The first offensive against democracy in inter-war Europe came from communism. The First World War had not yet ended, and it was not even known which side would win, the Entente or the Central Empires, when the Bolshevik coup d’état of November 1917 overthrew the fledgling Russian democracy. Not a few university students tend to think that Nicholas II was overthrown by Lenin himself. But what he liquidated was a coalition government of Kerensky’s Trudoviks (Labourites), SRs (agrarian socialists) from the majority right wing of that party, and Mensheviks or right-wing RSDLP, whose Bolshevik or majority left had been headed by Lenin. In other words, what today would be called a centre-left government. The dissolution after twenty-four hours of the constituent assembly in early January 1918 would definitively sanction the Bolshevik mortal hatred of social democracy and representative democracy1.

Red Guards at the Winter Palace, autumn 1917.

As one of its early proselytes, the Italian Gramsci, put it, the October coup had been a “revolution against Capital”2. And it was true. Although Marx, but not Engels, at the end of his days speculated on the possibility that Russia could reach socialism by avoiding the capitalist industrial phase thanks to the agrarian commune or “mir”3, to launch a socialist revolution in Russia, in the midst of a world war, was tantamount to a leap into the void. But Lenin had his alibi. An effective pro domo sua executor of the German strategy of destabilising Russia by any means necessary to close the two-front war that threatened to engulf the Germans, his triumph was excellent news for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German General Staff. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 sanctioned this de facto alliance to preserve Soviet power, at the cost of heavy territorial losses for ex-Imperial Russia, which Stalin would, however, more than recoup at the end of the Second World War.

Lenin in 1920

But what was Lenin’s alibi for his pro-German policy? Nothing less than the launching of the “proletarian world revolution”. The seizure of power in Russia meant only a prologue to the European socialist revolution, whose essential prey was to be Germany. In this way, backward socialist Russia would be placed at the service of advanced Germany and the “science of Marxism” would be settled. But what was needed to bring about this revolution? The indispensable thing was to create professional revolutionary vanguards which, by means of an iron international organisational centralisation, would face the necessity of turning the imperialist war into a civil war in order to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat4. And, for that, it was in turn obligatory to abort and destroy the democratising political process that had been taking place since the beginning of the 20th century in the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, and since the last three decades of the 19th century in the United Kingdom. While in the latter case, this development had been driven jointly by conservatives and liberals, in Scandinavia and Benelux the democratisation process was led to a significant extent by socialist or, rather, social-democratic parties.

This was a process that is paid too little attention, but which is at the basis of the social democratic hegemony in all these countries, in which an alternative political and then economic model was forged as an alternative to Bolshevism and an enemy of Bolshevism. The role of the Catholic parties in Belgium and the Netherlands should not be forgotten either. First and foremost in all cases was universal suffrage for men and women, which was established at the end of the war. Elections (usually with a proportional system) and their parliamentary embodiment thus became the sole and exclusive source of legitimacy for the exercise of power, leaving the principle of double trust (of the Crown and Parliament) of the constitutional regimes existing until then in the background. Without winning elections with millions of voters, organised by parties as large electoral machines, the Crown could no longer give its confidence to a government to be revalidated by Parliament. These were usually coalition governments, accountable to the Houses, but above all to the electorate. The so-called welfare state came later, in the second half of the 1940s and 1950s. The social-democrats never touched private ownership of the means of production, even though progressive taxation to finance egalitarian policies became oppressive, unjust and, in short, their Achilles’ heel. And another aspect not to be forgotten, the constitutional monarchies existing in all these countries acted as legitimising bodies for the new parties and the new policies, something that, in fact, the socialist parties sought rather than go down the path of republican confrontation with the existing constitutional order and the rest of the political forces5.

Detachment of Russian Guards in Pskov, 1918.

The continental expansion of the Bolsheviks

Against this background, it is easy to understand why Lenin went full steam ahead to create communist parties all over the world, with social-democracy and parliamentary regimes as his main enemies. The Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war had not yet been won; barely four months had passed since the armistice of November 1918 which had ended the Great War, when the Communist International was founded in Moscow, the capital of a Russia cut off from the world, in March 1919. Its principles were those of a revolutionary vanguard committed to the unleashing of insurrection and civil war in order to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. Germany was to be the main theatre of repeated attempts with these aims, between late 1918 and 1923, whose fundamental purpose was to overthrow the newly established Weimar Republic and wipe the “social-democratic murderers” (Ebert and Noske) of the new communist “arch-saint”, the otherwise critical of Bolshevik methods, Rosa Luxemburg, off the face of the earth6. The enterprise had more to do with voluntarism than with the desire to overthrow the newly-established Weimar Republic.

