After the Civil War Carlos de Baraibar commented bitterly on the manic enthusiasm of Carrillo and Melchor for everything they had seen in the Soviet Union. On their return, ‘they spoke extravagantly about the people, their achievements, their laboratories and even their toilets’. He believed that, in a sense, they had been corrupted by the experience. ‘In Moscow,’ he wrote,
they, like many simple souls before them, had found their road to Damascus and, on their return, began to sketch wild plans for the reorganization of the youth movement that signified the undermining of its revolutionary essence. They brought back with them a confused mixture of totalitarian illusions of recruiting the entire young population of Spain, ambition to create a colossal organization and sheer village idiocy. They were seduced by the bewildering panoply of figures, tables and statistics cleverly put before them.50
Shortly after Carrillo’s return to Madrid, a joint meeting was held of the FJS and UJC executive committees to consider the report that the delegation had elaborated in Moscow in favour of a new mass united movement. The report was approved as the basis for unification and a joint national committee set up to implement the fusion process. Much effort had been made to combat suspicions that the Socialist movement was about to lose its youth movement to the Communists. Rather, it was hoped to reassure Largo Caballero that the UJC would be absorbed into the FJS. However, in practice, as could have been anticipated, that was not what happened, given Carrillo’s ever closer links to Moscow. Public meetings were held in local sections of both organizations to propagate the unification. They culminated in a mass gathering at the Las Ventas bull-ring in Madrid on Sunday 5 April 1936. In his speech on that occasion, Carrillo declared that what was happening repaired the schism of 1921 which had seen the radical wing of the PSOE depart to form the PCE. The event at Las Ventas was followed throughout May and July 1936 by meetings of the provincial sections of the FJS and UJC to prepare for a great national conference of unification which, because of the outbreak of civil war, never took place. In those months, the joint membership of 100,000 was swollen to 140,000.51
Retrospectively, Largo Caballero recalled his reaction in similar terms to those of Baraibar. He claimed that when Carrillo and others came to explain the proposed organizational plans, he told them that their plans for a mass youth movement undermined the purpose of the FJS as an elite training school for future PSOE leaders. He declared uncompromisingly that he now considered the FJS to be dead and, with it, the hope that it would be a bulwark for the Socialist Party. Carrillo tried to convince him of his good faith and his loyalty. He made ‘a solemn promise that he would create a formidable organization that was totally socialist’.52
Amaro del Rosal, who was one of those present when Largo Caballero was informed of the unification, recalled his distress: ‘his eyes filled with tears’. Carrillo had effectively delivered a shattering blow to the PSOE, undermining its political future. As Largo Caballero perceived, he was delivering to the PCE, in the words of Helen Graham, ‘a political vanguard which undoubtedly included many potential national and provincial leaders’. There were those, Serrano Poncela among them, who were alarmed that Carrillo now talked of creating a mass organization contrary to the traditional perception of the FJS as an elite training ground for the PSOE. Although Carrillo made a speech in which he paid tribute to Largo Caballero, the damage had been done.53
Carrillo took part in a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee on 31 March, at which he suggested that the new JSU, the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, should seek membership of the KIM and that the PSOE should unite with the PCE and join the Comintern. Attendance at Central Committee meetings was a privilege not normally extended to outsiders.54 Carrillo would not formally join the Communist Party for another six months, but there is reason to believe that he was already a Communist in all but name. In 1974, he admitted that, on his return from Moscow, ‘I had begun to become a Communist. I did not join the Party immediately, although I began to collaborate with the Communists and was even invited to take part in meetings of the Central Committee. I had not yet joined because I was still hopeful of bringing about the unification of the Socialist and Communist parties.’55
The procedure whereby the new executive committee of the JSU was appointed in September 1936 was extremely opaque. There were fifteen members, of whom seven were Communists, although several of the eight Socialists were so close to the PCE as made little difference. Carrillo became secretary general of an organization that, despite its name, constituted a massive advance of Communist influence.56 Those who perceived the creation of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas as the loss of the FJS to the Third International coined the nickname ‘Juventudes Socialistas Urssificadas’ (USSR in Spanish being URSS).57
When the military coup in Spain began on 18 July, Carrillo was in Paris where he had gone with Trifón Medrano and José Laín Entralgo to discuss with Raymond Guyot, the secretary general of the Communist Youth International, the problems posed by the meeting in Madrid with the comical German woman delegate of the Comintern, Carmen. In his memoirs, he recounted his heroic response to hearing of the military coup. In this version, for which there is no corroboration, all three immediately set off for the border. Crossing into Spain at Irún, they headed for San Sebastián and immediately got involved in an assault on an hotel where some rebel supporters had barricaded themselves in. Later, in a vain effort to reach Madrid, Carrillo and his companions spent some weeks fighting on the Basque front with a unit organized by the Basque Communist Party. Being extremely short-sighted, Carrillo was anything but a natural soldier. Eventually, they were able to cross into France and then back into Spain via Puigcerdà. The Communist veteran Enrique Líster claimed that the entire account was pure invention and that, during this period, Carrillo remained in Paris. Whatever the truth, it is clear that already, in those early weeks of the war, he was convinced that the only party with the sense of direction to take control of events was the PCE.58
When he got back to Madrid at the beginning of August, the JSU was already trying to turn its pre-war militia structure into proper fighting units. Carrillo claims that he was made political commissar of the JSU’s ‘Largo Caballero’ battalion which was fighting in defence of the city in the sierras to the north. His heroic picture of that period of his life is somewhat undermined by Manuel Tagüeña, a much more reliable witness, who suggested that Carrillo was involved in political rivalries that undermined the efforts of the Italian Fernando De Rosa to link the various units.59 Certainly, his military career, if it took place at all, was brief. Given the vertiginous growth of the JSU, it was clear that Carrillo could be of most use in a political rather than a military capacity.
The JSU was being inundated with new recruits and soon had more militants than the adult membership of the PSOE and PCE combined.60 At every level of society, the economy and the war effort, in industry and the nascent armed forces, JSU members were playing a key role. Accordingly, Carrillo was now working in Madrid on the practicalities of consolidating Communist control over this