OUR FAVOURITE STALINIST
La Pasionaria, Heroine of the Spanish Civil WarBY PAUL PRESTONDEC. 9, 2020
Born 125 years ago today, communist leader Dolores Ibárruri was the most famous symbol of the Republican cause in Spain. Known as "La Pasionaria," she coined the battle cry "¡No pasarán!" — expressing the fearlessness which made her a heroine for generations of anti-fascists.
The Spanish Communist Dolores Ibarruri known as "La Pasionaria" at a meeting of Spanish workers in Geneva. (Keystone / Getty Images
For her admirers, Dolores Ibárruri was an inspirational Civil War heroine and a universal earth-mother figure. For her Francoist enemies, she was the terrifying virago whose bloodthirsty rhetoric had emasculated right-wing MPs in the Popular Front–controlled parliament. The fear she provoked was reflected in frequent insults casting her as both manly and a “whore.” Her essential crime was that she encouraged women to abandon the serene servility which was considered their proper attitude.
Such views revealed more about the sexual and social fears of right-wing men than about Ibárruri. Yet, the vehemence of such insults is an indication of her historical importance. To this day, her role in raising the morale of the defenders of Madrid faced with the Francoist offensive, her much-quoted words to the women of the beleaguered capital, and her immortal farewell speech to the International Brigades, have retained their ability to move sympathizers of the Republican cause.
Nevertheless, the familiar images of La Pasionaria — the passionate fire-eater portrayed by both communist legend and anti-communist demonology — give only a partial picture. In the political arena and her private life, Ibárruri’s essential characteristics were strength, realism, and fierce determination to correct injustice. During the hard years of exile in the USSR, a loyal Stalinist emerged who differed considerably from the Civil War stereotypes.
Becoming a Communist
Dolores Ibárruri was born on December 9, 1895 in Gallarta, a mining village in Vizcaya. She was the eighth of eleven children; her father was a miner, and her mother a devout Catholic. Although a rebellious child, she was piously Catholic until the age of twenty — and even flirted with the idea of a religious vocation.
Her first job was as a domestic servant to a local middle-class family. The work was harsh; she had to rise at 6 AM and did not get to bed until 2 AM the following morning. At age twenty she married Socialist miner Julián Ruiz. She found not happiness but bitter desperation as, in her own words, “a domestic slave with no rights.”
She sought diversion in reading, principally in the Marxist literature provided first by her husband and then by the library of the Casa del Pueblo in Somorrostro, where they lived. Grinding poverty, together with the proselytizing zeal of her husband, turned the previously Catholic wife into a leftist.
News of the October Revolution in Russia provided a beacon of hope for Ibárruri. In 1918, when she wrote an article for the miners’ newspaper, she used the pseudonym Pasionaria (passion flower) by which she would be known for the rest of her life. The choice of a flower that bloomed in spring was nothing to do with her character but a reference to the fact that the article was published at Easter.
In 1921, when the Communist Party (PCE) was founded, she and her husband were both among the Basques who left the Socialists to join the new party. She was soon elected to its Vizcaya provincial committee.
La Pasionaria giving a speech to a crowd in Madrid.
Throughout the 1920s, the human costs of her — and particularly her husband’s —militancy intensified Ibárruri’s appalling hardships. With Julián often in prison, she was left to bring up a family with little money. After he was released, she was often pregnant. Inability to pay for adequate medical care and nourishment for her children contributed to the deaths of four of her daughters.
Her grief and outrage intensified her determination to fight injustice — addressing meetings, writing articles, organizing demonstrations, but also often darning the socks of a comrade or cooking for them. She was an archetypal mother figure to the miners, teaching them to read; yet she was also an early feminist, passionately advocating the inclusion of women in PCE activities. Her growing significance within the party was recognized in March 1930 when she was elected to its Central Committee.
In the campaign for the April 1931 municipal elections, which brought the Second Republic, Ibárruri came to prominence as an orator. Despite frequent nerves, both the content and her delivery gave her speeches enormous emotional power. Her abilities, together with her rarity value as a woman, brought her to the attention of Comintern leaders and she was called to Madrid in September 1931 to work as a journalist for the party newspaper Mundo Obrero.
