Dolores Ibárruri
Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, also known as Pasionaria, was a Spanish Republican politician during the Spanish Civil War and a communist. She is renowned for her slogan ¡No Pasarán!, which she issued during the Battle for Madrid in November 1936.
Ibárruri joined the Spanish Communist Party when it was founded in 1920. In the 1930s, she became a writer for the Communist Party of Spain publication Mundo Obrero, and in February 1936, she was elected to the Cortes Generales as a PCE deputy for Asturias. After going into exile from Spain towards the end of the Civil War in 1939, she became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain, a position she held from 1942 to 1960. The Party then named her honorary president of the PCE, a post she held for the rest of her life. Upon her return to Spain in 1977, she was re-elected as a deputy to the Cortes for the same region she had represented from 1936 to 1939 under the Spanish Second Republic.
Biography
Dolores Ibárruri was born in 1895 as the eighth of eleven children. She had a Basque miner father and a Castilian mother. She grew up in Gallarta but later moved to Somorrostro. Gallarta was adjacent to a large siderite mine.Ibárruri left school at 15 after spending two years preparing for teachers' college at the encouragement of her schoolmistress. Her parents could not afford further education, so she went to work as a seamstress and later as a housemaid. She became a waitress in the town of Arboleda, the most important urban nucleus in the region of Somorrostro. There, she met Julián Ruiz Gabiña, a union activist and founder of the Socialist Youth of Somorrostro. They married in late 1915, two years after the birth of their first child. The young couple participated in the general strike of 1917, which led to the imprisonment of Ruiz. During this time, Ibárruri spent nights reading the works of Karl Marx, Engels and others found in the library of the Socialist Workers' Centre in Somorrostro. Ibárruri wrote her first article in 1918 for the miners' newspaper El Minero Vizcaíno under the pseudonym of "La Pasionaria" . The article was published during Holy Week and focused on religious hypocrisy, contrasting with the Passion of Christ. Because of the article's theme and timing, she signed it with the alias Pasionaria. In 1920, Ibárruri and the Workers' Centre joined the newly formed Communist Party of Spain, and she was named a member of the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party. After ten years of grassroots militancy, she was appointed to the Central Committee of the PCE in 1930.
During this time, Ibárruri had six children. Of her five daughters, four died very young. She "used to relate how her husband made a small coffin out of a crate of fruit." Her son, Rubén, died at twenty-two during the Battle of Stalingrad. The remaining child, Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri, outlived her mother. She was married to Stalin's adopted son, Artyom Sergeyev. In 2008, Amaya resided in the working-class neighbourhood of Ciudad Lineal in Madrid. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.
In Madrid (1931–1936)
With the advent of the Second Republic in 1931, Ibárruri moved to Madrid and became the editor of the PCE newspaper Mundo Obrero. She was arrested for the first time in September 1931. Jailed with common offenders, she persuaded them to begin a hunger strike to secure freedom for political detainees. Following a second arrest in March 1932, she led other inmates in singing "The Internationale" in the visiting room and encouraged them to reject poorly paid menial labor in the prison yard. She wrote two articles from jail: one published by the PCE periodical Frente Rojo and the other by Mundo Obrero. On 17 March 1932, she was elected to the Central Committee of the PCE at the 4th Congress held in Seville.In 1933, Ibárruri founded Mujeres Antifascistas, a women's organisation opposed to Fascism and war. On 18 April, Soviet astronomer Grigory Neujmin discovered asteroid 1933 HA and named it "Dolores" in her honour. In November, she travelled to Moscow as a delegate of the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which assessed the dangers posed by fascism and the threat of war. The sight of the Russian capital thrilled Ibárruri. "To me, who saw it through the eyes of the soul", she wrote in her autobiography, "it was the most wonderful city on earth. The construction of socialism was being managed from it. In it were taking shape the earthly dreams of freedom of generations of slaves, outcasts, serfs, and proletarians. From it one could take in and perceive the march of humanity toward communism." She did not return to Spain until the new year.
