The Eurocommunist architect who lit a cigarette at gunpoint
23 February 1981: 200 Civil Guards under Lt. Col. Tejero storm the Spanish parliament, firing submachine guns. As every deputy dives for cover, 66-year-old Santiago Carrillo remains seated, takes out a cigarette, and calmly lights it.
General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (1960–1982), Carrillo was a key architect of Eurocommunism alongside Berlinguer and Marchais. Breaking with Moscow after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, he argued in Eurocommunism and the State (1977) for a parliamentary path to socialism and guided Spain's peaceful democratic transition after Franco's death.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1930Begins at the Socialist Youth newspaper Renovación
- 1934Elected General Secretary of the Socialist Youth of Spain
- 1934–1936Imprisoned for participation in the 1934 revolutionary uprising
- 1936.11Joins the PCE; Councillor for Public Order, Madrid Defence Council
- 1937Candidate member of the PCE Political Bureau
- 1939–197638-year exile during the Franco dictatorship
- 1946–1947Minister without portfolio, Republican government-in-exile
- 1960Succeeds Dolores Ibárruri as PCE General Secretary
- 1968Opposes Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; breaks with Moscow
- 1976Returns secretly disguised in a wig; arrested and released
- 1977.3Launches Eurocommunism with Berlinguer and Marchais in Madrid
- 1977–1986Member of Congress of Deputies for Madrid
- 1981.2.2323-F coup — remains seated, lights cigarette as gunmen fire
- 1982Resigns as PCE General Secretary after electoral defeat
- 1985Expelled from PCE; forms splinter left party
- 1991Disbands splinter party; declines merger into ruling PSOE
Related historical events
Eurocommunism and the State: Breaking with Moscow
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was Carrillo's political and theoretical turning point. The PCE, with the Italian PCI, was among the West European communist parties that most firmly condemned the intervention, and Carrillo steered the party to full independence from Moscow while seeking a path to socialism suited to Western Europe's realities. Its summation was Eurocommunism and the State (1977). There he argued that the capitalist state apparatus could be democratised and converted into an instrument of socialist construction without being smashed by force; the scientific-technical revolution had plunged the ideological apparatuses into crisis, so winning hegemony for the "forces of labour and culture" would transform the state from within. On this basis he declared the renunciation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a formula he judged valid when the working class was a minority but obsolete now that the forces of labour and culture formed the overwhelming majority, and proposed an economic democratisation that preserved a mix of public and private property over a long transition. An attack in the Soviet journal New Times turned the book into a cause célèbre, and the Madrid declaration Carrillo shared with Berlinguer and Marchais in 1977 marked the theoretical summit of Eurocommunism.