This move coincided with the final breakdown of her marriage. In subsequent years, she was subjected to frequent arrests which meant separation from her children — something which caused her “tears of blood.” In 1935, at the party’s suggestion, she made the painful decision to send her son Rubén and daughter Amaya to Russia for a few months. However, the political turmoil of spring 1936, followed by the Civil War, meant that she would not see them again for several years.
Her success as an orator led to her selection as a PCE candidate in the February 1936 elections, in which she was elected to parliament. That spring she was increasingly in the limelight, campaigning for amnesties for political prisoners, advocating revolution at mass rallies and supporting strikers.
She was also a great success as a deputy, drawing media attention with her speeches passionately attacking the Right. The military uprising of July 18, 1936 fully revealed her capacity both to inspire and give voice to the popular mood. The following day, she made a broadcast on behalf of the PCE. In a rousing appeal, she declared “The fascists shall not pass! ¡No pasarán!” — a phrase which soon became the Republican battle-cry.
¡No pasarán!
In the early months of the war, she worked hard visiting fighting units, lifting the morale of the troops. Her courage and concern for their conditions guaranteed her a warm welcome, and her energy inspired those around her. Stalin’s agent, Mikhail Koltsov, described her work within the PCE leadership, where she provided a link with life in the streets, outside its smoke-filled rooms:
To the severe, masculine atmosphere of the Politburo, excessively dominated by the rule-book, the presence of Dolores brought warmth, joy, a sense of humour or of passionate anger.
Her greatest impact came from speeches appealing to the civilian population to support the militias — and to the rest of the world to support the Republic. Although her tone was broadly Republican and not narrowly Communist, the PCE derived enormous prestige from her emergence as the single most representative figure of the Republic. The pressure on her was intense — and she worked herself to exhaustion. The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau commented on “the simple, self-sacrificing faith which emanates from every word she speaks.”Throughout her life, her stature had grown commensurately with the scale of the problems with which she had to deal. She consistently met challenges with courage and was not diminished by defeat.
Ordinary people in Republican Spain found their lives turned upside down by the war — and found such a powerful “mother” figure appealing. Every day brought losses of loved ones, food shortages, bombing raids, and the constant anxiety of Francoist terror. The strength and concern emanating from Pasionaria was a beacon of certainty in a sea of insecurity.
Her simplicity and sincerity created a rapport which enabled her to voice the fears and hopes of many working-class people in the Republican zone. Every day, she was inundated by letters from ordinary people and soldiers, asking her to solve some problem or other.
On September 8, 1936, in an effort to mobilize public opinion in France against its government’s decision not to sell arms to Spain, she addressed a huge crowd in Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver. Here, she coined another resounding phrase: “the Spanish people would rather die on its feet than live on its knees.” She ended with a disturbing and prophetic warning:
And do not forget, and let no one forget, that if today it is our turn to resist fascist aggression, the struggle will not end in Spain. Today it’s us; but if the Spanish people is allowed to be crushed, you will be next, all of Europe will have to face aggression and war
The Defense of Madrid
The Paris trip established her worldwide as the symbol of the Republican war effort. But she came to even greater prominence during the siege of Madrid. Her courage was on display every day; even as bombs fell, she sauntered fearlessly along the tops of the trenches, calling for courage and determination in the face of the enemy.
In Mundo Obrero on September 25, she called for a total mobilization of Madrid’s population, with “Militarization: obligatory labour; rationing; discipline; exemplary punishment for saboteurs.” She was also a passionate advocate of a professional army for the Republic.
On October 5, she was made an honorary major in the PCE’s crack Fifth Regiment militia. At the ceremony, she made a belligerent speech:
This is not the moment to weep for our dead but to avenge them. The raped women, the murdered militiamen demand vengeance and justice; vengeance and justice are what we owe them and vengeance and justice is what we will impose on the executioners of the people.
Her frequent radio broadcasts also helped to maintain Republican morale — and as Franco’s African columns neared Madrid, she turned panic and fear into hope and a determination to fight. From her efforts to raise the morale of Madrid’s women came perhaps the most famous of her battle cries: “It is better to be the widows of heroes than the wives of cowards!”
Invariably accompanied by photographers and reporters, her every action had an impact on morale — and a propaganda dimension. She was regularly seen digging trenches, haranguing the troops, consoling soldiers who had lost their comrades and mothers who had lost their children. At times, she stopped panicked withdrawals by shaming the fleeing soldiers into returning to the trenches.
