary fraternity and support for the insurrection. The gesture and password were also a key mechanism for managing the local population. They served to regulate access to the revolutionary community. As Vega later explained, ‘[e]verywhere the password UHP was demanded’; without it, an individual would be ‘arrested and identified straightaway’.¹⁰² Yet other evidence suggests that militias and committees were not always so zealous in excluding those who were not revolutionaries. They did not always detain those unfamiliar with the new code of behaviour; rather, at times they adopted an instructional role in order to manage the local population. In Oviedo, a priest greeted revolutionaries with a fascist salute and ‘salud, comrades’. Rather than assaulting or arresting him, the militiamen showed him the correct salutation.¹⁰³ In a similar case in Aller, the revolutionary committee instructed a Passionist brother in the correct performance of the raised fist salute.¹⁰⁴ Revolutionaries were conscious that local society was not starkly delineated between friend and foe. Those in the grey zone between the two could be incorporated into the revolutionary process.

Such incorporation could be conducted through coercion. Later reports maintain that some were forced to ‘do guard duty or go to the frontline’.¹⁰⁵ Witness statements from an investigation into an assault in September 1935 include the allegation that the accused and his brother had been coerced into participating in the insurrection by undertaking guard duties. He singled out the victim of the assault as the revolutionary responsible.¹⁰⁶ Some rightists and members of the clergy attempted to evade arrest or persecution by volunteering their labour in the makeshift hospitals. They could justify this ostensible support for the insurrection on humanitarian grounds. Despite the intimacy of the coalfield communities, others managed to disguise themselves as a way of surviving the insurrection.¹⁰⁷ The revolutionary community was thus formed of a combination of willing volunteers and those who understood its new codes and symbols, as well as those co-opted into participating in the revolutionary process. Proclamations threatening those who looted or disseminated false news reveal the fragility of the community that the revolutionaries were attempting to construct and the codes of revolutionary honour that underpinned it.

Defeat

The revolutionary utopia proclaimed as triumphant at the beginning of the insurrection slowly slipped out of reach during the second week of the fighting. The final proclamations accepted that defeat was inevitable and began to historicize the insurrection. The third provincial revolutionary committee – headed by Belarmino Tomás and based in Sama – framed the end of the revolution as ‘a stop on the way, a parenthesis, a restorative rest’ and a ‘truce in the struggle’; the insurrection was no longer a historical terminus, but part of the onward march towards the inevitable revolution.¹⁰⁸ The anarchist committee in La Felguera echoed these sentiments. The revolution now belonged to the future, not the present: ‘When it will be we do not know, but we will participate [in it], because our ideas inspire us, they make our impulses vibrate and accelerate the pace of our revolutionary train’.¹⁰⁹

Despite the fragility of revolutionary authority during the final days of the insurrection, it did not splinter and collapse. The insurrection ended with a remarkable negotiated surrender. Belarmino Tomás crossed the lines and parleyed with General López Ochoa. Tomás, prompted by reports of murder, rape and looting by government troops on the outskirts of Oviedo, had two conditions of surrender: there would be no reprisals and the Moroccan troops would remain at the rear.¹¹⁰ According to the agreement, the army would enter the coalfields on 19 October. The transfer of authority from the committees to the army was relatively orderly. In Mieres, the committee released its prisoners and established a transitional authority.¹¹¹ Meanwhile, revolutionary leaders and militias fled into the mountains. Some would go into exile and not return until 1936.

With the defeat of the revolutionary insurrection, the Asturian October – or ‘commune’ – entered the pantheon of failed left-wing attempts at revolution. Without wider support, it was doomed to fail. The Asturian revolutionaries did not envisage that they would be on their own. Their confidence in success is evident in the enthusiastic reception given to the first planes seen overhead during the insurrection. Before the bombs began to fall, the planes were recognized as ‘emissaries’ of revolution rather than a reconnaissance mission. A landing strip was even cleared in Laviana and shouts of ‘they are ours!’ greeted the first planes that flew over Olloniego, where ‘it seemed logical not to suppose anything different … and it was even said that a pilot saluted with a raised fist’.¹¹² Revolutionaries wanted to see themselves reflected in the pilots. Even as a failed revolution, the Asturian insurrection was lived as a revolutionary process. The proclamations attempted to call into being a revolutionary future, even if this did not actually occur.

