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The Last Echo of 1917? The Asturian October Between Revolution and Antifascism

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Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

In October 1934, thousands of left-wing militants engaged in a revolutionary uprising in the northern Spanish region of Asturias. This chapter examines the Asturian October within a wider Spanish and European context and through a focus on the themes of antifascism and revolution. The insurrection was the last event of a 'small age of revolution' sparked by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and also provided the framework for the emergence of antifascism as a social movement in Spain. It was an important transitional moment that encourages reflection on the periodisation of antifascism and how revolutionary politics in interwar Europe is written.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Avance, July 18, 1936.

  2. 2.

    Histories of the Asturian October include Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Asturias, octubre 1934 (Barcelona: Planeta, 2013), David Ruiz, Octubre de 1934: revolución en la República española (Madrid: Síntesis, 2008) and Matthew Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936 (London: University of London Press, 2020). Discussion of casualties in Eduardo González Calleja, En nombre de la autoridad: la defensa del orden público durante la Segunda República Española (1931–1936) (Granada: Comares, 2014), pp. 228–240.

  3. 3.

    The political uses of October 1934 in Rafael Cruz, En el nombre del pueblo: república, rebelión y guerra en la España de 1936 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006) and Brian D. Bunk, Ghosts of Passion: Martyrdom, Gender, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

  4. 4.

    The insurrection is usually confined to Spanish politics, exceptions are Gabriel Jackson, ‘Fascismo y antifascismo, 1922–1939’ and Pierre Broué, ‘Octubre del 34 en el contexto europeo’, in Gabriel Jackson, Octubre 1934: cincuenta años para la reflexión (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1985), pp. 3–8, 9–18.

  5. 5.

    I draw on George Lawson here, ‘Within and Beyond the “Fourth Generation” of Revolutionary Theory’, Sociological Theory 34/2 (2016), pp. 106–127. For an example of a similar emphasis on approaching the unfolding process of revolution, e.g. Eliza Ablovatski, Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge: CUP, 2021).

  6. 6.

    Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001), pp. 39–187, here p.142.

  7. 7.

    E.g. Hugo García, Xavier Tabet and Mercedes Yusta, Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2016) and also ‘Transnational Anti-Fascism: Agents, Networks, Circulations’, special edition of Contemporary European History 25/4 (2016), pp. 563–727.

  8. 8.

    E.g. debate over an ‘antifascist minimum’, see Nigel Copsey, ‘Preface: Towards an Antifascist Minimum?’, in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-war Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xiv–xxi and Tom Buchanan, ‘“Beyond Cable Street”: New Approaches to the Historiography of Antifascism in Britain in the 1930s’, in García, Tabet and Yusta (eds.), Rethinking Antifascism, pp. 61–75.

  9. 9.

    On Spanish antifascist culture, Hugo García, ‘Was there an Antifascist Culture in Spain in the 1930s?’, in García, Tabet and Yusta (eds.), Rethinking Antifascism, pp. 92–113.

  10. 10.

    Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 254–255.

  11. 11.

    Kasper Braskén, ‘Making Anti-Fascism Transnational: The Origins of Communist and Socialist Articulations of Resistance in Europe, 1923–1924’, Contemporary European History 25/4 (2016), pp. 573–596.

  12. 12.

    Michael Seidman, Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  13. 13.

    I follow Ruchter: ‘a network of individuals, groups and organizations that, based on a sense of collective identity, seek to bring about social change (or resist social change) primarily by means of collective public protest.’ Dieter Ruchter, ‘Studying Social Movements: Some Conceptual Challenges’, in Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds.), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 45.

  14. 14.

    See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9 and Chris Wrigley, Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993).

  15. 15.

    See Francisco Romero Salvadó, Spain 1914–1918: Between War and Revolution (London: Routledge, 1999) and Francisco Romero Salvadó and Angel Smith (eds.), The Agony of Spanish Liberalism: From Revolution to Dictatorship, 1913–23 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  16. 16.

