From baker to General Secretary: the leader who steered Spanish communism through the Popular Front and Civil War
“We are fighting for the Democratic Republic, for a democratic and Parliamentary Republic of a new type, with deep social content.” — Report to the PCE Central Committee, Valencia, 5 March 1937
As General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), José Díaz led the party through the Popular Front strategy, transforming it from a small sect into a mass party central to the Republican war effort. A Sevillian baker who cut his teeth in the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, he joined the PCE in 1927 and rose to General Secretary in 1932. At the 7th Comintern Congress (1935), he stood with Georgi Dimitrov in championing the anti-fascist united front, and during the Civil War he committed the party wholly to military victory under the banner of a “democratic republic of a new type.” Stricken by stomach cancer, he died in Tbilisi in 1942; his decade of leadership laid the foundations of the Spanish communist tradition for generations.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1913Joins La Aurora, the Seville bakers' union
- 1917Leads bakers' strike in Seville
- 1920Participates in the CNT general strike
- 1925Arrested in Madrid under Primo de Rivera dictatorship; imprisoned
- 1927Joins PCE; leads the Andalusian party organization
- 1932.34th PCE Congress — elected to Central Committee
- 1932.9Joins Politburo; soon appointed General Secretary
- 19357th Comintern Congress — backs Dimitrov's anti-fascist united front line
- 1936.2Elected to Cortes for Madrid
- 1936–1939Leads PCE through Civil War — prioritizes military victory and Republican unity
- 1938.12Transferred to USSR for stomach cancer treatment; operated in Leningrad
- 1939–1942Comintern Secretariat cadre — oversees Spain, South America, British India
Related historical events
- 1934–1939The Comintern’s Popular Front turnPCE general secretaryUsed the Popular Front strategy to make the party a mass force in the Republican camp.
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarGeneral Secretary of the Spanish Communist PartyBuilt the party into the central force of the Republican camp on the Popular Front line that the war had to be won first
Final years in the USSR: cancer treatment, wartime evacuation and a disputed death, 1938–1942
From around the late summer of 1938 stomach cancer began to limit Díaz's activity. In November–December 1938 he travelled to the Soviet Union for treatment and was operated on in Leningrad; after the Republican defeat he never returned to Spain. He settled in Moscow as a Comintern Secretariat cadre responsible for Spain, South America and British India, and his writings from this period were collected as Tres años de lucha (Three Years of Struggle). After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 he was evacuated, first to Pushkin and in autumn 1941 to Tbilisi in Georgia, where his condition kept deteriorating.
Díaz died in Tbilisi in March 1942. Sources split between 19 and 20 March, and in official records he remained General Secretary until his death that year. Several biographies and reference works record that, unable to bear the pain of his advanced illness, he took his own life by throwing himself from a window. A long-standing counter-claim holds that he was murdered on Stalin's orders; when Soviet secret-police files were declassified in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, they yielded no material supporting that accusation. The circumstances of his death have thus never been fully settled.
He was first interred in Tbilisi's Vera Cemetery. In April 2005 his remains were reburied in Seville in a ceremony held by the Communist Party of Spain, and the city council named him an honoured son of the city. In the Soviet Union his surname became a widely used personal name, and it is still given today in parts of Central Asia and Russia.