Revolution of 1934
The Revolution of 1934 or revolutionary general strike in Spain of 1934 —also known as the October Revolution of 1934— was a strike movement revolutionary that occurred between October 5 and 19, 1934 during the second biennium of the Second Spanish Republic. This movement was organized by the PSOE and the UGT, with Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto as the main leaders. It had the participation of the tiny Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and, in Asturias, with that of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT).) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).
The main outbreaks of the rebellion occurred in Catalonia and Asturias, the region where the most serious events took place. It was also important in the Galician industrial city of Ferrol (where 4 deaths and a high number of arrests were recorded), in the mining areas of Castilla la Vieja and the León Region, and cities and towns in the province of Valladolid.
According to the historian Julián Casanova, «nothing would be the same after October 1934». For Gabriele Ranzato with the October Revolution of 1934 «the fragile Spanish democracy suffered a severe blow. And the most indicative aspect of its fragility is that those who attacked it, putting it in grave danger, were largely the same political forces that had contributed to laying its foundations by founding the Second Republic and endowing it with a Constitution that, despite some limitations, could represent a guarantee of democratic coexistence». "The main protagonists of that attack on democracy were the socialists." According to Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García, the October Revolution "poisoned" political life and clouded the regime of the Second Republic with uncertainty. José Luis Martín Ramos has warned that "if it were not for the episode in Asturias" the October Revolution of 1934 "would have gone down in history as an absolute fiasco, similar to that of the repeated anarchist insurrections of previous years".
“The events that followed the "October Revolution" they deprived a posteriori of any justification, not only the methods used to defend the Republic, but also the exalted conviction that it was in extreme danger. Because not only the Constitution, but also the institutions and democratic praxis remained essentially unchanged. To the point of offering, within a much shorter period of time than an emergency regime —more than possible in view of what happened— would have allowed, the opportunity for the forces defeated in that circumstance to return to power through elections».
Background
After the general elections of November 1933, which were a disaster for the left, the leader of the Radical Republican Party Alejandro Lerroux (which had 102 deputies) was commissioned by the President of the Republic Alcalá-Zamora to form a "purely republican" government, but to gain the confidence of the Cortes, he needed the parliamentary support of the CEDA (115 deputies), who was left out of the cabinet (he continued without making a public declaration of adherence to the Republic), and of other center-right parties (the agrarians, 30 deputies, and the liberal-democrats, 9 deputies, who entered the government with one minister each). As Santos Juliá has pointed out, "backed by his electoral victory, José María Gil [CEDA leader] Robles set out to put into practice the three-phase tactic enunciated two years earlier: lend his support to a government headed by Lerroux and then take a step forward demanding entry into the government to later receive the commissioned to preside over it" and, once the presidency was obtained, to give an "authoritarian turn" to the Republic by building a regime similar to the corporatist dictatorships that had just been established in Portugal (1932) and Austria (1933). Electoral campaign Gil Robles had made it clear: «democracy is not an end for us, but a means to conquer a new State. When the time comes, Parliament either submits or we make it disappear»; «We are going to do an essay, perhaps the last, of democracy. We are not interested. We go to Parliament to defend our ideals; but if tomorrow Parliament is against our ideals, we will go against Parliament. After his victory in the elections, he issued the following threat: «Today, I will facilitate the formation of governments of the center; tomorrow, when the time comes, I will reclaim power, carrying out the constitutional reform. If they do not hand over power to us, and the facts show that there is no room for right-wing developments within the Republic, it will pay the consequences.” On December 19, 1933, Alejandro Lerroux presented his government. Thus began what Lerroux called "a Republic for all Spaniards".
The support of the CEDA for the Lerroux government was considered by the Alfonsino monarchists of Renovación Española and by the Carlists as a "betrayal", for which they began contacts with Mussolini's fascist Italy to provide them with money, weapons and logistical support to overthrow the Republic and restore the Monarchy. For their part, the left-wing Republicans and the Socialists considered the Radical-Cedista pact a "betrayal of the Republic" and the Socialists of the PSOE and UGT agreed that they would unleash a revolution if the CEDA entered the government, which was especially serious since the PSOE was one of the parties that had founded the Republic and had governed during the first two years. This was expressed in the same investiture debate by the spokesperson for the socialist parliamentary group Indalecio Prieto, as reflected in the Record of Sessions of December 20, 1933:
We say, sir. Lerroux and Sres. Deputies, from here, to the whole country that publicly contradicts the Socialist Party the commitment to unleash, in that case, the revolution.)
In this framework, the new government began to govern with the determined purpose of "rectifying" the course taken by the Republic under the left-wing government of the previous two years. The Lerroux government's claim was to "moderate" the reforms of the first biennium, not to annul them, with the aim of incorporating into the Republic the "accidentalist" right (which did not openly proclaim itself monarchical, although its sympathies were with the Monarchy, nor republican) represented by the CEDA and the Agrarian Party. Lerroux thought that a partial "rectification" of the reforms of the first biennium would be sufficient, maintaining fidelity to the basic principles proclaimed on April 14, but tensions soon arose because the CEDA and its allies wanted to go further in the "rectification". ».
Diego Martínez Barrio was the minister of the Lerroux government who first criticized the collaboration with the CEDA until the latter declared itself republican, and denounced the pressure exerted by it, which inclined the government to carry out an increasingly right-wing policy. At the end of February 1934, he left the government, forcing Lerroux to form a second government on March 3. With the departure of Martínez Barrio from the government, Lerroux had to give in more and more to the pressure of the CEDA, as could see with the crisis that broke out in April due to the approval of an amnesty law, which meant the release of all those involved in the coup d'état of August 1932, including General Sanjurjo, and which ended up causing the fall of the government. The solution to the crisis was to find a new radical leader to preside over the government: it was the Valencian Ricardo Samper, who formed the third radical government on April 28, 1934. He remained in power until early October CEDA demanded the entry of three of its ministers into the cabinet. One of the arguments used was the alleged lack of character of the Samper government to resolve the conflict with the Generalitat of Catalonia on the occasion of the approval by the Catalan Parliament of the Law on Farming Contracts and the subsequent declaration of unconstitutionality by the Court of Constitutional guarantees
The CEDA's pressure on the Samper government had not only come from parliament, but also through demonstrations of force such as the two massive rallies held in El Escorial and Covadonga, in which signs of fascist paraphernalia appeared, such as the exaltation of its leader José María Gil Robles —who had just attended the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg— with the shouts of "Boss, boss, boss!". However, Gil Robles always expressed himself publicly assuring that the constitutional reform would be carried out when the time came, conquering public opinion and ratifying it at the polls. At the same time, a growing portion of the socialists did not hide that they were preparing to speak out with arms before the probable arrival of the "fascists" to power. In August 1934, without any special reason for it, socialist milieus such as Renovación invoked the "armed revolution for the conquest of power".
Preparation of the revolutionary movement
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Since their expulsion from the government in September 1933 and the consequent break with the Republicans, and especially after the victory of the right in the elections of November 1933, the socialists abandoned the "parliamentary path" to achieve socialism and They opted for the insurrectional path. For many socialists, the legal struggle, reformism and the parliamentary Republic were no longer useful, the social revolution becoming their only objective. "Reformist socialism has failed," said Luis Araquistain, the main ideologue of "revolutionary socialism."
During the electoral campaign, Francisco Largo Caballero, the socialist leader who led the change in direction, had warned that democratic reformism was no longer serving the socialists:
It is not enough for the emancipation of the working class a bourgeois republic... That is good: the Socialist Party goes to the conquest of power, and goes to the conquest, as I say, legally if it can be. We wish it could be legally, in accordance with the Constitution, and, if not, as we can. And when that happens, it will be governed as the circumstances and conditions of the country allow it. What I confess is that if the battle is won it will not be to give power to the enemy.
