Santiago Carrillo Solares (born January 18, 1915),
SpanishSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.
[The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though España , Estado español and Nación española are used interchangeably...]
politician, was the
General SecretaryThe term General Secretary denotes a leader of various unions, parties, churches or associations. The most notable usages are the following:...
of the
Communist Party of SpainThe Communist Party of Spain is the third largest national political party of Spain. It is the largest member organization of the coalition Izquierda Unida and has influence in the largest union of Spain, Workers' Commissions .The youth organization of PCE is Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de...
(PCE) from 1960 to 1982.
Born in
GijónGijón , is a coastal industrial city and a municipality in the autonomous community of Asturias in Spain. Early mediaeval texts mention it as "Gigia". It was an important regional Roman city, although the area has been settled since earliest history...
,
AsturiasThe Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community within the kingdom of Spain, former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...
province,
CarrilloThe House of Carrillo is a large Spanish noble house that traces its origins from the ancient Kingdom of Castille. There are several branches that exist such as Carrillo de Albornoz, Carrillo de Mendoza, Carrillo de Figueroa, Carrillo de Toledo and Carrillo de Mendoza among others. There are also...
is the son of the prominent
SocialistSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
leader
Wenceslao CarrilloWenceslao Carrillo was a prominent Spanish Socialist leader, father of Santiago Carrillo. He belonged to the "Caballerist" faction of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party....
. When he was six-year old, his family moved to Madrid. After attending school, he began to work in
El Socialista, the
Spanish Socialist Workers' PartyThe Spanish Socialist Workers' Party , is the ruling party in Spain and the second oldest, exceeded only by the Partido Carlista, founded in 1833. It identifies itself as a centre-left, social-democratic, democratic socialist and progressivist party....
(PSOE) newspaper when he was 13-year old. At the same time, he joined the Socialist union, the Workers' General Union and the
Socialist YouthSocialist Youth of Spain is the youth organisation of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party....
.
In 1932, he accessed the Executive Commission of the Socialist Youth and become editor of
Renovación, the newspaper of the Socialist Youth.
Santiago Carrillo Solares (born January 18, 1915),
SpanishSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.
[The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though España , Estado español and Nación española are used interchangeably...]
politician, was the
General SecretaryThe term General Secretary denotes a leader of various unions, parties, churches or associations. The most notable usages are the following:...
of the
Communist Party of SpainThe Communist Party of Spain is the third largest national political party of Spain. It is the largest member organization of the coalition Izquierda Unida and has influence in the largest union of Spain, Workers' Commissions .The youth organization of PCE is Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de...
(PCE) from 1960 to 1982.
Childhood and early youth
Born in
GijónGijón , is a coastal industrial city and a municipality in the autonomous community of Asturias in Spain. Early mediaeval texts mention it as "Gigia". It was an important regional Roman city, although the area has been settled since earliest history...
,
AsturiasThe Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community within the kingdom of Spain, former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...
province,
CarrilloThe House of Carrillo is a large Spanish noble house that traces its origins from the ancient Kingdom of Castille. There are several branches that exist such as Carrillo de Albornoz, Carrillo de Mendoza, Carrillo de Figueroa, Carrillo de Toledo and Carrillo de Mendoza among others. There are also...
is the son of the prominent
SocialistSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
leader
Wenceslao CarrilloWenceslao Carrillo was a prominent Spanish Socialist leader, father of Santiago Carrillo. He belonged to the "Caballerist" faction of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party....
. When he was six-year old, his family moved to Madrid. After attending school, he began to work in
El Socialista, the
Spanish Socialist Workers' PartyThe Spanish Socialist Workers' Party , is the ruling party in Spain and the second oldest, exceeded only by the Partido Carlista, founded in 1833. It identifies itself as a centre-left, social-democratic, democratic socialist and progressivist party....
(PSOE) newspaper when he was 13-year old. At the same time, he joined the Socialist union, the Workers' General Union and the
Socialist YouthSocialist Youth of Spain is the youth organisation of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party....
.