The Bolshevik by Boris Kustodiev, painted in 1920.

The enterprise had more to do with delusional voluntarism than with feasibility. The Soviet outbreak in Bavaria or the Hungarian communist revolution of Bela Kun, both in 1919, failed. Moreover, the latter had more to do with the hope of avoiding through revolution the crushing peace of the treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye (September 1919). The lesson drawn by the Communist International was, of course, that both failures had been due to “social-democratic treachery”. Nevertheless, still the Second Congress of the newly created International in the summer of 1920 was presented as a triumphal moment. The Bolsheviks had won the civil war. The myth of a revolution beset by imperialism struggling to survive was established. The effectiveness of the thick cloud of lies surrounding the effective action of the Bolsheviks in Russia and its aftermath of mass political terror and widespread hunger could be seen, at the cost of silencing in the West the denunciations of the remnants of the Russian democratic parties “so as not to play into the hands of the imperialist right”7.

The prurience of not allowing the defeat of Bolshevism by “allied imperialism” contained and attenuated social-democratic criticism. Pro-Bolshevism undoubtedly had a destabilising and anti-democratic effect on a considerable part of Italian, French and, indeed, German working-classism8. In that summer of 1920 and during that Second Communist International Congress, the Russian attack on the newly restored Poland unfolded. The advances of the Red Army were followed on a large map in the session hall of the Communist Congress. All this showed that the roles of vanguard and rear-guard in the “world revolution” had been reversed. It was no longer the proletariat of the advanced countries that was called upon to lead it and the Russians to be the modest apprentices. Even before the Communist International, the Red Army, victorious in the Russian civil war, was becoming the real vanguard of the proletariat in a process of outright conquest. This was the context of the 21 conditions, the real birth certificate of the Communist International and the original model of each and every communist party. A model that can be summed up in absolute centralisation, a dogmatic and aggressive creed, and total submission to Russian interests and policies disguised as internationalist9. The process of subjugation and automation took another decade and many purges, but in the end, in the case of Spain for example, the archetype of the automated communist was achieved, which Dolores Ibárruri and José Díaz would embody in the “anti-fascist” version, after having forged themselves as authentic shock communists, paradoxically, in the struggle against “social-fascism”10. Togliatti and Thorez would be, above all the former, better examples of equal subjugation to the Bolshevik model.

Pablo Iglesias Posse in Vigo

The chances of communism taking root in Spain, as in many other countries, were not very promising, although the reasons for this varied from case to case. In Spain, on the one hand, the democratising process mentioned in the cases of Benelux or Scandinavia did not stand a chance of making headway with the PSOE. This party, founded in 1876, with a first MP in 1910, thanks to the alliance with the Republicans, and six in 1918, represented an anomaly in Western socialism11 . Moreover, despite trying to show its own personality by participating in elections and in Parliament, Spanish socialism lived in the shadow of the worst enemy in our country of a democratising process comparable to those mentioned above: anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, organised in the CNT since 1910. Revolutionary workerism had arrived in Spain through the Italian Fanelli, a disciple of Bakunin, back in 1868. His propaganda of hatred and contempt for the state and politics took root in a working-class milieu already worked by revolutionary federalism and republicanism.

Spanish socialism did not aspire to any democracy. It was the appendix of the other trade union centre, the UGT, also created in Barcelona in 1888. Devoid of any state culture and therefore incapable of understanding what a pluralist democracy on a parliamentary basis meant, the PSOE saw itself as the political instrument to carry out, by legal but also revolutionary means, the supplanting of the state, whose basis lay in the division between “exploiters” and “exploited”, by a UGT that would turn us all into “emancipated workers” from capitalist domination. While that culminating moment, dictated by history and the irremediable failure of capitalism was arriving, the Spanish socialists spent more than thirty years trying to differentiate themselves from republicans and anarchists and syndicalists.

Pablo Iglesias Posse, founder of the PSOE.