In January 1934, after the electoral defeat, Largo Caballero said:
We went to a revolution and power fell into the hands of the Republicans and today there is in power a Republican government and already destroys what we did.
Largo Caballero was more explicit in a speech delivered in Madrid that same month of January:
I declare that we should go to it [arm], and that the working class will not fulfill its duty if it is not prepared for it. [...] It is necessary to be engraved in the consciousness of the working class that, in order to achieve triumph, it is necessary to fight in the streets with the bourgeoisie, without which the power cannot be conquered.
But for the insurrectionary path to be "legitimate," according to the Socialists, there had to be a "reactionary provocation," which they immediately related to the entry of the CEDA into the government. The day after the elections, Indalecio Prieto had said that if the CEDA entered the government, the Socialist Party "publicly [contracted] the commitment to unleash... the revolution." This change of direction coincided with the failure of the anarchist insurrection of December 1933 that closed the insurrectional cycle of the CNT during the Second Republic. "Just when the anarchists were exhausting the insurrectionary path and criticism of those "bold minority" actions appeared within the movement, the socialists announced the revolution."
Thus, as Santos Juliá has pointed out, «the socialists did not intend with their announcements of revolution to defend republican legality against an attack by the CEDA, but rather to respond to a supposed provocation in order to advance towards socialism. Partly for this reason and partly because they never believed that the President of the Republic and the Radical Party itself would allow the CEDA access to the government, they solemnly promised, from the Cortes and from the press, that in the event that this occurred, they would unleash a revolution. That decision was reinforced by the activism of the socialist youth and by the events of February 1934 in Austria, when the Social Christian chancellor [the equivalent of the Spanish CEDA] Dollfuss crushed a socialist rebellion by bombing the working-class neighborhoods of Vienna, events interpreted by the Spanish socialists as a warning of what could await them in case the CEDA came to the government".
Other events that also influenced socialist radicalization, according to Julián Casanova, were Hitler's rise to power in Germany in January 1933, the appearance of fascist violence by the Spanish Falange (in January 1934 there was an assault, in which several students were attacked, at the premises in Madrid of the leftist School University Federation, FUE, by a Falangist militia under the command of Matías Montero, who would be assassinated on February 9; the assassination of the socialist Juanita Rico in July by Falangist gunmen), and the verbal aggressiveness of Gil Robles with continuous statements against democracy and in favor of the "totalitarian concept of the State" and the "fascist" demonstrations of the youth of the CEDA (the Youth of Popular Action, JAP).
Gabriele Ranzato agrees with Julián Casanova's analysis and also highlights the role played by the figure of Gil Robles in the decision of the socialists to prepare a revolutionary insurrection. What the socialists feared from the CEDA was not only its ultra-clerical character but above all its inclination towards fascism, since Gil Robles had already made it clear during the electoral campaign: «democracy is not an end for us, but a means to to go to the conquest of a new State. When the time comes, Parliament either submits or we make it disappear. Shortly before, after attending the Nuremberg Congress of the Nazi Party held in September 1933 as an observer, Gil Robles had stated that there were common elements between that party and the CEDA such as “its eminently popular roots and actions; his exaltation of patriotic values; its clear anti-Marxist significance; his enmity with liberal and parliamentary democracy"—although he rejected "Nazi state worship"—. The fears of the socialists, alarmed after Hitler's accession to power in Germany by "legal" methods, increased when in February 1934 he it produced the crushing of the Viennese socialists by the Social Christian dictator Dollfuss. The newspaper El Socialista wrote on February 14: «The fascist front has been formed in Austria against the proletariat under the leadership of Jesuit clericalism, exactly as it is being formed in Spain with the participation of Gil Robles and for the same purposes." Later Largo Caballero justified his revolutionary plans by saying:
We cannot forget the example of Germany and how the most conscious, better prepared and trained part of the European proletariat has been destroyed. That the CEDA will follow the same tactical procedure as the German right ones, is evident. And we must advance the events... We have no other way than that of revolution, and our duty is to prepare it quickly, without loss of time, lest events overtake us and we have to lament our whole life a passivity like that of Otto Bauer.
At least at the beginning, the revolutionary general strike projected by the socialists was also a form of «defense of the republican legitimacy against the legality held by the radical Cabinet -Cedista [when it was formed], of defensive insurrection destined both to protect the working masses from fascism and to correct the course of the bourgeois Republic towards the revolutionary orientation that the Spanish labor movement had never renounced. By abandoning the "parliamentary route", "the socialists demonstrated the same repudiation of the representative institutional system that the anarchists had practiced in previous years".
The change of political orientation of the Socialists occurred after an intense internal debate that began as soon as the victory of the right wing in the November elections was known. From the outset two antagonistic positions were configured: the one held by Julián Besteiro, with the support of Trifón Gómez and Andrés Saborit, a supporter of following the parliamentary path with the aim of "defending the Republic and democracy"; and the one defended by Largo Caballero, with the support of Indalecio Prieto, who until then had maintained more moderate positions, in favor of the revolutionary turn.
In order for Julián Besteiro and his followers to accept the abandonment of the "parliamentary route", the PSOE leadership presented a "Base Project" with ten points drawn up by Indalecio Prieto on behalf of the executive, which Besteiro responded by presenting a "Base Proposal". In the first document, revolutionary measures (such as the nationalization of the land or the dissolution of the army, as a step prior to its democratic reorganization) predominated over reformist measures (in the administration, finances and industry, which would not be socialized even if the workers they would have a certain degree of control over the companies, along with "measures aimed at their moral and material improvement"), while the second document advocated the continuity of the reforms of the first biennium while maintaining the republican constitutional regime. In addition, the "caballeristas", for their part, to apply the "Bases Project", presented for debate five "specific points of action to be developed", in the first of which the will to organize "a frankly revolutionary movement with all possible intensity and using all available means". During the debates, Besteiro, addressing Prieto, said: "The program that you described yesterday [an immediate action plan to assault power] seems of such great temerity that if the proletariat manages to seize power under these conditions..., if it can hold onto power it will have to do things that I don't think the country can resist. That for me constitutes a true nightmare and it seems to me an obsession in others, truly disastrous for the UGT, for the Socialist Party and for our entire movement.
When on January 27, 1934, the UGT National Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the "Base Project", Besteiro had no choice but to resign from his position as UGT Secretary General, being replaced by Largo Caballero, who thus accumulated the presidency of the party and the general secretary of the union. It was the first step of the new revolutionary strategy. This is how Largo Caballero himself interpreted it:
Luck is cast, the Party and the General Union are already agreeing to organize a revolutionary movement with a specific program to get ahead of reactionary management.
On the other hand, in the following months, Largo Caballero will practically ignore the "Bases Project" and will focus on what he will call the "succinct program" of the revolutionary movement:
With political power in our hands we will override capitalist privileges and before any of them the right to exploit the workers. You want a more succinct program?