The fate of the insurrection depended on external, national factors. The context was far less propitious than the situation in central and eastern Europe at the end of the First World War, where defeat, demobilization, hunger and the dissolution of traditional political authority offered a window for a potential radical left seizure of power. The situation was very different in Spain in 1934. There was no crisis of the state, in either its legitimacy or capacity to act. Crucially, the military was willing to defend the government, though the Army of Africa was drafted in to crush the insurrection, as it was believed to be more trustworthy and less tainted by domestic politics than the forces on the mainland.¹¹³ The critical role played by the military is clear when compared to 1931 and 1936. Whereas the army refused to stand by King Alfonso XIII in 1931, it was divided in 1936, with significant sectors willing to follow conspirators in rebelling against the government.

The insurrection was not just an event; it was also a process. It is necessary to take the words and ideas of the participants seriously, as they provide a window onto the world that they tried to outline and create, even if the visions were nothing more than the ink on proclamations pasted on walls in public places. As in any revolution, the insurrectionaries had to work out how to recast the social, political and economic order, and it is not surprising that they swayed between reasserting left-wing hegemony – a situation they were familiar with – and attempts to destroy the existing order. The revolution was a liminal moment caught between the reassertion of the old and the construction of the new. It was a contested process that was understood and defined by participants, whether militias or committees, in different ways. The violence and the symbols used to define the revolutionary community – who belonged and who did not – went to the very core of the struggle to define what the revolution was.

It is not clear how many died in the Asturian October. In his detailed quantitative study of political violence in the Second Republic, González Calleja is unable to provide a definitive figure. The blurring of fighting into the repression as well as mass burials and the burning of corpses make any figure an approximation. The circumstances of death are only known for 200 revolutionaries, at best a quarter of the final figure. The official death toll stands at 855 civilians – which includes revolutionaries, victims of the repression and others who died behind the lines – and 229 members of the security forces and army in Asturias, which ascends to 1,051 civilians and 284 soldiers and police for Spain as a whole.¹¹⁴ Most believe these figures too low for Asturias and ‘civilian deaths’, which include the militias, are generally thought to number around 1,100, to which between 300 and 350 members of the armed and security forces can be added.¹¹⁵

One of the victims of the repression was the journalist Luis Higón Rosell, better known by his penname Luis Sirval. Like Chaves Nogales, he travelled to Asturias to report on the insurrection. His investigation into the reprisals by the army brought him to the attention of the authorities and he was arrested. Three legionaries, worried about what Sirval had uncovered, visited him and demanded that he reveal his sources. When he refused, they shot him in the courtyard.¹¹⁶ Denunciation of deaths like Sirval’s and amnesty for the thousands imprisoned after October served to be a powerful rallying cry for the left, for the repression of the Asturian revolutionary insurrection was wide-ranging, bitter and decisive in moulding the fractious and polarized nature of politics in the time leading up to the Civil War.

______________

¹ Ahora, 24, 26 Oct. 1934.

² See, e.g., contrasting views in D. Ruiz, Insurrección defensiva y revolución obrera: el octubre español de 1934 (Barcelona, 1988) and J. Avilés Farré, ‘Los socialistas y la insurrección de octubre de 1934’, Espacio, tiempo y forma, serie v, Historia contemporánea, xx (2008), 152–3.

³ Le Populaire, 5 Jan. 1935. See also J. Aróstegui, Largo Caballero: el tesón y la quimera (Barcelona, 2013), p. 363 and P. I. Taibo II, Asturias, octubre 1934 (Barcelona, 2013), p. 172.

⁴ La Tarde, 24, 27 Apr. 1936.

⁵ This emphasis on process is influenced by the work of G. Lawson, e.g., ‘Within and beyond the “fourth generation” of revolutionary theory’, Sociological Theory, xxxiv (2016), 106–27.

⁶ E.g. A. J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J., 2000). Some recent approaches have emphasized that violence is a ‘variable’ in revolution, not an intrinsic characteristic (e.g. R. Gerwarth and M. Conway, ‘Revolution and counterrevolution’, in Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. D. Bloxham and R. Gerwarth (Cambridge, 2011), p. 142). It is difficult to see how the societal reconstruction promised by the ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century would allow for a peaceful destruction and reconfiguration of political and social power.

⁷ C. F. Roman, ‘Liminality, the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of terror during the French Revolution’, in Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, ed. A. Horvath, B. Thomassen and H. Wydra (New York, 2015), p. 148. Revolution as ‘interregnum’ in J. C. Scott, ‘Foreword’, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. G. M. Joseph and D. Nugent (Durham, N.C., 1994), ix.

