Red Terror (Spain)

Red Terror Terror Rojo (Spanish)
Part of Spanish Civil War, Interwar period
"Execution" of the Sacred Heart by a Republican firing squad is an example of "an assault on the public presence of Catholicism".[3] The image was originally published in the London Daily Mail with a caption noting the "Spanish Reds' war on religion".[4]
Location	Second Spanish Republic
Date	1936–1939
Attack type	Anticlerical violence, Politicide, Antireligious violence, Political repression, Political violence
Deaths	38,000[5] to ~72,344 lives.[6]
Perpetrators	Republican faction

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Red Terror (Spanish: Terror Rojo)^[7] is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups involved.^[8][9] The May 1931 arson attacks against Church property throughout Spain and the determination of the Republican Government to never compromise upon and strictly enforce it's ban against Classical Christian education was the beginning a politicidal campaign of religious persecution against the Catholic Church in Spain. No Republican controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country.^[10] The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the wake of the rightist military coup in July 1936, the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, politicians and suspected supporters of the Right Wing political parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, and the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.^[11]

A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered and whether an individual continued practising Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the far-left.^[12]

While the violence long preceded the failed coup of July 1936, the immediate aftermath let loose a violent onslaught on everyone that the revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial".^[13] Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000^[14] to ~72,344 lives.^[6]

Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution", the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists".^[11] Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed rightist coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution".^[15] Other historians allege that they have found evidence of systematic religious persecution and revolutionary terror long preceding the military uprising and have pointed to a "radical and antidemocratic" opposition to religious toleration among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution.^[16] These attitudes and policies attracted harsh criticism at the time even from fellow Republicans Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, and ultimately from Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.

The Red Terror also included politicidal infighting within the Republican faction, particularly after the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain declared POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (an anti-Stalinist Left and Trotskyite political party), to be an illegal organization, alongside all other real and suspected Trotskyites and anarchists. The Stalinists, aided by the Comintern, the NKVD and the GRU, accordingly unleashed a revolutionary terror almost identical to the simultaneous Purge of 1937 in the Soviet Union, against the International Brigades and all other Republican factions, including en masse arrests, interrogation under torture, and mass executions. In contrast to the Stalinist official history blaming the defeat of the Spanish Republic on Leon Trotsky and his followers, historians Donald Rayfield and Ronald Radosh have instead laid the blame at the door of Joseph Stalin, the military advisors he sent to Spain, and Stalin's Spanish followers. The Stalinist Red Terror against fellow Republicans and the decision to immediately transform Spain into a prototype for "the people's democracies" of the Cold War-era Soviet Bloc instead of first defeating Francisco Franco were nothing short of catastrophic for the Republican faction.

George Orwell, an English social democrat who fought during the Spanish Civil War as part of the POUM, would describe the Soviet-decreed Purge of the Republican faction in his memoirs Homage to Catalonia, as well as writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to make the case that both Fascism and authoritarian socialism are two sides of the same coin.^[17][18] Other formerly Pro-Soviet Westerners who witnessed the Purges, including John Dos Passos and Arthur Koestler, were left similarly disillusioned.

In recent years, the Holy See has beatified hundreds of the victims of the Red Terror (498 in one 2007 ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in the Catholic Church's history).^[19]