On the occasion of the more than ten defectors who starred in Spanish political news in the first four months of last year – the most controversial was Toni Cantó, who left Ciudadanos to run for Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s candidacy for the Community of Madrid – and We tell the story of Óscar Pérez Solís. We are talking about a historic anarchist leader who ended up founding the PSOE together with Pablo Iglesias, who later joined the Communist Party (PCE), to finally support the 1936 coup and become an important figure in the Franco dictatorship.
The most curious thing about this surprising ideological shift is that Pérez Solís carried it out while always occupying positions of responsibility. He himself recounted it, without any shame, in a series of articles published in the pages of the Falangist weekly ‘El Español’. He titled them ‘A Spanish vocal in the Comintern and other writings on Soviet Russia’, published by Editorial Renacimiento in 2018.
As Forti defended in ‘Traitors, conformists and passionate about politics’, an article published in the magazine ‘Segle XX’ in 2013: «After all, reds and blacks were not so different. Fascism and communism were nothing more than two excesses, more similar than was thought. An idea that serves to explain another surprising case of turncoat in the history of Spain, much better known than the one mentioned: that of Dionisio Ridruejo.
This is a historical figure with one of the most strangely suggestive trajectories of our 20th century, who led a singular journey from the swastika to the socialist rose. This political conversion is less frequent, since the usual thing is to be a left-wing rebel youth who, upon reaching adulthood, becomes a conservative. However, in Franco’s Spain there were many old Falangists who ended up disappointed with the dictatorship and embraced contrary ideologies and were even persecuted by it. But none did it with the suddenness and speed that the unusual case of Dionisio.
Dinisio Ridruejo, during a meeting with ABC in 1970
The anthem of Phalange
«Ridruejo belonged to the privileged class of the provinces, but he hated the conservatism of the right and believed he saw in the Falangism a movement to his measure: sacred traditions and egalitarian revolution, all at the same time. To this must be added a trick of fate, as the young provincial fell madly in love with Marichu de la Mora, a lady of high society, a Falangist, who was the one who introduced him to the charismatic leader of the Spanish Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera». the historian Manuel Penella, author of the first biography of this politician, writer and poet Soriano, told ABC.
On December 3, 1935, precisely at the request of Primo de Rivera, Ridruejo met with other Falangists in the basement of the Or Kompon, a Basque restaurant near the Gran Vía. comrades could sing at the end of their meetings. It was then that he created, together with José Antonio, the diplomat Agustín de Foxá and the writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas, the famous ‘Face to the Sun’. Until reaching this privileged position in the political history of Spain, our protagonist, the son of a prosperous merchant from Soria, became a delegate of the Falange in Valladolid and moved to Madrid to study law. It was in the big city where he wanted to be, because that was where things happened.
From the capital, he traveled to Germany with a party delegation to see first-hand the benefits of Nazism. Both he and the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had always been interested in National Socialism and the fascism that emerged in Italy. This was recognized by the other Spanish dictator in 1926: “Mussolini’s gesture [la Marcha sobre Roma] it illuminated the path I had to follow to save my country. Mussolini is the torch that illuminates the peoples […] and I believe, like him, that the principle of liberty is no longer effective as a rule of conduct for peoples. It must be replaced by the principle of authority.”
During the Civil War, Ridruejo became responsible for the Francoist government’s propaganda in Burgos, where he contributed to creating the entire imaginary of the uprising against the Republic. That is to say, the imperial references, the aesthetics of the seasoned soldiers who had to save the homeland and the beauty of violence against the communists, among other things. He also wrote a series of fiery articles praising Hitler and Mussolini in the newspaper ‘Arriba’ and directed the literary magazine ‘Escorial’, in which he vindicated totalitarianism from the perspective of culture.
Franco’s reviews
Franco, however, began to relegate the Falangists and persecute them for fear that they would usurp power to transform his regime. That led Ridruejo to abandon some of the positions he held. He even dared to write a critical letter to the Spanish dictator for the drift that he was taking the regime that had emerged from the war, far from the promises that he had initially made. «It gives the impression that Ridruejo fell into favor with Franco, whom he once took out of his boxes without consequences. Franco could have crushed him, but he didn’t. He treated him with a certain deference, even after the harsh letter of rupture with the Regime that Ridruejo wrote to him in 1942,” Penella explained.
In June 1941, Dionisio Ridruejo enlisted in the Blue Division to fight against the USSR during World War II. That unit of volunteers was the initiative of Ramón Serrano Suñer, one of Ridruejo’s protectors within the regime, who created it with the aim of signaling the Falange’s commitment against communism. It was his first experience on the battlefield, because he didn’t fire a single bullet during the Civil War. He returned from the Soviet Union with a shattered soul and a book under his arm, his ‘Russian Notebooks’, a literary testimony of those terrible months in the trenches.
On his return, despite the fact that he still believed that the Nazis could win the war, he already felt a deep contempt for Franco. He resigned his remaining charges. As a result of his transformation, the dictator did not stand by and banished him to Ronda and San Cugat del Vallés for five years. In these destinations he experienced the defeat of Hitler and the end of Nazi Germany, which hardened his position against the regime without hiding. He “He did everything possible to transform the Francoist state into a ‘revolutionary’ fascist state, which led him to serious clashes with Franco himself. The monarchists hated him and he was about to fight a duel with a few, something that Serrano Suñer prevented », recalls Penella.
Ridruejo (right), visiting combatants from the Blue Division at the Mola Hospital in San Sebastián in 1942
Toward the left
At that time he began to undertake actions that linked him directly to left-wing anti-Francoism, and was even arrested during the university riots of February 1956. Later he was sent to Carabanchel prison for participating in a movement of writers against Francoism. Prisons would be since then one of his habitual residences. Before the end of the decade, he spent another five months in one of them for accusing the regime in a Cuban magazine. Upon being released, he began to frequent communist circles, although he renounced this ideology to finally position himself with the liberals and democrats.
At this point he already renounced any totalitarianism and even founded a party, Acción Democrática, for which he was arrested again, tried and imprisoned on numerous more occasions. Following his new principles, in 1962 he attended the IV Congress of the European Movement in Munich, known by the Francoists as the «Munich conspiracy». In it, together with the exiled Republicans, he demanded “the establishment of truly representative and democratic institutions.” After that trip, Ridruejo could not return to Spain until two years later. As soon as he set foot on Spanish soil, he was once again sentenced to six months in prison and to pay a fine of 10,000 pesetas.
In those years his health was already very delicate, but he continued to write in anti-Franco magazines and participate in the promotion of new parties, with which he sought alliances with liberals, Catholics and democratic conservatives. As he himself said: «I want an intermediate force, of a new type, that interprets the liberal heritage towards the left with a reformist spirit: a social democracy or a non-class socialism. This third group, in which I work, will in the future be a fragment or a moderate wing attached to socialism.
However, he did not have time. He suffered from heart failure that he had not revealed to anyone and he ended up being admitted to the Concepción clinic in Madrid waiting to be operated on. However, the intervention could not be carried out, because he died before entering the operating room, in the early morning of June 29, 1975. As Penella explained: «At the end of his days he defined himself as a social democrat, or as a neo-socialist, that is, as a non-Marxist socialist. I don’t see him joining the PSOE at the time, nor Tierno Galván’s PSP, who were Marxists. In 1975 he considered that the PSOE should be updated from within, not through the interference of bourgeois intellectuals ».