Second Republic and Civil War
In 1932, he accessed the Executive Commission of the Socialist Youth and become editor of
Renovación, the newspaper of the Socialist Youth. Carrillo was one of the members of the left-wing of the youth organization. In 1933, as the Socialist Youth was becoming more radical, Santiago Carrillo was elected General Secretary of the youth organization. From October 1934 to February 1936 he was jailed, due to his participation in the failed 1934 leftist coup (Carrillo was a member of the National Revolutionary Committee).
After his release, in March 1936, Carrillo and the executive of the Socialist Youth traveled to Moscow to meet the leaders of the
Young Communist InternationalThe Young Communist International was the parallel international youth organization affiliated with the Communist International .-International socialist youth organization before World War I:...
and prepare the unification of Socialist and Communist youth leagues. The outcome of the process was the creation of the
Unified Socialist YouthJuventudes Socialistas Unificadas - Unified Socialist Youth was a youth organization formed in the spring of 1936 in Spain through the amalgamation of the Socialist Party and Communist Party youth groups...
(
Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas).
After the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état by a group of Spanish Army generals against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña...
, he decided to join the Communist Party. The formal joining happened the same day the Government left Madrid in November. During the War he showed an intense pro-
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
approach. On November 7 1936 Carrillo was elected Councillor for Public Order in the Defense Council of Madrid, who was given supreme power in besieged Madrid, after the Government left the city. During his term, he made streneous efforts to maintain order in Madrid, but several thousand imprisoned people, military and civilians, including many women and children, were executed by uncontrolled groups in
Paracuellos del JaramaParacuellos del Jarama is a small town in the urban area of Madrid, Spain. It is located Northeast from Madrid and very close to Barajas International Airport....
and
Torrejón de ArdozTorrejón de Ardoz is a town in the urban area of Madrid, Spain, and has about 110,000 inhabitants.It is a town 20 km east of Madrid on the NII highway . It is essentially a dormitory town, mostly consisting of apartments. It can be reached by bus from Av...
(the biggest massacre performed by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War), where the dead were buried in common graves. Carrillo has always strongly denied any knowledge or involvement in the massacres, which according to his Memories and reliable evidence where committed by uncontrolled elements which intercepted a column of prisoners evacuated from Madrid, at the time under heavy fascist bombardment. In an interview with the historian
Ian GibsonIan Gibson is an Irish author known for his biographies of Antonio Machado, Salvador Dalí, Henry Spencer Ashbee, and particularly his work on Federico García Lorca, for which he won several awards, including the 1989 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography...
, Carrillo explained once again the details of the tragedy.
In March 1939 Madrid surrendered after an internal coup against the
NegrínJuan Negrín y López was a Spanish politician and physician.Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, he became a university professor of physiology....
administration and its close supporter, the Communist Party, which wished to continue the resistance until the foreseeable outbreak of the World War. Carrillo's father, Wenceslao, member of PSOE, was among those who led the coup and was a member of Casado's Junta. Some weeks before, Carrillo's mother had died. Carrillo then wrote a public letter to his father describing the coup as counter-revolutionary and as a betrayal, reproaching him for his anti-Communism, and renouncing any further communication with him. In his memoirs, Carrillo states that the letter was written in March 7. However, the journalist and historian Carlos Fernández published in 1983 the letter, as published in
Correspondance International; it was dated on May 15.
After the military collapse of the
Republican GovernmentThe Second Spanish Republic was the system of government in Spain between April 14, 1931, when King Alfonso XIII left the country following local and municipal elections in which republican candidates won the majority of votes in urban areas and April 1, 1939, when the last of the Republican ...
, he fled to
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and tried to reorganize the party. Carrillo spent 38 years in exile, most of the time in
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
, but also in the USSR and other countries.
Exile
In 1944 Carrillo led the retreat of the communist guerrillas from the Aran Valley .
According to
Jorge SemprúnJorge Semprún Maura is a Spanish writer and politician. His mother Susana Maura Gamazo was a daughter of Antonio Maura.- Career :...
