Andreu Nin, a late homage

Catalan Parliament finally decided praising the figure of Andreu Nin, a Catalan anti-stalinist intellectual and politician who was detained, tortured and finally executed with the placet of the Spanish Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. He had been one of the founders of POUM (Worker's Party for Marxist Unification) in 1935, as well as the Justice Minister of Catalan Government during the Civil War, until he was expelled from Generalitat in May 1937. A month later, he would be detained and finally murdered for daring to propose another way to conduct the Spanish civil war instead of the dependence towards the Soviet Union. In fact, even the NKVD was involved in his death.
It was the first time that all the Catalan political forces had managed to celebrate an hommage in his remembrance, almost 76 years after his death. However, his political relevance was once again a matter of controversy whilst each party praised a different trait of his career. Despite this disagreement, the reality is that he was a brave politician who dared to oppose Stalin after having worked for the Commintern, alying himself with the Trotskist Left Opposition. In addition, he would later break up with Trotsky because of the unification of Trotskist Izquierda Comunista de España and Bloc Obrer i Camperol, a Catalan communist party opposed to the Comintern. Furthermore, he always defended the right of Catalans and other peoples in Spain and Europe to freedly decide on their own future. As an intellectual, he collaborated in many newspapers, translated some classic books from Russian literature into Catalan and Spanish and wrote several essays in which he reflected his political ideas.

Nin was kidnapped on 16 June 1937 in front of the headquarters of his party at Ramblas, one of the main streets of Barcelona. After being held in Barcelona for a while, he was later transferred to a prison in Alcalá de Henares, a city situated 40km away from Madrid where several communist cadres from the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) and political commissars from the Soviet Union were trying to control the Republican Army. However, his inprisonment was totally unofficial: it is not on any record. 

He was repeatedly interrogated by the police while being held, in order to make Nin confess that POUM was involved with Falange in a conspiration against the Spanish republican government. No evidence could proof it, only a few documents which were fabricated by two Spanish policement following orders of Soviet NKVD and the Soviet consul in Barcelona. After that, several men under the command of Alexander Orlov picked him out from the prison and transferred him to a Cheka, a secret detention centre which was firstly seen in the USSR; during the Spanish Civil War, it was used by the Republican faction, mainly by communists, to detain either Francoist prisoners or political dissidents. The detention centre where Andreu Nin was confined was situated at the house of the matrimony formed by Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, a communist aristocrat and General of the Republican air forces, and Constanza de la Mora Maura, the granddaughter of former conservative Prime Minister Antonio Maura and eventually the head of the Foreign Press Office of the Republican government. Once there, Nin was tortured and finally executed at an undetermined point in the road from Alcalá de Henares to Madrid.
However, the official version would never admit that the death of Andreu Nin was the result of a conspiration led by Soviet agents who were deployed in Spain under the treaty by which the USSR agreed to provide weapons and aircraft to the Republican Army. Instead, the government claimed that the former POUM leader escaped from the prison helped by his "contacts" within Falange and Gestapo agents hidden in the International Brigades. That is the reason why Spanish Prime Minister Juan Negrín used to say that Nin was either in Salamanca or in Berlin, helping the Nationalist faction win the war.
The documentary below investigates the conspiration that would lead to the murder of Andreu Nin. It is based in the investigations by Catalan historian Pelai Pagès, among others and broadcast by Maria Dolors Genovès (in Spanish).

Andreu Nin was a victim of the tensions within the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil war, in a conflict that has be named as a "second Civil War within the Spanish Civil War" by some historians. The opposition between two ways of making the war was effectively one of the reasons that caused the defeat of those who were fighting for their freedom and trying to prevent the imposition of a regime with close ties to Fascism and Nazism. In fact, the Republic (and also the Catalan government) were victims of the geopolitical reality of a European continent on the eve of a total war. European countries decided not to help the legitimate government whereas Germany and Italy were helping Francoist troops, lefting Republicans in the hands of Stalin. However, the non-intervention would not prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.

Given all these circumstances, the hommage to Nin becomes an act of special importance, especially when his corpse has not still been recovered. His remains are lying somewhere near the road between Alcalá de Henares and Madrid. So the time has come to rehabilitate his memory and praise him as an intellectual who fought tirelessly against fascism.