Ernő Gerő

Of all the Hungarians in Spain during the Civil War, Ernő Gerő, shown in the photograph, was the most infamous, especially for carrying out purges among left-wing groups in Catalonia. Gerő learned Stalinist techniques of exercising power while working in exile in the Soviet Union and working in the Comintern apparatus. Gerő was a member of one of the delegations the Comintern sent to advise the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in the first half of the 1930s and he made analyses of the Spanish situation, including the period after the military uprising in the second half of 1936. 

In his reports, Gerő wrote that the Republic had a great chance of victory, but he also felt that the Francoists were being underestimated, and he sensed a lack of unity among the Republican factions. From the fall of 1936 until November 1938, Gerő was in Barcelona as a political adviser to the Comintern under the pseudonym “Pedro”, trying to coordinate relations between the Spanish communists and the Soviet center. His main focus was on the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), which the communists considered Trotskyist and a source of danger, and on mediating between the Comintern, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), and the PCE. He also supervised the activities of the Soviet Consul General in Barcelona and tried to integrate the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and other anarchist groups into the PSUC in order to gain control over them as well, which led to many conflicts.  From the beginning of 1937, in the wake of the Moscow show trials, his main task became the repression, by all means, of the “Trotskyist” POUM, which the Communists were comparing to fascists, and whose members they were denouncing as agents of Hitler and Franco. According to the recollections of the Hungarian and Catalan communists who worked with him, “Pedro was the cold, unpredictable, enigmatic, but undoubtedly one of the most experienced and educated representatives of the Comintern in Spain”. 

Gerő and the Soviet consul in Barcelona planned and directed the final destruction of the POUM and the anarchists, including the assassination of POUM leader Andrés Nin, who had been on good terms with Trotsky and had criticized the Stalinist conspiracy trials. Their methods included disinformation, falsification of evidence, torture, and execution of prisoners, in close cooperation with the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Republic’s Military Information Service (SIM). Gerő also worked with Catalan communist Caridad Mercader (whose son Ramón later assassinated Trotsky). The complete destruction of the groups considered internal enemies was not achieved, but the purges claimed many victims and the conflicts among the leftists became irreversible.  

Gerő left Spain in 1938. After World War II, and until the revolution of 1956, he was the second most important communist politician after the dictator Mátyás Rákosi, holding a number of prominent positions, such as Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister.