Red Terror (Spain)
Red Terror (Spanish: Terror Rojo)[7] is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups involved.[8][9] The May 1931 arson attacks against Church property throughout Spain and the determination of the Republican Government to never compromise upon and strictly enforce its ban against Classical Christian education were the beginning of a politicidal campaign of religious persecution against the Catholic Church in Spain. No Republican-controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country.[10] The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people, including 6,832 Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the wake of the rightist military coup in July 1936, the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, politicians, and suspected supporters of the Right Wing political parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, and the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.[11]
Red Terror
Terror Rojo (Spanish)
1936–1939
A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered, and whether an individual continued practising Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the far-left.[12]
While the violence long preceded the failed coup of July 1936, the immediate aftermath let loose a violent onslaught on everyone that the revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards, merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial."[13] Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000[14] to ~72,344 lives.[6]
Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution," the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists."[11] Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed rightist coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution."[15] Other historians allege that they have found evidence of systematic religious persecution and revolutionary terror long preceding the military uprising and have pointed to a "radical and antidemocratic" opposition to religious toleration among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution.[16] These attitudes and policies attracted harsh criticism at the time, even from fellow Republicans Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, and ultimately from Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.
The Red Terror also included politicidal infighting within the Republican faction, particularly after the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain declared POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (an anti-Stalinist Left and Trotskyite political party), to be an illegal organization, alongside all other real and suspected Trotskyites and anarchists. The Stalinists, aided by the Comintern, the NKVD, and the GRU, accordingly unleashed a revolutionary terror almost identical to the simultaneous Purge of 1937 in the Soviet Union against the International Brigades and all other Republican factions, including en masse arrests, interrogation under torture, and mass executions. In contrast to the Stalinist official history blaming the defeat of the Spanish Republic on Leon Trotsky and his followers, historians Donald Rayfield and Ronald Radosh have instead laid the blame at the door of Joseph Stalin, the military advisors he sent to Spain, and Stalin's Spanish followers. The Stalinist Red Terror against fellow Republicans and the decision to immediately transform Spain into a prototype for "the people's democracies" of the Cold War-era Soviet Bloc instead of first defeating Francisco Franco were nothing short of catastrophic for the Republican faction.
George Orwell, an English social democrat who fought during the Spanish Civil War as part of the POUM, would describe the Soviet-decreed Purge of the Republican faction in his memoirs Homage to Catalonia, as well as writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to make the case that both fascism and authoritarian socialism are two sides of the same coin.[17][18] Other formerly pro-Soviet Westerners who witnessed the Purges, including John Dos Passos and Arthur Koestler, were left similarly disillusioned.
In recent years, the Holy See has beatified hundreds of the victims of the Red Terror (498 in one 2007 ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in the Catholic Church's history).[19]
Background[edit]
According to historian Ronald Radosh, "The Spanish Civil War was the culmination of long-standing tensions and social strife that no government had been able to address satisfactorily. The divide between rich and poor in Spain was immense, and the powerful Catholic hierarchy did little to ameliorate conditions. The result was that destitute peasants and dissatisfied workers supported either radical anarchism or socialism, buttressed by a bitter anticlericalism, while Liberalism in Spain tended to be more extreme than in most of Europe. Yet the wealthy landowners and certain areas of the country, especially the North, maintained a staunchly conservative outlook that precluded any serious reconsideration of the nation's social ills. Many Spaniards in fact had monarchist leanings and believed that their country's salvation lay in native Spanish traditions and a strong centralized government. Meanwhile, nationalist movements in the Basque provinces and Catalonia encouraged these people to think of themselves as distinct from the Castilians who ruled in Madrid, and as deserving of more autonomy or even outright independence from the central government... As a result, political instability prevailed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was characterized by numerous military coups, a short-lived Republic, and monarchies with varying amounts of political power."[20]
