Dolores Ibárruri

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (Spanish: [isiˈðoɾa ðoˈloɾes iˈβaruɾi ˈɣomeθ]; 9 December 1895 – 12 November 1989), also known as Pasionaria ("the passionate one" or Passion flower"), was a Spanish Republican politician during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and a communist. She is renowned for her slogan ¡No Pasarán! ("They shall not pass!"), which she issued during the Battle for Madrid in November 1936.

Ibárruri joined the Spanish Communist Party (Spanish: Partido Comunista Español) when it was founded in 1920. In the 1930s, she became a writer for the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) publication Mundo Obrero, and in February 1936, she was elected to the Cortes Generales as a PCE deputy for Asturias. After going into exile from Spain towards the end of the Civil War in 1939, she became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain, a position she held from 1942 to 1960. The Party then named her honorary president of the PCE, a post she held for the rest of her life. Upon her return to Spain in 1977, she was re-elected as a deputy to the Cortes for the same region she had represented from 1936 to 1939 under the Spanish Second Republic, holding office until 1979. She lived another ten years in retirement until her death in 1989.

Dolores Ibárruri was born in 1895 as the eighth of eleven children. She had a Basque miner father and a Castilian mother. She grew up in Gallarta but later moved to Somorrostro (Biscay). Gallarta was adjacent to a large siderite mine.

Ibárruri left school at 15 after spending two years preparing for teachers' college at the encouragement of her schoolmistress. Her parents could not afford further education, so she went to work as a seamstress and later as a housemaid. She became a waitress in the town of Arboleda, the most important urban nucleus in the region of Somorrostro. There, she met Julián Ruiz Gabiña, a union activist and founder of the Socialist Youth of Somorrostro. They married in late 1915, two years after the birth of their first child. The young couple participated in the general strike of 1917, which led to the imprisonment of Ruiz. During this time, Ibárruri spent nights reading the works of Karl Marx, Engels and others found in the library of the Socialist Workers' Centre in Somorrostro. Ibárruri wrote her first article in 1918 for the miners' newspaper El Minero Vizcaíno under the pseudonym of "La Pasionaria" ("The Passion Flower"). The article was published during Holy Week and focused on religious hypocrisy, contrasting with the Passion of Christ. Because of the article's theme and timing, she signed it with the alias Pasionaria. In 1920, Ibárruri and the Workers' Centre joined the newly formed Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and she was named a member of the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party. After ten years of grassroots militancy, she was appointed to the Central Committee of the PCE in 1930.

During this time, Ibárruri had six children. Of her five daughters, four died very young. She "used to relate how her husband made a small coffin out of a crate of fruit." Her son, Rubén, died at twenty-two during the Battle of Stalingrad. The remaining child, Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri, outlived her mother. She was married to Stalin's adopted son, Artyom Sergeyev. In 2008, Amaya resided in the working-class neighbourhood of Ciudad Lineal in Madrid. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.

With the advent of the Second Republic in 1931, Ibárruri moved to Madrid and became the editor of the PCE newspaper Mundo Obrero. She was arrested for the first time in September 1931. Jailed with common offenders, she persuaded them to begin a hunger strike to secure freedom for political detainees. Following a second arrest in March 1932, she led other inmates in singing "The Internationale" in the visiting room and encouraged them to reject poorly paid menial labor in the prison yard. She wrote two articles from jail: one published by the PCE periodical Frente Rojo and the other by Mundo Obrero. On 17 March 1932, she was elected to the Central Committee of the PCE at the 4th Congress held in Seville.

In 1933, Ibárruri founded Mujereres Antifascistas, a women's organisation opposed to Fascism and war. On 18 April, Soviet astronomer Grigory Neujmin discovered asteroid 1933 HA and named it "Dolores" in her honour. In November, she travelled to Moscow as a delegate of the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), which assessed the dangers posed by fascism and the threat of war. The sight of the Russian capital thrilled Ibárruri. "To me, who saw it through the eyes of the soul", she wrote in her autobiography, "it was the most wonderful city on earth. The construction of socialism was being managed from it. In it were taking shape the earthly dreams of freedom of generations of slaves, outcasts, serfs, and proletarians. From it one could take in and perceive the march of humanity toward communism." She did not return to Spain until the new year.

In 1934, she attended the First World Meeting of Women against War and Fascism (Rassemblement Mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme) in Paris. Although the meeting was chaired by Gabrielle Duchêne, president of the French branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the separate Rassemblement was an organ of the short-lived French Popular Front. Both the Rassemblement and the Front dissolved in 1939.

Toward the end of 1934, Ibárruri and two others spearheaded a risky rescue mission to the mining region of Asturias to bring more than a hundred starving children to Madrid. The parents of these children had been jailed following the failed October Revolution, which was suppressed by General Franco at the behest of the Republican government. Ibárruri succeeded in her mission but was briefly detained in the prisons of Sama de Langreo and Oviedo. To spare her children further anguish, she sent them to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1935.

