Dolores Ibárruri

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Dolores Ibárruri in 1978

Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (called La Pasionaria ; born December 9, 1895 in the village of Gallarta in the municipality of Abanto y Ciervana , Bizkaia , Basque Country ; † November 12, 1989 in Madrid ) was a Spanish revolutionary and politician of the labor movement .

She was a member of the Communist Party (PCE) in the Spanish Parliament and an important political protagonist of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 . The exclamation “ ¡No pasarán! " (" You will not get through! ").

Life

Origin and youth

Ibárruri was the eighth of eleven children of Antonio Ibárruri and his wife Juliana Gómez. Her entire family worked in the Basque mining industry . One of her grandfathers was killed by a block of hematite in the tunnel . After school, the educational content of which consisted almost entirely of beatings and religious litanies , from the age of 15 she worked as a seamstress for two years and later as a maid for three years. She read everything that fell into her hands, and thus acquired the desired higher education herself, which, due to the circumstances, could not be achieved otherwise. Her father sent her to the meetings of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) instead . In 1917 she enrolled as a party member.

At the age of 20 she married Julián Ruiz, a communist and miner. Four of their six children died due to poor living conditions resulting from extreme poverty. After Ruiz took part in the general strike in 1917 , he was imprisoned several times, which exacerbated his family's dire financial situation. The repression intensified under the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera .

Career in the PCE and MPs

Ibárruri in 1936

Ibárruri joined the Communist Party in 1921. Under the pseudonym La Pasionaria (Eng. "The passion flower") she began to write articles for the miners' paper El Minero Vizcaino and to get actively involved in the labor movement. In 1920 she was elected to the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party.

She was one of the founders of the communist party in Asturias . In 1930 she was elected to the PCE Central Committee . She soon separated from her husband and moved to Madrid in September 1931 on the instructions of the party leadership . As the editor of Mundo Obrero (Eng. "The Workers' World"), she quickly achieved notoriety. In 1932 she became a member of the Politburo and responsible for the PCE's Women's Commission.

Ibárruri was a good speaker who could get people excited. She was soon followed by the Spanish authorities and arrested several times. In 1933 she was elected as a member of the CP of Asturias in the Spanish Chamber of Deputies " Cortes Generales ", where she campaigned for the improvement of women's rights, especially at work, in the household and in the field of health. In 1933 she delegated her party to the Comintern . In the same year she traveled to Moscow for the first time to meet Josef Stalin . In 1934 she took part in the World Congress of Women in Paris as chairwoman of the PCE Women 's Commission.

In May 1936 Ibárruri said during a parliamentary session to José Calvo Sotelo , the leader of the right in the Spanish parliament, "Ese hombre ha hablado por última vez" ("This man spoke for the last time"). Calvo Sotelo was murdered two months later. However, Ibárruri denied that she wanted to call for him to be killed with her words. The assassination attempt on Calvo Sotelo sparked the Spanish Civil War .

Civil war

Ibárruri supported the Republican troops against Franco during the civil war by making fiery speeches on the radio and visiting troops at the front to boost their morale. In autumn 1936 she mobilized all republican forces to defend the Spanish capital . Your slogan “ ¡No pasarán! "(Eng." You will not get through! ") Became the battle cry of the defenders of the republic. Their speeches drew a significant part of the population, especially women, to the Republican side. Together with various celebrities such as Palmiro Togliatti , she participated in various committees to solicit support for the Republicans. In 1937 she became vice-president of the Cortes, shortly thereafter president. Within the Spanish Communist Party, she was considered a Stalinist . She stayed out of the internal power struggles, but stuck to the party doctrine. In parliament she advocated the institutional order.

emigration

Even before her own escape, she supported the emigration of Spanish families to the Soviet Union . In 1939 she asked Stalin for asylum for herself and her two children. When the republican fronts collapsed, she left Spain. In Moscow she represented the PCE in exile and was elected its general secretary in 1942. Her only son Rubén Ruiz joined the Red Army and died on September 3, 1942 in the Battle of Stalingrad as a lieutenant in the 35th Guards Division.