    E.g. comments by Asturian socialist councillors and trade union officials reported in La Aurora Social 15, May 29, 1931. See also Paul Heywood, Marxism and the Failure of Organised Socialism in Spain, 1879–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 116.

  17. 17.

    The classic study of reform and reaction is Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London: Macmillan, 1978). For Largo Caballero, see Julio Aróstegui, Largo Caballero: el tesón y la quimera (Barcelona: Debate, 2013).

  18. 18.

    On this ‘double scenario’, Santos Juliá, ‘Los socialistas y el escenario de la futura revolución’, in Jackson (ed.), Octubre 1934, pp. 103–130.

  19. 19.

    Details in Francisco Largo Caballero, Escritos sobre la República: notas históricas de la guerra en España 1917–1940 (Madrid: Pablo Iglesias, 1985), particularly pp. 93–110 and Amaro del Rosal, 1934: el movimiento revolucionario de octubre (Madrid: Akal, 1984).

  20. 20.

    For background, Adrian Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: The Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987) and Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers!, chs 1 and 2.

  21. 21.

    E.g. an account of a debate in El Noroeste, May 14, 1932 and details of a pit assembly in Avance, August 17, 1933.

  22. 22.

    E.g. Avance, June 7, 1932; El Noroeste 6, January 10, 1932.

  23. 23.

    Avance, December 6, 1932.

  24. 24.

    See Luis Arias González and Manuel Jesús Álvarez García, Los palacios obreros: Casas del Pueblo socialistas en Asturias, 1902–1937 (Oviedo: Fundación José Barreiro, 2010) and Ángel Mato Díaz, La Atenas del Norte: ateneos, sociedades culturales y bibliotecas populares en Asturias (1876–1937) (Oviedo: KRK Ediciones, 2008).

  25. 25.

    On working-class sociability in Asturias, see work by Jorge Uría, e.g. Una historia social del ocio: Asturias, 1898–1914 (Madrid: UGT, 1996).

  26. 26.

    Región, July 16, 1931.

  27. 27.

    More detailed analysis in Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers!, chs 2 and 3.

  28. 28.

    See Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers!, ch. 4.

  29. 29.

    Avance, September 22, 1934.

  30. 30.

    See Heywood, Marxism.

  31. 31.

    Juan Avilés, ‘Los socialistas y la insurrección de octubre de 1934’, Espacio, tiempo y forma, serie v, historia contemporánea 20 (2008), pp. 129–157. See also Enric Ucelay-Da Cal and Susanna Tavera García, ‘Una revolución dentro de otra: la lógica insurreccional en la política española, 1924–1934’, Ayer 13 (1994), pp. 115–146.

  32. 32.

    See Santos Juliá, ‘“Preparados para cuando la ocasión se presente”: los socialistas y la revolución’, in Santos Juliá (ed.), Violencia política en la España del siglo XX (Madrid: Taurus, 2000), pp. 145–190.

  33. 33.

    La Tarde 24, April 27, 1936.

  34. 34.

    Proclamation issued by the La Felguera Revolutionary Committee, October 11, 1934, reproduced in Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Pequeños anales de quince días: la revolución en Asturias, Octubre 1934 (Oviedo: Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 1977), pp. 161–162.

  35. 35.

    José Canel [José Díaz Fernández], Octubre rojo en Asturias (Barcelona: Silverio Cañada, 1984), pp. 145–146.

  36. 36.

    E.g. Taibo, Asturias, pp. 454–455.

  37. 37.

    Proclamation issued by the La Felguera Revolutionary Committee, October 6, 1934, reproduced in de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Pequeños anales de quince días, p. 161.

  38. 38.

    Proclamation issued by the Grado Revolutionary Committee, undated, reproduced in Manuel Villar, El anarquismo en la insurrección de Asturias: la CNT y la FAI en octubre de 1934 (Madrid: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 1994), pp. 90–92.