As soon as the moderates "besteiristas" A Mixed Commission (or "liaison commission") was formed, chaired by Largo Caballero and made up of two representatives from the PSOE (Juan Simeón Vidarte and Enrique de Francisco), two from the UGT (Pascual Tomás and José Díaz Alor) and two from the Socialist Youth (Carlos Hernández Zancajo and Santiago Carrillo), whose mission was to organize the revolutionary general strike and the armed insurrectional movement. Immediately the Mixed Commission convened in Madrid delegations from the provinces that received instructions to form "revolutionary committees" to local level coordinated by the "Provincial Boards", and to which they were told that "the triumph of the revolution will rest on the extension that it reaches and the violence with which it occurs". Likewise, in addition to groups to sabotage services such as electricity, gas or telephones, militias made up of "the most resolute individuals" should be set up and would receive military training from the "chiefs" of the military. to those who should obey. However, the organization and control of the conspiracy process was not the responsibility of the "liaison commission", which was limited to being a coordinating body, but "remained in the hands of local organizations and certain individual paintings".
The Mixed Commission entrusted Indalecio Prieto with the military preparation of the movement, with the supply of weapons and the recruitment of officers in the barracks as the main tasks. «The recognized capacity for work and, especially, the dense network of personal relationships that his multifaceted activity —journalist, deputy, minister— had allowed Indalecio Prieto to weave, gave him some initial success in attracting financial resources and in the acquisition of weapons. But Prieto's activity ultimately ended in resounding failure, since he was neither able to attract the army officers to the insurrection, nor was he able to send the acquired weapons to the "revolutionary committees." Three important arms depots —those stored in the Casa del Pueblo in Madrid, in the Ciudad Universitaria and in Cuatro Caminos, also in the capital— were discovered by the police and in mid-September 1934 the Civil Guard prevented the landing in Asturias of the cache of arms that the ship was carrying Turquesa. The ship, renamed Turquesa after being purchased from the shipowner José León de Carranza, was carrying an important consignment of weapons that had been acquired from the Consortium of Military Industries by businessman Horacio Echevarrieta, Prieto's friend, alleging that they were going to be exported to Abyssinia. Around nine o'clock at night on September 10, it arrived off the coast of San Esteban de Pravia and some eighty boxes of arms and ammunition were unloaded, which were taken to three trucks owned by the Provincial Council of Asturias, whose presidency was held by a socialist.. Two of them managed to take the merchandise but the third did not start and was surprised by the Carabineros. Prieto was on the verge of being arrested. José Luis Martín Ramos concludes: "the preparation of the uprising accumulated one blunder after another" and in its "military" aspect "it turned out to be a bad farce, with repeated seizures by the police of the few consignments of weapons that were obtained, anecdotes from fans, falling into the scammers' traps and the biggest episode of the Turquoise incident on the beaches of Asturias».
Neither was the political preparation for the uprising any better, as evidenced by the fact that the FNTT of UGT called a laborers' strike in June 1934 without foreseeing the consequences that this would have for the revolution that was being prepared. It served for the Minister of the Interior Salazar Alonso to unleash strong repression "that dismantled peasant socialist unionism" so that "the countryside would not be next to the city at the time of the revolutionary movement [and] the forces of public order would have one less front to attend to". The Socialists supported the creation of Workers' Alliances in which small proletarian organizations were integrated, such as the Communist Left or the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc, which were the first to have proposed the idea of forming "anti-fascist alliances"., but not the CNT, and only at the very end the reduced Communist Party of Spain, which until then had fought them harshly. It was the only step that Largo Caballero took in search of support —in February 1934 he met in Barcelona with Joaquín Maurín—, but he never considered the Alianzas Obreras "as backbone platforms of the revolutionary movement, but simply as instances of relationship between the organizations that could facilitate support for the socialist initiative." On the other hand, Largo Caballero never sought the support of left-wing Republicans. The caballerista Amaro del Rosal went so far as to affirm that "the republicans already produced aversion".
The occasion for the insurrection arose after the parliamentary holidays that ended on October 1, 1934, when the CEDA made it known that it was withdrawing its support for the center-right government of Ricardo Samper and that it demanded to be part of the government. José María Gil Robles said that since the constitution of the Chamber "the majority of it has never been reflected in the numerical composition of the Government and if the situation lasts longer than is convenient, the essence of the parliamentary regime and the very base will be distorted." of the State". Alcalá Zamora entrusted the resolution of the crisis to the leader of the Radical Republican Party Alejandro Lerroux who agreed to the CEDista demand and formed the new government on October 4 with the inclusion of three CEDA ministers ("Justice, Agriculture and Labor were the ministries granted by Lerroux to the right, ministries from which it was evident that one could not attack, even if one had wanted to, against the security of the regime"). That same day the Socialist Mixed Commission called the revolutionary general strike that would begin at midnight on October 5. The CNT, which had recently led the anarchist insurrection of December 1933, refrained from supporting the call, except in Asturias.
The left-wing republican parties expressed their rejection of the entry into the government of ministers from the «accidentalist» CEDA («the monstrous fact of handing over the Government of the Republic to its enemies is a betrayal», declared the Republican Left) and they proclaimed that they were breaking “all solidarity with the current institutions of the regime” (Izquierda Republicana went even further, affirming “its decision to resort to all means in defense of the Republic”), but they did not join the socialist insurrection. He also showed his rejection of the "policy of handing over the Republic to its enemies" by the Conservative Republican Party of Miguel Maura.
Development of the insurrectionary strike
The October Revolution in Madrid, Andalusia, Extremadura, La Mancha and Aragon
In Madrid, the UGT declared a general strike at midnight on October 4-5, which would continue for the next eight days with a high rate of participation, despite the fact that the CNT did not support her. However, the insurrectional action failed, and the timid attempts to attack the Presidency of the Government and the other centers of power, after two hours of shooting, were dominated with relative ease by the Government of the Republic, which imprisoned the revolted. On October 12, Madrid returned to normality. The reason for the failure of the insurrection in Madrid, in addition to the lack of "military" of it (perhaps naively trusting that the soldiers of the Madrid garrison would join the rebellion), was the lack of a leadership that would transform the general strike into an insurrection, despite the fact that the socialist National Revolutionary Committee had its headquarters in Madrid. "The capital appeared as the place where the strikers were abandoned to their fate without, in the end, there being an insurrectionary army to lead. Thus, there were striking workers and very active youth groups, but no insurrectionary movement. As Santos Juliá has pointed out, "the insurgents did not know what to do with their pistols and machine guns and the strikers did not know what to do with their strike..., while the leaders returned home to wait patiently for the arrival of the police"&# 34;.
In "Latifundia Spain," (Andalusia, Extremadura and La Mancha), day laborers, exhausted by the violent government repression on the occasion of the general strike in June, it was difficult for them to support the new strike. So these three regions were the big "absent" of the October revolution, although in a few localities there was an attempt at insurrection. This was the case of the Albacete town of Villarrobledo (where a column of peasants seized the casino where they resisted until they learned of the failure in Madrid, for which their leader, the secretary of the mixed jury, committed suicide while his companions sang La Internacional), or Algeciras and Prado del Rey, in the province of Cádiz, La Carolina, Sabiote, Navas de San Juan, Marmolejo or Santo Tomé, among others, in the province of Jaén, and Teba, in the province of Malaga. In all of them there were clashes with the Civil Guard, assaults on the town halls, fires in the courts and churches.
In Aragón, the fundamental reason for failure was the same as in Extremadura, Andalusia and La Mancha: the government repression of the peasant strike in June. The CNT did not join the movement there either, exhausted after the last general strike that it had called alone in April-May 1934 and which had lasted thirty-six days, in addition to the fact that, according to the Local Federation of Trade Unions, which had some twenty thousand members, the socialist project put the conquest of power before the fight against capitalism and fascism. The call was only seconded by some sectors of the socialist workers in Zaragoza, where the CNT was hegemonic, and in the Teruel mining area. However, there were some outbreaks of insurrection in Mallén and Tarazona, towns where the Town Hall was occupied and the red flag was hoisted on their balconies and the Civil Guard barracks were besieged, and in the Cinco Villas region, where the government it took him four days to put down the rebellion.
