Jose Diaz Ramos

José Díaz Ramos (Seville, May 3, 1895-Tbilisi, March 20, 1942) was a Spanish politician of communist ideology. Although initially militant in anarchism, he ended up becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and would hold this position for a decade. His time as leader of the PCE coincided with the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War. Seriously ill during his later years, he committed suicide in 1942.

Biography

Political activity

José Díaz was born in Seville on May 3, 1895. A baker by profession since he was eleven years old, at the age of 18 he joined La Aurora, the Seville bakers union, which shortly after joined the anarchist National Confederation of Work. In 1917 he led a strike by bread workers and in 1920 he participated in the general strike decreed by the leadership of the CNT, which ended in failure. After the coup d'état of September 13, 1923 that established a military dictatorship in Spain, José Díaz continued his union work in hiding. He would be arrested in Madrid in 1925. In September 1927 he joined the Communist Party of Spain, already out of jail, together with a large part of the leaders of Seville anarchism.

At the IV Congress of the PCE, held in Seville in March 1932, he was elected a member of its Central Committee. A few months after the expulsion of the then general secretary, José Bullejos, at the request of the Communist International or Comintern, he was appointed general secretary. Díaz's arrival at the leadership of the PCE coincided with a generational renewal in the leadership of communism Spanish, as was the case with Antonio Mije, Jesús Hernández or Dolores Ibárruri. In addition to Díaz himself or Mije, among the Sevillian communists who also stood out was Saturnino Barneto Atienza, leader of the Seville port workers. José Díaz, Barneto was a former syndicalist from anarchism. Another prominent Sevillian communist was Manuel Delicado, who would later become a close associate of Díaz.

After a few years of radicalism, José Díaz promoted, from the summer of 1933, a rapprochement with other left-wing political forces to constitute the Popular Front together with the socialists and left-wing republicans. In June 1935 he gave a speech at the Cine Pardiñas in which he advocated the creation of a "Popular Antifascist Concentration". Shortly after, in the February 1936 elections, he was elected deputy for Madrid. Around this time, he also maintained contacts with the PSOE that led to the establishment of a body made up of both parties to coordinate the political actions of both.

In 1935 he was one of the Spaniards who attended the VII Congress of the Communist International.

Civil War

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, José Díaz focused all his activity on the PCE, not occupying any official position in the governmental structure of the Republic, prevailing in him the idea of the absolute priority of military victory, fighting against the measures taken in the factories and the countryside of some specific areas, through collectivizations by anarchist militias. During a meeting of the Central Committee of the PCE in March 1937, he declared that they were fighting "for a democratic Republic, for a democratic and parliamentary republic of a new type and with a deep social component."

However, his leadership within the PCE paled in contrast to the influence wielded by the envoy of the Communist International, the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, who became the actual head of the PCE during the war. Togliatti, in fact, he wrote many of the speeches given by Díaz. This was increased when, from 1937, the progressive deterioration of his health due to the cancer he suffered from made his figure relegated to the ascendancy of cadres such as Dolores Ibárruri and other prominent militants communists who distinguished themselves on the battlefield such as Enrique Líster or Juan Modesto.

Although the PCE accepted the directives of the Communist International without too much problem, José Díaz did not always agree with the leaders of the International. When in the spring of 1937 some international communist leaders raised the need to remove Francisco Largo Caballero as head of the Republican government, Díaz reacted against this idea, and protested what he considered an interference in Spanish internal affairs. A similar thing would happen again when, a few months later, the head of the NKVD, Alexander Orlov, raised the need to arrest Andrés Nin and dissolve the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The PCE maintained bad relations with the POUM, and Díaz went so far as to affirm that the party was a "band of spies and provocateurs at the service of international fascism". However, when he heard of Orlov's idea, He showed deep discomfort, harshly criticized this idea and came to clash with the representative of the Comintern in Spain, Victorio Codovilla. Díaz criticized the fact that the Soviets acted in Spain as foreign agents.

On a personal level, Díaz suffered several tragedies as a result of the war. During the first months of the war, both his sisters, Carmen and Concha, and his former sentimental partner, Teresa Santos, were shot in Seville by the rebel forces of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, due to their relationship with the General Secretary of the PCE.

Stay in the Soviet Union

Due to his serious illness —he suffered from stomach cancer— he had to move to the USSR, in December 1938, to undergo surgery in Leningrad. After the Republican defeat, Díaz would no longer return to Spain. In Moscow he worked as a member of the secretariat of the Communist International. During World War II, after the German invasion, he moved to various Soviet locations until he settled, in very poor health, in the fall of 1941 in Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. He would remain there until his suicide on March 20, 1942. The communist leader, unable to bear the pain of his illness, in a very advanced state, fell out of the window and died. Upon his death, Dolores Ibárruri assumed the PCE leadership.

For many years there was speculation about the fact that he had been assassinated because of his discrepancies with Stalin, especially authors such as Eduardo Comín Colomer. the USSR in the 1990s.

Works

• Three years of struggle.
• The War and the Popular Front (recollection of articles; editions.
• The teachings of Stalin, a luminous guide for the Spanish Communists