In 1934, she attended the First World Meeting of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. Although the meeting was chaired by Gabrielle Duchêne, president of the French branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the separate Rassemblement was an organ of the short-lived French Popular Front. Both the Rassemblement and the Front dissolved in 1939.
Toward the end of 1934, Ibárruri and two others spearheaded a risky rescue mission to the mining region of Asturias to bring more than a hundred starving children to Madrid. The parents of these children had been jailed following the failed October Revolution, which was suppressed by General Franco at the behest of the Republican government. Ibárruri succeeded in her mission but was briefly detained in the prisons of Sama de Langreo and Oviedo. To spare her children further anguish, she sent them to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1935.
In 1935, she secretly crossed the Spanish border to attend the 7th World Congress of the Communist International, held from 25 July to 21 August in Moscow. At this Congress, Georgi Dimitrov delivered a keynote speech proposing an alliance with "progressive bourgeois" governments against the fascists. Under this doctrine, the Popular Front would come to power in France in June 1936.
Ibárruri welcomed Dimitrov's speech as a vindication of the PCE's long-standing position and returned home "full of enthusiasm, determined to do the impossible to achieve a consensus among the various workers' and democratic organisations of our country." At the same Congress, she was elected a deputy member of the ECCI and became the second prominent Communist figure in Spain after José Díaz, the secretary-general of the PCE.
In 1936, Ibárruri was jailed for the fourth time after enduring severe abuse from the arresting officers in Madrid. Upon her release, she went to Asturias to campaign for the PCE in the general elections held on 16 February. In these elections, 323,310 ballots were cast. However, "one ballot, one vote" did not apply; each voter could choose up to 13 candidates simultaneously. The PCE received 170,497 votes, enough to secure one seat in Parliament for Dolores Ibárruri. The Popular Front's election platform included the release of political prisoners, and La Pasionaria set out to free the detainees in Oviedo immediately.
As soon as the victory of the Popular Front in the elections became known I, already an elect member of Parliament, showed up at the prison of Oviedo the next morning, went to the office of the Director, who had fled in a mad panic because he had behaved like a genuine criminal toward the Asturian prisoners interned after the revolution of October 1934, and there I found the Administrator to whom I said, "Give me the keys because the prisoners must be released this very day." He replied, "I have not received any orders", and I answered, "I am a member of the Republic's Parliament, and I demand that you hand over the keys immediately to set the prisoners free." He handed them over and I assure you that it was the most thrilling day of my activist life, opening the cells and shouting, "Comrades, everyone get out!" Truly thrilling. I did not wait for Parliament to sit or for the release order to be given. I reasoned, "We have run on the promise of freedom for the prisoners of the revolution of 1934—we won—today the prisoners go free."
In the months before the Spanish Civil War, she joined the strikers at the Cadavio mine in Asturias and stood beside poor tenants evicted from a suburb of Madrid. Around this time, Federico García Lorca, La Pasionaria, and friends were chatting and sharing a coffee in a Madrid café when Lorca, who had been observing Ibárruri's appearance, told her, "Dolores, you are a woman of grief, of sorrows... I'm going to write you a poem." The poet returned to Granada and met his death at the hands of the Nationalists before completing the task.