In 1935, she secretly crossed the Spanish border to attend the 7th World Congress of the Communist International, held from 25 July to 21 August in Moscow. At this Congress, Georgi Dimitrov delivered a keynote speech proposing an alliance with "progressive bourgeois" governments against the fascists. Under this doctrine, the Popular Front would come to power in France in June 1936.

Ibárruri delivered a series of speeches, some of which were radio broadcasts from Madrid: "Danger! To Arms!" (19 July), "Our Fighters Must Lack for Nothing!" (24 July), "Discipline, Composure, Vigilance!" (29 July), "Restrain the Hand of the Foreign Meddlers!" (30 July), "Fascism Shall Not Pass!" (24 August), "Better to Die Standing Up Than to Live Kneeling Down!" (3 September), "A Salute to Our Militia Women on the Front Line" (4 September), and "Our Battle Cry Has Been Heard by the Whole World" (15 September). It can be inferred that the majority in Madrid rallied to the Republic's side, that uncontrolled elements roamed the capital and many rounds of gunfire were wasted out of nerves (29 July), that Nationalist propaganda was more effective (30 July), and that she recognised early on that the war would be lost without foreign aid (24 August). On 2 October, she wrote a revealing letter to her son in Russia, apologising for not having written earlier and describing the harrowing situation: "You cannot even imagine, my son, how savage is the struggle going on in Spain now... Fighting is going on daily and round the clock. And in this fighting, some of our finest and bravest comrades have perished." She recounted spending many days beside the troops at the front and expressed her concerns about the war's outcome: "It is my hope that in spite of all the difficulties, particularly the lack of weapons, we shall still win." The war became particularly brutal in 1937. Just as the Blitz later drove the Allies to bomb German cities mercilessly, the Nationalist bombardment of open cities spurred Ibárruri (then the newly named fourth vice president of Congress) to demand an equal response from the "progressive bourgeois" government. President Manuel Azaña, an intellectual and writer, was unwilling to flout constitutional or international laws, while Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, a socialist, was reluctant to cooperate with the PCE. The closing lines of her speech signalled her readiness to endorse radical violence.

Men and women of every country who love freedom and progress, we appeal to you for the final time. If our appeal remains a voice crying out in the wilderness, our protests are ignored, our humane conduct, if all these are taken for signs of weakness, then the enemy will have only himself to blame—for we shall give vent to our wrath and destroy him in his lair.

On 24 February, Stalin forbade the sending of Soviet volunteers to fight in Spain, but he did not recall Alexander Orlov, an Order of Lenin awardee from the NKVD (secret police). Orlov and the NKVD orchestrated the May Days, the conflict that erupted between 3 and 8 May in Barcelona between the Popular Front and the Trotskyist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). The battle resulted in approximately 1,000 fighters being killed and 1,500 injured, though estimates vary. Following the suppression of the POUM, any possibility of Spain serving as a refuge for Leon Trotsky was eliminated. Orlov employed the same methods of terror, duplicity, and deception used during the Great Purge (1936–1938).

As a result of the events from 3 to 8 May in Barcelona, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists came to be seen by Ibárruri as the "Fascist enemy within."

When we point out the need of opposing Trotskyism we discover a very strange phenomenon, that voices are raised in its defense in the ranks of certain organizations and among certain circles in certain parties. These voices belong to people who themselves are intoxicated with this counter-revolutionary ideology. The Trotskyists have long been transformed into the agents of Fascism, into the agents of the German Gestapo. We saw this on the ground during the May putsch in Catalonia; we saw this clearly in the disturbances that occurred in various other places. And everybody will realize this when the trial opens against the POUM. leaders who were caught spying. And we realize that the hand of Fascism is behind every attempt to demoralise our home front, to undermine the authority of the Republic. Therefore it is essential that we wipe out Trotskyism with a firm hand, for Trotskyism is no longer a political option for the working class but an instrument of the counter-revolution.

On 6 March 1939, she flew out of Spain under enemy naval fire to the major Algerian port city of Oran, then under French sovereignty. Her arrival surprised the authorities, who hurriedly put her aboard a liner bound for Marseille. The ship's captain was a Nationalist sympathiser, but a clandestine Communist cell aboard ensured he did not steer the ship towards Nationalist-held Barcelona. This was the third time Ibárruri had evaded capture by the Nationalists.