Pasionaria was tireless, hurrying around the city’s defenses, in one place stopping to deliver an impromptu speech, in another undertaking to do something about the lack of supplies. Sure that Madrid would fall, the Republican government left for Valencia on November 6.
Two days later, in a now terror-stricken Madrid, she addressed an enthusiastic meeting in the Cine Monumental, barely one kilometer from the front. She was greeted enthusiastically — and her speech giving thanks for Soviet aid raised spirits enormously. This was not just a recital of the party line — Dolores was genuinely moved by the Russian assistance to the Republic.
Similarly, she was especially affected by the arrival of the International Brigaders to help defend Madrid, also on November 6. Without thought for her own safety, she shared the same risks as they did in her efforts to help boost their morale.
In the cellars of the Faculty of Architecture on the northern outskirts of Madrid, full of women and children sheltering from the Nationalist bombardment, she addressed the brigaders on November 15. Making herself heard over the sound of artillery shells and machine guns, she again emphasized the international significance of the Spanish struggle:
You fight and make sacrifices for the freedom and independence of Spain. But Spain is sacrificing herself for the whole world. To fight for Spain is to fight for freedom and peace in the whole world.
By November 23, Franco had to accept that the frontal assault on Madrid had been beaten back. He moved to a policy of trying to encircle the capital and simultaneously mop up some of the periphery. She would never again be as directly involved in the war effort. But her role in maintaining morale remained crucial.
Defeat
Ibárruri was infuriated by the fall of Málaga in February 1937 — a defeat for which she held incompetent Socialist prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero largely responsible. She played an important role in the campaign to remove him, through both her speeches and private channels.She and most of the Left saw such a move as tantamount to surrender; they were determined to resist until, they hoped, the Western powers realized that their interests required them to support the Republic.
An opportunity arose after the infamous May Days, when the anti-Stalinist communists of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) rebelled against the Republic in Barcelona. Ibárruri visited president Manuel Azaña to complain about Largo Caballero’s ineptitude, his timidity with regard to the CNT, and the pernicious influence of his personal entourage.
Largely under Communist pressure, on May 17, Largo Caballero was replaced by finance minister Dr Juan Negrín. Yet, this change came too late to help the Basque Country; in a devastating blow to Ibárruri, Bilbao fell on June 19. In an eloquent article, she expressed her pain — and the conviction that this was a consequence of Largo Caballero’s mistakes.
Desperately anxious about how the war was going in the north, she fervently supported the diversionary attacks on Brunete and then Belchite. In articles published in Mundo Obrero, she paid tribute to the heroic resistance in Asturias. But she also railed against the shortsightedness of the Western democracies, in failing to support the Republic:
We have appealed to the proletariat of the entire world to come to our aid. We have shouted until we were hoarse at the doors of the so-called democratic countries, telling them what our struggle meant for them; and they did not listen.
By summer, with PCE Secretary-General José Díaz profoundly ill, she carried out many of his functions. She worked day and night, constantly importuned by problems, papers to read and authorize, and visitors to receive. Given her intense commitment to the war effort, she was infuriated by the frequent pessimistic remarks made by defense minister Indalecio Prieto. Within a week of the loss of Teruel in February 1938, she launched a savage attack on him.
On March 16, with Azaña and Prieto inclined to seek international mediation, she led a mass demonstration to pressure the cabinet against this. She and most of the Left saw such a move as tantamount to surrender; they were determined to resist until, they hoped, the Western powers realized that their interests required them to support the Republic.
Members of the Tom Mann Centuri unit of the International Brigaders in Barcelona in September 1936.
The entire event was stage-managed. As part of the orchestration of the event, Negrín left the cabinet meeting in order formally to receive Pasionaria. She presented him with the demonstration’s demands for commitment to continued resistance — with which he fully agreed.
But the following month, Franco’s forces reached the Mediterranean — splitting Republican Spain and cutting off Catalonia. In this context, she made a brutally frank report to the Central Committee on May 23, making no effort to minimize the gravity of the situation.
The military defeats that we have suffered in recent months have left us in such a state that we have to declare, without any kind of exaggeration, that, at this moment, the liberty and independence of our country is more directly and seriously threatened than ever before.