  39. 39.

    Proclamation issued by the Grado Revolutionary Committee, October 11, 1934, reproduced in de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Pequeños anales de quince días, pp. 149–150.

  40. 40.

    Proclamation issued by the Third Provincial Revolutionary Committee, October 16, 1934, reproduced in Narcís Molins i Fábrega, UHP: la insurrección proletaria en Asturias (Madrid: Júcar, 1977), pp. 130–131.

  41. 41.

    Proclamation issued by the Sama de Langreo Revolutionary Committee, October 7, 1934, in Molins i Fábrega, UHP , p. 125.

  42. 42.

    A. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection (London: LLB, 1970), p. 186.

  43. 43.

    Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (eds.), Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). See also Eric Selbin’s ‘storying’ approach in Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story (London: Zed, 2010).

  44. 44.

    Proclamation issued by the Sama de Langreo Revolutionary Committee, October 7, 1934, in Molins i Fábrega, UHP, p. 137. Anarchist criticism in Fernando Solano Palacio, La revolución de octubre: quince días de comunismo libertario (Madrid: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 1994), p. 152; Villar, El anarquismo, p. 115, p. 118.

  45. 45.

    References to Russia extended to ‘vivas’ to Russia or ‘Let’s save Russia!’ daubed on walls, La Veu de Catalunya, October 28, 1934.

  46. 46.

    For case studies, see chapters in Wrigley, Challenges. Councils undermining the unions in Germany and Italy in Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 163. The classic study remains Francis L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). More recently, see Eliza Ablovatski, Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

  47. 47.

    Jakub S. Beneš, ‘The Green Cadres and the Collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918’, Past & Present 236 (2017), pp. 207–241, here p. 210. See also Eley, Forging Democracy, pp. 152–153. For the 1930s, Pamela Radcliff, ‘The Political “Left” in the Interwar Period, 1924–1939’, in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 282–298 and Gerd-Rainer Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  48. 48.

    Further detail in Matthew Kerry, ‘Painted Tonsures and Potato-Sellers: Priests, Passing and Survival in the Asturian Revolution’, Cultural & Social History 14/2 (2017), pp. 237–255.

  49. 49.

    Photographs in Mundo Gráfico, June 27, 1934.

  50. 50.

    See Horn, European Socialists.

  51. 51.

    Anson Rabinbach, ‘Paris, the Capital of Antifascism’, in Warren Breckman, Moses Dirk and Peter E. Gordon (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 183–209.

  52. 52.

    E.g. Avance, October 26, 1933. See further Matthew Kerry, ‘Radicalisation, Community and the Politics of Protest in the Spanish Second Republic’, English Historical Review, 132/555 (2017), pp. 331–336.

  53. 53.

    On the socialists’ watchful eye on Austria, Sandra Souto Kustrín, ‘Las revoluciones no se hacen con hachas y hoces: estrategias del octubre madrileño’, in Alejandro Aleassi and José Luis Martín Ramos (eds.), De un octubre a otro: revolución y fascism en el period de entreguerras, 1917–1934 (Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 2010), p. 261ff.

  54. 54.

    E.g. El Noroeste, August 25, 1932; Avance, October 18, 1933.

  55. 55.

    See Mercedes Yusta, ‘The Strained Courtship Between Antifascism and Feminism’, in García, Tabet and Yusta (eds.), Rethinking Antifascism, pp. 174–175.

  56. 56.

    Avance, February 20, 1934; June 5, 1934; June 12, 1934; August 17, 1934.

  57. 57.

    Ferrán Gallego, Barcelona, mayo 1937: la crisis del antifascismo en Cataluña (Barcelona: Debate, 2007), p. 143.

  58. 58.