Ibárruri was helped in France by the Communists, who sheltered her in Paris under police surveillance (the Communist Party would be outlawed by the government of Édouard Daladier on 26 September). From Paris, she travelled to Moscow and stayed there with Díaz, generals Enrique Líster and Juan Modesto, and others. She was reunited with Amaya and Rubén, who had escaped from a French internment camp at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

The Soviet Union received the refugees warmly. Ibárruri was given an apartment in Díaz's building and was assigned a chauffeur to drive her around Moscow. She was also invited to dine at the Dimitrovs'. She enjoyed attending performances at the Bolshoi Theatre and the Romen Theatre, and was an avid reader. She delighted in witnessing the emancipation of Russian women. She helped other families adapt to their new country and generally felt happy enough to sing on occasion.

Ibárruri worked in the Executive Committee of the Communist International Secretariat at the Communist International Headquarters near the Kremlin. Her work involved the continual evaluation, analysis, and discussion of the progress of Communism outside the Soviet Union. This was complemented by internal discussions within the PCE central committee, which focused on Spain. No serious disagreement existed between the Communist Party of Spain and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until 1968 over the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The PCE supported or excused Stalin's domestic and foreign policies, including the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 24 August 1939.

In January 1940, La Pasionaria wrote the following praise of Joseph Stalin:

At the 6th Congress of the PCE, held in Prague from 28 to 31 January 1960, 64-year-old Ibárruri ceded the post of secretary-general to Carrillo and accepted the honorary position of president. As confirmation of her retirement from active politics, she wrote her first memoir in 1960. The book, titled El Único Camino (The Only Way), was first published in Paris in 1962 and subsequently printed in Moscow in 1963. It was translated into English and published in New York in 1966 under a new title. In her second memoir, Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977, Ibárruri notes that the childhood memories recorded in El Único Camino came to her in vivid detail.

On 10 November 1961, Ibárruri was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Historical Sciences by Moscow State University for her contributions to the development of Marxist theory. In her acceptance speech, she asserted that class struggle is the motor of history. In 1962, she attended the 10th Congress of the Italian Communist Party, held from 2 to 8 December in Rome, where she met Socialists, Christian-Democrats, and some church representatives. To the clerics, she remarked, "We are not as wicked as you think, and we are not as good as we probably think we are."

During the first few months of 1963, Ibárruri unsuccessfully appealed to the Spanish government to spare the life of executive committee member Julián Grimau. Before his execution, Grimau wrote to Ibárruri, saying, "My execution will be the last one." During the week of 13 May, Ibárruri unveiled a plaque in his honour on Building 11, Block 1, of the newly renamed Grimau Street in Moscow. On 5 December, she arrived in Havana to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Cuban leader Fidel Castro invited Ibárruri to move permanently to the island, but she declined.

On 15 April 1964, Ibárruri spoke at the banquet celebrating Nikita Khrushchev's 70th birthday. On 30 April, she shared the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples, with three others. On 22 February 1965, Ibárruri requested that the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Spanish Army, as well as the defence attorney, appear as witnesses at the court martial of former Republican commander Justo López de la Fuente, who had been condemned to twenty-three years in prison. Everyone expected that he would be sentenced to death. Ibárruri held a press conference in Moscow to publicise these actions. On 27 February, the Captain General of the Madrid region annulled the proceedings. However, the initial sentence remained, and López later died in prison.

Sometime in 1965, Ibárruri flew from Paris to Dubrovnik to apologize to Josip Broz Tito as president of the PCE. On 17 May 1948, the Cominform, successor to the ECCI, had expelled Yugoslavia from the community of Socialist countries, and Ibárruri had supported this censure. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held from 14 to 26 February 1956, had repudiated the charges against Yugoslavia. Now, Ibárruri came face to face with the man she had slandered. She began to apologise profusely, but Tito interrupted her, saying, "Do not vex yourself, Dolores, do not worry. I know very well how things worked in those days. I know it perfectly. Furthermore, believe me, I most likely would have done what you did had I been in your situation." Ibárruri returned to visit Yugoslavia several times thereafter. In late December 1965, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarded Ibárruri the Order of Lenin medal. Between 1930 and 1991, a total of 431,418 decorations were given out, but only seventeen were awarded to foreigners.

At 2:00 p.m. Moscow time on 13 May 1977, Ibárruri left Sheremetyevo Airport aboard an Aeroflot jet after a "very affectionate" send-off from Boris Ponomarev, Mikhail Suslov, three other civilians, and Colonel Sergeyev, the husband of Ibárruri's daughter. On the tarmac, a girl in traditional costume offered the departing president of the PCE a bouquet of flowers. At 7:59 p.m. Madrid time, the Aeroflot jetliner landed at Barajas Airport. The PCE did not give her an official welcome and secretary-general Carrillo was in Seville. Five hundred party members and sympathisers, some waving PCE flags and wearing red berets with a communist insignia, gathered at the airport. They went up to the observation deck to watch and cheer as she landed. Ibárruri then visited the office of the Registrar General of Fuencarral and officially changed her name from Isidora to Dolores.