She went on to draw a bleak assessment of the international situation, of the difficulties likely to face the central zone and of the ongoing problem of defeatism. She ended with a rousing call for greater unity and discipline behind the program of Dr Negrín, as the basis for resistance. The audience was shaken by her message; yet, in the words of American reporter Vincent Sheean,
the genius of Dolores — her unquestionable genius as a speaker, the most remarkable I ever heard — worked upon them its customary miracle, and she had the whole audience cheering with enthusiasm when she finished.
During the Munich crisis of fall 1938, Negrín proposed the withdrawal of the International Brigades, in the hope that this might tip British and French sentiment in favor of the Republic. Although she understood the political reasons behind the decision, Pasionaria was devastated by its implications. She had always seen the presence of the brigaders as the ultimate symbol that the Spanish Republic did not have to face fascism alone. The official farewell parade was held in Barcelona on October 29. In the presence of many thousands of tearful, but cheering, Spaniards, Dolores Ibárruri wept as she gave an emotional and moving speech:
Comrades of the International Brigades! Political reasons, reasons of state, the good of that same cause for which you offered your blood with limitless generosity, send some of you back to your countries and some to forced exile. You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy. […] We will not forget you; and, when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back! Come back to us and here those of you who have no homeland will find a homeland, those who are forced to live without friends will find friends, and all of you will find the affection and the gratitude of the entire Spanish people.
Exile and Return
As the war ended in victory for Franco, Ibárruri escaped to Algiers. From there, she headed to France, before being recalled to Moscow.
This escape from Spain was traumatic — and the beginning of thirty-eight years of difficult exile in Russia. With the party fighting for survival against savage repression in Spain — and pursuing much of its activity in exile, in Latin America and Europe — she steered the PCE skillfully and often harshly in the years before Stalinism thawed. After her replacement as general secretary by Santiago Carrillo, she became party president and retired into a more symbolic role.
Ibárruri would finally return to Spain only on May 13, 1977. She would now play a significant role in the transition to democracy. She campaigned energetically in that June’s elections, and was herself elected a deputy. For a brief period in the new democracy’s first parliament, the Communist herself acted as Presidente de las Cortes — an astonishing symbol of national reconciliation.
In her final twelve years, she witnessed the consolidation of democracy and the collapse of the PCE. After a battle with pneumonia, she died on November 12, 1989, aged ninety-three. Her body lay for three days at party headquarters and over seventy thousand people came to pay their respects.
Her funeral in Madrid saw her coffin, draped in the party’s red flag, drawn through crowds of many thousands. After many tributes, a recording of her last speech was played and the crowd sang La Internacional. The woman who had come to maturity as the Bolshevik revolution was taking place died as holes were being knocked in the Berlin Wall and the USSR itself was collapsing.
This did not mean that she had been a failure. During the Civil War, she had progressed from being the mother of her party to a maternal symbol for large swathes of the population in the Republican zone. Throughout her life, her stature had grown commensurately with the scale of the problems with which she had to deal.
She consistently met challenges with courage and was not diminished by defeat. In exile, just as they had done during the Civil War, her speeches and broadcasts helped to keep alive the spirit of resistance to the dictatorship — and of the struggle for democracy in Spain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Preston is a historian of Spain. His most recent book is A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874-2018.
La Pasionaria, Spanish Anti-Fascism’s Greatest Orator, Remained Defiant in Exile
BY LISA A. KIRSCHENBAUM
12.09.2020
During Spain’s Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri was famed worldwide as La Pasionaria, the brilliant orator who stirred anti-fascists’ souls. Fleeing to Moscow in 1939, she soon became the exiled Communists’ leader — both political guide for a defeated party and a “Spanish mother” confronting the expectations of her male comrades.
Dolores Ibárruri addressing a rally in Madrid in 1936.
When the Spanish Republic fell in March 1939 after three years of civil war, forcing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians to flee the country, only about two thousand of them were admitted into the Soviet Union. Dolores Ibárruri was the most famous of this select group, and perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time. Born on December 9, 1895, into a family of impoverished miners in Spain’s Basque country, by 1939, she had become an international symbol of the Spanish struggle against fascism. In one of his earliest columns from Spain, Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov described Ibárruri as a “daughter of the people — yesterday a simple, illiterate worker, today one of the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party . . . a simple Spanish woman in a black housedress.”