,
Enrique LísterEnrique Líster Forján was a Spanish communist politician and military officer....
and Ricardo de la Cierva, in 1945 Carrillo ordered the execution of fellow communist party member Gabriel León Trilla and helped the Francoist forces to detain the fellow communist Jesús Monzón . According to Enrique Líster and Ricardo de la Cierva, Carrillo also ordered in 1949 the execution of the fellow communist Joan Comorera, who was saved by the precautions he took . In 2005 Carrillo said
"yo he tenido que eliminar a alguna persona" (I have had to eliminate someone)
In August 1948, Carrillo personally met Stalin. .
Carrillo became the General Secretary of the PCE in 1960, replacing
Dolores IbárruriDolores Ibárruri Gómez , known more famously as "La Pasionaria" was a Spanish Republican leader of the Spanish Civil War and communist politician of Basque origin, perhaps best known for her defense of the Republic with the famous slogan ¡No Pasarán! , during the Battle of Madrid...
(
Pasionaria), who was given the post of Party President. Carrillo's policies were meant to strengthen the party's position among the
working classWorking class is a term used in academic sociology and in ordinary conversation to describe, depending on context and speaker, those employed in lower tier jobs as measured by skill, education, and compensation....
and intellectual groups , and averted several attempts of removal instigated by the
Marxist-LeninistMarxism-Leninism is a communist ideological stream that emerged as the mainstream tendency among the Communist parties in the 1920s as it was adopted as the ideological foundation of the Communist International during Stalin's era....
,
StalinistStalinism was the political system and ideology of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1928–1953...
and pro-democracy factions. In 1968, when Soviets invaded
CzechoslovakiaThe Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...
, Carrillo began to distance the party from
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
.
Spanish Transition. Eurocommunism
He returned secretly to
SpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.
[The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though España , Estado español and Nación española are used interchangeably...]
in 1976 after the death of long-time dictator
Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco Bahamonde, commonly known as Francisco Franco , or simply Franco, was a military general and dictator of Spain from October 1936, and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in 1975...
. Arrested by the police he was released within days. Together with Communist comrades
Georges MarchaisGeorges René Louis Marchais was the head of the French Communist Party from 1972 to 1994, and a candidate in the French presidential elections of 1981 - in which he managed to garner only 15.34% of the vote, which was considered at the time a major setback for the party.-Early life:Born into a...
of
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
and
Enrico BerlinguerEnrico Berlinguer was an Italian politician; he was national secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1972 until his death.-Early career:...
of
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
, he launched the
EurocommunistEurocommunism was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties to develop a theory and practice of social transformation that was more relevant in a Western European democracy and less aligned to the influence or control of the Communist Party of the Soviet...
movement in a meeting held in
MadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. It is the third-most populous municipality in the European Union after Greater London and Berlin, and its metropolitan area is the third-most populous city by urban area in the European Union after Paris and London.The city is located on the river...
in March 2, 1977.
Carrillo was elected to the
Congreso de los DiputadosThe Spanish Congress of Deputies is the lower house of the Cortes Generales, Spain's legislative branch. It has 350 members, elected by popular vote on block lists by proportional representation in constituencies matching the Spanish provinces using the D'Hondt method. Deputies serve four-year terms...
(Congress of Deputies), the lower house of the
Cortes GeneralesThe Cortes Generales is the legislature of Spain. It is a bicameral parliament, composed of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate . The Cortes has power to enact any law and to amend the constitution...
(Spanish Parliament), representing
Madrid districtMadrid is one of the 52 electoral districts used for the Spanish Congress of Deputies - the lower chamber of the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes Generales. It has the largest electorate of all the 52 districts. Madrid is the largest city...
in the first democratic elections in 1977, shortly after the legalization of the PCE (April 9, 1977) by the government of
Adolfo SuárezDon Adolfo Suárez y González, 1st Duke of Suárez, Grandee of Spain, KOGF was Spain's first democratically elected prime minister after the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and the key figure in the country's transition to democracy.-Parents:He is a son of Hipólito Suárez y … and...