The October Revolution in Navarra, La Rioja, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria and Castilla y León
The repression of the June strike was also decisive in the failure of the insurrection in La Rioja, where there was only a violent confrontation with the Civil Guard in Casalarreina and some agitation in Logroño, and in Navarra, where the protest manifested itself in archaic forms, such as the destruction of agricultural machinery or the burning of barns, due to the fact that seven thousand peasants had been detained or deported in this region. In the cities of Pamplona, Tafalla, Alsasua (where the only fatality in the province occurred: on the 8th in a clash with the Civil Guard, a striker was killed) and Tudela there was some follow-up to the strike, accompanied by sabotage to railways and electrical and telephone lines.
In Valencia, where in 1934 the UGT had ousted the CNT as the first union force, a general strike was declared in the most important urban centers, causing armed confrontations with the forces of public order, especially in the south (Alicante, Elda, Novelda, Elche, Villena and other towns). In the city of Valencia, port workers had a special role and in the nearby town of Alcudia de Carlet, libertarian communism was proclaimed.
In the Balearic Islands, due to the induced effect of the uprising in Barcelona, there were two insurrectionary strikes, in Lluchmayor and Manacor, where, according to a contemporary chronicler of the events, "they it stopped on October 6 and 7, but in view of the fact that the movement did not catch on in Palma and the decisive influence that, on the other hand, produced the capitulation of Catalonia, the order to return to work was given on Sunday night ".
In Cantabria, the insurrectional strike took place from the 5th to the 16th. Although there were clashes with the Civil Guard and the police in the port of Santander and in the Nueva Montaña factory, the epicenter was the industrial area of Torrelavega and the Besaya basin. There were bitter combats in Torrelavega, Corrales de Buelna and, especially, in Reinosa, a city where the Government used the army with forces sent from Burgos. Normality did not return to Torrelavega until the 18th and the final balance was eleven dead in the region.
There were also armed confrontations in mining areas in the north of Castilla y León, both in Palencia and León. In Barruelo de Santullán, where the miners occupied the Civil Guard barracks, artillery had to be used to put down the rebellion. In Guardo, after burning down the Civil Guard barracks and occupying the Town Hall where the civil guards and the directors of the mining companies were imprisoned, a socialist economy was organized in which the revolutionary committee chaired by the mayor suppressed money and issued vouchers instead. The government had to resort again to artillery, and also to aviation, to put down the insurrection. The town was occupied by the Palencia cycling battalion.
The insurrection in the mining area of León was linked to the Revolution of Asturias, where the plan was, once the Civil Guard barracks and the Town Halls had been dominated, to encircle the capital and occupy it. But the project failed because the Asturian insurgents could not send reinforcements and because of the determined action of the civil governor of León. So the revolution intensified at the local level, where in towns like Villablino, Bembibre or Sabero the "socialist republic" and an embryonic war economy subservient to the needs of the "revolutionary army" that was organized.
Outside the mining areas of Palencia and León, there were only a few clashes with the Civil Guard in Medina del Campo, Medina de Rioseco and Tudela de Duero.
The October Revolution in the Basque Country
After Asturias and Catalonia, the place where the events of October 1934 were most serious was in the Basque Country. There, during the week that the insurrectionary strike lasted (from October 5 to 12), there were forty fatalities (most of them insurrectionists), including a notable figure Marcelino Oreja Elósegui, deputy for Vizcaya in 1931 and 1933 and prominent traditionalist militant, whose murder in Mondragón shocked the entire Basque Country.
The value that the socialists granted to the Basque Country for the triumph of the revolution in all of Spain is explained by the strategic importance of the mining and industrial zone of Bilbao and of Éibar, the main arms manufacturing center of the country (with some thirty factories, two of them socialist cooperatives), in addition to the weight of Vizcaya as one of the historical bastions of Spanish socialism and the political base of Indalecio Prieto, one of the leaders of the insurrectionary movement. However, the socialists could not count with the PNV, the first Basque party after the November 1933 elections, nor with its Solidarity of Basque Workers union (SOV) because they were two Catholic organizations opposed to the idea of socialism. Hence, as soon as the insurrection began, the leadership of the PNV ordered its members to "refrain from participating in any kind of movement and pay attention to the orders that, if necessary, would be given by the authorities”.
Although in Álava the “revolutionary general strike” called by the Socialists had little follow-up, in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa there was an insurrectional strike that lasted between October 5 and 12, and in some points, like the Vizcaya mining area, the conflict lasted until Monday, October 15.
The intervention of the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard and the Army put down the revolution with a toll of at least forty dead, including some local Carlist leaders from Éibar and Mondragón and the traditionalist deputy Marcelino Oreja Elósegui, dead by the leftists, and several strikers, killed in the armed clashes.
Proclamation of the Catalan Federated State
In Barcelona, the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia, chaired by Lluís Companys, from the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), proclaimed the "Catalan State of the Spanish Federal Republic" on the night of October 6:
Catalans: The monarchist and fascist forces that intend to betray the Republic for a while have achieved their goal and have stormed power. The parties and men who have made public demonstrations against the narrow freedoms of our land, the political nuclei that constantly preach hatred and war to Catalonia, today constitute the support of the current institutions [...]. All the genuinely republican forces of Spain and the advanced social sectors, without distinction or exception, have risen in arms against the bold fascist attempt. [...] In this solemn hour, on behalf of the people and the parliament, the presiding government assumes all the powers of power in Catalonia, proclaims the Catalan State of the Spanish Federal Republic and, in establishing and fortifying the relationship with the leaders of the general protest against fascism, invites them to establish in Catalonia the provisional government of the Republic, which will find in our Catalan people the most generous urge for fraternity in the common Federal Republic free. [...] Catalonia links its flag and calls on everyone to fulfill the duty and absolute obedience to the Government of Generality, which, from this moment on, breaks all relations with the false institutions.
This event led to the proclamation of the state of war a few hours later, published in the official gazette of the Ministry of War, and the intervention of the army, commanded by General Domingo Batet, who quickly mastered the situation after a few armed confrontations —in which some forty people were killed—, the arrest of Companys and the flight to France of Josep Dencàs, councillor of Public Order. Catalan autonomy was suspended by the Government, which also appointed a Consell de la Generalitat with which it replaced the Generalitat of Catalonia and in which different leaders of the Regionalist League and the Radical Republican Party participated. Manuel Azaña was also arrested, who happened to be in Barcelona to attend the funeral of former cabinet minister Jaume Carner.
Revolution of Asturias
In Asturias, the CNT maintained a position more prone to the formation of workers' alliances than in other areas of Spain. In this way, this organization and the UGT had signed a pact in March with which the FSA, the federation of the PSOE in Asturias, agreed, forging the workers' alliance embodied in the UHP that emerged the previous month. The UHP would be joined by other labor organizations such as the BOC, the Communist Left and finally the PCE.
The miners had weapons and dynamite and the revolution was very well organized. The Asturian Socialist Republic is proclaimed in Gijón and the Civil Guard posts, churches, town halls, etc. are attacked, and after three days almost all of Asturias is in the hands of the miners, including the arms factories of Trubia and La Vega. Ten days later, some 30,000 workers form the Ejército Rojo Asturiano. There were acts of looting and violence not attributable to the revolutionary organization. But the repression was very harsh where the revolutionaries found resistance. From the government they consider that the revolt is a full-fledged civil war, even unaware that the miners in Mieres are beginning to consider the possibility of a march on Madrid.
