On 24 August 1977 Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE), went to the Madrid premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the classic Soviet film of the 1920s.Footnote 1 He was not alone. The ambassadors of eight Eastern European communist countries arrived with him.Footnote 2 The episode received wide coverage in the Spanish media because of its novelty. The PCE had been legalised in Spain only four months previously and most of the ambassadors were quite new: the Kingdom of Spain had established diplomatic relations with most of the ‘people's republics’ of Eastern Europe only that year.Footnote 3 The presence of the leader of the most important opposition party to the dictatorship, and of the communist world's diplomats, was remarkable: Spain was still formally a dictatorship, although since Francisco Franco's death in November 1975 some legal changes and a democratic election had taken place.
Santiago Carrillo (1915–2012) was at that time a prominent figure in the world communist movement.Footnote 4 Born in northern Spain but raised in Madrid, he was the son of Wenceslao Carrillo, an influential member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE). He had been instrumental in the fusion of the Young Socialist Federation (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas; FJS) and the Union of Young Communists of Spain (Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España; UJCE), back in March 1936. After this he became a member of the PCE. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) he played an important role as an activist and as a member of the Commission of Defence of Madrid (Junta de Defensa de Madrid) for the first months of the siege of the Spanish capital by the rebels. For his role in this organisation, he was accused of being responsible for the massacres of two thousand pro-Francoist prisoners in November 1936.Footnote 5 After the civil war, Carrillo lived for almost forty years in French exile. In February 1976 he returned clandestinely to Spain, where the police arrested him in December. However, after international protests, he was freed a week later.Footnote 6
The coming together of the ambassadors of the socialist states and the secretary of the PCE was not as troublefree as it might seem. After 1968, and the crushing of the Prague Spring, Carrillo – a former Stalinist – became one of the most critical voices of Soviet imperial politics within the communist movement and a strong supporter and theorist of Eurocommunism. Many Eastern European communist parties had come to regard Carrillo and his followers as traitors to the cause of proletarian internationalism.Footnote 7 The search for autonomy among ‘national communists’ had always been regarded as an attack on the ‘socialist camp’, but the PCE, while combating Franco, had generated a huge amount of patriotic discourse about national liberation and independence.Footnote 8
By 1975 most Spanish communists felt primarily linked to Spain and only secondarily to the European and international communist movement.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, the presence of Spanish exiles in Central and Eastern Europe, the frequent ideological debates within the European communist parties and numerous direct contacts between Eastern Bloc organisations and the anti-Francoist resistance, ensured that there were frequent exchanges of political ideas between communists in Spain and those on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It is this connection, which was especially strongly felt during the Spanish transition to democracy in the second half of the 1970s, that is the focus of this article. These contacts – alongside other connections – crystallised in a kind of entanglement between Eastern Europe and the Spanish communist elites, who were deeply immersed in the debates of these countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Spanish communists took inspiration from these developments in their own political disputes and actions during the transition period. It was not only that ideological positions and actual systemic changes and transformations in Eastern Europe had an influence on the Spanish communists: there was a real exchange of ideas and experiences between key figures, such as Carrillo and other communist functionaries.Footnote 10 The activities of Eastern European dissidents – especially after the Helsinki Conference in 1975 – also had a major impact on Spanish communists, forcing new critiques of ‘real existing socialism’. And debates in left-wing journals with dissidents and critical Marxists – especially with philosophers Adam Schaff, Rudolf Bahro and Wolfgang Harich – brought productive changes to the theoretical problems of the Spanish left. Such interactions had a long afterlife too: certain ideological aspects of the protests after the Great Recession in 2008 – such as the Podemos movement – still bear the marks of this era of communist revisionism.
Despite these interactions, historical studies of the Spanish transition period have, for the most part, been national in focus. Where they have considered the international dimension, this has mainly concentrated on its Western or Atlanticist aspects.Footnote 11 Historians have shown little interest either in placing the Spanish transition in the context of broader global changes on the left or in tracing the importance of connections between Spanish communism and Eastern Europe. Where transnational connections have been considered, these have addressed the history of exiles and the experiences of children sent to the Soviet Union during the Civil War.Footnote 12 Moreover, there is still no balanced biography of Carrillo – one of the main players in the relationship between East and South.Footnote 13 David Ginard, a historian of Spanish communism, has argued that after years of one-sided works on the PCE, there is nevertheless currently a ‘normalisation’ of Spanish historiography, beyond partisan history and anti-communist narratives.Footnote 14 In exploring the transnational dimension of the Spanish transition, and bringing together new approaches to both the history of the PCE and Spanish democratisation, this article aims to contribute to this process of ‘normalisation’.
Spanish Communists and Eastern Europe
Until the beginning of the 1960s the PCE, in exile and at home, was a pale shadow of what it had been during the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 15 The absence of meaningful autonomy for party members active in Spain and the control exerted by a faraway leadership made them easy prey for Franco's secret police – the feared Political-Social Brigade (Brigada Político-Social) – while poor political strategy prevented them from developing a real influence in factories and work centres.Footnote 16 Neither the communists’ temporary participation in the Republican Government in Exile nor the guerrilla strategy within Spain during the 1940s had been successful. The insurgency around 1948 failed, costing many activists’ lives, while purges of dissidents took many important cadres out of political life.
