The international bankers helped finance the revolutionary effort in Spain without becoming involved themselves.  In February 1932 Le Journal reports that Stalin promised $200,000 to help finance the Revolutionary Training Schools in Spain.

The financial statements submitted to the 1931 congress of the Communist international discloses the fact that £240,000 (English money) had been received to help the Spanish Revolutionaries.^[9]

In addition to the above, two and a half million pesetas were made available for the purchase of arms and ammunition.

General Mola says that by 1938 over two hundred revolutionary leaders had arrived in Spain after being trained in the Lenin Institute in Moscow.

From 1930 to the date of the election a campaign of L’Infamie was carried on against the king of Spain and the royal family exactly as it was against Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  One of the most ridiculous lies ever invented claimed that one Spanish soldier was bled to death every day to keep the Prince of Asturias alive.  He was known to be suffering from haemophilia.  Other slanders accused the king of being a libertine, just as the Empress of Russia had falsely been accused of being mistress to Rasputin.

The plugged ballots in the large industrial centres wiped out the strong rural vote in favour of the monarchy.  After the election had been declared to favour a repubilcan form of government, King Alfonso XIII of Spain issued his last public proclaimation.  It read as follows :

“The elections held on Sunday proved to me that I no longer hold the love and affection of my people.  My conscience tells me this condition will not be permanent because I have always striven to serve Spain, and my people, with all my devotion.  A king may make mistakes.  Without doubt I have done so on occasion, but I know our country has always shown herself generous towards the faults of others committed without malice.

“I am the king of all Spaniards, and I am a Spaniard.  I could find ample means to maintain my royal prerogatives in effective resistance to those who assail them, but I prefer to stand resolutely aside rather than to provoke a conflict which might array my countrymen against one another in Civil War and patricidal strife.

“I renounce no single one of my rights which, rather than being mine, are an accumulated legacy of history for the guardianship of which I shall one day have to render strict account.  I shall wait the true and full expression of the collective conscience and, until the nation speaks, I deliberately suspend the exercise of my royal powers and am leaving Spain, thus acknowledging that she is sole mistress of her destinies.  Also now I believe that I am fulfilling the duty which the love of my country dictates.  I pray God that all other Spaniards may feel and fulfill their duty as sincerely as I do.”^[10]

Many of the Socialists who formed the Spanish republican government in 1931 were sincere in their beliefs.  They wanted no part of “Red” Communism or “Black” Nazism.  But they were proved to be powerless to prevent the Communists and Anarchists from putting the second part of their revolutionary programme into effect.

The tactics the revolutionary leaders employed were to double-cross the Socialists at every opportunity.  Red Cells within the government caused the government to commit some foolish mistakes.  The Reds outside then damned the government as a lot of incompetent, corrupt,and inefficient nincompoops.  The Communists, and Anarchists, claimed only a dictatorship of the proletariat could establish a stable government.  The agents of Moscow committed evey conceivable kind of crime to bring those responsible for internal security into disrepute also.

General De Rivera had used Largo Caballero a great deal to iron out differences between labour and employers during the years he had been dictator.  With the advent of the republican movement Largo Caballero showed his true colours.  By 1935 Caballero openly boasted that he had placed “Tens of thousands of Communist Cells throughout Spain.”

At the Eleventh Plenum of the Executive of the Communist International, the Spanish delegates were showered with congratulations because “The prerequisites of a revolutionary crisis are being created at a rapid rate in Spain.”^[11]

At the Twelth Plenum the wording of the congratulations to the Spanish delegates was as follows:  “In Spain, in paticular, we have been able to observe such revolutionary strike struggles going on uninterruptedly over period of many months as the Spanish proletariat has never experienced before.  What is happening in these struggles is, above all, the further development of a Spanish Revolution.”