However, in the offensive against Maura in 1909, they turned 180 degrees and formed the Republican-Socialist Conjunction, which lasted from 1910 to 1919. This Conjunction, apart from electoral mediocrity, did not represent a reformist or democratising force, but one of revolutionary agitation and destabilisation…, although still “bourgeois”. The Republic was to be a means of acclimatisation and maturation for the definitive triumph of socialism. In the meantime, Spanish socialism illustrated its activity by putting pressure with great propagandistic fuss and “regulatory” strikes, i.e. with resistance boxes and not “crazy” strikes like those promoted by the syndicalists. The visceral hostility to the constitutional governments of the Restoration never ceased. Their social legislation was never valued and even less appreciated, and the institutions for social reform were taken over by the socialists, in a monopolistic attitude, facilitated by the lack of competence of the abstentionist and anti-reformist CNT. The reformist path that all this would have been was ignored and scorned by the PSOE and the UGT12. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia and launched their call for a new International, the Spanish socialists were caught off guard. During the Great War they had adopted an Allied-phile position, convinced that, if the Entente triumphed, it would liquidate the supposedly “Germanophile” Spanish Monarchy and its political parties, although the PSOE was very careful to contest Spain’s solid neutrality. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias’s first reaction to the Bolshevik coup came in an article entitled “Sería bien triste…” (It would be very sad…) in El Socialista. What was sad, of course, was not the abrupt end of the flimsy Russian democracy, but that such a triumph might harm the Allied cause, whose victory was supposed to rid them of Alfonso XIII.

The PCE as a split from the PSOE

After the failure of the revolutionary attempts in the summer of 1917, and specifically the general strike of August, aimed at overthrowing the Monarchy and opening a new constituent process in imitation of what had happened in Russia from February to October of the same year, the PSOE began a progressive shift to the left. It was a question of simultaneously capturing and neutralising sympathy for Bolshevik Russia for its own benefit. Thus, for the first of the extraordinary congresses that Spanish socialism held to decide whether or not to join the new Communist International, the Conjunction with the Republicans and any trace of sympathy with the now “imperialist” democracies that had triumphed in the Great War was swept aside. Needless to say, within the party, the enemies of the republican alliance, among others, saw in the change of international affiliation an opportunity to seize command of the organisation.

Second Congress of the Third International in 1920, with Lenin in the foreground.

It was very significant that, along with the alliance with the Republicans, the Second Social-Democratic International was also abandoned, with great problems in reorganising itself because of the internal conflicts between the German and Belgian socialists, for example. Within the PSOE no one advocated it. None of its leaders was willing to fly the flag of the subordination of socialism to parliamentary democracy, which became the key principle of what was called the Berne International. Such a thing would have been to question the revolutionary prurience which was the principle of legitimacy of the PSOE13. The anarcho-syndicalist pressure contributed decisively to reinforcing this prurience. The so-called Congress of the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid, organised by a radicalised and particularly aggressive CNT, decided to join the Communist International without further consideration, attracted perhaps by Lenin’s supposedly anarchist positions in his work The State and the Revolution, which attracted many other anarchists in Europe, albeit for a short period of one year. But what the CNT sought, above all, was to corner the UGT by declaring it “yellow”14. As if that were not enough, the unscrupulous manoeuvres of a couple of Communist International agents, the Russian Borodin and the Mexican Ramirez, led to a minority split in the Socialist Youth, which nevertheless remained headless. It was in April 1920 that the first of the two Communist parties, the so-called Spanish Communist Party (PCE in Spanish)15, was born.

The Second Extraordinary Congress of the PSOE, also devoted to plucking the daisy of international membership, coincided with that of the Communist International and its 21 Conditions. It may be that without them, as in the case of the Italian maximalists of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), the PSOE would have simply joined the Moscow organisation. But the evidence that these conditions would cancel all political and organisational autonomy of the party made such membership conditional on maintaining one and the other, without prejudice to the assumption that, in matters of revolutionary commitment and will, nothing differentiated the Spanish socialists from the Russian Bolsheviks. Two exponents of the party, one, Anguiano, on behalf of unconditional adherence, and the other, de los Ríos, on behalf of the advocates of conditional adherence, were sent to Moscow on a round trip of several months. It was a fruitless journey. The Bolsheviks only made concessions to membership in the case of the French Socialists (SFIO), who themselves adhered overwhelmingly to the Communist International at the Tours Congress in December 1920. There were none for the Spanish Socialists.

Julián Besteiro, Anguiano, Andrés Saborit and Francisco Largo Caballero.

