One of the principal issues that inspired the founding of Tribune in 1937 was the civil war that was raging in Spain. Many on the left were already fighting on the peninsula and many, later to be closely associated with Tribune, such as George Orwell, Bob Edwards and Jack Jones, had been members of the International Brigade. So, it is little wonder that over the years Tribune not only campaigned for a return to democracy in Spain but has actively remembered the legacy of those who bravely fought in the civil war between 1936 and 1939.
A couple of years ago, I visited the battlefield of Jarama, just north of Madrid with some of the last surviving International Brigaders. In February 1937 hundreds of their comrades, and particularly British Brigaders, had been killed in one of the first great conflicts of the War.
The battlefield remains much as it was 75 years ago. The scrubland of the hill where the battle was fought is still littered with the archaeology of war – rusty sardine tins, bullets caked in mud and even the odd hand grenade. You can still see the trenches and boltholes where fixed guns attempted to shoot down Franco’s threatening bombers. It’s an eerie scene of sweet smelling wild thyme, olive groves and lavender all growing in abundance on the hillsides. In all more than 15,000 died here in the struggle that lasted for a few weeks. Only the odd hunter ventures on the hillside today in search of rabbits along with the annual pilgrimage of International Brigaders from around Europe.
The tragedy of Jarama and the Spanish Civil War have been well documented from oral histories to political and military analyses, and not just in Britain but in most of the countries who found themselves sending volunteers. American historian Richard Rhodes recounts the story of the war through the eyes of a number of observers and participants, from Orwell himself to Hemingway (why is it always Hemingway?), Joan Miro, Picasso and photographer Martha Gelhorn, plus a few lesser known characters who mostly fought with the International Brigade. Many of these did not actually carry arms but played a part nonetheless in propagating the ideals of the struggle against fascism.
It’s a sympathetic and readable account of the war but I can’t help feeling that it’s all been told before, though perhaps in a variety of other places, and Rhodes adds little new to an already well-documented tale.
The difficulty for any writer focusing on the war is in finding a new angle or an untold story in what has become a somewhat swamped subject. Rhodes may not have achieved this but the same cannot be said of Paul Preston, who, alongside Raymond Carr, qualifies as perhaps the foremost academic of the war. Over the years Preston has written not just straightforward histories of the war itself but about the newspaper correspondents who covered the war, the Spanish holocaust, Guernica, women in the war and even a biography of Franco. And now he has turned his attention to Santiago Carrillo, for so long the foremost leftist in Spain during and after the war. But, as Preston argues, there was more than one side to this character.
Carrillo was born in Gijon and became politically active in the socialist movement at an early age. By the age of 13 he was working for the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). In 1934 he was imprisoned for two years for his part in a failed revolutionary coup. He emerged from prison just as the war was beginning and immediately joined the Communist Party. Within a short time he had been appointed to a prominent position in the Defence Council of Madrid, a city at that point under siege.
Caririllo’s tactics during this dark period have been much debated, with thousands of civilians alleged to have been murdered by communist forces on the instructions of Carrillo. It was the most appalling massacre by Republicans and one which has long been shrouded in mystery. Carrillo himself always denied any involvement but there seems little doubt that his fingerprints were plastered all over it. And nor was it the only unsavory incident.
With the war lost, Carrillo fled initially to France, and then to Moscow, before returning to France to reorganize the embattled Spanish Communist Party. For some time, he maintained a hard Stalinist approach but with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he began to take a more pragmatic, electorally based standpoint, in common with Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party and Enrico Berlinguer of the Italian Communist Party, shifting the party to a more liberal position, though not without having to expel all the remaining Stalinists, some of them close colleagues and friends.
Following the death of Franco in 1975, Carrillo slipped back into Spain and in common with his new beliefs, began to build an electoral base for the Communist Party, winning almost 10 per cent of the votes in the first democratically held elections since before the war. Carrillo himself was elected as a member of the Congress of Deputies. In many ways, it was a considerable achievement but what was perhaps even more noteworthy was his role in encouraging and negotiating a peaceful transition to democracy. Many of the old battles were put aside, though not always forgotten, allowing old foes to help rebuild a modern democratic Spain. But any power the communist party had boasted would soon be on the wane as their share of the vote slumped in subsequent elections. Carrillo, growing weary of internal struggles resigned as secretary of the party and the party itself slid into anonymity.
For a time in the 1970s, Carrillo was praised for his Euro-Communist politics, much commented upon in the pages of Tribune itself. But as Paul Preston and others have since written, Carrillo’s role in the darker moments of Spain was not altogether praiseworthy. Carrillo, as Preston suggests, was something of an old-fashioned Stalinist, shifting the politics of the Spanish Communist Party first one way, then another, by either simply expelling opponents or eliminating them. History has not been kind to him and Paul Preston’s detailed and powerful examination of his life and activities only adds to the litany of accusations that can be levelled against Spain’s one time hero of the left.
When it comes to history nothing quite rivals the reading of newspaper reports from the time. Instant history is being reported as it is seen and without any of the hindsight or analysis that later follows. Many teenagers have kept a scrapbook, usually to do with sport, films or music ,but in the case of Elizabeth Bickerstaffe, it was to do with politics. Born into a political family the teenage nurse from Doncaster was swept up by the events in southern Europe and began to cut articles out of newspapers and stick them in her homemade scrapbook. Generally the articles came from the Daily Worker with many reports from Peter Kerrigan in Barcelona, but Tribune also features along with the left-leaning News Chronicle, Picture Post and Daily Sketch. There are vivid accounts of the bombing of Barcelona, interviews with International Brigaders and hundreds of painful photographs, many of which have probably long been lost. It’s a fascinating montage of a war and editor Jim Jump and Elizabeth’s son Rodney Bickerstaffe, have produced a delightful and valuable reproduction of the scrapbook.