Santiago Carrillo

Santiago Carrillo Solares (born January 18, 1915), Spanish politician, was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) from 1960 to 1982.

Born in Gijón, Asturias province, Carrillo is the son of the prominent Socialist leader Wenceslao Carrillo and was already as a 13-year old a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). He took part in the unification of Socialist and Communist youth leagues in 1934, forming Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. He became a member of the PCE in 1936. During the Spanish Civil War he led the Communist forces in Madrid and showed an intense pro-Soviet approach. After the military collapse of the Republican Government, he fled to Paris and tried to organise the party. Carrillo spent 38 years in exile, most of the time in France, but also in the USSR and other countries.

He became the General Secretary of the PCE in 1960, replacing Dolores Ibárruri (Pasionaria), who was given the post of party president. Carrillo enforced the party's position among the working class and intellectual groups, and averted several attempts of removal instigated by the Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist and pro-democracy factions. In 1968, when Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, Carrillo began to distance the party from Moscow.

He returned secretly to Spain in 1976 after the death of long-time dictator Francisco Franco and was arrested by the police, but was released within days. Together with Communist comrades Georges Marchais of France and Enrico Berlinguer of Italy, he launched the Eurocommunist movement in a meeting held in Madrid in March 2 1977. More wary and open-minded than many party comrades, Carrillo's activities were instrumental in the successful outcome of the political transition to democracy in Spain.

Carrillo was elected to the Congreso de los Diputados (Congress of Deputies), the lower house of the Spanish Parliament (Cortes), in the first democratic elections in 1977, shortly after the legalization of the PCE (April 9, 1977) by the government of Adolfo Suárez. Carrillo was reelected again in 1979 and 1982, but was forced to leave his post as party leader on November 6, 1982 due to the poor party perfomance in the ballots. The new General Secretary, the much younger Gerardo Iglesias , a member of the "renovators" wing, was at odds with him from the start.

On April 15, 1985 Carrillo and his followers were expelled from the PCE and the next year, in 1986, they formed his own political group, called the Workers' Party of Spain-Communist Unity (PTE-UC). This tiny, leftist party was unable to attract voters, so in October 27 1991 Carrillo pledged to disband it. Subsequently, the PTE-UC merged into the ruling PSOE, but Carrillo declined to be given the PSOE membership considering his many years as Communist militant.

List of Works

• "Adónde va el Partido Socialista? (Prieto contra los socialistas del interior)" (1959)
• "Después de Franco, ¿qué?" (1965)
• "Problems of Socialism Today" (1970)
• "Eurocomunismo y Estado" (1977)
• "El año de la Constitución" (1978)
• "Memoria de la transición: la vida política española y el PCE" (1983)
• "Problemas de la transición: las condiciones de la revolución socialista" (1985)
• "El año de la peluca" (1987)
• "Problemas del Partido: el centralismo democrático" (1988)
• "Memorias" (1993)
• "La gran transición: ¿cómo reconstruir la izquierda?" (1995)
• "Un joven del 36" (1996)
• "Juez y parte: 15 retratos españoles" (1998)
• "La Segunda República: recuerdos y reflexiones" (1999)
• "¿Ha muerto el comunismo?: ayer y hoy de un movimiento clave para entender la convulsa historia del siglo XX" (2000)
• "La memoria en retazos: recuerdos de nuestra historia más reciente" (2004)

See also

• History of Spain
• Politics of Spain
• Prime Minister of Spain