La revolución imposible

In June 1937, several agents of the secret police, under the orders of the well-known Soviet commissioner Orlov, arrested and kidnapped the communist leader Andreu Nin in Barcelona. In a city at war against fascism and torn apart by internal struggles between anarchists and communists, the top leader of the POUM, a heterodox Marxist party, had long drawn the ire of Stalin. And that was bad news. Nin was a teacher, writer, translator and, above all, a revolutionary intellectual faithful to Leninist postulates who, after nine years in the Soviet Union, did not tire of denouncing the subsequent degradation of the Russian Revolution at the hands of Stalin. Falsely accused of treason and conspiracy against the Republic, Andreu Nin was secretly transferred to Alcalá de Henares for questioning. His body never appeared.