Spanish leader face of gentler communism
But he viewed some Soviet practices as a necessary evil
Santiago Carrillo, who evolved from a bomb-throwing opponent of Gen. Francisco Franco and his fascist forces into a Spanish communist leader who promoted a more moderate, democratic European Communist Party independent of the Soviet Union, died Tuesday at his home in Madrid. He was 97.
The cause was heart failure, his son Santiago said.
Born into a socialist family in dynastic Spain, Carrillo converted to communism and fought Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, leaving him haunted by a massacre on his watch. When Franco came to power, Carrillo was forced to retreat to Paris, but he continued to manage the Spanish Communist Party from there, becoming its secretary general in 1960.
Over the next two decades in exile, he distanced the party from the Soviets, having grown disenchanted with their repressive system of government. He sneaked back into Spain after Franco’s death in 1975 and later lobbied successfully for the Communist Party to be allowed to compete in elections.
During this period he became the face of a new, moderate communism through his book Eurocommunism and the State (1977) and his convening of a summit meeting of western Europe’s communist leaders.
Democracy, however, was not so kind. After his party performed poorly at the polls in 1982, he was forced to resign as party leader. His critics said that while promoting the cause through democracy, he ruthlessly stifled dissent within his own ranks.
Carrillo was expelled from the party leadership altogether in 1985. He sensed the end of the era.
“Now the only debate is what to do with the body,” he said of the Communist Party in an interview with the New York Times, “whether to bury it forever or to have it embalmed.”
His enemies maintained that his softened rhetoric and avuncular looks masked an unrepentant ideologue. Even as he was rebuilding a democratic Communist Party in Spain in 1978, he told the Times that he viewed Soviet practices as an understandable evil.
“There were political police, concentration camps, etc., but those institutions were necessary, and I am not sure they won’t be in other social revolutions,” he said.
Santiago Carrillo Solares was born into a radical political family on Jan. 18, 1915, in Gijón, on Spain’s north coast. His father, Wenceslao, a metal worker, was a rising agitator in the Socialist Workers Party. The family moved to Madrid so Wenceslao could edit the party’s newspaper.
The young Carrillo became secretary general of the United Socialist Youth, which had tens of thousands of members. When the monarchy collapsed in 1931, he enlisted many of the youths to form an antifascist militia that bombed bridges and disrupted Franco’s attempts to organize and rally support.
After the civil war began and the new Republican government fled Madrid, Carrillo, just 21 and with a well-armed militia at his command, found himself in charge of security for the besieged city. Franco’s army was at his doorstep, and with concerns about a fifth column aiding it from within, Carrillo moved to relocate thousands of imprisoned rightists from the capital.
Taken by bus to the villages of Paracuellos del Jarama and Torrejon de Ardoz, several thousand prisoners were shot in what is remembered as the Republicans’ single greatest crime of the war, the Paracuellos massacre. Carrillo and his allies long insisted that they had no role in the killings, that the buses had been waylaid by mobs.
“What was happening outside of Madrid was completely out of control and beyond my responsibility,” he said in a 2010 interview.
Historians have been skeptical of that claim, however. And Francoists, who also committed wartime atrocities, continued to blame Carrillo, calling him guilty of “red barbarism.”
In Paris, Carrillo lived in semi-secrecy. Financed by the Soviets and other Communist governments, he kept an office around the corner from the Paris stock exchange and was chauffeured to and from his home in the suburbs, where he lived with his second wife, Carmen Menendez, also a party stalwart, and three children. The family vacationed on the Black Sea in Romania, where he spent time with dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. In 1956, he defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary and continued to argue that Stalin’s savagery had been an aberration in an otherwise sound communist system.
But after becoming secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in 1960, he began drifting from Moscow’s orbit as he built alliances with others opposed to Franco, including members of the middle class. Such were his new allegiances that when the Soviets invaded Prague in 1968, he had no choice but to issue a formal protest. After Franco died and Carrillo had returned to Spain, his presence there helped move the successor government away from authoritarianism toward democracy.
Besides his son Santiago, Carrillo is survived by his wife and two other sons, Jose and Jorge.