To add to past instability, the revolution of 14 April 1931 that overthrew King Alfonso XIII and established both the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Constitution of 1931 also brought to power an anticlerical and authoritarian socialist coalition government.[21]
The relationship between the new, secular Republic and the Catholic Church was fraught from the start. Between 10 and 13 May 1931, in retaliation for a Left Wing demonstrators allegedly hearing a vinyl recording of the former Royalist national anthem being played through the windows of a nearby flat, more than 100 religious buildings were deliberately burned down in an epidemic of Church arson that began in Madrid and then spread to cities and towns throughout the Second Spanish Republic.[22] While some cabinet ministers in the Provisional Government of the Second Spanish Republic wanted to intervene and restore order, others opposed the idea. According to the canonical narrative, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña overruled those who wished to intervene by stating, "All the convents of Spain are not worth the life of a single Republican".[23] Among the many priceless works of Spain's cultural heritage that were lost during the 1931 arson attacks was the copy of Marko Marulić's De institutione bene vivendi per exempla sanctorum ("Instruction on How to Lead a Virtuous Life Based on the Examples of Saints") that once belonged to St Francis Xavier. It was the only book, aside from the Roman Breviary, that the early Jesuit carried with him and constantly re-read during his missionary work in Portuguese India and was long treasured in Madrid as a second class relic by the Society of Jesus. Writing in 1961, however, Marulic scholar Ante Kadič announced that recent inquiries about the volume had come up empty and that the Saint's book must have been destroyed during the burning of the Jesuit monastery in Madrid.[24]
In response to this and other similar attacks by the Government, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, the primate of Spain, urged Catholics to vote in future elections against the ruling Leftist political parties, whom the Cardinal alleged wanted to completely destroy religion.[25] Those who sought to lead the 'ordinary faithful' had insisted that Catholics had only one political choice, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA): "Voting for the CEDA was presented as a simple duty; good Catholics would go to Mass on Sunday and support the political right".[26]
The constitution respected civil liberties and representation, but in articles 26 and 27 placed restrictions on the church's use of its own property and banned religious orders from running schools or engaging in education.[27][28] Even advocates of the separation of church and state had serious problems with the Constitution; one such advocate, José Ortega y Gasset, stated, "the article in which the Constitution legislates the actions of the Church seems highly improper to me".[29]
In a speech delivered on 28 November 1932, at the Madrid Ateneo, the poet Miguel de Unamuno, one of the founding fathers of the Second Spanish Republic, angrily denounced the increasingly repressive and illegal domestic policies of Prime Minister Manuel Azaña: "Even the Inquisition was limited by certain legal guarantees. But now we have something worse: a police force which is grounded only on a general sense of panic and on the invention of non-existent dangers to cover up this over-stepping of the law."[30]
In 1933, Pope Pius XI also condemned the Spanish Republican Government's refusal to grant religious toleration to Catholics in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.[31]
Since the left considered reform of the anti-clerical passages of the constitution impossible, Historian Stanley G. Payne believes, "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset",[27] and it has been posited that such a "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and in the onset of the civil war.[32] One legal commentator has stated plainly "the gravest mistake of the Constitution of 1931—Spain's last democratic Constitution prior to 1978—was its hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church".[33]
Following the general election of February 16, 1936, political bitterness grew in Spain. Violence between the coalition government and its supporters, the Popular Front, whose leadership was clearly moving towards the far left (abandoning constitutional Republicanism for violent revolution[34]), and the opposition accelerated, culminating in the coup of right-wing generals in July. As the year progressed Nationalist and Republican persecution grew, and Republicans began attacking churches, occupying land for redistribution and attacking nationalist politicians in a process of tit-for-tat violence.