In 1939, after the defeat of the Republic, half a million Spaniards went into exile – mainly to France and Mexico – many thousands of whom were communists. After the beginning of the Second World War, and then after 1945, many Spaniards returned to the country, but most communists did not. They stayed in France and in other countries, many of them until Franco's death. Almost 4,000 communists were in exile in the Soviet Union, plus another 4,000 children who had been sent there during the war, the so-called ‘children of the war’.Footnote 17 They returned to Spain in two waves: after 1956, because of the liberalisation in Eastern Europe; and after 1975, when Franco died. But many of them left children and relatives behind. In 1950 the Spanish communist exiles were expelled from southern France.Footnote 18 Cold War tensions, increased social conflicts in France – with numerous communist-led strikes – and concerns about the well-organised Spanish communist milieus in southern France made the French government decide to ban the party.Footnote 19 In a coordinated operation against Spanish and Eastern European communists (‘Operation Bolero-Paprika’), the French government not only banned the PCE and all its related organisations but also imprisoned many of its leaders.Footnote 20 Many were expelled and took up residence behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, where they formed ‘colonies’ in towns such as Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, Katowice and Budapest.Footnote 21 Many functionaries who worked for international organisations went to Prague, which was the cultural capital of the communist movement, a sort of ‘red Geneva’. Among the organisations which were based there were the International Union of Students (founded in 1946), the International Organisation of Journalists (founded in 1949, previously in Brussels), the World Peace Council (founded in 1950, previously in Paris and from 1968 in Helsinki) and the World Federation of Trade Unions (founded 1956).Footnote 22 After 1956 another important Spanish exile colony was formed in Bucharest, based around Independent Radio Spain (Radio España Independiente; REI), a PCE broadcaster, which mirrored for Spain the propaganda role that the US-backed Radio Free Europe performed in communist countries.Footnote 23
In France the party managed to reorganise itself quickly, under the protection of the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français; PCF), but for many years it had to survive underground. The situation became easier only in the 1960s, when millions of Spaniards emigrated looking for work and Paris became ‘the second capital town of Spain’. With time, and recognising that the dictatorship was not going to fall soon, Spanish communists developed new forms of resistance against Franco. This strategy, which was based, on the one hand, around discourses of reconciliation with all Spaniards, and, on the other, on infiltration of the state and the fascist unions by communists still in Spain, led the PCE to become the most important clandestine opposition party in Franco's Spain.
Although after 1945 the centre of the PCE was in Paris, connections with Eastern Europe were also important. Dolores Ibárruri, long-time general secretary of the party, lived in Moscow and Bucharest. Prague was central for some of the most important cadres of the Spanish communists, such as Manuel Azcárate, Antonio Cordón, Enrique Líster, Juan Modesto, José Moix and the Pàmies family. The Spanish edition of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) journal Problemas de la Paz y el Socialismo was produced in Prague, as were the Catalan and Spanish broadcasts of Czechoslovak national radio.Footnote 24 Groups of émigrés dispersed around the entire Eastern Bloc also played an important role in the political life of the party, supporting the underground activities and connecting communist ruling parties with the transnational activism of the PCE.Footnote 25
One important connection to the East was the economic support that communist parties, unions and mass organisations gave to the PCE.Footnote 26 Beyond the legends – and realities – of dependence on Moscow, Eastern European solidarity was vital for supporting the structures of the PCE both in exile and underground in Spain. Some of the party's infrastructure was based in different countries: a school of cadres in East Germany, the above-mentioned REI broadcasting from Bucharest and several broadcasting teams from the national radio stations of Romania, Poland and the Soviet Union.Footnote 27 During the 1960s and 1970s there was always the possibility of sending endangered Spanish underground activists to the Eastern Bloc.Footnote 28 Spanish communists received forged papers and support for travel, and often used East Germany or Poland as a shelter and a way-station on their journeys towards the Soviet Union.Footnote 29 And, of course, the propaganda in support of the Spanish cause provided by the communist movement – especially during crises such as mass strikes or the execution of members of the PCE – helped to sustain the party in its fight against the dictatorship in the European and international media.
