This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish civil
war: The massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican
security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejon de
Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took
place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in
the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo
played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's
death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still
denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the
massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the
focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Paracuellos
in the wider context of the 'Red Terror' in Madrid, where a minimum
of 8,000 'fascists' were murdered after the failure of military
rebellion in July 1936. He rejects both 'revisionist' right-wing
writers such as Cesar Vidal who cite Paracuellos as evidence that
the Republic committed Soviet-style genocide and left-wing
historians such as Paul Preston, who in his Spanish Holocaust
argues that the massacres were primarily the responsibility of the
Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The book argues that Republican
actions influenced the Soviets, not the other way round:
Paracuellos intensified Stalin's fears of a 'Fifth Column' within
the USSR that facilitated the Great Terror of 193738. It concludes
that the perpetrators were primarily members of the Provincial
Committee of Public Investigation (CPIP), a murderous all-leftist
revolutionary tribunal created in August 1936, and that its work of
eliminating the 'Fifth Column' (an imaginary clandestine Francoist
organisation) was supported not just by Carrillo, but also by the
Republican government. In Autumn 2015 the book was serialised in El
Mundo, Spain's second largest selling daily, to great acclaim.
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