Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

There is an operation afoot to re-write the history of the second half
of the twentieth century in Europe, laying the blame for all the evil
that occurred at the door of Stalin and of communism. Yet Stalin
was not alone at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam; he was there with
the leaders of the main Western Allies. They all, by mutual agreement,
took the decisions that resulted in the situation that arose in
Europe, and they were all responsible for the suffering that many
people endured as a result of those decisions: all of them – Stalin
and the others – and as far as Spain is concerned, the others even
more than Stalin.
The terrible repression in Spain of anything that smacked of resistance,
freedom, social justice or socialism continued after 1945 and
the end of the war. My party, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party
(PSOE), suffered some of the worst repression. Year after year successive
PSOE executive committees – seven of them – were taken
prisoner, and in 1953 our Secretary General, Tomás Centeno, was
murdered whilst being tortured. This was a heavy blow and resulted
in a decision that had two significant outcomes: the party leadership
was to leave to join other exiles in the French city of Toulouse,
the closest of the major French cities to the Franco-Spanish border;
and party activists remaining in Spain were to go underground,
which meant that practically nothing was heard of us for a number
of years.
This period underground was to last five years. At the end of the
1950s, a group of young people emerged and began to stir things
up in the University of Madrid, expressing disagreement with how
things were operating. I was one of these young people. Right from
the start, this group of about a dozen young men and women were
united by the idea of Europe. We did not accept that our country
was somehow different. We did not accept our lack of freedom,
democracy and respect. For us Europe was a model for all the
things we were demanding for Spain. We always felt that we
needed to organise ourselves, attaching great importance to a
structure that would go beyond mere protest and agitation. We
were in favour of a spontaneous movement but felt that behind it
there should always be an organisation to give meaning, coherence
and continuity. We also felt that we needed to consolidate an ideological
foundation on which to base the organisation that we
wanted to build. Criticising the regime was not enough. We felt that
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