The government takes a series of strong measures. At Gil-Robles's request, informing Lerroux that he does not trust the Chief of Staff, General Masquelet, Generals Goded and Franco (who had experience having participated in the repression of the 1917 general strike in Asturias) are called to that they direct the repression of the rebellion from the General Staff in Madrid. They recommend that Legion and Regular troops be brought in from Morocco. The government accepts his proposal and the radical Diego Hidalgo, Minister of War, formally justifies the use of these mercenary forces, in the fact that he was concerned about the alternative that young peninsular recruits died in the confrontation, so the solution adopted seems very acceptable.
During the revolution of 1934, the city of Oviedo was largely devastated. Among other buildings, the University building, whose library kept bibliographic collections of extraordinary value that could not be recovered, or the Campoamor theater were burned down. The Holy Chamber in the Cathedral was also dynamited, where important relics taken to Oviedo, when it was a court, from the South of Spain disappeared.
General Eduardo López Ochoa, commanding the government military forces, went to support the besieged troops in Oviedo, and Colonel Juan Yagüe with his legionaries and with the support of aviation. The subsequent repression was very harsh. It was carried out by mercenaries whose merit was having been merciless without limit against the Riffians. They used the same methods of repression against insurgent workers as against the fierce and aggressive Rif guerrillas. More than 1,000 workers died, another 2,000 were injured, and thousands more were imprisoned. The challenge was not small but the response was absolutely excessive and many historians consider it the turning point. After the thousands of deaths in Asturias, the parliamentary path would be much more difficult.[citation required]
In La Felguera, a place in Langreo, and in the neighborhood of El Llano in Gijón there were brief experiences of libertarian communism:
In the neighborhood of El Llano, we proceeded to regularize life according to the postulates of the CNT: socialization of wealth, abolition of authority and capitalism. It was a brief experience full of interest, since the revolutionaries did not dominate the city. [...] A procedure similar to that of Langreo was followed. For the organization of consumption, a Committee of Abbots was established, with street delegates, established in the grocery stores, which controlled the number of neighbors in each street and proceeded to the distribution of food. This street control allowed us to easily establish the amount of bread and other products needed. The Committee on Abbots had general control over available stocks, particularly flour.Manuel Villar. Anarchism in the insurrection of Asturias: CNT and FAI in October 1934
Serious events also occurred in the Palencia mining basin. On October 5, the miners of Barruelo de Santullán rose up in arms and took control of the town, causing the death of a lieutenant colonel and two members of the Civil Guard, as well as the director of the Marist school. In these confrontations they died also the socialist mayor and four miners. In Guardo, the miners took the assault and set fire to the Civil Guard barracks; during the confrontations, an agent lost his life. The arrival of the army caused the revolutionaries to flee into the mountains, who subsequently surrendered and turned themselves in to the authorities. In the rest of Spain, there were some incidents that were quickly suppressed by the Republican law enforcement.
It is estimated that, in the fifteen days of the revolution, there were between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths in all of Spain (although some authors speak of 1,000 and even 4,000) of whom about 320 were civil guards, soldiers, assault guards and police officers; and about 35 priests. The city of Oviedo was practically destroyed and it is estimated that in all of Spain between 15,000 and 30,000 people were arrested and put on trial for participating in the revolution. The data is difficult to verify due to the strong censorship that was applied.
In 1937 the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo Durán, responsible for the repression, entrusted his opinion to an American journalist who was a war correspondent for the Associated Press agency:
I know how a stalked criminal should feel—he said, smiling faintly. But I am not a criminal; I only fulfilled my duty as war minister when I ordered the army to attack leftist extremists. Since when is the fulfilment of duty a crime? If I had to face myself again with the same situation, I wouldn't hesitate to behave just like that, even knowing what I expected.Edward Knoblaugh. Last hour: war in Spain
Consequences
Balance of victims
According to official figures given by the General Directorate of Security at the beginning of 1935, the total number of victims was 1,335 dead and 2,951 wounded. The deceased were distributed as follows: 1,051 countrymen, 100 civil guards, 19 members of the security and surveillance forces, 51 assault guards, 16 police officers and 98 soldiers. Subsequent studies have only slightly increased the official figures. Referring exclusively to the Revolution of Asturias, the historian Julián Casanova estimates that during the combats that followed the armed uprising, 1,100 people died, including those who supported the insurrection, in addition to some 2,000 wounded, and there were some 300 deaths among the security forces and the army; 34 priests and religious were assassinated. Casanova coincides almost completely with the figures given some time ago by Hugh Thomas, who placed the number of fatalities during the Asturian Revolution at between 1,500 and 2,000 people, of which some 320 would correspond to the security forces and the Army. A study published in 1972 by the Historical Service of the Civil Guard on the number of victims among the security forces throughout Spain coincided with Thomas' estimate for Asturias, since it put the number of deaths at 321 (284 according to the official report of the DGS of 1935). He distributed them as follows: 111 from the Civil Guard (100 in the 1935 report); Army, 129 (98 in the 1935 report); Carabineros, 11 (16 in the 1935 report); Security and Assault Corps, 70 (same figure as the 1935 report).
The right-wing interpretation of the “October Revolution”
In the description of the events of October, especially those that occurred in Asturias, the parties and the newspapers of the right (such as ABC, spokesperson for the monarchist right of Renovación Española; or El Debate, linked to the "accidentalist" Catholic right of the CEDA) tended to use "mythical-symbolic" schemes when describing the revolutionaries as "beasts", as non-human beings whose only instinct is to kill and destroy, so their final destiny is to be dead or imprisoned. This expression was even used by the liberal newspaper El Sol, which asked for clemency for those who had acted like men, and "for capable beasts of monstrous events that not even a degenerate is capable of imagining. The Sun only asks for tremendous, implacable, definitive punishment." Honorio Maura Gamazo in the newspaper ABC on October 16 described the Asturian insurgents as " scum", "rottenness" and "garbage" and referred to "those women and children with their throats cut and barbarically outraged by some disgusting jackals who deserve neither to be Spanish nor human beings".
As for the events, especially those in Asturias, the right-wing saw them as a mere desire to destroy, especially the holiest of Spanish tradition, their religion and culture —alluding to the Cathedral of Oviedo and the University—, and finally Spain itself. ABC, in its editions of October 10 and 17, described them as a "brutal, bloodthirsty and devastating company", whose authors were possessed of "vile instincts of the most repugnant materialism", and were the authors of "vandal crimes" that constitute a "macabre Marxist explosion".
The essential element on which the right-wing perception of the "October Revolution" was to consider it as a work of the "Anti-Spain", of the "Anti-Patria", in a "mythical-symbolic" vision in which Good is identified with the Homeland, Spain, against which Evil fights, the Anti-Patria or Anti-Spain, defining the Patria from an essentialist point of view as something alien to the will of the citizens and identifying it, of course, with the values and ideas of the right. «Who defines the will of the Homeland, through which organ his desire is expressed and his voice made heard, is something that is not considered: it is taken for granted that this will is none other than the perennial traditional Spain, the missionary, conquering, unitary and Tridentine" and thus "those who do not serve it or are faithful to it because they do not assume or practice its system of values are expelled from it physically, metaphorically, politically or legally, depending on the case. From there comes the final identification between the Homeland and the Right".
