Paul Preston - The Last Days of the Spanish Republic

The following day, 16 February, according to a report by Togliatti, Negrín spoke on the telephone to Uribe saying, ‘I am told that the Communists in the Popular Front have declared that whether they respect or not the orders of the government depends what the Party decides.’ He said angrily: ‘I will shoot all the Communists.’ According to a similar account of this confrontation given by Stepanov, Negrín rang Uribe and asked him if it was true that the PCE politburo had decided that government measures would be accepted only with its approval. Before Uribe could reply, Negrín said that, if it was true, he would have the entire politburo arrested and put on trial. Shortly after this conversation with Uribe had taken place, Togliatti returned from France and he was able to smooth things over with Negrín. 7

During the three and a half weeks that Negrín spent in Spain after his return to the centre-south zone, he seemed to be afflicted with a degree of uncertainty. The man appointed on 24 February to be head of the corps of political commissars, Bibiano Fernández Osorio Tafall, although a member of Azaña’s Left Republican party Izquierda Republicana, was a supporter of the policy of resistance. 8He confided in Cordón his concern that Negrín was wasting time reorganizing government departments instead of creating a general staff of loyal officers. Cordón saw this as the Prime Minister suffering one of his occasional bouts of indecision. Indeed, he concluded that Negrín had returned to Spain ‘not with a sense of being a resolute leader firmly determined to take the reins and steer events, but with the rather heroic attitude of a decent man who accepts a sacrifice, even though he is sure of its futility, in the more or less vague hope that it will not be rendered pointless at the last minute’. In an earlier version of his memoirs, Cordón speculated that Negrín had returned to ease his conscience. Cordón’s concern about what he saw as Negrín’s indecision derived from a conviction that, although the situation was desperate, resistance was still possible and indeed the only way to save thousands of lives. 9After the end of the war, the senior PCE politburo member, the organization secretary Pedro Checa, told Burnett Bolloten (then engaged in writing a pro-Communist history of the Spanish Civil War) that Negrín did not really believe in the possibility of resistance. 10Checa was probably right, but, as Zugazagoitia pointed out, Negrín did believe that a rhetoric of resistance could help bring about a better peace settlement.

A letter from Negrín to Prieto dated 23 June 1939 substantiates the comments of both Ossorio Tafall and Cordón. ‘Once I reached the centre-south zone I endeavoured to raise morale, reorganize services so as to meet the new circumstances, gather the elements necessary for an effective resistance. The measures adopted … would have allowed us to keep fighting until now. Keep fighting, I say, because, even if we could not win, there was no other way to save what we could or at least save our self-respect.’ 11This had been confirmed even before that. Álvarez del Vayo had written to Marcelino Pascua on 25 February stressing the importance of giving the British government the sense that the Republic had the capacity for a lengthy resistance in the centre-south zone so that London would put pressure on Franco to agree to no reprisals as the basis of a peace settlement. 12When, after Casado’s coup, Fernando de los Ríos, the Republican Ambassador in Washington, recognized his Consejo Nacional de Defensa as a legitimate authority, Negrín sent him an angry telegram in which he reminded him that the whole point of the rhetoric of resistance was to gain time for a coordinated evacuation and some guarantees against reprisals. 13

Prieto’s reply to Negrín’s letter on 3 July quoted a report written after Casado’s 5 March coup by a close collaborator of Besteiro, Trifón Gómez, quartermaster general of the Republican army and president of the Railwaymen’s Union. He supported the coup but had taken little part other than to try to negotiate refuge in Mexico for the Republicans who had to flee. His efforts in Paris to this end were rendered futile by Besteiro’s refusal to allow any government resources to be used to pay for the passage of those who had to flee. Besteiro believed that the national wealth was needed in Spain for post-war reconstruction and that Franco would treat those who stayed behind in Spain all the better for having thus safeguarded resources. That short-sightedness seemed not to diminish the loyalty to Besteiro of Trifón Gómez. Through the visceral anti-communism of his report can be discerned the impotence of Negrín’s government after his return from Catalonia.

Only men blinded by vanity and arrogance could fail to see that everyone was against them when they returned to the centre-south zone; everyone except the gang of Communists who continued to manipulate Negrín, driving a wedge between him and the Socialists and forcing him to oppose the will of the rest of the Spaniards … Negrín’s government was a phantom. Not one Ministry worked; none of the Ministers had the slightest desire to establish themselves; their one obsession was to secure for themselves a way of getting out of Spain … The government had no will to lead and, what is worse, no one thought that they had to obey it. 14

Unlike Trifón Gómez, the Communist Jesús Hernández believed that resistance was possible, yet he described Negrín’s government in similar terms as ‘a kind of mute paralytic phantom that neither governed nor spoke and that lacked both an apparatus of state and a fixed seat of government’. 15

On 8 February, while still in France, Negrín had made three appointments that he would soon regret. The unreliable General José Miaja was promoted from commander of the group of armies of the Centre to supreme commander of the Republican army, navy and air force, which was really only a promotion in name. The pro-Francoist General Manuel Matallana Gómez was promoted from chief of the general staff of the armies of the Centre to commander thereof. Matallana’s previous post went to the equally pro-Francoist Colonel Félix Muedra Miñón. Already, there were rumours, which Miaja hastened to deny, that his general staff was in contact with Franco’s headquarters. He called it ‘an absurd fabrication’ ( una patraña absurda ) but it was in fact the case. 16

These postings were, in part, Negrín’s considered response to a series of suggestions made to him on 2 February, almost certainly by Colonel Cordón. The doubt arises because the document containing the recommendations is unsigned. However, the overall drift suggests the thinking of the Communists and, therefore, in the context of Figueras on 2 February, of Cordón. The first suggestion, which was acted on, was the most intriguing. It was that, given the accumulation of tasks falling to Miaja since the declaration of martial law, operational responsibility for the Army Group of the Centre should be passed to General Matallana. If, as the other recommendations imply, the document’s author was Cordón, it would show that, at this stage, neither the Communists nor Negrín had any substantial suspicion of Matallana’s loyalty.

The next two proposals, however, point to a degree of suspicion and therefore to Cordón’s authorship of the document. They called for the Communist ex-minister Jesús Hernández to be left as commissar to Miaja and that another Communist hard-liner, Luis Cabo Giorla, be appointed as commissar to Matallana. The next suggestion was that Casado be relieved of command of the Army of the Centre and be appointed Director of the Higher War College, where he had been a professor before the war. The idea was that Casado would be replaced by Colonel Juan Modesto. Equally interesting were the following recommendations which called for José Cazorla, the coldly efficient Civil Governor of Guadalajara, to be made overall chief of the Republican security service, the Servicio de Investigación Militar (SIM), in the centre-south zone and for Ángel Pedrero to be replaced as head of the SIM in Madrid by a Republican, Juan Hervás Soler. Apart from a series of proposals for improving the efficiency of the Army of Catalonia, the most significant of the other suggestions was that the highly talented Communist Civil Governor of Cuenca, Jesús Monzón Reparaz, be made Director General de Seguridad. 17