2023-08-21 22:25:56
After the Spanish Civil War, her figure became a universal myth, a synonym for a brave woman who fought against injustice, a kind of tragic and loving mother for millions of communists. Always in mourning, with her hair tied up in a bun, tall and strong, with a thunderous and magnetic voice, the role of Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, (Gallarta, Vizcaya, 1895-Madrid, 1989) in that conflict elevated her to a secular altar among the most important women of the 20th century. The reissue now of her memories, The only way (Akal), reveals little-known facets of her biography, including her defense of feminist claims within communism or her childhood and youth in a mining area of the Basque Country.
The stories that Vox invents for its ideological crusade
Further
Three decades have passed since this first part of Pasionaria’s memoirs, which covers her life until the end of the Civil War, was published in Spain. In addition, on this occasion it is the first time that the text is accompanied by a critical edition and completed with a selection of articles by the leader and with the memoirs of her daughter, Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri.
The historian and journalist Mario Amorós, author of a monumental biography of Pasionaria, Not pass (Akal), and person in charge of this recent edition, points out that The only way offers the trajectory of “a housewife, simple daughter and wife of miners, Catholic, who ends up becoming a communist leader.” “Her memories of her,” she comments, “explain her progressive social awareness, at the same time that they reflect the life of misery and repression in working-class environments at the beginning of the 20th century. We are, in some way, before an anthropological and sociological portrait of the Spain of the time”.
This is how the author relates it in a passage from her book: “All my relatives, Castilians and Basques, were miners. My maternal grandfather died in the mine, crushed by a block of ore. My mother worked in the mine until she got married; my father, from the age of eighteen, when he left the Carlist Army at the end of the last civil war, until he died at the age of sixty-seven. Miners were my brothers and miner my husband. I am, therefore, of pure mining stock. Granddaughter, daughter, wife and sister of miners. And nothing in the life of the people in the mine is strange to me. Neither his pains, nor his efforts, nor his language, nor his rudeness.
Along these lines, the testimony of her memoirs leaves no doubt about the decisive influence of Julián Ruiz, the socialist miner whom Pasionaria married at the age of 20. A committed trade unionist, protagonist of strikes and a clear admirer of the Soviet revolution, her husband will introduce his wife to readings of Marxist works, while involving her in her agitation work. Arrested on several occasions, Dolores will be forced to help Julián and help her house and his children as best she can. “There is no doubt”, affirms Amorós, “that without Julián Ruiz there would have been no Pasionaria. Said by herself. However, her natural talent and her dedication led her to publish articles in the labor press from a very young age and to prepare her speeches. In one of them, published at Easter, she will sign for the first time as Pasionaria. Although she had primary education, Dolores Ibárruri’s autodidactism is amazing. No one helped her write her captivating and charismatic speeches and we have thousands of manuscripts of hers in her sinuous handwriting to prove it.” Mario Amorós has dedicated years to the study of Pasionaria and has delved in a special way in the historical archive of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and in the personal and family of the leader.
That image of a grieving mother, of a secular virgin, that Dolores always projected and that was magnified by the propaganda of the communists, part of a real tragedy in her life such as the death of four daughters at very early ages. In a country that in the twenties of the last century registered high infant mortality rates, with scarce and precarious health care among the working class and without financial resources in the family, only two children, Rubén and Amaya, survived from the Ruiz and Ibárruri couple. . The first died young fighting with the Soviet Army in the Battle of Stalingrad. For her part, Amaya, as she relates in her memories, chose a life next to her mother. Married and later separated from a Soviet soldier, Stalin’s godson, she gave Pasionaria three grandchildren and returned from exile in Russia with her mother. In this way, Dolores relates the memory of her daughters who died of hers.
“Cry… Cry over our ills, over our impotence. Cry over our innocent children, to whom we could only offer our tear-soaked caresses. Cry for our painful lives, with no horizons, no way out. Bitter crying, with a permanent curse in the heart and a blasphemy on the lips. Blaspheme a woman, a mother blaspheme? And what is strange about it if our life was worse than that of the damned?
Her absolute dedication to politics led her to accept an offer from the USSR in 1935 for her children to study there and for a few years she could not see them. “In her speeches”, affirms her biographer, “that condition of a mother who has suffered a lot is always present and to a large extent the magnetism of her figure and her voice also respond to that tragedy. She connected with the people because she came from the popular classes. However, it also influenced its growing popularity that the PCE went from having barely a thousand militants to being a force with hundreds of thousands of members during the Civil War in the Republican years. The PCE was already a mass party with very modern propaganda techniques through the radio or billboards”.
Feminist as a communist
Dolores Ibárruri was an exception among the Spanish avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. As a worker of humble origins, her path to the front line of politics had little to do with the lawyers Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent, the writers María Lejárraga, Margarita Nelken and María Teresa León, the actress Margarita Xirgu or the painter Maruja Mallo, to mention symbolic women of the republican period.
All of them came from an enlightened upper-middle class and had been able to count on a solid intellectual formation. In fact, Pasionaria hardly maintained any friendship with other pioneers, except perhaps with the also communist María Teresa León. On the other hand, her rivalry with Margarita Nelken, more rebellious than Pasionaria, was very notorious. Once this socialist deputy left the PSOE and joined the PCE shortly after the start of the Civil War. Nevertheless, Ibárruri exercised a notable fascination over other avant-garde leaders. in his book A woman on the roads of Spain, the writer and socialist deputy María Lejárraga dedicated this paragraph to Dolores: “She was born in the Basque Country, in the mining region; In the tragedy of that hour, the rebels, the defeated, the dead, the imprisoned, the tormented were hers, a people like her, blood of her blood (…) The people who heard her, and especially the women, swept away by her , would have marched without hesitation, if she had started the march, to die or kill “.
#Pasionaria #daughter #wife #miners #universal #myth