Building Utopia. The Spanish Revolution 1936-1937 by Stuart Christie

Author:Stuart Christie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: ChristieBooks
Published: 2012-05-29T03:00:00+00:00

“The Iron Column has not disbanded, nor is it contemplating disbandment. Nor has it militarised… it has requested that it be temporarily relieved so that it may snatch a little rest and reorganise.”

By mid-March the Column had largely been disbanded on account of the desertions by many of its militians. After an assembly held in Valencia on 22 March militarisation was accepted as a lesser evil and the remainder of the Iron Column, 4,000 men out of a total of 20,000, became known as the 83rd Mixed Brigade commanded by José Pellicer, with Segarra as political commissar. Before disbanding the Column’s assets were shared out among rationalist schools, the CNT field hospital, the anarchist international prisoners’ aid group and anarchist publishing ventures and libraries.

In Catalonia the statist politicians and functionaries were also making the final preparations for delivering the deathblow to the revolution. On 4 March, Artemio Aiguadé, the communist Councillor for Internal Security, announced the dissolution of the Control Patrols, the armed representatives of the workers’ organisations, the Internal Security Council, composed of representatives of every shade of opinion, and the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.1 In addition, members of union or political organisations were prohibited from belonging to the forces of public order. Any infringement of this ban was to be punished by dismissal from the security corps. This provoked an immediate government crisis which was to last almost a month. That same day, La Batalla, paper of the POUM, reprinted extracts, with enthusiastic comments by Andrés Nin, from an article that had appeared in the CNT evening paper La Noche. The author was the paper’s editor, CNT militant Jaime Balius, soon to be one of the founders of the Friends of Durruti group:

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