Red Terror (Spain)

Red Terror (Spanish: Terror Rojo) is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups. News of the rightist military uprising in July 1936 unleashed a politicidal response, and no Republican controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country. The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, and politicians and supporters of the conservative parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, as well as the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.

A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered and whether an individual continued practising Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the far-left.

The failed coup of July 1936 let loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial". Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to ~72,344 lives.

Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution", the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists". Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution". Other historians have found evidence of systematic persecution and violence preceding the military uprising and have found what they term a "radical and antidemocratic" anti-clericalism among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution. In recent years, the Catholic Church has beatified hundreds of the victims (498 in one 2007 ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in its history).

There was infighting between the Republican factions, as the communists following Stalinism under the Communist Party of Spain declared POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (an anti-Stalinist communist party), to be an illegal organization, alongside anarchists. The Stalinists betrayed and committed mass atrocities on the other Republican factions, such as torture and mass executions. George Orwell would record this in his Homage to Catalonia as well as write Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to criticize Stalinism.