Living My Life - Emma Goldman [25]
Meanwhile, it must have seemed tragic to Goldman that so many forces conspired to defeat the revolution: the European democracies averted their eyes; the international working class remained strangely silent; the fascist enemies prepared their assault ; while the Spanish revolution was being devoured from within by deadly fighting among socialists, anarchists, and communists. In response, Goldman was not consistent with her advice, publicly making urgent appeals for support for the republic, no matter their mistakes or friends, privately alternately excoriating anarchists for making common cause with the popular government or accepting its strategic necessity, loathing the centralization of the military with its accompanying hierarchies while at the same time regretting the naïveté of the volunteer militias, so hopelessly less skilled and less well armed than their fascist enemies.
In May 1937 the storm that had long been brewing surfaced. As part of a campaign to centralize command, the popular front government, attempting to take control of the telephone exchange in Barcelona, met armed resistance from anarchists and socialists in the streets. Under pressure from the communists, brigades advanced into Barcelona from Valencia. Socialists and anarchists who resisted died in the streets; thousands more were later imprisoned and socialist leaders murdered. Meanwhile, enacting Stalin’s strategy of reversing the social revolution, military forces under communist leadership were sent into Aragon to disassemble the agricultural collectives and to return land to former owners. Franco had not yet ended the Spanish civil war, but in those regions of northern and eastern Spain where the CNT/FAI had held sway, the anarchist social revolution was effectively shut down. Goldman wrote to a friend, “Spain has again proven that nothing remains of anarchism when one is forced to make concessions that undermine the ideal” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 220).
Barcelona surrendered to Franco in 1938. Emma Goldman was in London still rallying the faithful to her “beautiful ideal.” “I wish I had remained in Spain,” she wrote. “I have lived long enough. The agony over the debacle of the Russian Revolution was enough for one life. Now the Spanish revolution is to be crushed. Life holds nothing else” (Falk 491). Goldman blamed the surrender of Barcelona on the Communists, who she believed betrayed the anarchists, who unwittingly or not were complicit in the Communist program to reverse the radical progression of the revolution. Mariano Vásquez of the CNT responded to Goldman’s reproach that the anarchists had been “childlike” in their relationship with the Communists, writing, “Nobody has betrayed anybody” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 229). The death blow had been “the lack of arms brought about by the attitude of the Democracies. The fact is,” finished Vásquez, “that one country alone cannot fight against the whole world” (ibid., 230). In this gallant fight, however ill destined, Emma Goldman, Vásquez insisted, had played a magnificent role. He cabled Goldman on her seventieth birthday, naming her their “spiritual mother.” “You have understood us,” he wrote, “and our aim as few who came to our shores have understood us” (ibid., 232). No other accolade, among the many she had received in a long lifetime, pleased her half so well. While the revolution had flourished, Emma Goldman had made Spain her spiritual home. Its death had been tragic but not ignoble. And as with the Haymarket martyrs, whose sacrifice she had enshrined a half century earlier,