La Pasionaria statue in Glasgow

In May 1944 Ibárruri became general secretary of the PCE, in 1960 its chairwoman. She acquired Soviet citizenship in the early 1960s. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lomonosov University . In 1964 she received the International Lenin Peace Prize and in 1965 the Order of Lenin . In 1966 she published her autobiography under the title ¡No Pasarán!

In the course of the 1960s, especially after the CP sent them to Czechoslovakia and experienced the situation there, their political attitudes became more moderate. As early as 1968 she condemned the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring . Together with her co-chair, Santiago Carrillo , she founded the so-called Eurocommunism when the Spanish Communist Party was the first Communist Party to remove Leninism from its program in order to make its independence from the CPSU clear. She was now convinced that all democratic groups and parties should unite in order to build a just society together.

Return to Spain and death

After Franco's death in 1975, the time of the Transición , Ibárruri returned to Asturias on May 13, 1977, at the age of over 80. In the same year she was re-elected as a member of parliament. The icon of Spanish communism, who had spent 38 years of her life in exile, remained politically active until her death. Ibárruri died of pneumonia in Madrid in late 1989 at the age of 93 .

On November 14th, thousands marched past her body, including veterans of the civil war and the ambassadors of Cuba , Czechoslovakia , East Germany , Yugoslavia and China, as well as the mayors of Madrid. Thousands later attended her funeral under the shouts of "¡No pasarán!" Some mayors ordered four days of national mourning.

reception

The life and work of La Pasionaria have been recognized by poets such as Rafael Alberti , Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández . Ernest Hemingway set her a literary monument in the figure of the partisan Pilar in his novel Whom the Hour Strikes . Oskar Kokoschka drew La Pasionaria in 1937 as a mother with an exhausted child in her arms and her fist raised at the same time.

See also

Wikisource: No Pasaran  - Sources and full texts (English)

literature

Primary literature

  • 1938: Speeches & Articles 1936–1938, New York
  • 1952: The struggle of the Spanish people against the Franco regime
  • 1955: The National Revolutionary War of the Spanish People 1936–1939
  • 1963: El único camino, Moscow
  • 1966: ¡No Pasarán! Memorias de Dolores Ibárruri, Moscow
  • 1984: I missed Spain
  • 1985: Pasionaria, the struggle and the life

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Dolores Ibárruri  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Bartolomé Bennassar, Jean-Pierre Amalric, Jacques Beyrie, Lucienne Domergue: Histoire des Espagnols - XVIIIe – XXe siècle . In: Marguerite de Marcillac (ed.): Tempus . 2nd Edition. tape 2 , no. 378 . Editions Perrin, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-262-03441-2 , pp. 359 ff .
  2. ↑ Santiago Carrillo, Ángel Maestro: Dolores Ibárruri. Ediciones B, Barcelona 2004, p. 210.
  3. ^ Antony Beevor (translated by Jean-François Sené): La Guerre d'Espagne . 3. Edition. No. 31153 . Éditions Calmann-Lévy, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-253-12092-6 , pp. 740 (Original edition: The Battle for Spain . Weindenfeld & Nicolson, London 2006).
  4. ↑ José Jornet : Républicains espagnols en Midi-Pyrénées: exile, histoire et mémoire . Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2005. ISBN 2858168091 (Page 213)
  5. ^ A. Suarez. Miles de personas rindieron homenaje a "La Pasionaria" . ABC . November 15, 1989, p. 26.
  6. ↑ Genin Andrada. Funeral of Dolores Ibárruri . Getty Images.
  7. ↑ Ovidio. Zig Zag. Luto . ABC . November 21, 1989, p. 21.
  8. ↑ Dietmar Grieser : You really lived: From Effi Briest to Mr Karl, from Tewje to James Bond. Amalthea Verlag, 2001.
  9. ^ Nigel Glendinning: Art and the Spanish Civil War. In: Stephen M. Hart: “! No Pasarán!” Art, Literature and the Spanish Civil War. Tamesis Books Ltd., London 1988, pp. 20-45, here p. 35.
personal data
SURNAME Ibárruri, Dolores
ALTERNATIVE NAMES La Pasionaria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish revolutionary and politician in the labor movement
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Abanto y Ciérvana , Basque Country
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 1989
Place of death Madrid