1933 election and aftermath[edit]
Leading up to the Civil War, the state of the political establishment had been brutal and violent for some time. In the 1933 elections to the Cortes Generales, the CEDA won a plurality of seats, but President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora declined to invite the leader of the CEDA to form a government. Instead, he invited the Radical Republican Party and its leader, Alejandro Lerroux, to do so. CEDA supported the Lerroux government in exchange for three ministerial positions. Hostility between the left and the right increased after the formation of the government. Spain experienced general strikes and street conflicts. Noted among the strikes was the miners' revolt in northern Spain and riots in Madrid. Nearly all rebellions were crushed by the government, and political arrests followed.
Lerroux's alliance with the right, his harsh suppression of the revolt in 1934 and the Straperlo and Nombela scandals combined to leave him and his party with little support going into the 1936 election. (Lerroux himself lost his seat in parliament.)
1934 murder of priests and religious in Asturias[edit]
The murder of 37 priests, brothers and seminarians by leftists in Asturias marks what some see as the beginning of the Red Terror.[16] In October 1934, the Asturian Revolution was strongly anticlerical and involved violence against priests and religious and the destruction of 58 churches, which had been rare until then.[35]
Turón, one of the locales of anticlerical violence, a coal-mining town in the Asturias Province, was a hub of anti-government and anticlerical agitation.[36] The De La Salle Brothers ran an illegal Catholic school there. This enraged the far-left politicians who ran Turón, because of the brothers' refusal to cease religious practice and their civil disobedience of the Constitution's ban on religious education. On October 5, 1934, the agents of the local rebel government invaded the brothers' residence on the pretext of a search for concealed weapons. A Passionist priest, Padre Innocencio, had arrived the previous evening and was about to say Mass for the brothers. He and the brothers were arrested, held without trial, and summarily executed in the middle of the night by a firing squad in the cemetery.[36]
1936 Popular Front victory and aftermath[edit]
In the 1936 elections, a new coalition of socialists (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE), liberals (Republican Left and the Republican Union Party), Communists, and various regional nationalist groups won the extremely tight election. The results gave 34 percent of the popular vote to the Popular Front and 33 percent to the incumbent government of the CEDA. This result, when coupled with the Socialists' refusal to participate in the new government, led to a general fear of revolution. The fear was worsened when Largo Caballero, hailed as "the Spanish Lenin" by Pravda, announced that the country was on the cusp of revolution.
Attitudes[edit]
Republican side[edit]
Attitudes to the "red terror" varied on the Republican side. President Manuel Azaña made the well-publicised comment that all of the convents in Madrid were not worth one Republican life.[78] Yet equally commonly cited, for example, is the speech by Socialist leader Indalecio Prieto on the Madrid radio on 9 August 1936 pleading Republican militiamen not to "imitate" the murderous actions of the military rebels and the public condemnation of arbitrary "justice" by Julián Zugazagoitia, the editor of El Socialista, the Socialist Party newspaper, on 23 August.[79]
Julius Ruiz goes on to note, however, that "not cited... are El Socialista's regular reports extolling the work of the Atadell brigade", a group of Republican agents who engaged in detentions and frequently murders of (in the end) up to 800 alleged Nationalists. "On 27 September 1936", Ruiz continues, "an editorial on the brigade stressed that its 'work, more than useful, is necessary. Indispensable.' Similarly, the Prieto-controlled Madrid daily Informaciones carried numerous articles on the activities of the Atadell brigade during the summer of 1936".[79]
Nationalist side[edit]
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Spain believed that the Red Terror was the result of a plan, "a program of systematic persecution of the Church was planned to the last detail".[80] Before he was himself abducted and shot without trial by Indalecio Prieto's bodyguards just 5 days prior to the coup, Monarchist politician and leader of the opposition José Calvo Sotelo told the Spanish Parliament in April 1936 that in the six weeks since the government, from mid-February 15 to April 2, 1936, had been in power, some 199 attacks were carried out, 36 of them in churches. He listed 136 fires and fire bombings, which included 106 burned churches and 56 churches otherwise destroyed. He claimed they there were 74 persons dead, and 345 persons injured.[81][82]