In her 1962 memoir, Ibárruri presented herself in similar terms. As a young girl, she had dreamed of becoming a teacher. But poverty prevented her from completing her education. In 1916, she married a miner and trade union activist, Julián Ruiz, with whom she had six children; only two survived to adulthood. A year after the Russian Revolution, she began writing for the local miners’ newspaper under the pseudonym “La Pasionaria” — the passionflower. In 1921, she and Ruiz joined the tiny, recently founded Spanish Communist Party (PCE). By 1933, Ibárruri had moved high enough in the party’s ranks to travel to Moscow for a meeting of the Comintern’s executive committee. Her rise to international fame began with the radio address she gave in July 1936, the day after the military launched a coup against the Republic, when she declared “¡No pasarán!” These words would become the most recognizable anti-fascist rallying cry of the era: “They shall not pass!”
During the Civil War, Ibárruri’s popular influence and appeal had less to do with a specifically Communist message than with her powerful — and profoundly gendered — performance of defiance and self-sacrifice. In 1935 or 1936, around the time of her fortieth birthday, she had begun always appearing in widow’s black. This costume disguised the fact that she was separated from her husband and allowed her to turn herself into an icon. In a letter, published in Pravda, to the Soviet actress who had played her in Aleksandr Afinogenov’s 1936 play Salut, Ispanii!, Ibárruri attributed her success as an orator to her ability to express — to become — the suffering and courage of the Spanish people: “My voice is the outraged cry of a people that does not wish to be enslaved . . . In my voice sounds the cry of mothers, the lament of women in bondage, demeaned and scorned.”
A Mother to the Exiles
In her 1984 memoir, Ibárruri scarcely mentioned the transition from the frenzy of wartime Spain to the routine of Comintern bureaucracy. Instead, from forty-five years’ distance, she defined her role in the USSR in terms of her maternal responsibility to her own children and to all the Spaniards in that country. Offering few details, she emphasized her joyful reunion in Moscow with her children, Amaya and Rubén. Her narrative then moved beyond her intimate circle, as she observed that “in some ways all the exiled Spaniards were my family.”
As she took up the task of mothering the exiles, Ibárruri depended on her ability to infuse public messages with emotion — something that had long been her trademark. Participating in fewer mass meetings and making fewer public appearances than in Spain, she used her correspondence with the exiles to express political commitments in personal, even intimate terms. She presented herself as the center of a community united by memories of wartime heroism and sacrifices — and by shared hopes for a speedy return to Spain and the defeat of fascism there.Ibárruri’s popular influence and appeal had less to do with a specifically Communist message than with her powerful — and profoundly gendered — performance of defiance and self-sacrifice.
A review of Ibárruri’s copious correspondence with the émigrés provides a glimpse of her self-presentation and its reception and suggests that the role of Iberian mother was more than symbolic. Ibárruri and her correspondents, both prominent and rank-and-file exiles, who wrote requesting everything from help securing a pension or housing to permission to join the party, took seriously her responsibility for their material and emotional well-being. She did this both as La Pasionaria and, from 1942, as PCE general secretary, after the suicide of her predecessor José Díaz. After the German invasion of the USSR, a group of Spanish pilots asked her to help them get to the front. In 1944, when a lovelorn comrade asked her to meet with his estranged wife on his behalf, Ibárruri agreed to try to effect a reconciliation. After the meeting, she bluntly informed the husband that his wife “has ceased to love you,” and advised him to look to “the fulfillment of your duty for some compensation for this lack of affection.”
Dolores Ibárruri (National Library of France)
While Ibárruri presented herself as the mother of the exiles, as a party leader she necessarily crossed traditional gender boundaries. And it was in her actions as PCE leader — where the party’s vocal commitment to gender equality met its aggressively masculinist culture — that the trouble began for Ibárruri in exile. Unlike critics of Romania’s Ana Pauker and Poland’s Wanda Wasilewska — women who shared something like her prominence in the communist movement — those who disparaged Ibárruri rarely described or derided her as masculine. Instead, they imagined her as an oversexed, out-of-control woman — the black housedress notwithstanding. Her opponents in inner-party power struggles focused on her affair with Francisco Antón, a political commissar about fifteen years her junior. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Hitler’s subsequent invasion of France made possible a prisoner swap to free Antón, who was being held in a French internment camp, Ibárruri’s rivals characterized the diplomatic machinations that brought him to Moscow as grounded in vulgar desire, and thus unworthy of a communist.