Ibárruri's first campaign rally was held on 23 May at the Exhibition Fairgrounds of Bilbao, where she spoke before 30,000 to 50,000 supporters. She acknowledged feeling tired but volunteered to explain the workings of socialist countries, "where the workers can live very well without capitalism." However, the emotion of the day exhausted her, and an evening press conference had to be cancelled. The following day, she spoke at the Suárez Puerta Stadium in Avilés in front of "many thousands of workers." A 20-year-old eyewitness recalled, "The city wore red. 'The Internationale' was heard everywhere... the atmosphere, the silence when Pasionaria spoke, the explosion of joy that day, are unforgettable memories."

On 25 May, at the presentation of his book Eurocommunism and the State, Carrillo told a reporter that Ibárruri reminded him of Pablo Iglesias as he knew him as a child—a sick, elderly man who participated very little in party activities and often remained silent during meetings. On 28 May, Ibárruri spoke in Sama de Langreo, and the right-wing newspaper ABC admitted that she was drawing "multitudes." On 30 May, she affirmed in La Felguera that the same spirit which had motivated her in 1936 continued to drive her in support of the PCE and Asturias. On 8 June, a full house (6,000 people according to ABC, 8,000 according to La Vanguardia) listened to her at the Palacio de los Deportes in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. The following day, she appeared at the national rally of the party held in the neighbouring province of León.

In the general elections held on 15 June, the Oviedo constituency saw 584,061 votes cast, with a voter turnout rate of 74.6%. The PCE received 60,297 votes (10.5% of the total), securing one seat for Dolores Ibárruri.

On 13 July at 10:05 a.m., as noted in her memoirs, Ibárruri returned to the Congress chamber she had left forty-one years earlier. Moments later, she took her place in the vice-presidential chair for the inaugural session. The following day, Radio España Independiente aired its final broadcast, number 108,300. On 22 July, the king opened Parliament. Ibárruri participated in the one-minute general standing ovation, though she remained seated. Earlier, as she entered Congress, a 56-year-old man in Falangist uniform gave the Roman salute and heckled her, saying, "Drop dead! If you had any shame, you would not have returned to Spain."

Dolores Ibárruri served as inspiration for artist Arthur Dooley, who was commissioned in 1974 by the International Brigade Association of Scotland to create a monument commemorating the 2,100 British volunteers of the International Brigade. These ordinary men and women joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War to fight against Franco's regime. The monument’s inscription is dedicated to the 534 volunteers who died in the conflict, including 65 from Glasgow, where the monument is situated.

The statue was funded by money raised from Trade Unionists and Labour movement supporters. However, the £3,000 raised was insufficient to cover the artist's plans to cast the statue in bronze. Instead, an armature was welded together from scrap iron and covered in fiberglass. The final version of the monument is a stylized female figure representing Dolores Ibárruri, depicted in a long dress, standing with legs apart and arms raised. On the plinth, Dooley carved Dolores's famous slogan: "Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees." Originally used by the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, Ibárruri gave the phrase new meaning when she used it during the miners' strike in Asturias, Spain, in 1934.

Over time, the B-listed statue fell into extremely poor condition, generating criticism from the public, elected officials, and trade unionists. A restoration project was carried out between April and August 2010, and the monument was re-dedicated on 23 August 2010 by the Leader of the Council, Bailie Gordon Matheson, and the General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Grahame Smith, in the presence of Thomas Watters, 97, a surviving International Brigade veteran. Watters was a veteran of the Scottish Ambulance Unit, which worked on the front lines in Spain to aid wounded fighters and volunteers from around the world.

In February 2017, the People's Party of the Basque Country called for a street named after her to be renamed due to her “terrible role in the Spanish Civil War” and her close association with Stalin.

Dolores Ibárruri: Speeches & Articles 1936–1938, New York, 1938.

El único camino, Moscow, 1963. (republished in 2023 by Akal with ISBN 978-84-460-5325-5)

Memorias de Dolores Ibarruri, Pasionaria: la lucha y la vida, Barcelona, 1985. ISBN 978-8432043628

They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria, New York, 1966.

Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977: Me faltaba España, Barcelona, 1984. ISBN 978-8432058301

The Brazilian punk rock band Blind Pigs included an English-language song about Ibárruri in their 2002 album Blind Pigs.

In Anthony Powell's novel Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, Norah and Eleanor have a picture of La Pasionaria on their mantelpiece.

In Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, El Sordo's unit debates La Pasionaria's motives for sending her son to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War while under attack from pro-Franco forces.

The Glasgow-based fusion band Inyal included an instrumental song dedicated to Ibárruri, entitled "Pasionaria," on their 2017 album INYAL.

The American sculptor Jo Davidson created a portrait bust of Ibárruri in 1938. Davidson describes his sittings with Ibárruri at his hotel in Madrid in his autobiography, Between Sittings: An Informal Autobiography.