Eurocommunism and Eastern Europe
When Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 the position of the PCE in Spain completely changed.Footnote 30 The PCE, with its autonomous partner, the Catalan Communist Party (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya; PSUC), was now the main opposition party, having achieved a strong influence within civil society and the social movements that had helped to oppose the Francoist system and set the context for the transition. Nevertheless, the unexpected turn by Francoist elites towards transforming the regime into a parliamentary system created difficulties for the PCE. Because Francoists had taken the initiative, communists had to react quickly to avoid being left behind. As a consequence, the PCE intensified its political activities, quickly advocating that the party be fully legalised. By the beginning of 1976 Carrillo decided to return to Spain illegally to force the state to move against him. The PCE had to take a firm position in the uncertain period of post-Francoism. Together with its oppositional experience and the prestige gained in its clandestine actions against the dictatorship, the party added a powerful ideological weapon that would help legitimate its claim for a place in the new and presumably democratic Spain: Eurocommunism.Footnote 31
Enrico Berlinguer, the head of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI) and one of the main supporters of Eurocommunism, considered it as a ‘coordination of efforts, a non-episodic collaboration between the communist parties of the capitalist West and a unitary relationship with the other forces of the working and democratic left interested in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society’.Footnote 32 Eurocommunism was, indeed, a complete theoretical re-evaluation of the communist tradition, shaped by new ways of thinking about how a communist party should act in a parliamentary system, the result of both the experience of détente and the evidence of the disaster that Eastern European communism had become. Carrillo argued in 1976 that if Eurocommunism ‘is still rather imprecise, a part of this imprecision corresponds to what is still undecided, exploratory, in this trend which has up till now manifested itself more as a serious, self-critical rectification of policy than in theoretical elaboration’.Footnote 33 In 1978, in a conversation with a Soviet diplomat, Carrillo said that ‘things at your home are bad, getting worse and worse. And you do not even want to discuss this inside the party, between you’.Footnote 34 Indeed, in this process of overcoming the Soviet version of communism, Carrillo was probably the Eurocommunist leader who went further than any other. According to the political scientist Vernon V. Aspaturian, ‘by the 1970s . . . Eurocommunist leaders severely criticised internal Soviet practices and relationships with other communist parties and states. Carrillo, in particular, expresses fundamental anti-Soviet views that attack the basic nature and character of the Soviet system.’Footnote 35
In general, theorists of Eurocommunism located the origins of their new thinking in the works of the Italian Marxist theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci, something that they had in common with the organisations of the new left. Many pre- and non-Stalinist ways of understanding communism were rediscovered, such as Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and the young Marx.Footnote 36 For Manuel Azcárate, one of the leading Spanish Eurocommunists, even Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader of the Budapest revolt of 1956, was a Eurocommunist avant la lettre.Footnote 37 Of course, the origins of Eurocommunism are multiple, but a central role in its development was played by the huge disappointment of the unfulfilled revolution of those twelve years between 1956 and 1968 – when it seemed briefly that the programme of ‘socialism with a human face’ under the reformist Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia might transform the communist movement in Eastern Europe. In PCE leaders’ memoirs, such as those of Carrillo and Azcárate, and in the declarations of communist intellectuals, the end of the Prague Spring is always presented as a key to the transformation of their thinking on socialism. Events in Czechoslovakia also played a role in the reconsideration of the way post-Franco Spain had to change.Footnote 38
However, it was not these new currents of thinking that led directly to Carrillo and his colleagues changing the ideological profile of the PCE. As late as 1964 he had expelled some of the most important intellectuals of the PCE, who had challenged the Stalinist style of leadership. The most well-known of them, Jorge Semprún and Fernando Claudín, argued that the dictatorship would not fall by itself any time soon and that the traditional means of clandestine resistance – supported by the PCE – would not aid this process.Footnote 39 They argued that a new, modernised society in Spain contained within itself the seeds of change, which would develop in a non-violent, evolutionary fashion. Carrillo continued to ban his former comrades from the party but clearly understood that they were right. He took this Eurocommunist position with such strength that years after the journalist Oriana Fallaci, in a famous interview, would write that Carrillo had been ‘the first communist in Europe’ to understand that communism had to be democratic and pluralistic.Footnote 40 This position is of relevance. Carrillo had his own proposal for the Eastern Bloc: he demanded of them the political transformations necessary to achieve a ‘developed socialism’ and become true ‘workers’ democracies’.Footnote 41 The Spanish general secretary aspired, at least in some way, to contribute to an eventual transition of Eastern Europe to democracy. He was very aware of the problems that were facing socialist societies. In a conversation with a Soviet diplomat, Carrillo explicitly stated that ‘it is impossible to carry on in this way for a country like yours’. He described the Soviet Union as ‘a country ruled by frail elderly people, no longer capable of anything’. He warned them that they might bring the country to the point ‘where you will provoke “Polish”, “Hungarian” or “Bohemian” events’.Footnote 42
Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, various Western European communist parties felt that the time was ripe to develop a different type of socialism.Footnote 43 Of course, hardly a political party in the libertarian and anti-establishment atmosphere of the 1960s could survive in the elections if it publicly expressed support for the invasion. But Spain was still a dictatorship and Carrillo's problem was the opposite: how to convince moderate people in Spain and Western Europe that the end of the Franco regime did not mean the beginnings of ‘real existing socialism’.Footnote 44 The PCE had made very clear to the Soviets its opposition to an eventual invasion of Czechoslovakia. Indeed, with reassurances from Moscow, the PCE Central Committee was convinced that there would be no intervention. When this finally occurred, Carrillo was on holiday in the Crimea and Azcárate, the Central Committee member responsible for international issues, was staying with his family on the Polish Baltic coast.Footnote 45 The Spaniards felt betrayed, and the stance they took against the invasion was very firm. The central committees of the PCE and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partya Sovetskogo Soyuza; CPSU) exchanged some strongly worded declarations.Footnote 46
Despite these differences, the PCE still received financial and logistical support from Eastern Europe. For years the party balanced statements of loyalty to the Soviet Union with criticisms of Soviet imperialism.Footnote 47 However, the idea of political and cultural reform within the communist movement survived the suppression of the Prague Spring. As Silvio Pons has put it: ‘the hopes of “socialism with a human face” had been severely dented, but were still there. Its banner was taken up by the Western communist parties, albeit with hesitancy and diplomacy.’Footnote 48 The PCE was one of these standard-bearers, although in the years after 1970 it came to a certain arrangement with the Soviet Union whereby it avoided direct criticism of Moscow.
