Catalonia Unites Left: Socialists and Communists Merge

Four rival leftist parties walked into a meeting hall in Barcelona and emerged as a single organization, creating the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia just four days after military officers attempted to overthrow the Spanish Republic. Socialists, communists, worker unionists, and Catalan separatists merged their memberships, their newspapers, and their militias into a coalition designed to survive a civil war that everyone now understood had already begun. The military uprising of July 17-18, 1936, led by generals including Francisco Franco, had succeeded in roughly half of Spain but failed in Barcelona, Madrid, and the industrial north. In Catalonia, workers' militias and loyal police had defeated the garrison, and the streets were now controlled by an unstable alliance of anarchists, communists, and socialists who distrusted each other almost as much as they opposed Franco. The merger was driven partly by genuine solidarity and partly by the Communist International's directive to build broad anti-fascist fronts across Europe. The new party, known by its Catalan initials PSUC, immediately affiliated with the Communist International, making it the only regional party in Spain directly connected to Moscow. Soviet advisors, weapons, and political influence followed, giving the PSUC outsized power in Catalan politics despite its relatively modest membership. The relationship was double-edged: Soviet aid kept the Republic fighting, but Moscow's insistence on eliminating rival leftist factions, particularly the anti-Stalinist POUM, created internal conflicts that weakened the war effort. George Orwell, fighting with the POUM militia in Catalonia, witnessed the internecine violence firsthand and documented it in "Homage to Catalonia," one of the most penetrating accounts of revolutionary politics ever written. The PSUC survived Franco's victory as an underground organization, reemerging after the dictator's death in 1975 to play a role in Catalonia's transition to democracy.