Spanish Socialist Workers' Party

The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party is a major Republican political organization in the novel, but it is never depicted as a unified instrument of government. Its members and allies are divided by internal competition, pressed by the military and political emergencies of the civil war, and later connected to antifrancoist resistance. Through Manuel Arroyo’s work, the party’s predicament becomes part of a wider portrait of a Republic trying to resist Franco while its own coalition struggles over authority, security, and the means of survival.

Identity and Political Position

The party is identified by its Spanish initials, PSOE, and is represented among the political forces supporting Juan Negrín’s government. Francisco Largo Caballero, a party leader, served as president of the Republic’s government from September 1936 until May 1937. His simultaneous leadership of the government and the Ministry of War gives the party a central place in the Republic’s wartime leadership, but the novel’s account emphasizes that governmental position did not guarantee trust or cohesion.

Pablo de Azcárate and Negrín maintained a confidential channel of communication because each trusted the other and neither trusted their common superior, Largo Caballero. Manuel Arroyo travelled from London to Valencia once a month to act as their intermediary. The arrangement bypassed official channels, and its exposure could have broken the connection while leaving Arroyo as the expendable link: Azcárate warned that they would deny having instructed him and characterize his actions as a private conspiracy. Arroyo accepted despite the risk. The episode places the party’s political leadership inside a system where personal confidence could sustain coordination, but where institutional protection was uncertain.

Internal Divisions and the Republican War Effort

When Negrín described the political situation to Arroyo, he depicted the Republic’s intelligence service as a nest of competing interests. Soviet advisers exerted extensive influence; Communists, in Negrín’s characterization, looked the other way; and his fellow Socialists were occupied with obstructing one another. Anarchists and Trotskyists continued their own revolution, he said, even at the risk of losing the war. This is a character’s sharply partisan assessment, not a neutral account of every faction, but it establishes the political atmosphere in which the party operated: disagreement over authority and revolutionary aims was not separate from the military crisis but threatened the Republic’s capacity to wage war.

Negrín’s dependence on Soviet military aid further constrained what his government could do. He disliked the Soviet advisers’ influence, yet believed that expelling them would mean giving up the Soviet Union’s support, the Republic’s only source of aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons. He contrasted those supplies with the affection of the International Brigades and the rifles sent by Mexico, and concluded that breaking with the Soviet Union would amount to handing Spain to Franco. His account makes the government’s relationship with Communist allies a matter of survival as well as political conflict, while the PSOE’s own internal rivalries compound the strain.

The consequences of the Barcelona May Days and the disappearance of Andreu Nin sharpen this picture. In May 1937, Trotskyists and anarchists fought the security forces of the Catalan government and the Republican government for six days; the clashes left more than two hundred antifascists dead and brought down Largo Caballero’s government. Negrín succeeded him. The novel notes that the arrests of the leadership of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification were retaliation, although officials did not publicly call them that, and that Nin had been missing since the eighteenth. His disappearance angered the small POUM presence in Madrid and drew support from many Madrid anarchists. Socialists, meanwhile, were themselves divided, even as Socialists and Communists together supported the Valencia government and Madrid’s Defense Junta. Their agreement was real but limited, and did not erase the competing interests within the coalition.

Intelligence, Party Allegiances, and Coercion

After Negrín became president, he recruited Arroyo for a dangerous assignment in Madrid as an auxiliary government delegate to the Defense Junta. The post was unprecedented and imprecisely defined. Arroyo was to learn what was happening amid clandestine detention and factional conflict, where illegal detention centers continued to operate despite the Junta’s closure of Madrid’s checas late the previous year. Negrín warned him that there was no effective oversight: when one center was closed, another opened.

Arroyo’s work drew him into contacts with people sheltering political refugees, diplomats, foreign journalists, Protestant church representatives, and even concealed fascists. He had never formally joined a party, because a declared affiliation would have hindered his work in Geneva and London, but he identified with Azcárate and, especially, Negrín. His stated priority was to resist, save the Republic, and win the war. Information he sent to Valencia helped the government rule out a possible uprising in Madrid and press the parties, the Ministry of the Interior, the Defense Junta’s public-order council, and the Soviet delegation. The pressure had results, but it also made it evident that someone in Madrid was working for Negrín.

That visibility helped make Arroyo vulnerable. After he was kidnapped and shot, he could not identify his attackers or determine whether they had intended to kill him or merely frighten him into withdrawing. He considered several possibilities: anarchists or Trotskyists, members of rear-guard brigades dismantled through his intelligence, or Soviet secret services working with local Communists. He did not entirely exclude the PSOE or the Communist Party, despite their support for Negrín, nor a counterintelligence operation designed to exploit his death by blaming a rival faction. He also considered the possibility that Franco’s government might have arranged the killing to spread the claim that Soviet agents had eliminated a Republican government operative. These alternatives remain suspicions rather than established explanations. The uncertainty itself conveys the peril created when political factions, secret policing, and wartime propaganda overlap.

From Wartime Affiliation to Resistance

The party’s presence continues beyond the Republican government’s wartime crisis. Paco Contreras, an old party member, had been a prewar PSOE affiliate and a show-business columnist; in the later Madrid setting, he earned his living as a proofreader. Arroyo encountered Ramón Mateos through Contreras. Ramón was an antifrancoist engineering student whose family had been broken and impoverished by the war: his father had died before it, one brother had been killed at Brunete, another was serving a prison sentence in a penal detachment, and his sister earned money cleaning houses so he could study. A scholarship from Franco, secured through an uncle who had served as a military chaplain in the victorious army, tormented him even as it enabled his education.

Ramón belonged to a small group preparing to seize the Communications Palace at Cibeles by force if the United Nations intervened decisively on behalf of Spanish democrats. Arroyo found him with three other young men in the last row of the Paseo de Recoletos; six or seven more were nearby. When they already knew that the hoped-for news had not come, Arroyo was relieved that he did not have to deliver it, yet felt his heart breaking. The episode does not present this group as an official PSOE operation. Instead, the party’s historical and social world extends into a later resistance composed of individuals whose political hopes have survived defeat, even as their plans rest on an intervention that does not arrive.

Narrative Significance

The party’s political history is rendered through connected but vulnerable channels: a trusted personal intermediary, a government delegate collecting intelligence, divided party leadership, and later antifrancoist contacts in Madrid. The contrast between the discreet Azcárate–Negrín connection and the exposed work of Arroyo shows how political coordination can depend on relationships that official institutions will disown when pressure becomes dangerous. Likewise, Negrín’s reliance on Soviet weapons, alongside his distrust of Soviet interference and the Socialist infighting he describes, makes Republican unity a practical necessity that remains incomplete.

The novel does not reduce the PSOE to either the cause of Republican failure or a seamless resistance tradition. It shows Socialists divided among themselves, cooperating with Communists in support of Negrín and the Defense Junta, and confronting a war in which covert detention and factional violence made political loyalty perilous. In the later Madrid episodes, the party is visible through people such as Contreras rather than through control of the state. That shift—from government leadership under Largo Caballero and Negrín to individual opposition under Franco—gives the organization’s presence in the novel its historical arc, while preserving the differences between a governing party, its members, and the broader clandestine struggle.