The PCE's disillusionment with Eastern European regimes resulted perhaps partly from the normalisation of relations between countries like Poland or East Germany and Franco's Spain in the wake of Ostpolitik and détenté. Poland sold coal to Franco during a long-running strike by Asturian miners, and commercial connections between Spain and the Soviet Union increased rapidly. The PCE saw the prospect of establishing full diplomatic relations between communist Eastern Europe and Franco's Spain as a betrayal and they protested against it repeatedly.Footnote 49 In a closed meeting with cadres of the party in 1970, Carrillo explained that these diplomatic developments were not a punishment for the PCE's opposition to the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.Footnote 50 When in 1973 East Germany established full diplomatic relations with Spain, the protests of the PCE were dismissed by the East German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED).Footnote 51
For Spanish communists the main problem with the Soviet Bloc, however, was what they perceived as the marginalisation of the Spanish struggle within the communist movement because of the policy of détente. From the early 1970s onwards the PCE harshly criticised Soviet policy concerning peaceful coexistence.Footnote 52 The resolution of the Eighth Congress of the PCE in Bucharest in August 1972 claimed that peaceful coexistence could not mean an end to class struggle. Indeed, Spanish communists insinuated that the fight against Franco's dictatorship could not be forgotten.Footnote 53
The ‘updating’ (aggiornamento) of the political organisation of the PCE within Spain, which Carrillo began to build, drew a distinction between the Spanish party and Eastern Europe. Spanish communists argued for a normalisation of Spain within a Western Europe that was politically and economically integrating. At the same time, they demonstrated a strong desire to be independent of the Eastern Bloc – a position which would be displayed in their ‘national road to socialism’. Such attitudes had been long held in the PCE when Carrillo finally got round to publicly stating this at the Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties of Europe, in East Berlin, in June 1976, an event that might be considered Moscow's last attempt to preserve orthodoxy within the communist movement, Carrillo spoke about ‘differences between us, which can be overcome only through discussion, in a critical and open criticism, in recognition of the diversity of ways and national forms of socialism and socialist politics’.Footnote 54 He declared that communists did not have a ‘central leader nor international discipline’ and that ‘it is necessary that this diversity of our movement is accepted once and forever, no form of conspiracy to neutralise it should be used’. In his opinion, the differences will not lead to any schism, ‘but this means that nobody believe their own conceptions to be a dogma and that the personality and the positions of each party are respected’.Footnote 55
Carrillo was attacked by his Eastern partners for being ‘anti-Soviet’. An SED report concluded that it was ‘from the general abandonment of the leadership of the Communist Party of Spain of the science of Marxism-Leninism that deviations arise, in all fundamental questions’. The report accused the PCE of assuming ‘an incorrect ideological line about imperialism’ and taking ‘clear anti-Soviet and almost social-democratic positions’.Footnote 56 The East German Secret Police, the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) watched the Eurocommunist development carefully. They recorded and archived many political and theoretical declarations of Carrillo and his supporters (as well as his detractors’ attacks).Footnote 57 They went so far as to survey Spanish émigrés living in communist countries who supported Carrillo and were critical of the Soviet Union, as in the case of a former militant of the PSUC, who left the party.Footnote 58 Other Eastern European secret police agencies, such as the Romanian Securitate and the Polish Secret Police (Służba Bezpieczeństwa; SB), also carefully watched the PCE, probably fearing the spread of Eurocommunism in their own countries.Footnote 59
In the same year as the conference of communist parties in East Berlin, the PCE, in a joint declaration with the PCI, renounced the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Moreover, its leadership subsequently became deeply critical of the repression of dissidents in Eastern Europe, especially those involved in the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and the Defence Committee of Workers in Poland (1978).Footnote 60 Eastern European dissidence was becoming a major issue for Spanish communism, an issue that challenged the way Eurocommunists tried to distance themselves from Soviet-type communism.
