Andreu Nin

Andreu Nin i Pérez [ ənˈdɾew ˈnin ], in the Castilian form of the name Andrés Nin [ anˈdɾes ˈnin ], (born February 4, 1892 , El Vendrell in the province of Tarragona ; † June 20, 1937 near Madrid ) was a Spanish revolutionary from Catalonia . As a leading member of the POUM , which he co-founded , he was very likely abducted, tortured and murdered by Stalinists after the May events of the Spanish Civil War in 1937 .

Live and act

The son of a poor shoemaker and a peasant woman went to Barcelona before the outbreak of World War I , where he was a temporary teacher at a libertarian school before turning to journalism. In 1917 he joined the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). In 1918 he left the party and switched to the syndicalist union CNT ; there he belonged to the current of communist-syndicalists who sympathized with the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks . In 1921 Nin was one of the founders of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). Soon after, he worked in Moscow for the Profintern and the Comintern for nearly a decade . He joined the left opposition and was for a time on Leon Trotsky's staff . He also translated Russian literature into Catalan. After returning to Spain, he and others formed the small and largely isolated Izquierda Comunista de España (ICE, Communist Left Spain), which saw itself as a Leninist- oriented group of the International Left Opposition (ILO) founded by Leon Trotsky in 1930 . Nin had considerable arguments with its founder, particularly over the question of the ICE joining the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU), the socialist youth organization of the PSOE, which Trotsky directed. Nin feared the group's disappearance and instead spoke out in favor of joining forces with the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC, workers and peasants' bloc), which emerged in 1931 as a rather "right-wing" opposition from the Catalan communist movement. In fact, in 1935, together with BOC leader Joaquín Maurín, he founded the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM, Workers' Party of Marxist Unity). It saw itself as an alternative to both the socialist and communist parties, concluded alliances with anarchist organizations and, despite its numerical weakness, played a not insignificant role in the looming war against the fascist troops of Franco .

Arrest and death

After the Spanish Popular Front won the elections in 1936, Nin became Minister of Justice. With the beginning of the civil war, when the Second Republic of Catalonia granted autonomous status, he joined the regional government there under Lluís Companys . As a concession to Moscow, however, it was quickly removed along with other POUM government members. Moreover, in 1937, shortly after the May battles in Barcelona between anarchist and pro-Soviet communist forces, most of the POUM leadership was arrested and locked in communist-controlled prisons. Nin was separated from his comrades and deported to Alcalá de Henares . According to the later renegade high communist functionaries Jesús Hernández and Enrique Castro Delgado, Nin was tortured on the orders of Moscow and murdered on June 20. Moscow's liaison to the communist secret police of the "Republic" was the NKVD agent Orlov . In addition, the Soviet agent Josef Romualdowitsch Grigulewitsch and the commander of the 5th republican regiment Carlos J. Contreras alias Vittorio Vidali are said to have been involved in the murder plot : according to Julian Gorkin, the immediate murderer of Nins.

Historian Hugh Thomas gives a somewhat different picture . After that, Nin is said to have withstood the torture, so that the aforementioned Vidali came up with the plan to have him “liberated” by alleged Nazis. Ten German members of the International Brigades kidnapped Nin and murdered him after his so-called liberation. During the operation, the brigadists spoke German loudly to one another, and they also left German tickets.

Since all this happened in secret, that summer the remaining POUM started the campaign “Gobierno Negrín: ¿dónde está Nin?” (“To the Negrín government : Where is Nin?”). The PCE responded with “Either in Salamanca or in Berlin .” (Salamanca was controlled by Franco troops, Berlin ruled by Hitler.) Even before that, the Communists had claimed that the missing Nin had been kidnapped by the “other side” he allegedly served - as a "fascist agent". So, as it were, he was violated again.

literature

• Reiner Tosstorff: Andreu Nin and the Red Trade Union International (RGI) 1921–1928 - A sketch. In: Yearbook for research on the history of the labor movement . Issue III / 2005.
• Enrique Castro Delgado: La vida secreta de la Comintern, o cómo perdí mi fe en Moscú (I have lost faith in Moscow), Madrid 1950.
• Jesús Hernández: Yo fui un ministro de Stalin. Mexico 1953.
• Julián Gorkin : Les communistes contre la révolution espagnole. Belfond 1978. German edition: Stalin's long arm. Cologne 1980; with a foreword by Willy Brandt .
• Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez: "Marxist and Proudhonist at the same time": The Communist-Syndicalists of the Spanish CNT 1917-1924 , in: Work - Movement - History , Issue 2017 / III, pp. 74–96.

Web links

Commons : Andreu Nin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Fundación Andreu Nin Documents on Nin and POUM (Spanish)
• Andrés Nin: El crimen que remató la República

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez: "Marxist and Proudhonist at the same time": The Communist-Syndicalists of the Spanish CNT 1917-1924 , in: Work - Movement - History , Issue 2017 / III, pp. 74–96.
2. ^ Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , 2nd edition, p. 348.
3. ↑ See literature. Hernández was then, among other things, Republican Minister of Education.
4. ↑ See literature. In Moscow, Delgado had worked with the Comintern executive.
5. ↑ Gorkin: Stalin's long arm. P. 182.
6. ↑ Hugh Thomas: The Spanish Civil War. Ullstein, Berlin West 1962, p. 304.
7. ↑ According to Gorkin ( Stalin's long arm. P. 30) previously in the Mexican magazine Asi , which he himself runs , then in the French daily Le Monde , later also published as a book by Gallimard in Paris.
8. ↑ English I was an Minister of Stalin - only partially published. ( marxists.org , accessed May 16, 2011).
9. ↑ The leading POUM cadre and head of the daily newspaper La Batalla Gorkin, which appeared in Barcelona at the time , was one of those arrested for "high treason" in June 1937. Based on conversations with Delgado and Hernández and other testimonies and investigations, he gives a detailed reconstruction of the kidnapping and murder of Nin on pages 164 to 185, even if there is a lack of verifiable evidence. In the foreword (p. 19) Brandt (1980!) Notes that “with the utmost precision” Nin's torture and murder could not be proven - “unless one accepts the admission of a communist ex-minister as evidence”. FAU commented on recent evidence (“KGB archive”) in 2004 , accessed on May 16, 2011.