    Avance, April 1, 1934. The quotations in Report by the Asturian CNT Regional Committee on its actions and those of the Regional Revolutionary Workers’ Alliance in the revolutionary events between March and October 1934, [undated], Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, PS Gijón, J series, box 12, file 2, pp. 12–13 and Report by the Asturian CNT Regional Committee submitted to the Regional Plenary of unions on the events of October 1934, 10 April 1936, CDMH, PS Gijón, J series, box 12, file 3, p. 5. The pact in Víctor Alba, La Alianza Obrera: historia y análisis de una táctica de unidad en España (Madrid: Júcar, 1978), pp. 205–206.

  59. 59.

    Yusta acknowledges that October 1934 was a ‘touchstone’ in female antifascist mobilisation. Mercedes Yusta, ‘La construcción de una política femenina desde el antifascismo (1934–1950)’, in Ana Aguado and Teresa María Ortega (eds.), Feminismos y antifeminismos: culturas políticas e identidades de género en la España del siglo xx (Valencia and Granada: Universitat de València/Universidad de Granada, 2011) p. 266.

  60. 60.

    Translations of reports into torture in Leah Manning, What I Saw in Spain (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935). For International Red Aid, Laura Branciforte, El Socorro Rojo Internacional en España (1923–1939): relatos de la solidaridad antifascista (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009). Communist politician Ibárurri’s account of evacuating children in Dolores Ibárruri, Memorias de Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria: la lucha y la vida (Barcelona: Planeta Verlag, 1985), pp. 187–190.

  61. 61.

    Reports abounded on the use of torture in 1936, e.g. testimonies in the International Red Aid newspaper Ayuda.

  62. 62.

    E.g. La Tarde, January 15, 1936; February 5, 1936; February 10, 1936; April 8, 1936.

  63. 63.

    La Tarde, May 29, 1936.

  64. 64.

    Buchanan notes that the British left debated how far Abyssinia constituted an antifascist struggle, Tom Buchanan, ‘“The Dark Millions in the Colonies are Unavenged”: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s’, Contemporary European History 25/4 (2016), pp. 645–665, here pp. 653–654, the quotation at p. 653.

  65. 65.

    Asturias, September 28, 1935.

  66. 66.

    Adrian Shubert, ‘A Reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the Case of Asturias’, in Martin Alexander and Helen Graham (eds.), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 223–224, the quotations at p. 244.

  67. 67.

    La Tarde, April 29, 1936.

  68. 68.

    On the wider dynamics of Republican culture at war, see, recently, Carl-Henrik Bjerström, ‘A Respectable Revolution: Republican Cultural Mobilisation during the Spanish Civil War’, Cultural and Social History 18/1 (2021), pp. 97–121.

  69. 69.

    La escuela actual es esencialmente antifascista. s.l, s.n, 1937, quoted in Magadena Garrido Caballero, ‘Antifascistas españoles: discurso y movilización antifascista de los Amigos de la Unión Soviética en la Europa de entreguerras’, in Carlos Navaja Zubeldía and Diego Iturriaga Barco (eds.), Novísima. Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Historia de Nuestro Tiempo (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2010), p. 224.

  70. 70.

    E.g. for the idea of a ‘crisis of antifascism’, see Ferran Gallego, Barcelona, mayo 1937: la crisis del antifascismo en Cataluña (Barcelona: Editorial Debate, 2007).

  71. 71.

    Ruiz has argued that the Asturian October was the last working-class revolution in the west in Ruiz, Octubre.

  72. 72.

    Recently, Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).

  73. 73.

    Yusta, ‘The Strained Courtship’; Buchanan, ‘Millions’, p. 654. See also García, ‘Antifascist Culture’, p. 96.

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  1. Division of History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

    Matthew Kerry

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  1. Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Berger

  2. Faculty of History, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Klaus Weinhauer

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Kerry, M. (2023). The Last Echo of 1917? The Asturian October Between Revolution and Antifascism. In: Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (eds) Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_10

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