The PCE and Eastern European Dissidence
In February 1966 the Soviet writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried in Moscow for having their satirical works published abroad. This was the first trial of dissidents in the Soviet Union and is considered to mark the end of Khrushchev's ‘Thaw’. In an interview in 1966, in Nuestra Bandera, the theoretical journal of the PCE, Carrillo, after speaking about his connection to the Soviet Union, stated that he belonged ‘to the generation that defended Madrid in 1936, enlightened and inspired by the example of the Bolsheviks in the red Petrograd’. There were also the first (light) criticisms of the Soviet Union in response to these trials: ‘but in the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel my impression is that the laws applied are more in line with the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat than with the State of the whole people [meaning the post-Stalinist Soviet Union under Khrushchev]’.Footnote 61 This was the first sign of Carrillo's open dissent against the Soviet Union. Even though Sinyavsky himself, years later, acknowledged the support of the PCE, the relationship between Spanish communists and dissidents such as these was very problematic.Footnote 62 The PCE journal Mundo Obrero did not hesitate to defend the freedom of the dissidents, but often without directly attacking the Soviet Union.Footnote 63
However, the new Eastern European dissidents who were gaining greater prominence all over Europe – especially after Helsinki – were viewed with increasing disapproval in Spain.Footnote 64 According to most of the Spanish liberal media, Eastern European dissidents represented not only anti-communism but also, above all, a reaction against cultural change and modernity. Given that the Spanish left had recently identified itself with progressive patriotism, gender issues, sexual liberation and ecology, the agenda of the dissidents on the other side of the Iron Curtain was perceived to be very different. The Spanish left remained ambivalent towards Eastern European dissidence as they saw it as culturally backward and because some dissidents supported or relativised Franco's dictatorship.Footnote 65
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's case is a good illustration of this development. From the very beginning, his work was widely published in Spain. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union his many books informed the Spanish reader of his conservative, anti-communist worldview.Footnote 66 The initial Spanish reception was positive, but this changed dramatically when the Russian dissident visited Spain in 1976 and praised Franco and his regime in a television interview that was very well orchestrated by the Spanish propaganda machine. The interview, which was broadly discussed in the press, was shown on television again two days later, which was quite unusual.Footnote 67 In the show Solzhenitsyn praised Spain as a quiet and lawful country and even stated that Franco's Spain was not a dictatorship: ‘your progressive circles are pleased to call the existing regime a “dictatorship”. I, however, spent ten days traveling through Spain incognito. I saw how people live, I saw with my own eyes in amazement and wonder: do you know what this word means, you know what is behind this term?’Footnote 68 Solzhenitsyn's overconfident words saw to it that most intellectuals lost all hope of understanding dissidents. The still clandestine Mundo Obrero wrote about the interview as ‘a sinister show’, describing ‘this mental process that metamorphosed Solzhenitsyn – a victim of Stalin – into a Slav reincarnation of Torquemada . . . hired by the Spanish government to serve a policy of denial of human rights’.Footnote 69 Back in 1974 Mundo Obrero, even though it considered Solzhenitsyn a reactionary and anti-communist dissident, had defended his right to free speech.Footnote 70
Another kind of conflict with the PCE arose when the Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik visited Spain in April 1977, shortly after the legalisation of the PCE. His presence in France had caused a stir, especially his meeting with the PCF leader Georges Marchais. Upon arrival in Madrid, he asked to meet Carrillo but the communist leader refused. The PCE had just been legalised and Carrillo probably feared an uncomfortable debate.Footnote 71
Carrillo never properly recognised the direct influence that dissidents had on his politics, but such an influence, indeed, existed. During these years he expressed solidarity many times with the dissidents, above all in interviews and press declarations.Footnote 72 In November 1979, in a television talk-show in which, together with other Spanish intellectuals, he debated with the anti-totalitarian French philosopher Bernard Henry Levy, he simply was not able to rebuff Levy's sharps attacks on communism.Footnote 73 However, at this point, for Carrillo and the majority of the PCE it was clear that their growing ambivalence towards authoritarian dissidents did not mean support for the Soviet way of socialism. At last, Solzhenitsyn was, as Carlos Alba put it in Mundo Obrero, ‘a victim of Stalin’.Footnote 74
Communists and Left-Wing Dissidents
