José Díaz
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José Díaz (1896—March 19, 1942) was a Spanish trade unionist and communist politician.
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[edit] Trade unionism
Born in Sevilla and a baker by trade, he became known as the leader of a strike in 1917. After the start of Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Díaz continued his labor activism in clandestinity, and then, beginning in 1927, joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). He was able to attract the more radical workers, who were disenchanted with the traditional unions, as well as helping the PCE profit from rivalry between the moderate socialist Unión General de Trabajadores and the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.
[edit] Leadership in Spain
As a result, the 4th PCE Congress in Sevilla (March 1932) elected him a member of the Central Committee; in September of the same year, he joined the Politburo, and soon after was appointed general secretary. In this capacity, Díaz was replacing José Bullejos, who had been expelled for opposing the official party line during a "campaign of Bolshevisation" that enforced Stalinism as the official Marxism-Leninism. In 1935, he and Dolores Ibárruri led the PCE delegation to the 7th Comintern Congress, where Georgi Dimitrov introduced Joseph Stalin's dogma calling for a "united front against Fascism", which signalled world communists to seek an alliance with movements previously considered "bourgeois".
With PCE participation in the Spanish Popular Front government and the Civil War, Díaz dedicated himself to inner party politics, without occupying official positions in the administration of the Second Spanish Republic. His focus was on contributing to the military victory of the Republican forces over Francisco Franco's troops, and was a noted critic of Juan Domingo Astigarrabia and his Communist Party of Euskadi (the PCE wing in the Basque Country), whom he saw as too sympathetic to Basque nationalism.
[edit] In the Soviet Union
His health deteriorated due to stomach cancer, and he left Spain for the Soviet Union in January 1939, being operated on in Leningrad. He remained in Moscow after the Republican defeat and the start of World War II, active as a cadre in the Comintern Secretariat (an overseer of communists in Spain, South America, and British India). Díaz also wrote an essay containing self-criticism, one prompted by the ideological demands of the Great Purge and Stalin's personality cult, entitled Las enseñanzas de Stalin, guía luminoso para los comunistas españoles ("The Teachings of Stalin, a Luminous Guide for the Spanish Communists"). The articles he wrote in the period were collected as Tres años de lucha ("Three Years of Combat").
When the German forces invaded the Soviet state in June 1941, José Díaz was forced to take refuge in Pushkin. In autumn, he had settled in Tbilisi (Georgian SSR), where his ailment and the immese pain it caused made him take his own life in spring. The circumstances have for long been subject of dispute, with many believing that he had actually been murdered by the Soviets for his disagreements with Stalin. Notably, the stance Díaz had taken in 1939, when he asked for the PCE to be given full control over the Republican government, went clearly (albeit perhaps unwittingly) against the Stalinist strategy.
The KGB file concerning him was declassified in the 1990s (after the fall of the Soviet Union): it failed to provide any evidence incriminating the dictator. Díaz was replaced as general secretary by Ibárruri.
In April 2005, his remains were reburied in Seville, and the PCE honored his memory with a ceremonial; the city's Ayuntamiento unanimously voted to designate him Hijo predilecto ("Favored son").
| Preceded by José Bullejos |
Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain 1932-1942 |
Succeeded by Dolores Ibarruri |
[edit] External links
- Biography (in Spanish)
- Homage in Seville (in Spanish)
- Collected speeches (in Spanish)
- Lessons From Our National Revolutionary War Against Fascism, 1936-1969 (PCE self-criticism of its Stalinist past) (note the reference to José Díaz as "[an] authentic Marxist-Leninist")