Abdicated Responsibility?
The question of how best to be a Spanish communist (woman) in the USSR constituted a central theme, both implicit and explicit, of the conflicts within the party leadership that followed the suicide of previous general secretary Díaz. The power struggle culminated in 1944, when Jesús Hernández, who, along with Antón, had been dispatched to Mexico the previous year, attempted to turn the Latin American emigration against Ibárruri. In her memoir, Ibárruri noted dryly that Hernández “tried to orchestrate a small coup d’état” in Mexico but failed to “win the support of fellow émigrés in Latin America.” But the minutes of the late-night central committee meeting held in May 1944 — which resulted in the expulsion from the party of both Hernández and his ally Enrique Castro Delgado, who was still in Moscow — tell a fuller story.
The minutes of this 1944 showdown offer a rare view of party leaders in action. The archival traces of PCE central committee meetings in this period are often quite scanty. In some cases, the archive provides nothing more than the meetings’ resolutions without any sense of the preceding discussion, in others a general summary of the agenda. By contrast, the record of the May 5, 1944 meeting runs to more than fifty pages and often reads like a verbatim transcript. Both the minutes and Castro’s dissenting retrospective account make clear that the battle hinged on defining what behavior was appropriately “communist” and “Spanish” in the context of exile and war.Ibárruri defined her role in the USSR in terms of her maternal responsibility to her own children and to all the Spaniards in that country.
Exile magnified the ambiguities in communist normative codes as Spaniards — and Ibárruri more clearly than most — were torn between different ways of understanding and enacting loyalty to the Spanish cause and their Spanish comrades as well as to Stalin and the socialist fatherland. If her status as Spanish mother bolstered her authority, it also offered powerful grounds for critique and limited her room to maneuver. As Ibárruri noted in her opening statement at the central committee meeting, her opponents focused on her alleged failure to ensure the welfare of the nearly three thousand children evacuated from Spain to the USSR during the Civil War, and who were now suffering from tuberculosis — this, at a time when the Nazi-Soviet war was generating disease and malnutrition on a massive scale. Ibárruri’s opponents depicted her as substituting Soviet values for Spanish Communist ones. No longer the protective Iberian mother, Ibárruri had become, her critics argued in their retrospective narratives, Stalin’s “disciple,” the “priestess of Stalin’s temple” bent on turning Spanish children into “good Bolsheviks.” In their interventions, Ibárruri’s allies answered these charges with evidence of her maternal abnegation. Ibárruri’s secretary, Irene Falcón, did not deny the children’s illness but bore witness “to the fact that Dolores has suffered not as a party leader but as a mother for the misfortunes suffered by each [Spanish] child in the Soviet Union.”
Dolores Ibárruri with Fidel Castro.
The most caustic disagreements in this debate on communist values centered on how to define communist (feminine) propriety and “normal” communist relations between men and women. Ibárruri’s supporters linked Hernández’s political crimes to the influence of his wife; he had “fallen,” Juan Modesto explained, “into the hands of an adventuress,” and therefore, far from leading the life of a “party militant,” he was engaging in “orgies, carousing, friendships with noncommunists, and hostility toward his old comrades in struggle,” especially Ibárruri.
In their memoirs, Ibárruri’s opponents made analogous accusations, often depicting her alleged abdication of maternal responsibility and transgression of norms of sexual behavior in strikingly malicious — not to say misogynist — terms. Hernández charged that while she let the children suffer, she and her lover lived a life of debauched privilege. Castro described her as a menacing and lustful “Exterminating Angel.” Allowing someone else to put words in his mouth, Castro’s memoir quoted Rafael Vidiella, a Catalan communist, who had testified to a conversation with Castro in which the latter voiced opposition to both Ibárruri and Hernández. In Castro’s account of the meeting, Vidiella declared that Castro “told me categorically: ‘Dolores is impossible — she’s a woman who reacts with her genitals; Hernández is too frivolous.’” Castro did not specify whether Vidiella reported the conversation accurately, but the picture of Ibárruri is clear. The minutes recorded only that Vidiella stated his discomfort with hearing Castro say “disagreeable” things about Ibárruri. Castro did not note Ibárruri’s rebuttal.While Ibárruri presented herself as the mother of the exiles, as a party leader she necessarily crossed traditional gender boundaries.