Beyond PCE's Eurocommunist and anti-Stalinist features, many Spanish intellectuals considered themselves to be fellow travellers and did not find it easy to criticise the Soviet Union. There were obviously other views, such as that of the former communist Fernando Claudín, who warned of the dangers of ‘real socialism’ and wrote works that embraced dissidence.Footnote 75 Claudín was a special case because he had lived in the Soviet Union for many years, had travelled extensively in communist countries, was able to read the local languages and had obtained first-hand information about dissidence. His books and articles accurately informed the Spanish public about the development of dissidence in the East.Footnote 76 But since his expulsion from the party together with Semprún in 1964 he had become one of the most serious left-wing critics of the Soviet Union and the PCE.Footnote 77
The relationship of the PCE to dissidence was easier with those, such as Wolf Biermann and Rudolf Bahro, who considered themselves left wing.Footnote 78 Biermann, a songwriter critical of the East German regime, was prevented from returning to his ‘socialist fatherland’ after performing in Cologne in 1976, and had to stay in the Federal Republic. Biermann had been singing songs about the Spanish resistance before his enforced exile, and now he became a member of the exile delegation of the PCE in Hamburg and went to Spain as a Spanish communist.Footnote 79 He had strong links to the anti-Franco movement. Indeed, as he recounted in his memoirs, while participating in a West German anti-Franco congress a year before his expulsion, the Stasi prepared an operation to expel him. The East German secret service thought that if he sang anti-East German songs at an anti-fascist concert, he would lose the sympathy of Western intellectuals.Footnote 80
Rudolf Bahro's case was different, both because of his importance as a political thinker and also the fact that, after being expelled from East Germany, he had become a founding member of the West German Green Party. In 1980 the East German embassy in Madrid informed the Stasi that Bahro was staying at the invitation of the magazine Argumentos in Spain. The magazine was an unofficial organ of the PCE, oriented to young intellectuals. Bahro was thus factually a guest of the PCE. This was underlined by an encounter with Carrillo in Parliament. On 4 October 1980, Mundo Obrero, the central organ of the PCE, printed a photo of Carrillo and Bahro, with Bahro identified as a ‘German theorist’. Bahro gave a lecture to the ‘Foundation of Marxist Studies’, a PCE think tank, as well as other presentations in Barcelona and Valencia. Earlier, on 10 April 1980, Mundo Obrero had briefly discussed his imprisonment in East Germany, but, as the Stasi noted, ‘abstained from direct attacks against East Germany’.Footnote 81
The PCE clearly used its solidarity with the dissidents as a way to distance itself from the Soviet Union. But the connection to dissidence was also part of a search for new ideas for Eurocommunism. Leaders and intellectuals of the party edited books by dissidents and wrote prologues for them. Azcárate, for instance, wrote a contribution to the Czech politician and dissident Jiří Hájek's Praga: diez años después. In the prologue, Azcárate stated that ‘the year 1968 . . . stimulated the process of Marxist reflection . . . which has resulted in the phenomenon now known under the name Eurocommunism’.Footnote 82 Another Marxist intellectual, the philosopher Manuel Sacristán, contributed decisively to the introduction of different intellectual currents of East European thinking in Spain and was quite influential on the communist party.Footnote 83 Sacristán, a member of the PSUC, had been very active in 1968, facilitating the publication in Spain of some works of Czechoslovak reform communists.Footnote 84 In his introduction to Dubček's 1968 book on the ‘Czechoslovak road to socialism’ he was fairly critical of the Warsaw Pact invasion and outlined some proposals for renewing socialism based on the Czechoslovak experience.Footnote 85 Years later Sacristán published the works of East German dissident Wolfgang Harich, whose eco-Marxism was intellectually very close to his own views.Footnote 86 Harich's idea of the ‘feminisation of politics’ was praised by Sacristán and influenced his own work.Footnote 87 Of course, Sacristán's publication of Harich's work was carefully monitored by the Stasi, who viewed contact between critical communists as an ideological threat.Footnote 88 Sacristán even met Harich in May 1979 at a workshop in Barcelona, which produced a celebrated interview.Footnote 89 Sacristán was very critical of Eurocommunism and, as shown in his reading of Harich's writings, he helped establish in Spain the roots of a new ecological, more libertarian left, which learnt from Eastern European experiences.Footnote 90 However, 1979 was also the year in which Sacristán declared openly that he had left the PCE looking for a different kind of left-wing ideology.Footnote 91
Sacristán's actions were indeed part of a wider trend. Javier Tusell, a Spanish liberal intellectual, wrote in 1981 that Russian dissidents were misunderstood in Spain, especially in traditional left-wing media. For Tusell, the phenomenon of dissidence had only influenced and had been aired by people from the PCE ‘once they have left the party, but it has not produced a shift away from political positions within the party as a result of reading the texts of those dissenters’.Footnote 92 Even though dissidence was helping to transform the left in Spain, their reception remained ambiguous. The PCE did not assimilate Eastern European contributions to left-wing ideologies. Only the beginning of the Solidarity movement in Poland challenged this.