The right-wing conception of «the Homeland» was expressed very well by Calvo Sotelo in the speech delivered in Parliament on November 6 when he defined the «Homeland» as «something more than a territory, something more than a language community'; that something else was a "moral heritage of traditions, institutions, principles and essences". Thus, the revolutionary events were understood as a "grievance inflicted on Spain", as a "betrayal of the Homeland", cheered on by the "Stinking press of the Anti-Patria". By defeating the revolution "Spain recovered itself".
This idea of Spain materialized in the relationship between the Homeland and the Army, as Calvo Sotelo also expressed in the same speech:
It is necessary, in a word, that we consider that the Army is the same honor of Spain. Mr. Azaña said the Army is nothing but the armed arm of the Homeland. False, absurd, sophistical: The Army has now seen that it is much more than the arm of the Homeland; I will not say that it is the brain, because it should not be, but it is much more than the arm, it is the spine, and if it is broken, if it bends, if it creaks, breaks, folds or crunches with it Spain
Honorio Maura wrote «Today, all of Spain is in uniform» (ABC, October 16) and Ramiro de Maeztu, the same day also on ABC:
The Army always saves us, because it is unity around a banner, because it is the hierarchy, because it is the discipline, because it is the power in its most eminent manifestation. In short, because it is civilization... Because the Army is Spain, it wants to destroy the revolution.
On the other hand, the repressive action of the troops that put down the uprising is barely mentioned. The destructions in "Asturias, the martyr", and especially in "Oviedo, the martyr" were attributed exclusively to the revolutionaries.
Lastly, the anti-republican right took advantage of the insurrection of the left to incite an "authentic and saving revolution for Spain", since the "red-separatist" revolution of October, as they called it, was the verification that the "revolution anti-Spanish" was on the march and that it could only be defeated by force. Honorio Maura wrote on ABC on October 20:
The genuine and saving revolution for Spain... the good, the holy, the definitive, which can return to Spain days of peace, glory and prosperity... has begun. And we have to go on and get to the end. It is necessary to sweep everything that is antipatria, extranjerismo, exotic doctrine (...). We are (...) From crosses and swords our past is made, and on the cross and swords our future must be established. It's our Spanish destination.
On November 6, Calvo Sotelo specified the proposal in a speech in Parliament:
[The] disappearance of the democratic system, replaced by a civic-military dictatorship..., a profound reform of political representation, of which the options of the left and center would be excluded, until they reached a model of corporate suffrage. And finally, culminating in the transition, the call for a popular referendum that confirmed the establishment of the neo-traditionalist monarchy and the totalitarian New State.
In conclusion, as the historian Julio Gil Pecharromán has pointed out, «October reaffirmed in the right, and especially in the monarchists, the conviction that if the State had reacted on time this time, it had not been due to the effectiveness of the political institutions [democratic republicans], but by the determination of the Armed Forces to act quickly and decisively. The Army —the backbone of the Homeland, as José Calvo Sotelo called it then— thus constituted the last guarantee, the reserve of the traditional forces against revolutionary change, which the parliamentary regime seemed incapable of averting». An assessment that is largely shared by Gabriele Ranzato, who considers that the events in Asturias were "not only an anticipation, but also an important premise of the future Civil War." «That withering test of revolution, brief but extraordinarily bloody, continued to obsess, with all its images of atrocities, true or invented, all those who, due to economic and social position, political convictions and religious sentiments, could fear being victims of its reply. », concludes Ranzato.
The government's reaction and right-wing pressure: repression
The radical-CEDA government of Alejandro Lerroux came under heavy pressure from the right-wing groups who demanded that the insurgents be harshly punished and that action be taken to prevent them from having a second chance. On October 8, the leader of Renovación Española José Calvo Sotelo published an article in the newspaper La Época in which he said that once the revolution had been dominated, "only one thing is missing: that the government knows how to take advantage of the victory." achieved by the armed elements of the country". "For God's sake, let the hour of decision begin at once! The country demands scalpel, pruning, relentless surgery. If there were not, those who now turn out to be cover-ups for the latest attempt could be branded as unaware perpetrators of the coming one. And Spain demands harsh punishment for the last one, so that those poisonous and fratricidal plants that have already made so much blood flow will not resound in our soil for a long time...».
On October 9, a session of the Cortes took place in which neither the socialist deputies nor the left-wing republicans attended —two days before the rebellion of the Catalan Generalitat had ended and in Asturias, the only insurrectional focus that was still holding out, the Army of Africa troops sent to crush the revolution had begun to disembark. As soon as the Government entered the chamber, it was received with a resounding ovation and shouts of "Long live Spain!" by the deputies present standing up, except those of the Basque Nationalist Party who remained seated. This attitude was reproached by Calvo Sotelo, who pounced on the Basque leader José Antonio Aguirre giving him two slaps in "response" to the "aggressive" attitude he showed when the monarchist leader made him ugly for not having shouted "Long live Spain!" The following day, the newspaper ABC published that "the entire Spanish spirit was present" in Parliament (it did not seem remarkable that only the center-right and the right had attended the session).
During the revolution and in the days that followed, some thirty thousand prisoners were taken throughout Spain. The Asturian mining areas were subjected to harsh repression by the military, first (there were summary executions of suspected insurrectionists), and later by the Civil Guard, headed by the latter by Commander Lisardo Doval. The detainees were tortured as a result of which several of them died. Numerous left-wing leaders were also arrested, including the Socialist Revolutionary Committee headed by Francisco Largo Caballero. "Without needing to be the bloodbath invoked by some, the repression was enough to dismantle the entire opposition, which had participated in the rebellion and the one that does not, with their meeting spaces closed or under control, their leaders fled, prosecuted or in a defensive clandestinity".
The right-wing press —especially the monarchist daily ABC and the “accidentalist” Catholic newspaper El Debate— launched an intense campaign encouraging the intensification of repression and demanding reprisals especially for the murder at the hands of the Asturian insurgents of 34 religious and several civil guards and countrymen of conservative ideology. The center-right leader Melquiades Álvarez came to ask that the policy of Adolphe Thiers in the repression of the Commune of Paris during which thousands of communnards were shot. So did the leader of the extreme right José Calvo Sotelo who in a speech in the Cortes stated that "the 40,000 executions of the Commune ensured sixty years of social peace".
The right-wing's initial enthusiastic support for the government was radically changed by the issue of death sentences. Military jurisdiction was applied to the insurgents and the war councils acted immediately, issuing numerous death sentences. On October 18, the Government, in a meeting headed by the President of the Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora himself, discussed the death sentence of Commander Enrique Pérez Farrás. Alcalá Zamora, contrary to the opinion of some ministers, opposed the confirmation of the sentence, alleging that this would make him a "martyr" and recalling that those sentenced to death for the coup d'état of August 1932 not only had not been executed but had been amnestied twenty months later. The three CEDA ministers resigned in disagreement with the position of the President of the Republic, but Gil Robles convinced them not to do so because he feared that Alcalá Zamora would call new elections if the Government did not hold. November Alejandro Lerroux communicated at the exit of the Council of Ministers that of the 23 death sentences received so far, the commutation of 21 had been proposed to the President of the Republic. Five days earlier, the President of the Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora had managed to have Lerroux endorsed the commutation of almost all of the death sentences to life imprisonment, despite the strong opposition of the CEDA (Gil Robles came to probe the possibility of a solution by force" by the army to restore the "violated legality by the President" of the Republic") and the party of Melquiades Álvarez.
