André Marty, the French Comintern leader who was responsible for organising the International Brigades, admitted to having shot 500 International Brigadiers. Unable to return to Spain because of his political activities, he stayed in Moscow and was saved from prison only by his international reputation. The POUM itself had perhaps 40,000 members and a militia column of 10,000.But if the workers of Barcelona had taken power, as both the POUM and the CNT leaders admit they could have done, wouldn't they have been isolated? His body was buried on the outskirts of the town. EcoCookies help us deliver our services.

The Popular Front was formed in 1936 by a coalition of left-wing republican parties. Hitler's rise to power caused panic among the French bourgeoisie. Yet it proved to be the means of winning support behind enemy lines among the slaves as well as internationally. Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party, he declared, were correct, although he deplored their methods. ""But that is precisely the chief misfortune of the Spanish Opposition," he went on, "that its leaders have persistently kept their organization away from the internal life and the internal struggles of the other sections, and thereby have shut it off from an irreplaceable international experience. Already in May 1931, Trotsky was anticipating a second revolution which would be a revolution of the proletariat leading the poor peasants behind it.For that reason Stalin's turn to the Popular Front threw a lifeline to the liberal bourgeoisie of the republican and social-democratic parties in Spain. Their defenders claim that they were ignorant of what the GPU did, but the historical record refutes this claim. At national, regional and local municipal levels, the machinery of the state had collapsed in the face of the fascist uprising.The entire apparatus of the state had disintegrated, and its role was assumed by improvised committees as workers took control of the factories and began to organise the towns and cities, while in the countryside peasants began to occupy the land and set up collectives. This is a spontaneous response to a Stalinist provocation. Revolution had to be stamped out with the utmost ruthlessness.The Soviet intervention in Spain can best be understood as an attempt to strangle a developing revolution, to physically liquidate its leading representatives, terrorize wider layers of workers and peasants and prevent their spontaneous revolutionary strivings from acquiring a more politically conscious form.The electoral agreement which became the Popular Front in Spain was signed in January 1936, but its origins go back much earlier than that—to 1931 and the beginning of the Spanish revolution. The influence of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party was small compared to that of the POUM. "Throughout the correspondence, Nin expressed his agreement with the programme of the Opposition but consistently refused to draw the necessary conclusions from it. "In another letter from the same period Trotsky makes a similar point more briefly. All rights reserved. This is a decisive moment for the Revolution. With few exceptions, the historians who spoke at the conference concurred and were uncritical of the policies of the Popular Front Republican government and dismissed the idea that a revolution was occurring in Spain during the 1930s.The paper I gave on behalf of the WSWS provoked a sustained attack from one of Spain's leading historians, Professor Angel Viñas. Not only was it the visible symbol of dual power, but it was also a strategic building, control of which allowed workers to monitor the telephone conversations of government ministers. Alexander Orlov, the head of the GPU in Spain, sent a number of agents into Barcelona with orders to fraternise with the POUM and identify targets for kidnapping or assassination. Other European sections had sent delegates, but not the Spanish comrades. An English volunteer, David Crook, later recalled how he was recruited from the International Brigade for special work.

Instead of coming out openly under their own banner even as a small nucleus, they played hide-and-seek with principles during the most critical months of the revolution, first engaging in diplomacy with the petty-bourgeois nationalist and provincial phrasemaker Maurín and then hanging on to his tail. The government has enacted a "Law of Historic Memory" which seeks to contain the demand for knowledge about the crimes of the Franco regime but has nonetheless enraged the right wing.The conference was well attended and in addition to the academic seminars, public sessions were held every evening that filled a large theatre in the centre of Madrid.The opening address to the conference was given by the writer and former minister of culture Jorge Semprun, who denounced what he called "the thesis of Trotsky that the civil war would have been won if the revolution had not been betrayed."

Erwin Wolf, Trotsky's former secretary, was assassinated in Spain.