⁸ H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1973 [1963]), pp. 20ff.

⁹ J. P. Fusi, El País Vasco: autonomía, revolución, guerra civil (Madrid, 2002), pp. 175–201. See J. R. Garai, J. Gutiérrez and J. Chueca, Octubre de 1934 en Euskal Herria (Oñati, 2014) for a detailed account.

¹⁰ For a brief survey, see S. Souto Kustrín, ‘Octubre de 1934: historia, mito y memoria’, Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, xi (2013), 477–81. For Madrid, see S. Souto Kustrín, ‘Y ¿Madrid? ¿Qué hace Madrid?’: movimento revolucionario y acción colectiva (1933–1936) (Madrid, 2004), ch. 3; for Ourense, see J. Prada Rodríguez, De la agitación republicana a la represión franquista (Ourense 1934–1939) (Barcelona, 2006), pp. 37–51.

¹¹ For Catalonia, see 6 d’octubre: la desfeta de la revolució catalanista de 1934, ed. A. Gonzàlez i Vilalta, M. López Esteve and E. Ucelay-Da Cal (Barcelona, 2014).

¹² Taibo, Asturias, pp. 169–70, 179–80; I. Lavilla, Los hombres de octubre (Gijón, 2004), p. 41.

¹³ XXX [sic], Lo que yo he visto: La Felguera en la revolución asturiana (New York, 1935), pp. 9–10; M. Villar, El anarquismo en la insurrección de Asturias: la CNT y la FAI en octubre de 1934 (Madrid, 1994 [1935]), p. 119.

¹⁴ J. Rodríguez Muñoz, La revolución de Octubre de 1934 en Asturias: orígenes, desarrollo y consecuencias (Oviedo, 2010), p. 236.

¹⁵ Lavilla, Los hombres, pp. 30, 52.

¹⁶ In Madrid, the MAOC dated from 1933, at least notionally (see M. Tagüeña Lacorte, Testimonio de dos guerras (Barcelona, 1978), p. 38).

¹⁷ Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 41.

¹⁸ ‘Informe del Comité Regional de la CNT de Asturias sobre su actuación’, pp. 36–41.

¹⁹ B. Díaz Nosty, La comuna asturiana: revolución de octubre de 1934 (Bilbao, 1974), p. 172.

²⁰ See Taibo, Asturias, pp. 196–8; D. Ruiz, Octubre de 1934: revolución en la República española (Madrid, 2008), pp. 292–3.

²¹ J. A. Cabezas, Morir en Oviedo: historia en directo (vivencias de un periodista) (Madrid, 1984), pp. 56–63.

²² S. Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford, 2002), pp. 251–2; for López Ochoa’s account, see Campaña militar de Asturias en octubre de 1934 (narración táctica-episódica) (Madrid, 1936). See also J. E. Álvarez, ‘The Spanish Foreign Legion during the Asturian uprising of October 1934’, War in History, xviii (2011), 200–24. Bombing is mentioned in several accounts, e.g., N. Molins i Fábrega, UHP: la insurrección proletaria en Asturias (Gijón, 1977 [1935]), pp. 128–9; M. Grossi, La insurrección de Asturias (Madrid, 1978 [1935]), pp. 173–5.

²³ Taibo, Asturias, p. 390.

²⁴ On the fate of the money, see Taibo, Asturias, pp. 583–7.

²⁵ According to the socialist account, the second committee lasted eight hours. Benavides increases this to ten, while Shubert declares it lasted a day (Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 139; M. Benavides, La revolución fue así (octubre rojo y negro) (Barcelona, 1935), p. 360; A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: the Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), p. 8); see also Taibo, Asturias, p. 428.

²⁶ Ruiz, Insurrección, p. 131; Lavilla, Los hombres, the quotation at p. 33.

²⁷ Grossi, a BOC member, unsurprisingly, pointed the finger at the PCE as the focal point for ‘disagreements’ (Grossi, La insurrección, pp. 27–8, 45, 48).

²⁸ C. Vega, ‘Copia de un informe remitido al Comité Central del PCE por Carlos Vega relativo a los sucesos revolucionarios de octubre de 1934’, CDMH, PS Madrid, box 721, file 3, p. 8.

²⁹ Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 75.