On the same day, November 5, that the commutation of the 21 death sentences was communicated, there was a session in the Cortes. The president of the monarchist Spanish Renovation Antonio Goicoechea intervened to oppose them and to reproach the president of the Government for having squandered the "spontaneous, disinterested, enthusiastic vote of confidence" that he had been given in the session of October 9. The next day it was the turn of José Calvo Sotelo. After attributing the revolutionary movement, now definitively stifled, to the "separatist ferment" and the "communist ferment", the leader of the anti-republican right wing criticized the actions of General López Ochoa for having agreed the surrender of the Asturian miners, since he considered it unacceptable that an agreement had been reached "between the representative of the public Power and a faction that had committed the most villainous crimes recorded in the history of all countries." He then demanded the Government to act with "energy", "which will never be cruel if protected by law", "to overcome, to devastate, to crush" and thus prevent "another similar criminal wave". a dictatorship”, which was based on the idea of class struggle. "The class struggle, Members of Parliament, is the pedagogy of hatred" and the "aristocratic workers" of Asturias ("the social revolution has been declared precisely in a province where the proletarians enjoyed a standard of privileged life and could be considered as the aristocrats of the Spanish proletariat") "they embarked on this adventure because they have been drunk, they have been poisoned with the virus of the class struggle". He then proposed "suppressing" the class struggle, which no Liberal State could achieve it because it would only be achieved "by subordinating freedom to the Homeland": "I say that the classic, old, flabby and archaic concept of freedom that is embodied in your Constitution is useless". that "this Republic" "has now been saved by a few generals, chiefs, officers and soldiers", which demonstrated "that the Army is the very honor of Spain" and "that it is much more than the arm of the Fatherland... It is the backbone, and if it breaks, if it bends, if it creaks, it breaks, it bends, or Spain creaks". unfortunate" ("two unfortunate common criminals") and offering to initiate the impeachment proceedings of the President of the Republic, for having "violated the Constitution" and having "trampled on the spirit represented by this House".
The harsh criticism leveled against the previous president of the government Ricardo Samper (whom Calvo Sotelo held politically responsible for the revolution for "the inconceivable softness, for the immeasurable weakness with which he acted at the forefront of the country's destinies") and against the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo (whom Calvo Sotelo accused of propagating "communist and Marxist literature" through the Zenit publishing house, of which he was supposedly a shareholder) had an effect and both were forced to resign on November 16, their respective ministries in the Government of Lerroux.
The next to be prosecuted were the president of the Catalan Generalitat Lluís Companys and the rest of the "consellers" who were sentenced to 30 years in prison each for "military rebellion". As for the Asturian revolutionaries, 17 death sentences were handed down, of which only two were carried out (an army sergeant who had gone over to the side of the insurgents and a worker accused of various murders). Precisely the commutation of the death sentence of two of the socialist leaders of the "Revolution of Asturias", Ramón González Peña and Teodomiro Menéndez on March 29, 1935, caused a serious crisis within the government, since the three CEDA ministers, the agrarian and the liberal-democrats voted against, and presented their resignation.
But the government never considered amnesty for the thousands of detainees in jail, many of whom had been sentenced for the mere fact of having supported the strike but without having participated in the armed insurrection. On the other hand, many intellectuals, such as Miguel de Unamuno, denounced the violence and torture that the prisoners had suffered, achieving wide repercussions in the international press. Although "perhaps what most impacted public opinion was the persecution to which Azaña was subjected".
The trial against Manuel Azaña
On Tuesday, October 9, while in Madrid the right-wing acclaimed the Lerroux government in the Cortes with shouts of "Long live Spain!", the police arrested the former president of the Government Manuel Azaña in Barcelona, who was hospitalized the following day on the prison ship "Ciudad de Cádiz" anchored in the port of Barcelona. There he gave his first statement before General Sebastián Pozas, who was convinced that Azaña had not participated in the rebellion of the Generalitat of Catalonia. Despite this, the president of the Lerroux Government, euphoric, affirmed that same day 10 before the press that Azaña had been intervened with "a very extensive and interesting documentation, the documentation of a politician who is going to carry out a company as important as the one that took Azaña to Barcelona" (which turned out to be completely false). On October 13 The Attorney General of the Republic filed a complaint for the crime of rebellion before the Supreme Court, which was the competent body to try a deputy like Azaña, and requested that the petition be requested from the Cortes in order to be tried. On October 31, the warships "Alcalá Galiano" were transferred to Azaña first, and later the "Sánchez Barcáiztegui", where he was treated with greater consideration. There he received hundreds of letters and telegrams of solidarity and support every day.
While he was a prisoner, an important group of intellectuals addressed an open letter to the Government on November 14 denouncing the "persecution" of which Azaña is subjected, but censorship prevented the letter from appearing in the newspapers. It was the first time that the action taken against Azaña was publicly described as "persecution". They signed the letter "To public opinion" among others Azorín, Luis Bagaria, José Bergamín, Alejandro Casona, Américo Castro, Antonio Espina, Oscar Esplá, León Felipe, García Mercadal, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gregorio Marañón, Isabel de Palencia, Valle- Inclán and Luis de Zulueta. The "accidentalist" Catholic newspaper El Debate defined the signatories as "that false intellectuality and without Spanish content".
On November 28, the Cortes granted the request by 172 votes (radicals, cedistas, agrarians and monarchists) against 20 (with the socialists and the republican left absent). But a month later, on December 24, the Supreme Court dismissed the complaint for lack of evidence and ordered Azaña's immediate release. On December 28, Azaña was released after a dubious legal detention that had lasted ninety days "Azaña, persecuted, rose to a symbolic figure of the oppressed, acquiring a popularity that he had never had until then."
The reaction of the Spanish Military Union (UME)
The first leaflet of the Spanish Military Union (UME) that was distributed among the Spanish military was dedicated precisely to the «October Revolution». In it, the UME attributed the defeat of the revolution to "a handful of Spanish chiefs, officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers who had the heroism of uniting and giving battle to the other anti-Spanish part of the Army, criminally involved in the attack against the Homeland". and that it was made up of "committed masons". That "handful of Spanish chiefs, officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers" constituted the "authentic Spanish Army", "the Spanish Army that saved Spain from the communist and Masonic October Revolution!", while the State was "in the hands of cowards and traitors." That “authentic Spanish Army” embodied the “eternal Spain” as opposed to the “eternal Anti-Spain”. The UME denounced that Spain was the object of the "appetite of foreigners and insatiable, vindictive sects", an "Enemy" that "promotes separatism, promotes regional nationalism, and the ruin of Religious Sentiment and the ruin of the Spanish Family and the Capital and Labor, and contempt for the Spanish language, and the discredit and tares of our armed forces and of everything in Spain that has meant and still means UNITY, UNION». That "implacable Enemy" was defeated by the Army in October but "seeks revenge", "prepares a new attack", "filtered into the highest powers of the republic, into the most decisive springs of command and propaganda." «You see, Spaniards, how no genuine culprit of a crime against the Homeland is shot! Neither Pérez Farrás, nor Largo, nor Prieto, nor Azaña, nor Teodomiro, nor Peña. Only the poor little revolutionary deceived, defenseless and anonymous!». The leaflet ended by calling for «An Army without traitors! An Army of heroic and unforgettable Spaniards!"
The interpretation of the left of the «October Revolution»
The republican and socialist left did not condemn the insurrection, but rather justified it by claiming that "enemies of the Republic" had been allowed into the government. This was reason enough to provoke enormous ideological polarization in the subsequent elections February 1936 and served as a pretext for the left to delegitimize any option to center the Republic and attract a part of the Catholic right to the system, which could establish the regime in the future. Neither was the revolution interpreted as a failure or a mistake that deserved self-criticism or correction, but rather they claimed it as an act of legitimate defense.