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
Ibárruri delivered a series of speeches, some of which were radio broadcasts from Madrid: "Danger! To Arms!", "Our Fighters Must Lack for Nothing!", "Discipline, Composure, Vigilance!", "Restrain the Hand of the Foreign Meddlers!", "Fascism Shall Not Pass!", "Better to Die Standing Up Than to Live Kneeling Down!", "A Salute to Our Militia Women on the Front Line", and "Our Battle Cry Has Been Heard by the Whole World". It can be inferred that the majority in Madrid rallied to the Republic's side, that uncontrolled elements roamed the capital and many rounds of gunfire were wasted out of nerves, that Nationalist propaganda was more effective, and that she recognised early on that the war would be lost without foreign aid. On 2 October, she wrote a revealing letter to her son in Russia, apologising for not having written earlier and describing the harrowing situation: "You cannot even imagine, my son, how savage is the struggle going on in Spain now... Fighting is going on daily and round the clock. And in this fighting, some of our finest and bravest comrades have perished." She recounted spending many days beside the troops at the front and expressed her concerns about the war's outcome: "It is my hope that in spite of all the difficulties, particularly the lack of weapons, we shall still win." The war became particularly brutal in 1937. Just as the Blitz later drove the Allies to bomb German cities mercilessly, the Nationalist bombardment of open cities spurred Ibárruri to demand an equal response from the "progressive bourgeois" government. President Manuel Azaña, an intellectual and writer, was unwilling to flout constitutional or international laws, while Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, a socialist, was reluctant to cooperate with the PCE. The closing lines of her speech signalled her readiness to endorse radical violence.On 24 February, Stalin forbade the sending of Soviet volunteers to fight in Spain, but he did not recall Alexander Orlov, an Order of Lenin awardee from the NKVD. Orlov and the NKVD orchestrated the May Days, the conflict that erupted between 3 and 8 May in Barcelona between the Popular Front and the Trotskyist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. The battle resulted in approximately 1,000 fighters being killed and 1,500 injured, though estimates vary. Following the suppression of the POUM, any possibility of Spain serving as a refuge for Leon Trotsky was eliminated. Orlov employed the same methods of terror, duplicity, and deception used during the Great Purge.
As a result of the events from 3 to 8 May in Barcelona, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists came to be seen by Ibárruri as the "Fascist enemy within."
When we point out the need of opposing Trotskyism we discover a very strange phenomenon, that voices are raised in its defense in the ranks of certain organizations and among certain circles in certain parties. These voices belong to people who themselves are intoxicated with this counter-revolutionary ideology. The Trotskyists have long been transformed into the agents of Fascism, into the agents of the German Gestapo. We saw this on the ground during the May putsch in Catalonia; we saw this clearly in the disturbances that occurred in various other places. And everybody will realize this when the trial opens against the POUM. leaders who were caught spying. And we realize that the hand of Fascism is behind every attempt to demoralise our home front, to undermine the authority of the Republic. Therefore it is essential that we wipe out Trotskyism with a firm hand, for Trotskyism is no longer a political option for the working class but an instrument of the counter-revolution.
Trotskyism must be rooted out of the proletarian ranks of our Party as one roots out poisonous weeds. The Trotskyists must be rooted out and disposed of like wild beasts, for otherwise every time our men wish to go on the offensive we will not be able to do so due to lawlessness caused by the Trotskyists in the rear. An end must be put to these traitors once and for all so that our men on the front lines can fight without fear of being stabbed in the back.
Ibárruri attributed the events to an "anarcho-Trotskyist" attempt to undermine the Republican government on orders from Franco, acting in concert with Adolf Hitler. She claimed the violence was the culmination of an anarchist plot that included plans to halt train movement and cut all telegraph and telephone lines. She cited an "order to its forces to control the telephone building and disarm all people whom they encounter in the streets without proper authorization" as part of the anarchist scheme. She did not cite specific evidence for these claims, which were accepted by many Party members at the time. Later analyses by historians have challenged the validity of these claims.
The Communist Party alleged that the anarchist "putsch" was motivated by resentment of the centralized military command sought by the Communists and their allies in Lluís Companys's Catalan government, as well as a desire to seize political power. The anarchists and Trotskyists viewed the events as an attempt by the Communist Party to dominate all revolutionary activity and blamed the Communists for authoritarianism. They contrasted the Communist police state with the egalitarian conditions that existed prior to the May 1937 events.
Ibárruri, Díaz, and the rest of the PCE viewed the Trotskyists as a significant threat and worked to suppress their influence.
The remnants of the POUM leadership were put on trial in Barcelona on 11 October 1938. Referring to the arraignments, Ibárruri said: "If there is an adage that says in normal times it is preferable to acquit a hundred guilty ones rather than punish a single innocent one, when the life of a people is in danger, it is better to convict a hundred innocent ones than to acquit a single guilty one."
On 30 April 1938, Stalin proposed a military alliance to France and Britain, effectively forsaking the Spanish Republic.