People of the Revolution and the USSR

Spanish Republic state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1946 ○ Illness

The UGT worker-leader they called the Spanish Lenin, a prime minister broken between revolution and war

In November 1936 Largo Caballero appointed four CNT leaders to his cabinet: anarchists whose programme was the abolition of the state took ministerial office in one. One of them, the health minister Federica Montseny, was the first woman to hold a ministry in Spanish history.

A man who left school at seven, worked as a stucco plasterer and became a union leader. At the head of the UGT he was sentenced to life for the general strike of August 1917, and under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he took a seat on the Council of State to keep the organization alive, a choice argued over for the rest of his life. As labour minister of the Second Republic he pushed through the eight-hour day in the countryside, and around the Asturias rising of 1934 he moved so far left that his supporters called him the Spanish Lenin. In September 1936 he became prime minister and war minister, and in November brought four CNT leaders into the cabinet, seating anarchists in a government for the first time; but he clashed continuously with the communists and the Soviet advisers over rebuilding a regular army and over the pace of the revolution. After the May Days of 1937 he refused to outlaw the POUM, lost his ministers and fell. In exile in France he was seized by the Gestapo and held in Sachsenhausen until the liberation of 1945.

Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1940 ○ Died in prison

PSOE right-wing leader, Speaker of the Cortes; joined Casado's coup, refused exile, and died in Franco's prison

"The great majority, the masses, they cannot leave, and I, who have always lived with the workers, will continue with them and with them I will stay. Whatever is their fate will be mine," to the socialist daily La Voz, March 1939

A Marxist revisionist who started as a philosophy professor in Madrid and succeeded Pablo Iglesias as leader of the PSOE and UGT in 1925. As Speaker of the Constituent Cortes (1931) he held to a moderate parliamentarism, and his opposition to the armed rising of October 1934 cost him his party base. During the Civil War he stayed in Madrid seeking a negotiated peace, and in March 1939 joined Colonel Casado's coup against Negrín, serving on the National Defence Council; but Franco demanded unconditional surrender. When every other council member fled, Besteiro refused, telling the socialist daily La Voz that he had always lived with the workers and would share their fate; a Francoist court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment and he died in Carmona prison.

Spanish Republic state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1892–1956 ○ Heart attack

The physiologist trained in Leipzig who sent the Republic's gold to Moscow and chose to fight to the end as its last prime minister

The Thirteen Points he put to Franco in May 1938: full Spanish independence, a government chosen by universal suffrage, regional autonomy, freedom of conscience, land reform, and no reprisals for acts of war. Franco''s answer was unconditional surrender.

A physiologist turned PSOE politician. He studied medicine at Kiel and Leipzig, became professor of physiology in Madrid at twenty-nine and built the laboratory that trained the future Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa, joined the PSOE in 1929 and entered parliament in 1931. As finance minister from September 1936 he moved the national gold reserve to Cartagena and signed the decision to place it in Soviet hands, and after the Barcelona May Days he became prime minister in May 1937, centralizing the Popular Army under the slogan that to resist is to win. He leaned on the communists and the Soviet advisers because under Western non-intervention there was nowhere else to buy arms, and was called a puppet of Moscow for it for the rest of his life. His Thirteen Points of May 1938 were an attempt to negotiate; Franco would accept only unconditional surrender, and in March 1939 Colonel Casado''s coup drove him out of Spain. Expelled from the PSOE in 1946, he was rehabilitated by the party only in 2008.