But the central committee record does offer a view of how Ibárruri attempted to reconcile her intimate relationship with the norms of femininity dominant in the Soviet Union and the Spanish party in exile. Her closing statement as reproduced in the minutes includes a rare — perhaps the only — “public” admission of her (now terminated) relationship with Antón. If she had a relationship with him, Ibárruri averred, it was “normal, such as communists have.” Claiming the right to a relationship without specifying what made it “communist,” Ibárruri echoed earlier Soviet and socialist norms. Associated with both communist practices during the Spanish Civil War and the theories of Alexandra Kollontai and August Bebel, such norms accommodated some measure of “privacy and freedom in sexual relations.”
However, even this minimal “private” feminism proved unsustainable, as it was incompatible with Ibárruri’s self-representation as the mother of the exiles. In 1977, in the first interview she gave after returning to Spain, following Franco’s death, Ibárruri denied that her male comrades “tried to limit my work.” But she also characterized them as operating on the assumption that “women are inferior” and that men “are the ones who need to lead and govern.” According to Santiago Carrillo, Ibárruri’s successor as leader of the PCE, breaking off her relationship with Antón and renouncing all “personal life” was the price she had to pay to become general secretary. In any event, her political authority did not give her leverage to challenge the dominant norms and practices that opened the “private” lives of both men and women to party scrutiny, but, at least in the case of discussions within the Spanish party, tended to hold women to more rigid standards of sexual conduct. Unable to define her quite decorous sexual emancipation as “normal,” Ibárruri found herself constrained by the maternal image that authorized her political role.
Stalinist Discipline
By emphasizing the close, often personal, connections between the Spanish and Soviet causes as well as the degree to which Spanish victory depended on Soviet aid and advice, Ibárruri found more room to maneuver in adapting her continued identification with Spain to the Stalinist cultural environment. The overlap of the Soviet and Spanish causes emerged most powerfully and personally when Ibárruri’s son Rubén died at the Stalingrad front in September 1942. As the mother of a son who fought in Spain and then died for the cause at this decisive battle, she embodied both the suffering that the Spanish/Soviet cause demanded and hopes for the defeat of fascism in her homeland.Ibárruri found herself constrained by the maternal image that authorized her political role.
Ibárruri’s fusion of the Spanish and Soviet causes relied on an idealized and personalized memory of Soviet and international communist aid during the Spanish Civil War as well as a large measure of forgetting. Nowhere was the forgetting clearer than in the 1977 interview, in which the question of arrests in the Soviet Union drew an emphatic response from the eighty-two-year-old Ibárruri: “If Spaniards were arrested I don’t remember . . . I don’t remember, I don’t remember, what more do you want?” This is a startling lapse given the number of friends and acquaintances, both Spanish and Soviet, who disappeared in the purges. It suggests the persistence of Ibárruri’s Stalinism, her party discipline, or perhaps self-delusion. Her unwillingness or inability to remember arrests can also be understood as the obverse of her powerful memory of the Spanish Civil War. It is useful to contrast Ibárruri’s vehement forgetting with her 1975 letter to American communist Steve Nelson, who served as a political commissar in the International Brigades in Spain, on the occasion of his seventy-second birthday. Here, she insisted that neither time nor distance could dim the memory of his commitment to the liberation of the Spanish people. Writing from the USSR, she evoked an international community linked to Moscow but also defining itself in terms of memories, sorrows, and dreams rooted in Spain.
Ibárruri’s efforts in exile to fashion herself as the maternal heart of this community illustrates the power of conceptualizing international communism as structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists. Her case also highlights the importance of understanding international communism in terms of everyday practices. In Moscow, she worked to reconcile and apply norms of communist (female) behavior developed in the relatively open environment of western communism — and in the extreme circumstances of war — to Stalin’s Russia and the challenges of political exile. Her story confirms that for international communists, communism was more than an institution or a political creed; it was a way of life. Forging political and personal networks in and beyond Moscow, people like Ibárruri made international communism, although never just as they pleased.
This article reprints with permission portions of Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning: Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 566–89.S
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is professor of history at West Chester University. She writes and teaches about modern Russia and the Soviet Union, war and memory, international communism, and gender in modern Europe.
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