José Díaz (politician)

José Díaz Ramos
General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain
In office 1932–1942
Preceded by	José Bullejos
Succeeded by	Dolores Ibárruri
Personal details
Born	1896 Seville, Seville, Spain
Died	March 19, 1942(1942-03-19) (aged 46) Tblisi, Georgia SSR
Nationality	Spanish

José Díaz Ramos (1896—March 19, 1942) was a Spanish trade unionist and communist politician.

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.

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.

In the Soviet Union

Diaz's 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, being 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 settled in Tbilisi (Georgian SSR) but his ailment and the immense pain it caused him made him take his own life that spring. The circumstances of his death have been disputed ever since, with many believing that he had actually been murdered on the Stalin's orders. 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 Stalin's government. Díaz was replaced as general secretary by Dolores 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").

Some references

• Braunthal, Julius. (1967). History of the International, vol. 2, tr. Henry Collins and Kenneth Mitchell. London: Praeger.

• Carr, E.H. (1982). The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930-1935. London: Pantheon Books.

• Chase, William J. (2001). Prof. Hist. Univ. Pittsburg : Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. See particularly, 72 translated documents covering the period 1935 - 1941, : http://www.yale.edu/annals/Chase/Documents/list_of_documents.htm

• Dallin, Alexander and Firsov, F. I. eds., Dimitrov and Stalin : 1934–1943 : letters from the Soviet archives ;(2000), Yale Univ. Press, New Haven And London, Russian documents translated by Vadim A. Staklo. p. cm. — (Annals of communism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-08021-2 (alk. paper)

• Degras, Jane T., ed. (1956-1965). The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press.

• Geoff Eley, Prof. of History at the Univ. of Michigan, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, Oxford University Press (2002), paperback, 720 pages, ISBN 0-19-504479-7, ISBN 978-0-19-504479-9

• Kahan, Vilém, ed. (1990). Bibliography of the Communist International (1919-1979). Leiden: E. J. Brill Academic eds. Leyden and New York, 400 pages, ISBN 90-04-09320-6

• Kahan Vilém, The Communist International, 1919-1943: the Personnel of its Highest Bodies, 352 pages, London: I B Tauris, (2002), ISBN 1-86064-747-2

• McDermott, Kevin, and Agnew, Jeremy. (1997). The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. XXV + 304 pages, 978-0312162771 New York: St. Martin's Press.

• Lazitch, Branko, French spñeaking Serbian historian and political journalist, (1923 - 1998), specialist in Soviet History and the International Communist, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern,(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973)

• Salas Larrazabal, Ramón, (1916 - 1993). Historia General De La Guerra De Espana

ISBN 84-321-2340-4, Hardcover, Edit. Rialp, (Madrid).

External links

• 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")

• http://www.marxists.org/archive/ibarruri/1942/05/x01.htm* in English by Dolores Ibarruri, (9 December 1895 – 12 November 1989, aged 94), a woman, General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, between March 1942 – 3 July 1960, strictly obeying Russian Stalinist lines, who was followed by Santiago Carrillo, (born 1915 - living still at Madrid in December 2011 aged 96) till the year 1982, monopolozing thus 40 years of Spanish Communism.