³⁰ A. de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Pequeños anales de quince días: revolución en Asturias octubre de 1934 (Oviedo, 1935), p. 181; El Noroeste, 17 Oct. 1934.

³¹ Díaz Nosty, La comuna, p. 174.

³² F. Solano Palacio, La revolución de octubre: quince días de comunismo libertario (Madrid, 1994 [1936]), p. 52; El Noroeste, 23 Oct. 1934; Llano, Pequeños anales, p. 150.

³³ El Noroeste, 29 Nov. 1934; Villar, El anarquismo, p. 125. See also La Veu de Catalunya, 28 Oct. 1934.

³⁴ Asociación Mercantil Española SA, ‘Segunda Relación de los Comerciantes de Asturias que han sufrido quebranto con motive de la huelga revolucionaria’, Barcelona, 5 Nov. 1934, CDMH, PS Madrid, J series, box 50, file 3.

³⁵ Grossi, La insurrección, pp. 28, 41–2; Solano Palacio, La revolución, p. 48. See also Región, 15, 18 Dec. 1934 and El Noroeste, 15 Nov. 1934.

³⁶ Cruz y raya: revista de afirmación y negación, Nov. 1934.

³⁷ Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 75. See also Llano, Pequeños anales, pp. 158–9. El Noroeste, 23 Oct. 1934.

³⁸ Grossi, La insurrección, p. 75.

³⁹ Llano, Pequeños anales, pp. 67, 177–8; Grossi, La insurrección, p. 77. Solano Palacio claims money was banned everywhere, except in Sama (La revolución, p. 72).

⁴⁰ Villar, El anarquismo, pp. 123–4.

⁴¹ See Scripting Revolution: a Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. K. M. Baker and D. Edelstein (Stanford, Calif., 2015).

⁴² See Ruiz, Insurrección, p. 126; Villar, El anarquismo, pp. 114–15; for Sotrondio, see El Noroeste, 23 Oct. 1934.

⁴³ For the proclamation issued by the Sama Revolutionary Committee, see Molins i Fábrega, UHP, pp. 88–9; for the proclamation issued by the La Felguera Revolutionary Committee, 6 Oct. 1934, see Llano, Pequeños anales, p. 161.

⁴⁴ For the proclamation issued by the Grado Revolutionary Committee, undated, see Villar, El anarquismo, pp. 90–2.

⁴⁵ For the proclamation issued by the Sama Revolutionary Committee, see Molins i Fábrega, UHP, pp. 88–9; for the proclamation issued by the Mieres Revolutionary Committee, see D. Ruiz, Asturias contemporánea (1808–1936) (Madrid, 1975), pp. 104–5; for the proclamation issued by the Valdesoto Revolutionary Committee, see Villar, El anarquismo, p. 121.

⁴⁶ For the proclamation issued by the Grado Revolutionary Committee, undated, see Villar, El anarquismo, pp. 90–2.

⁴⁷ E.g. Taibo, Asturias, pp. 454–5; Ruiz, Insurrección, p. 127. Alejandro Valdés, a Communist, claimed authorship of one of the bandos (F. Erice, ‘El octubre asturiano. Entre el mito y la interpretación histórica’, in De un octubre a otro: revolución y fascismo en el periodo de entreguerras, 1919–1934, ed. A. Andreassi and J. L. Martín Ramos (Madrid, 2010), p. 204).

⁴⁸ E. Selbin, Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: the Power of Story (London, 2010), p. 24.

⁴⁹ See Taibo, Asturias, p. 455.

⁵⁰ El Noroeste, 23 Oct. 1934; Región, 11 Nov. 1934.

⁵¹ M. Vincent, ‘“The keys of the kingdom”: religious violence in the Spanish civil war, July–August 1936’, in The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, ed. C. Ealham and M. Richards (Cambridge, 2005), p. 72. On Tragic Week, the classic study is J. C. Ullman, Tragic Week: a Study of Anticlericalism in Spain (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

⁵² J. Canel [J. Díaz Fernández], Octubre rojo en Asturias (Barcelona, 1984 [1935]), pp. 145–6.

⁵³ S. Noval Suárez, Langreo Rojo: historia del martirio y persecución de los sacerdotes en el Arciprestazgo de Langreo durante los sucesos revolucionarios del año 1934 (La Felguera, 1935), pp. 125–30.

⁵⁴ See Llano, Pequeños anales, pp. 17, 26, 35, 50, 61–2, 81–2. For medical care and food preparation, see Noval Suárez, Langreo rojo, pp. 33, 107; ACNP, Asturias Roja, p. 76. For the ‘taboo’, see Vincent, ‘“Keys”’, p. 86.