The attitudes of the Catholic side towards the government and the ensuing Civil War were expressed in a joint episcopal letter from July 1, 1937, addressed by the Spanish bishops to all other Catholic bishops.[83] Spain was said to be divided into two hostile camps, one side expresses anti-religious and anti-Spanish, the other side upholding the respect for the religious and national order. The Church was pastorally oriented and not willing to sell its freedom to politics but had to side with those who started out defending its freedom and right to exist.[83]
The attitudes of people in the Nationalist zones were characterized by hope and religious revival. Victories were celebrated with religious services, anticlerical laws were abolished, and Catholic schools became legal again. Catholic military chaplains were reintroduced and attitudes to the Church immediately changed from hostility to respect and even admiration.[84]
Aftermath[edit]
With the total victory of the Nationalists over the Republicans in 1939, the Red Terror ended in the country. Throughout the country, the Catholic Church held Te Deums to thank God for the outcome. Numerous left-wing personalities were tried for the Red Terror, not all of whom were guilty. Franco's victory was followed by thousands of summary executions (the remains of 35,000 people are estimated by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) to lie in mass graves)[93] and imprisonments, and many were put to forced labour, building railways, drying out swamps, digging canals (La Corchuela, the Canal of the Bajo Guadalquivir), construction of the Valle de los Caídos monument, etc. The 1940 shooting of the president of the Catalan government, Lluís Companys, was one of the most notable cases of this early repression.
The new Pope Pius XII sent a radio message of congratulation to the Spanish government, clerics and people on April 16, 1939. He referred to the denunciation of his predecessor, Pope Pius XI, who had described past horrors and the need to defend and restore the rights of God and religion. The pope stated that the victims of terror died for Jesus Christ. He wished peace and prosperity upon the Spanish people and appealed to them to justly punish Republicans who were guilty of war crimes, but to also exercise leniency and generosity against the many others who were on the other side.[94] He also asked for their full participation in society and entrusted them to the compassion of the Catholic Church in Spain.[95]
Many Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War were later to fall victim to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. This was because, according to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria mistrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Francisco Franco. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics".[96]
NKVD General Pavel Sudoplatov, an ethnic Ukrainian who was later the main handler for his Spanish Civil War colleagues Nahum Eitingon and Ramón Mercader's during the assassination of Leon Trotsky, later recalled, "From 1936 to 1939 there were two life-and-death struggles in Spain, both of them civil wars. One pitted nationalist forces let by Francisco Franco, aided by Hitler, against the Spanish Republicans, aided by Communists. The other was a separate war among Communists themselves. Stalin in the Soviet Union and Trotsky in exile each hoped to be the savior and the sponsor of the Republicans and thereby become the vanguard for the world Communist revolution. We sent our young inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors. Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations. Our subsequent intelligence initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republicans lost, but Stalin's men and women won. When the Spanish Civil War ended, there was no room left in the world for Trotsky."[97]
Both the Spanish Red Terror and the NKVD and the SIM's witch hunt for both real and imagined anti-Stalinists, however, had deadly serious political consequences. They horrified numerous formerly pro-Soviet Westerners who had been witnesses, including John Dos Passos, and Arthur Koestler, and caused them to permanently turn against the U.S.S.R.[98]
Furthermore, in a public break from his past service in the Spanish Republican Army and its Servicio de Información Militar (S.I.M.) secret police force, Scottish Communist Hamish Fraser converted to Catholicism following the Second World War and expressed support for granting both diplomatic recognition and the reintegration of Spain under Franco into the international community.[99] In later years, Fraser compared both the Red Terror and the Stalinist witch hunts among the Spanish people and within the Spanish Republican Armed Forces, in which he had been a perpetrator, with what happened throughout Eastern Europe after it was assigned to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference.[100]
In 2007, the Vatican beatified 498 priests killed by the Spanish Republican Army during the civil war. Relatives of Catholics who were killed by the Nationalists have requested similar recognition, criticizing the unequal treatment.[101]