Solidarność and the PCE
The repression of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement in Poland created an unbridgeable gulf between the PCE and the Eastern Bloc. Although Carrillo had seen the Polish crisis as a ‘confirmation of Eurocommunism’, the influence of Solidarity on the PCE grew, especially after the proclamation of Martial Law in Poland on 12 December 1981.Footnote 93 Spaniards saw this as an attempt by the army to crush the opposition trade union movement, and in so doing, put the clock back in the same way as their own military had tried to do ten months earlier.Footnote 94 The Spanish perception of the coup d’état in Poland was always connected, sometimes very clearly, to their own experience of the failed putsch against democracy of 23 February 1981. In their reaction to Polish events, it was evident that Spanish communists were looking at Solidarność through Spanish lenses.Footnote 95
Carrillo put this very clearly in a speech on 16 December 1981. While condemning General Jaruzelski's proclamation of a state of war in Poland, he questioned the ‘moral legitimacy’ the PCE had in ‘denouncing the armed coup in Spain if we are not opposed to the military regime in Poland’. He spoke of a ‘communist tradition of fighting coups d’état’.Footnote 96 The communists, both the PCE and the communist unions, were not present at the various demonstrations in front of the Polish embassy, although they had strongly condemned the coup. As Carrillo put it, they ‘did not want to take part in an anti-communist campaign’.Footnote 97 Given that Carrillo was often criticised by the hardliners in his party for his alleged ‘anti-Sovietism’, it is hardly surprising that he was not so explicit in his condemnation of Polish events and tried to find a balance between an internal necessity – solidarity with the Polish workers – and external relations with the CPSU. In its leading article on 18 December 1981, the left-liberal journal El País questioned Carrillo's contradictory statements that attacked the coup on the one hand, while on the other warning of anti-communism.Footnote 98
However, the next declaration of the PCE's Central Committee was so harsh that even the conservative newspaper ABC – which was very critical of Carrillo – was amazed.Footnote 99 The declaration was a long revision of the history of the communist movement from a Eurocommunist point of view, criticising the whole understanding of the ‘people's democracies’. Politically this was still not enough for some PCE militants who wanted broader internal democratisation of the party and saw this as an occasion for forcing Carrillo to make changes, charging him with having a lukewarm ideology and demanding the official rupture of relations with the Polish United Workers’ Party, ‘as happened when in 1968 Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia’.Footnote 100
The consequences of Martial Law in Poland for the PCE were discussed publicly in the main article of Nuestra Bandera of January 1982. With the title ‘Poland: Nothing is as Before’, the article pointed to a total rupture with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.Footnote 101 ‘The events in Poland have shocked public opinion and in particular the communists who believe in the cause of socialism. The establishment of a military regime in Poland is a fact of extreme gravity and somewhat unusual in the story of a group of countries that started the road of socialism as a consequence of the result of the Second World War.’Footnote 102 The PCE went beyond politics and considered the events in Poland as the collapse of ‘a model of economic growth’. That was, for the PCE, the final declaration of the bankruptcy of socialism with a Soviet face. But the declaration was even stronger when it came to discussing the international dimension of the communist movement, because it stated that ‘historical models in which the articulation of the world communist movement was manifested since the Third International, through the Cominform and the following conferences of communist and labour parties, has been exceeded and we must move into a new phase’.Footnote 103 The international communist movement was now – for the PCE – dead and buried. Solidarność provoked the final departure of Carrillo's communism from the Soviet experience.
Ideological Debates and the Fall of the PCE
The exceptional role of the PCE in the changes that had been taking place in Spain impressed the Western European left and turned Carrillo into one of the figureheads of Eurocommunism. Carrillo's choice of a moderate course, the embracing of a pluralistic multi-party democracy, firm support of the parliamentary system and the explicit renunciation not only of Stalinism but of Leninism too, made the PCE a benchmark for all moderate communist forces both inside and outside of Spain. Yet, while organisationally the PCE had been the strongest force within the democratic opposition, decades of anti-communist propaganda, and the compromises they had made during the transition, nevertheless dented the electoral success of the party – while its main rival, the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE), triumphed.Footnote 104
The conflict between the PCE and the Soviet Union continued throughout the 1970s and reached its highest point after Carrillo's publication of Eurocommunism and the State in 1977.Footnote 105 The book, probably the best known theoretical statement of Eurocommunism, was a break with the whole experience of Leninism. Carrillo defended a pluralistic and democratic version of communism but, beyond this, criticised the Soviet Union and even spoke of similarities between the Soviet system and the fascist regimes. The Soviet press and the CPSU's journal Novy Vremiia started a fiery campaign against Carrillo, blaming him for being an ‘enemy’ and almost a traitor.Footnote 106 In the memoirs of a Soviet diplomat, the author recounts a conversation with Carrillo in which he referred to the attacks against him:
so I wrote a book (Eurocommunism and State). I wrote it, we might say amateurishly. There had never been and there still are no academic works on this theory. But the book is necessary, determined by our actual needs and challenges. And what are you doing? You stupidly anathematised the book and at the same time you called me again anti-Soviet! You have many scholars, skilled people, whole institutes. Why don't you argue with me, show my ideological weaknesses seriously, prove that I'm wrong? Why don't you give their replies to the issues raised in the book? You do not. And you do not, because you are afraid of this argument, you do not want it. Just as you do not want and cannot seriously discuss your internal problems.Footnote 107
Of course, Carrillo's relationship to the Soviet Union got worse after the publication of the book. Moscow began to support Carrillo's enemies, such as Ignacio Gallego, an old member of the Central Committee of the PCE with long-time links to the Soviet Union, who became head of the pro-Soviet section of the party. After he resigned as member of the Executive Committee and the Central Committee in October 1983, Gallego started, along with other splinter groups, the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España; PCPE), a much more serious menace to the hegemony of the PCE over the communist movement. After 1986, a year in which the PCPC formed the United Left coalition alongside the PCE, Gallego pursued a policy of unity, which led to his dismissal as general secretary of PCPE. During all this time, the Soviet Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti; KGB) were sending money to Gallego and his new party. He was the agent who sent insider's information to Moscow about Carrillo's political activities, including a copy of the whole manuscript of Eurocommunism and the State.Footnote 108 Carrillo, very aware of the conspiracy from the beginning, considered that the Soviet Union was ‘in favour of “political terrorism” against Eurocommunism’.Footnote 109
Intellectual debates did not end after the publication of Eurocommunism and the State. At a conference in Madrid in October 1980, various Eurocommunists, social democrats and left-wing European intellectuals and politicians met to discuss Eurocommunism and the possibilities of socialist unity.Footnote 110 At the conference Manuel Azcárate had a fierce argument with the Polish Marxist philosopher Adam Schaff about whether it would be right to name the ‘people's democracies’ of Eastern Europe as ‘socialist’.Footnote 111 Five years later Schaff and Carrillo exchanged polemics for some months in the communist press after the Spaniard had published an article on the transition to socialism in the journal Ahora.Footnote 112 The nucleus of the quarrel was almost the same as the one with Azcárate: what were the possible conditions for a transition to socialism. Explicitly, the polemic had to do with explaining the failure of Eastern European socialism and the impossibility of applying it to the more developed Western world. The belief in a modernisation that set the context for democratic development was plainly invoked by Carrillo to explain the changes in Poland, in a similar way to how the PCE in the second half of the 1960s had explained the possibility of a peaceful transition to democracy in Spain. However, such discussions were now only of intellectual interest. Carrillo had been dismissed as general secretary in 1982 – under accusations of authoritarianism – and soon he was expelled from the party. If in 1980 Eurocommunism still had some possibility of seizing political power, by 1985, when Carrillo was debating with Adam Schaff, these illusions had vanished.