⁵⁵ Díaz Nosty, La comuna, pp. 338–40.

⁵⁶ M. Castejón Rodríguez, ‘La patronal hullera asturiana en la Segunda República’ (unpublished UNED PhD thesis, 2009), pp. 404, 415.

⁵⁷ Canel, Octubre, p. 137.

⁵⁸ Taibo, Asturias, p. 272.

⁵⁹ Á. Garralda García, La persecución religiosa del clero en Asturias 1934, 1936 y 1937: martirios y odiseas (Avilés, 2009 [1977]), pp. 506–8.

⁶⁰ Los mártires de Turón: notas biográficas y reseña del martirio de los religiosos bárbaramente asesinados por los revolucionarios en Turón (Asturias) el 9 de octubre de 1934 (Madrid/Barcelona, 1934), p. 68.

⁶¹ Taibo, Asturias, p. 447; Ruiz, Octubre, p. 289.

⁶² Grossi, La insurrección, pp. 106–8; G. Ranzato, ‘The Spanish Civil War in the context of total war’, in ‘If You Tolerate This …’: the Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War, ed. M. Baumeister and S. Schüler-Springorum (Frankfurt, 2008), p. 240.

⁶³ R. Gerwarth, ‘The central European counter-revolution: paramilitary violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War’, Past & Present, cc (2008), 175–209.

⁶⁴ Gerwarth and Conway, ‘Revolution’, p. 144.

⁶⁵ F. Martínez, Dos jesuitas mártires en Asturias (Burgos, 1936), pp. 43–55.

⁶⁶ El Noroeste, 19 Sept. 1935; Taibo, Asturias, p. 220.

⁶⁷ Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas de Oviedo, Asturias roja (octubre de 1934): sacerdotes y religiosos perseguidos y martirizados (Oviedo, n.d. [1935]), p. 75.

⁶⁸ This occurred as the first committee discussed the withdrawal of the revolutionaries (Díaz Nosty, La comuna, pp. 204–5).

⁶⁹ For reports on Olloniego, Mieres and Sotrondio, see El Noroeste, 20, 23 Oct., 15 Nov. 1934.

⁷⁰ Noval Suárez, Langreo rojo, pp. 101–5.

⁷¹ El Noroeste, 15 Nov. 1934.

⁷² See ACNP, Asturias roja, pp. 60, 199; Los mártires de Turón, p. 58; Canel, Octubre, p. 137.

⁷³ Cabezas, Morir, p. 102; Díaz Nosty, La comuna, p. 279.

⁷⁴ A. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection (London, 1970 [1928]), p. 186.

⁷⁵ Molins i Fábrega, UHP, p. 136.

⁷⁶ For the proclamation issued by the Sama Revolutionary Committee, 7 Oct. 1934, see Molins i Fábrega, UHP, p. 125.

⁷⁷ El Llano Revolutionary Committee, ‘Parte del día de hoy’, undated, in Llano, Pequeños anales, p. 132.

⁷⁸ Sama Revolutionary Committee, ‘Noticias de Madrid’, 7 Oct. 1934, in Molins i Fábrega, UHP, p. 138.

⁷⁹ For the proclamation issued by the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, 16 Oct. 1934, see Molins i Fábrega, UHP, pp. 130–1.

⁸⁰ Solano Palacio, La revolución, p. 51.

⁸¹ El Llano Revolutionary Committee, ‘Parte del día de hoy’, and Grado Revolutionary Committee, ‘Noticias oficiales de la revolución’, 13 Oct. 1934, in Llano, Pequeños anales, pp. 132, 150–1.

⁸² L. Bolín, Spain: the Vital Years (London, 1967), p. 132.

⁸³ This is a common theme in M. Álvarez Suárez, Sangre de octubre: U.H.P. Episodios de la revolución en Asturias (Madrid, 1936), e.g. pp. 58–9.

⁸⁴ For the proclamation issued by the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, 11 Oct. 1934, see Ruiz, Asturias contemporánea, p. 106.

⁸⁵ Canel, Octubre, p. 107.

⁸⁶ C. Fontalbat and C. Álvarez, Ceferino Álvarez Rey: historia de un minero de Asturias (1907–2009) (Oviedo, 2010), p. 85.