There is an old saying “When thieves disagree the truth will come out.”  That is exactly what happened in Spain.  The three leaders of Moscow’s underground in Spain were Joaquin Maurin, Victor Serges, and Andres Ninn.  They were all young men.  They had all received special training in revolutionary activities in the Lenin Institute in Moscow before being entrusted with the leadership in Spain.  Maurin had been mixed up in the Separatist movement in Catalonia since he was sixteen years of age.  At the mature age of seventeen this intellectual thinker had set out to teach the Spanish people the Soviet solution of the world’s economic troubles.  At the age of twenty-one he was elected head of the Anarchists.  He preached and practised the religion of hate and violence.  In 1914 he was condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment but he was not of legal age for such a penalty.  Maurin was a delegate to the Third Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow, 1921.  He attracted favourable attention.

With the fall of Primo De Rivera, Maurin returned to Spain.  He had been hiding out in France and Moscow.  He had lived a hectic life.  He had been in and out of jail;  had escaped from prison;  been wounded in 1925;  confined in Citadel Montjuich, etc., etc.  It is said the only period of peace he enjoyed in his life was the three years he and his young wife spent in Paris, 1927-30.

Maurin wrote a book in 1936.  Victor Serges wrote the preface to it.  In this book Hacia la Segunda Revolucion he exposed the fact that Stalin had departed from the Marxian ideology and charged he was using the forces of Communism to forward his own secret totalitarian imperialistic ambitions.^[12]

Even after Maurin, Serges, and Ninn broke openly with Stalin in 1936, their power and influence amongst the working classes was so great that Stalin ordered that they should be allowed to live until they had served their purpose.  Stalin used them right up to the beginning of the Civil War in Spain.  Then he ordered them liquidated.  He directed that “Their deaths shall be accomplished in such a manner as to make it appear to the public that all three had died as martyrs to the Communist Cause.”  Maurin was betrayed to Fraco’s forces and after trial was executed.  Serges is reported to have been shot by Loyalists while fighting, and Ninn was also disposed of.  Their deaths were loudly attributed to acts of violence by the enemies of communism.

Victor Serges wrote “The evolution of Soviet Communism was completed in 1936... from revolutionary internationalism to a nationalism of great military power served, in various countries, by parties which it subsidized.  After July 1936 the Stalinites formed the unified Socialist Party affiliated with the Third International... and the object of Stalinism is to establish the new power of a Fascist nature to encircle France, the probable ally of Russia, IN THE WAR THAT IS being prepared.”

Then again Maurin says :  “The traditional policy of England is to ruin its adversaries, so as then to pose as the Protector and to render impossible the renaissance of the conquered vassal.  Spain is primarily the victim of England and, next in order, of France.  When Spain hesitates England and France attacks her strongly.  If she inclines towards England, France increases the persecution.  So long as France and England are capitalistic countries they will not have to be the natural ally to Spain.^[13]  The Logical line would be the curve through Portugal, Germany, Italy and Russia.  A bloc of this nature would neutralize France and England.”^[14]

Serges explained how so much Loyalist propaganda found its way into the universal press, while so little space was given to Franco’s releases.  Serges wrote:  “Never has there been brought into play, the one against the other, such low and demoralizing methods as those used by Stalin and his instrument, the Third International, in a continuous stream of propaganda at long range and without heed for the truth.  The method of repetition and cynicism have become almost mechanical ... The Soviet bureaucracy is plotting this procedure on an international scale.  Every infamy given out by a correspondent of Izvestia at Valentia is at once taken up in a chorus by the special papers in Paris, Stockholm, Oslo, Brussels, London, New York, Melbourne and Buenos Aires... Millions of copies of infamous lies are circulated, they are the only information millions of Soviet workers receive.  English, American, Chinese, and New Zealand papers reproduce these lies (by order).  Advanced intellectuals, who think they are anti-Fascist, will appear to believe them.  One sees that a formidable enterprise of demoralization is functioning in the universe, and I find pitilessly just, the words of Trotsky, that the Stalinite Comintern propaganda is a Syphilis of the Workers Movement.”^[15]