. Throughout the Transition, Carrillo's authority and leadership was decisive to secure peaceful evolution towards a Democratic system, a constructive approach based on dialogue with opponents, and a healing of the wounds from the Civil War (the "Reconciliation" policy). Carrillo was re-elected again in 1979 and 1982, but was forced to leave his post as party leader on November 6, 1982 due to the poor party performance in the ballots. The failed Coup d'etat attempt on 23 February 1981 played a critical role against Carrillo's PCE, as Spanish society was still under the trauma of the Civil War and subsequent repression and Dictatorship. Fear of another military uprise propelled the most moderate left wing forces in the next elections. However, it is widely acknowledged that Carrillo's Reconciliation policy (see above) played a key role in making possible a peaceful transition to Democracy. His own courageous personal behaviour during the failed Coup d'Etat is also very remarkable - he was, together with outgoing PM Suarez, the only MP not to obey the rebel's orders to lay down choosing to sit and have a cigarette. (as shown in the surviving TV footage of that memorable day). The new General Secretary, the much younger Gerardo Iglesias, a member of the "renovators" wing, was at odds with him from the start.
Leaving the Spain Communist Party
On April 15, 1985 Carrillo and his followers were expelled from the PCE and the next year, in 1986, they formed his own political group, called the
Workers Party of Spain-Communist UnityWorkers' Party of Spain-Communist Unity was a communist political party in Spain, founded by Santiago Carrillo and his followers after their expulsion from the Communist Party of Spain in October 1985.Initially, the party was known as Communist Party of Spain Workers' Party of Spain-Communist...
(PTE-UC). This tiny, leftist party was unable to attract enough voters, so in October 27 1991 Carrillo announced that it would be disbanded. Subsequently, the PTE-UC merged into the ruling PSOE, but Carrillo declined PSOE membership considering his many years as a Communist member.
Retirement
On October 20, 2005 Carrillo was granted an honorary doctorate by the
Autonomous University of MadridThe Autonomous University of Madrid commonly known by its Spanish initials UAM or as "la Autónoma" is a Spanish Public University established in 1968, along with the Autonomous Universities of Barcelona and Bilbao during of one of Spain’s most ambitious educational reforms, which took place...
. The action of the University was strongly criticized by right-wing commentators. Carrillo, however, is no longer a Communist having "moved to the right through Eurocommunism to social democracy." He was quoted in September 1991: "the Communist movement as such has completed its historical cycle and it makes no sense trying to prolong it."
List of works
- "Adónde va el Partido Socialista? (Prieto contra los socialistas del interior)" (1959)
- "Después de Franco, ¿qué?" (1965)
- "Problems of Socialism Today" (1970)
- "Eurocomunismo y Estado" Editorial Critica (1977) ISBN 8474230152 ; English edition: Eurocommunism and the State, Lawrence and Wishart, 1977, ISBN 0-85315-408-2
- "El año de la Constitución" (1978)
- "Memoria de la transición: la vida política española y el PCE" (1983)
- "Problemas de la transición: las condiciones de la revolución socialista" (1985)
- "El año de la peluca" (1987)
- "Problemas del Partido: el centralismo democrático" (1988)
- "Memorias" (1993)
- "La gran transición: ¿cómo reconstruir la izquierda?" (1995)
- "Un joven del 36" (1996)
- "Juez y parte: 15 retratos españoles" (1998)
- "La Segunda República: recuerdos y reflexiones" (1999)
- "¿Ha muerto el comunismo?: ayer y hoy de un movimiento clave para entender la convulsa historia del siglo XX" (2000)
- "La memoria en retazos: recuerdos de nuestra historia más reciente" (2004)
See also
- Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún Maura is a Spanish writer and politician. His mother Susana Maura Gamazo was a daughter of Antonio Maura.- Career :...
- Eurocommunism
Eurocommunism was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties to develop a theory and practice of social transformation that was more relevant in a Western European democracy and less aligned to the influence or control of the Communist Party of the Soviet...
- History of Spain
The history of Spain spans the period from Prehistoric Iberia, through the rise and fall of the first global empire, to Spain's current position as a member of the European Union.Modern humans entered the Iberian Peninsula more than 35,000 years ago...
- Politics of Spain
The Politics of Spain take place in the framework of a parliamentary representative democratic constitutional monarchy, whereby the Monarch is the Head of State and the President of the Government is the head of government in a multi-party system. Executive power is vested in the government...
- Prime Minister of Spain
The President of the Government of Spain , usually known in English as the Prime Minister of Spain, is the Spanish head of government...