⁸⁷ Cabezas, Morir, p. 94; La Veu de Catalunya, 28 Oct. 1934. See also Solano Palacio, La revolución, p. 81.

⁸⁸ M. Corman, Incendiarios de ídolos: un viaje por la revolución de Asturias, trans. C. García Velasco (Oviedo, 2009 [1935]), p. 65.

⁸⁹ El Noroeste, 15 Nov. 1934.

⁹⁰ El Noroeste, 9 Dec. 1934.

⁹¹ M. Vincent, ‘Political violence and mass society: a European civil war?’, in The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945, ed. N. Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), p. 400.

⁹² Grossi, La insurrección, pp. 37, 58; Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 39.

⁹³ M. A. Mateos, ¡Salud, compañeras! Mujeres socialistas en Asturias (1900–1937) (Oviedo, 2007), p. 180. See also El Noroeste, 20 Oct. 1934; Taibo, Asturias, p. 313. On the Civil War, see M. Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver, Colo., 1995), particularly at pp. 105–9.

⁹⁴ El Noroeste, 20 Sept. 1935.

⁹⁵ El Noroeste, 9 Dec. 1934.

⁹⁶ Taibo, Asturias, pp. 415–17.

⁹⁷ Grossi, La insurrección, p. 29.

⁹⁸ El Noroeste, 15 Nov. 1934; Solano Palacio, La revolución, p. 54; Díaz Nosty, La comuna, p. 219. See also Benavides, La revolución, p. 228.

⁹⁹ For background, see H. García, ‘Was there an antifascist culture in 1930s Spain?’, in Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present, ed. H. García, M. Yusta, X. Tabet and C. Clímaco (New York, 2016), p. 101.

¹⁰⁰ There are reports of other passwords: ‘PP’ (‘proletarian power’), ‘Trabajadores rojos salud’ (‘salud, red workers’), ‘FAI’, ‘Pablo Iglesias’ and ‘Hermanos proletarios, salud’ (‘salud, proletarian brothers’). Nevertheless, UHP was the main password (Cabezas, Morir, p. 114; Ruiz, Insurrección, p. 98, n. 1; Álvarez Suárez, Sangre, p. 188).

¹⁰¹ Suárez Álvarez, Sangre, p. 104.

¹⁰² Vega, ‘Copia’, p. 13. See also C. Vega, ‘Notas complementarias al informe elevado al Comité Central del PCE’, CDMH, PS Madrid, box 721, file 3, p. 14.

¹⁰³ ACNP, Asturias roja, p. 73.

¹⁰⁴ Episodios de la revolución en Asturias: los pasionistas de Mieres (Asturias) y la revolución de octubre de 1934. Episodios narrados por los mismos protagonistas (Santander, 1935), pp. 67–8.

¹⁰⁵ El Noroeste, 15 Nov. 1934; Taibo, Asturias, p. 457.

¹⁰⁶ AHPA, AP, box 78437, file 178 (1935).

¹⁰⁷ See M. Kerry, ‘Painted tonsures and potato-sellers: priests, passing and survival in the Asturian Revolution’, Cultural & Social History, xiv (2017), 237–55.

¹⁰⁸ For the proclamation issued by the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, 18 Oct. 1934, see Ruiz, Asturias contemporánea, p. 107.

¹⁰⁹ For the proclamation issued by the La Felguera Revolutionary Committee, 18 Oct. 1934, see Villar, El anarquismo, pp. 136–7.

¹¹⁰ See the interview with Tomás in Le Populaire, 5, 6 Jan. 1935.

¹¹¹ Grossi, La insurrección, pp. 128–9.

¹¹² Llano, Pequeños anales, p. 159; Lavilla, Los hombres, p. 26.

¹¹³ Balfour, Deadly Embrace, p. 251.

¹¹⁴ E. González Calleja, Cifras cruentas: las víctimas mortales de la violencia sociopolítica en la Segunda República española (1931–1936) (Granada, 2015), pp. 11, 176, 232.

¹¹⁵ For similar figures, see Rodríguez Muñoz, La revolución, pp. 825–6; Taibo, Asturias, p. 476; Díaz Nosty, La comuna, pp. 337–8. See also E. González Calleja, En nombre de la autoridad: la defensa del orden público durante la Segunda República española (1931–1936) (Granada, 2014), pp. 228–40.

¹¹⁶ Balfour, Deadly Embrace, p. 255; Taibo, Asturias, pp. 504–10.