Glyn Ford on the other Spanish republicans
Volunteers for the Revolution: International Militia of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War by Andy Durgan published by Brill \ Haymarket
The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution by Andy Durgan publshed by Resistance Books
Andy Durgan has performed an act of solidarity in his awesome rescue of the Partido Obrero de Unificació Marxista’s (POUM) foreign volunteers from the deep forgetfulness of the Spanish Civil War. While the heroism of the International Brigades is known across the Labour Movement, what is less known are the foreign fighters who chose to join the anarcho-syndicalists of the Confederaciòn Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) or the POUM militias. Durgan has managed to identify 371 of the 500-plus volunteers who fought for the latter from Franco’s abortive coup d’état in July 1936 until the Party’s suppression eleven months later.
The sole reason the POUM is known at all is that George Orwell fought for five months with them on the Aragon front encircling Huesca, was shot in the throat and almost killed by a sniper, and shortly after was forced to flee the country after the Party’s purge orchestrated by Moscow; all detailed in his great unread – at the time – polemic Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was one of 35 Britons, mostly members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who enlisted, alongside briefly the poet John Cornford, who was to die with the International Brigades, one of whose last poems was Full Moon at Tierz: before the storming of Huesca. The ILP claimed they had a further 200 volunteers waiting to go, but were frustrated by the British Government’s early ban in foreign volunteers immediately after the ILP’s first contingent had left. The CPGB, to their credit, were less law abiding. Nevertheless, in contemporary terms, the ILP donated £50,000 to the fight and an ambulance.
The largest contingent in the volunteer ranks were 105 Germans, followed by 83 Italians and 39 French. In total there were over twenty-five countries covering Europe’s map and far beyond, ranging to Australia, Bolivia and Brazil, Mexico and Peru. They had women fighting at the front, with the Argentinian Mika Etchébèhere leading the POUM column – after the death of her husband Hipólito – that was virtually wiped out in the battle of Madrid.
The problem was the POUM’s politics. They were far to the left of Spain and Britain’s Communist Parties. Yet the POUM was not Trotskyist; even if a fairly small minority in its ranks were. Amongst the foreign volunteers it was barely 10%. The Party chose, after its formation in 1935, to join the ILP led International Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Unity (IBRSU) based in London. This was an eclectic mix of left socialists and of dissident communists, like the POUM and the Dutch. During the Civil War, apart from the IBRSU parties, the German “Bukharinist” dissident KPO (Communist Party – Opposition) played an important role. At the time of the coup the POUM was the largest left-wing Party in Catalonia, but with only a scattered presence across the rest of Spain.
Immediately after the coup, industrial Spain – Catalonia and parts of Aragon – saw a revolution from the bottom up with workers spontaneously seizing control of companies and farmers collectively appropriating the land of absentee proprietors. POUM’s position was to fight fascism and defend the revolution, while Stalin’s was to restore the status quo ante. Their position was anti-capitalist, with fascism seen as just a venomous variant. They echoed Orwell when he wrote the Popular Front was an “unholy alliance between the robbers and the robbed”, and resonated with the Italian volunteer Giuseppe Borgo’s pithy comment, “none of my comrades have come to Spain to defend the interests of bourgeois democracy”.
The overwhelming bulk of the POUM militia, 6000 strong, was on the Aragon front. But the whole front was starved of resources, meaning they could do little more than hold the line. The leader of the POUM’s anti-fascist Action Squads before the war, Josep Rovira, appointed commander established a 400-strong heavily German “shock battalion” led by Hans Reiter to bear the brunt of the fighting. But their fight and fate rested with events behind the line rather than in front.
At the beginning of May 1937, there was an attempted seizure, initiated by the Communists, of the anarchist-controlled Telephone Exchange that was resisted both by them and the POUM. At least 500 died in this civil war within the civil war, before a truce was agreed. That defence became the excuse to exterminate the POUM, whom Stalin had long been accusing in wild Marxist fairy tales of being Trotskyists colluding with Franco.
The Party was banned, its leader Andreu Nin tortured to death in a clandestine Soviet prison, with hundreds arrested and dozens “disappeared” and murdered. Amongst the foreign volunteers, the ones who suffered most were those in exile from their own fascist governments in Germany and Italy. Neither Nin nor the Austrian Kurt Landau’s bodies were ever found, while the ILP’s Bob Smillie – grandson of the Scottish Miners’ leader Robert Smillie – apparently ‘fell ill and died’.
At least one volunteer got his revenge. Hans Reiter, after being freed from a prison camp, joined the French forces fighting with “La Neuve”, the majority of which had fought in Spain. His half-track, Brunete, named after the civil war battle, led the forces liberating Paris on 24 August 1945. Durgan has done the volunteers proud. Their story should live.