The socialist Anguiano returned deeply impressed by the human, economic and political catastrophe he had seen in Moscow. No less so was Angel Pestaña, who had attended the Second Congress of the Communist International on behalf of the CNT, but who had been detained on his return to Spain and was unable to submit his report, so that it was not until 1922 that the break between the CNT and the Communist International was proclaimed. But Anguiano did not have the courage to openly confront the reality of Bolshevism. For his part, de los Ríos made a lot of fuss about his visit to the marginalised libertarian communist Prince Kropotkin. But, in essence, the main thrust of his conclusion was that Central European and, in particular, German socialism would produce a much better organised and supposedly humane socialism than Russian socialism. Any possible democratic fibrillation, if it existed at all, was piously concealed under the revolutionary parade. The last of the Extraordinary Congresses took place, after the delegates sent to Russia had arrived, in April 1921. A second layer of Moscow supporters then emerged, a lacklustre and mediocre group of careerists, whose action Besteiro had defined as the revolt of the sergeants against the generalate. An inappropriately elitist comment for the milieu, but one that reflected their self-esteem. Thus arose the second of the Spanish Communist parties, the PCOE, a radicalised copy of the PSOE16. The latter, for its part, adhered without any enthusiasm or influence whatsoever to the so-called Second and Middle, or Vienna, International, created in February 1921 by those who tried to harmonise parliamentary democracy with the dictatorship of the proletariat, in an impossible squaring of the circle, whose main champions were the Austrian socialists.

It was not, however, Besteiro, a trade unionist and radical, supposedly orthodox defender of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, who prevented the PSOE from falling into the clutches of the Communist International. The effective wall was put up by the organisation that really ruled the party, the UGT trade union. In the UGT, no doubt because of the harassment to which it had been subjected by the CNT despite an alliance pact in June 1920 which did not last more than five months and cost the PSOE two of its six MPs, Bolshevik sympathies were much less than in the party. So it was the future “Spanish Lenin”, its general secretary Largo Caballero, who, on the basis of this conditional adherence, deployed the necessary pressure to get the PSOE’s pseudo-reformists off the hook, which resulted in the party’s total indebtedness to the trade union.

From 1917 to 1923, therefore, Spanish socialism demonstrated its democratising inanity, something that would be confirmed during the Second Republic and which had already anticipated its respectful accommodation with Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship17. The two Communist parties, reunified at the end of 1921 in the PCE, coexisted little and poorly. The party remained an extremist and marginal force, mired in changes of leadership, which the new Bolshevised leadership of the Seville Congress of 1932 did not bring out of irrelevance. It was the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the fact that Stalin, precisely at the height of his terrorist policy, sponsored the “anti-fascist” Republic, which gave the PCE an unsuspected relevance, earning it the hatred of socialists and anarcho-syndicalists throughout the Civil War18. Nevertheless, its effective director during the war was Togliatti, endowed with an intellectual heritage and political capacity far superior to the Ibárruri-Díaz duo.

War poster of the Communist Party (PCE). Josep Renau Berenguer, 1936.

The Spanish communist experience, on the basis of Dimitrov’s theses on “popular democracy” and “anti-fascism” exhibited at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 and all with Stalin’s consent19, of course, had in time a paradoxical outcome far superior to the mediocre conversion of the Moscow-hostile syndicalist from 1919 to 1921, Largo Caballero, into the “Spanish Lenin” of the 1930s. This paradox consisted in the fact that events such as the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and the invasion and crushing of “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, as well as Togliatti and the PCI’s own trajectory in post-war Italy, integrated into the Atlantic bloc, with its problematic “democratic road to socialism”20, contributed to progressively untie the fallacious conceptual knots that linked democracy, even the “anti-fascist” democracy of the Popular Fronts, to its ineluctable end: the dictatorship of the proletariat. When the latter was totally discredited, in the form of the dying Party-State in the decrepit hands of the Soviet gerontocracy, the so-called Eurocommunists (the Italian, French and Spanish communists) discovered that they were in fact no longer Bolsheviks, but Mensheviks21, and that parliamentary and multiparty democracy with alternation had no valid alternative. There was even more in the case of the PCE: the first thing it did after its legalisation after thirty-six years of clandestinity was to recognise that the Monarchy was the lever of the legal and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy and the main shield of the latter. A complete denial to the revolutionary trajectory of Spanish workerism22. Oh, and that the national ensign was the one decided by Carlos III in 1785. The despised and combated “bourgeois democracy” defeated Lenin’s mummy.