The Revolution was considered by many proletarians as a "heroic" undertaking turned into a myth "thanks to the sacrificial appendage of harsh and long repression", which "would continue to feed hopes of redemption and a spirit of revenge". In the civil war, already in exile, Indalecio Prieto himself recognized that the revolution had only served to "deepen the political abyss that divided Spain". In a speech delivered in Mexico City in 1942, Prieto said the following:
I plead guilty to my conscience, to the Socialist Party and to the whole of Spain, to my participation in that revolutionary movement. I declare it as guilt, as sin, not as glory. I am free of responsibility in the genesis of that movement, but I have full responsibility in its preparation and development.
Historiographical debates
The relationship between the 1934 Revolution and the civil war
Historiography has debated a lot about these events. Some authors point out the importance of these events in the subsequent Spanish Civil War of 1936. However, the most recent historiography has tended to rule out that the "October Revolution" can be considered as the "prelude" or the "first battle" of the Civil War. This is the point of view, for example, of Julián Casanova: «Posing that with the October insurrection any possibility of constitutional coexistence in Spain was broken, a 'prelude' or 'first battle' of the civil war, is to place a worker insurrection, defeated and repressed by the republican order, on the same plane as a military uprising carried out by the armed forces of the State. The Republic always repressed insurrections and imposed legitimate order against them. Both anarchists and socialists abandoned the insurrectional path after October 1934 and the chances of trying again in 1936 were practically nil, with their organizations divided and greatly weakened»-
The American historian Gabriel Jackson, in his work entitled The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (1931-1939), published in 1965, argues that these events increased hatred and polarization on both sides of Spanish politics between "revolutionaries" and "conservatives", tensions that would end up taking away the republicans who tried to maintain the legality of the Second Spanish Republic. Hugh Thomas has a similar opinion (Book One, Chapter 10).
Stanley G. Payne, also an American, refutes this version in several of his works, pointing out that the so-called "republicans" —incarnated no longer in the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux but in the Izquierda Republicana coalition of Manuel Azaña— could having been responsible for the disappearance of the Second Spanish Republic for having collaborated, according to Payne with hardly any reservations, with the most "extremist", numerous and "revolutionary" factions of the time -represented in a sector of the PSOE- allowing them all kinds of « excesses” despite their proven collaboration in the October Revolution.
Many authors have been the ones who have spoken, from very different political positions, on October 1934 and its consequences: such as Joaquín Arrarás, Juan A. Sánchez García-Saúco, Ricardo de la Cierva, Ángel Palomino, Paul Preston, Manuel Tuñón de Lara, and a long etcetera, moving from a spontaneous reaction of the working and revolutionary masses against the imminent rise to power of conservatism, represented in the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), led by José María Gil-Robles, winner by a simple majority in the early elections of 1933. Paul Preston, has criticized the following conclusion: «Since in the last elections of November 1933 the CEDA had emerged as the most numerous party represented in the Cortes, these events have been interpreted as a deliberate rejection of the rules of democratic coexistence by the left. According to this interpretation, the egotistical extreme of the left, who tried to achieve by violence what had been denied them by the vote, would make the right lose all faith in the possibilities of legality and be forced to defend their interests by others. media".
Historian Santos Juliá states:
From the second round of elections, which confirmed the triumph of the Radical Party and the CEDA, the socialists announced, as in the old days of Paul Churches, that they would go to the revolution if they were provoked by the right. And to a provocation he must have believed Prieto that he faced when, in the debate on the ministerial declaration, Gil Robles promised his support for the Radical Party and claimed the right to govern "when the moment comes." (...) The defeat of the Republic and the implacable repression that was debated over those who had taken the weapons in their defense ended, among the socialists, a tradition that had revolution as an inevitable historical necessity for which the working class needed to be prepared. The most outstanding leaders of the October revolution, one of them president of the Council and another minister of the Republic at war, not only did they not think of the weapons to regain power, but they confessed their guilt for taking part in those facts. That was the case, above all, of Indalecio Prieto, very active among the exiles of Mexico, when in 1942 he pleaded guilty to his "consciousness, before the Socialist Party and before Spain whole of (his) participation in that revolutionary movement.
The scope of repression
There has also been a debate about whether the repression was "hard" or "weak". Stanley G. Payne has asserted that the Republic's crackdown was "weak and inconsistent." "Initially, it was rigorous in the mining basin, but, in the long run, it did not punish the culprits severely." In fact, according to Payne, it was "so mild" "that it was without historical precedent" because it "could not compare, not even remotely, with the much more brutal practices that, in similar circumstances, had been used by other countries, even democratic ones." Payne recalls, among others, the repression of the Paris Commune, "drowned in blood." Thus, according to Payne, "the most remarkable aspect of the repression carried out in 1934-1935 was its relatively lenient character." «Hundreds of revolutionaries were court-martialled, but only two were executed, and it was clear that one of them was guilty of multiple murders, while the other was a mutinous soldier... Furthermore, the insurrectionary PSOE was not outlawed, some of its offices remained open and the vast majority of its affiliates were never arrested. [...] In little more than a year the same revolutionaries were able to participate again in democratic elections that offered them the opportunity to legally access the power that they had just tried to seize by force. All of this cannot be described as harsh repression and it is certainly not the repression that leftist propaganda describes." Payne concludes: "such leniency did not benefit liberal democracy and may have precipitated its end, emboldening revolutionaries."
A similar but more nuanced position is the one held by Fernando del Rey Reguillo when referring specifically to the suspension of left-wing city councils:
After the insurrection led by socialism in that autumn [of 1934], the left was swept away from the councils, but we must highlight the unbalanced detail that took place after an armed attempt against a legitimately constituted democratic government, despite which, within a few months, much of the individuals involved in the coup d'force enjoyed full freedom of movement and their organizations had not been illegalized.
The reasons for the failure of the «October Revolution»
The historian Santos Juliá summarized the reasons for the failure of the October Revolution:
A revolution on a fixed date, pending a provocation that the adversary could manage to his taste and dissatisfaction of the former labor and peasant mobilization, based on a deplorable armed organization, without precise political objectives, with the abstention of a large sector of the trade union working class, projected as a mix of conspiracy of supposedly addicted military and general strike of the great day, in front of a State that kept its ability to respond intact, was not.
This assessment is shared by various historians such as José Luis Martín Ramos or Gabriele Ranzato. Martín Ramos agrees in pointing out as causes of failure "the absence of a central political leadership, deficiencies in political and military preparation, the lack of an explicit insurrectional plan —which could not be confused with the readings of insurrectional technique manuals—, the publicity given to the insurrectional decision, the very scant discretion with which they acted [and] the organizational slovenliness». Martín Ramos points to Largo Caballero himself as the main person responsible for leaving "the greatest burden of responsibility to local organizations", for "his incompetence combined with the desire to control everything, without being able to do so", for "his confusion between leadership and leadership role" and for the "reductionism of the insurrectional movement to the mobilization of their own organizations." According to Martín Ramos, Largo Caballero's actions can ultimately be explained because he found himself trapped in the "oxymoron he had formulated, that of a 'defensive revolution,' without really being convinced that neither the socialists nor the labor movement were still capable of an "offensive revolution"".
For his part, Ranzato points out that the socialists had threatened “to make the revolution if the CEDA entered the government, with the idea that this was enough to prevent it. Many testimonies indicate that such was the conviction of the main leaders of the PSOE. They were thus caught up in his own threat and were forced to act when the adversaries, alerted, were already prepared to quell their attempts. Its ruinous failure was, then, inevitable...".
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