Conclusion
On 16 November 1989 more than 200,000 people marched through the streets of Madrid, following the coffin of Dolores Ibárruri.Footnote 113 The veteran communist had died four days before, only three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The register of condolence telegrams sent from Spain and many other countries to the PCE and the family of La Pasionaria – ‘the Passionflower’, Ibárruri's ‘nom de guerre’ – took up more than nineteen pages. The PCE flooded the streets of the city – and other towns – with almost a million posters of Dolores with the slogan: ‘Pasionaria. A flower of the Twentieth Century’. But her time, and the time of the party, was finished. The PCE – like La Pasionaria – was a creature of a century which was now fading away.
The general secretary of the party was by then Julio Anguita, a committed communist with an old-fashioned, but brilliant rhetorical flair.Footnote 114 Anguita took the party to a brief high point through a coalition with other left-wing parties (United Left) and a strategy of confrontation towards the PSOE. Anguita reversed in practice many of the changes that Eurocommunism had brought, since, in his view, Carrillo (and his Eurocommunism) was to blame for the loss of significance of the party and the hegemony of the PSOE. Between 1979 and 1982 the PCE suffered multiple internal crises. There was a conflict with the Catalan party (around Eurocommunism), a split with the party in the Basque country and a nationwide rebellion against Carrillo's authoritarianism led by the so-called ‘Euro-renovators’ (eurorrenovadores), who demanded more internal democracy.Footnote 115
The evident decline of Western communism after the disruption of the 1970s, especially clear in the case of the electoral results of the Eurocommunist parties, was temporarily halted in the mid-1980s with the beginning of the democratisation of the Eastern Bloc under Gorbachev in 1985.Footnote 116 But the changes in Eastern Europe finally put the PCE under intense pressure to change. Nuestra bandera, the theoretical journal of the party, was not published at all during the memorable year of 1989, and the first issue of 1990 spoke about ‘the indispensable theoretical debate’. Such a debate never took place. The lessons of the East were not learnt. The PCE did not disappear but instead became a peculiar amalgam of old Stalinists, confessed Eurocommunists – without the name – and left wingers of every stripe. There were no longer explicit connections to Eastern Europe, beyond nostalgic invocations to the old mythos of the October Revolution. Indeed, the feeling of having been betrayed by the Central and East European countries crystallised in a prejudice against the other part of Europe, a clear example of which was the Spanish communists’ perception of 2013 Euromaidan events in the Ukraine as a return of fascism and counterrevolution.Footnote 117
Carrillo, after trying to turn the Eurocommunists into a new party, saw the end of the Eastern Bloc as a defeat. As he recalled in his memoirs a decade later: ‘it was late. The Berlin Wall collapsed. The communist movement as such, has entered a terminal crisis. The right will make progress across Europe’. In 1991 Carrillo advised the Eurocommunists who were still with him to join the PSOE, although he himself subsequently did not.Footnote 118 By the late 1990s he was still confident of the necessity of left-wing politics because ‘even after the failure of the Soviet system, the inability of the imperialist and capitalist system to solve the current problems of Mankind is still obvious’.Footnote 119 Eurocommunism, however, was not entirely dead in Spain. In 2014 the radical movement Podemos obtained unexpectedly strong results in the European parliamentary elections in Spain. After a short phase of radicalism, the movement developed some features of Eurocommunist reformism, which were soon recognised as such by the press.Footnote 120 The close ties between Podemos and the only post-Eurocommunist movement that won in national elections in Europe, the Greek coalition Syriza in 2015, are a good example of these ‘genetic links’ with the old Eurocommunism.Footnote 121 But this time around, Spanish left populists did not connect to the East but to the South: Greece, Portugal and the Bolivarian republics of Hispanic America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela) were their models. The ideological links to the former Socialist Bloc did not exist anymore.
