In France, Carrillo missed the coup launched on 5 March by Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre. Casado thought that he could put a stop to the increasingly senseless slaughter. Together with Wenceslao Carrillo and Julián Besteiro, and with anarchist leaders, Casado formed an anti-Communist National Defence Junta (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) under the presidency of General Miaja. Casado wrongly believed that this would facilitate negotiation with Franco, with whose representatives he had been in touch. In fact, he sparked off a disastrous civil war within the Republican zone, ensured the deaths of many Communists and undermined the evacuation plans for hundreds of thousands of Republicans. In Paris on 7 March, a Party comrade, Luis Cabo Giorla, gave Carrillo two pieces of bad news. He told him about the coup and his father’s role therein and also that his mother had died some weeks before. Carrillo’s reaction, a virulent denunciation of his own father, would be among the most revealing episodes of his life.151
3
A Fully Formed Stalinist: 1939–1950
With the Civil War still raging, Carrillo remained in France along with other members of the politburo. The prominent Communist General Enrique Líster later claimed that his place should have been back in the central zone where the majority of the JSU’s militants were to be found. However, Carrillo did not accompany Líster and some members of the politburo to Spain on the night of 13 February 1939. Interviewed in 1974, he claimed that he had wanted to return to Spain but had been prevented by a series of reasons. The most implausible of these was that the politburo wished to ensure that he would not find himself fighting against his own father. Carrillo had been in France for nearly six weeks when he learned of the coup carried out by Colonel Segismundo Casado on 5 March. Casado’s anti-Communist Junta included Wenceslao Carrillo as Councillor for Public Order, an ironic echo of his son’s role in 1936 – the irony being that it was Wenceslao’s mission to hunt down Communists. Santiago claimed in 1974 that the news of his father’s involvement with Casado had upset him more than did that of the death of his mother which he had received at the same time. News of the coup could hardly explain why Carrillo had not returned to Spain three weeks earlier. Hardly more plausible was his claim that he could not travel because there was no room on any aircraft flying to Alicante. Líster pointed out that the thirty-three-seat aircraft in which he travelled on 13 February had twenty empty seats. The head of the Republican air force, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, told Burnett Bolloten that the last six aircraft that flew from France to Republican Spain were ‘nearly empty’. The most likely of Carrillo’s three excuses, which did little for his attempts to construct an heroic past, was that he had been unable to travel because he had scabies. Since Manuel Tagüeña believed that Carrillo had just ignored orders to return, scabies may well have been the excuse that he gave to his superiors.1
The PCE’s politburo met on 12 March to discuss the situation. This was followed by further meetings at which lists were drawn up of those cadres chosen to find refuge in the Soviet Union.2 Santiago Carrillo’s sentiments as he sat through these meetings may easily be imagined. Having nailed his colours so firmly to the PCE mast, he was at best deeply embarrassed, if not seriously frightened. He must have been extremely concerned that his father’s participation in the Casado Junta might have undone at a stroke all his efforts to rise within the Party hierarchy. He needed to take drastic action to avoid being besmirched in the eyes of the PCE leadership. After all, the recent purges in the Soviet Union had demonstrated that the treachery of a militant’s relative was believed to contaminate the blood of the entire family and so would have dire consequences for the Party member. Carrillo claims in his memoirs that he immediately locked himself in his hotel room and began to write an open letter denouncing his father. This is simply not true. His text is dated 15 May and opens by saying that it is a reply to a letter sent by his father from London. Since his father did not reach London until early April, that letter could not have arrived much before the end of the month. Moreover, there are ample signs in the letter that the two and half months’ delay had permitted lengthy contemplation, if not consultation with others, in the drafting process. Moreover, the fact that Santiago’s reply was very widely publicized suggested that his principal motivation was to prove his Stalinist orthodoxy by the ferocity of the attack on Wenceslao.
The letter was thus directed more to his superiors than to his father. Without the slightest hint of sadness or sorrow, its text was a mixture of understandable outrage about the consequences of the Casado coup and absurdly exaggerated Stalinist rhetoric. Santiago declared that he had decided to break off all relations with his father because of his participation in ‘a counter-revolutionary coup and in the back-stabbing treachery that handed over the heroic Spanish people, bound hand and foot, to Franco, the OVRA [the Italian secret police] and the Gestapo’. He pointed out, rightly, that internationally the Casado coup had tipped the balance of power in favour of Hitler and, within Spain, had opened the way to a brutal repression. In particular, he wrote with indignation of those Communists who had been imprisoned for the convenience of the Francoists.
Much of the rest of the extremely long text was a hymn of praise to those against whom the Casado coup had been directed: ‘my Party and its most beloved leaders; you insulted Pasionaria, the woman all Spaniards consider a symbol of the struggle for freedom, you hunted her like wolves to hand her over to Franco’. He wrote in similar terms of the Casado Junta’s denigration of, and determination to capture and execute, José Díaz, Jesús Hernández, Juan Modesto and Enrique Líster. He then moved on to insult his erstwhile idol, Largo Caballero, and his one-time fellow bolshevizers Luis Araquistáin, Carlos Baraibar and Carlos Hernández Zancajo, whom he now denounced as Trotskyists motivated by ‘hatred of the great fatherland of socialism, the Soviet Union, and the leader of the international working class, the great Stalin, because they are the vanguard and the faithful friend of all the peoples who fight for liberty, because they have consistently helped the Spanish people, and because they have been able with an iron hand to sweep aside your twin brothers, the Trotskyist, Zinovievist and Bukharinite traitors’.
The letter to his father ended with a final effort to convince the leadership of the PCE that he was a loyal element ready to sacrifice his family for the cause: ‘I remind you that every day I feel more proud of my party which has been the example of self-sacrifice and heroism in the struggle against the invaders, the party that in these difficult times of illegality does not lower its flag but continues to fight fascism with determination and courage … Every day I feel prouder of being a soldier in the ranks of the Great Communist International. Every day my love grows for the Soviet Union and the great Stalin.’ He ended with the words, ‘When you ask to be in touch with me, you forget that I am a Communist and you are a man who has betrayed his class and sold out his people. Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind.’3
The letter was published in early June in the mouthpieces of both the Comintern and the KIM, La Correspondance Internationale and Jeunesses du Monde. Nevertheless, not everyone in the PCE believed in its sincerity. Manuel Tagüeña, who at the time was living in clandestinity in the same safe house as Carrillo near Paris, wrote later, ‘Between Carrillo and me there was never much trust and certainly no friendship. I always believed that he would do anything to further his political ambitions. He had just publicly disowned his father Wenceslao for joining Casado’s Junta. No matter how much it was made out to be the gesture of a heroic Spartan warrior, no one doubted that he had done it to show the PCE leadership that he was the complete militant, ready to sacrifice his family for the good of the cause.’4
When Wenceslao read the letter some weeks later, he refused to believe that it had been written