Free The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor

buildings at dawn. They occupied Mieres, Gijón, Avilés and some small towns in the mining region. They also sent columns to seize Trubia, La Felguera and Sama de Langreo. The next day they moved on Oviedo, defended by a garrison 1,000 strong, and took it, fighting street by street and house by house. The revolutionaries set up a commune, replacing money with coupons signed by the committee. They requisitioned trains and transport vehicles, and took over buildings. Some 40 people were murdered, mainly the rich and a number of priests. It was full-scale civil war, although limited to one region.
    With the country under martial law the minister of war ordered General Franco to suppress the rebellion. On 7 October General López Ochoa left Lugo with an expeditionary force. The same day the cruiser Libertad accompanied by two gunboats reached Gijón, where they fired at the miners on shore. Aircraft also bombed the coalfields and Oviedo. On 8 October Franco sent two banderas of the Spanish Foreign Legion and two tabors of Moroccan regulares under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe. 35 López Ochoa took Avilés later that day.
    By 11 October the situation of the revolutionaries in Oviedo was desperate. They had run out of ammunition and knew that the rising had failed in the rest of Spain. At dusk on 12 October General López Ochoa’s troops were in control of almost the whole town. Six days later the new head of the revolutionary committee, Belarmino Tomás, offered to surrender providing the Moorish troops were kept out of the towns and villages. Yet from 10 October legionnaires and regulares had invaded the mining villages and treated them as enemy territory, with looting, rape and the execution of prisoners on the spot. The security forces unleashed a savage repression on the area as a whole. The man most notorious for his cruelty was the Civil Guard commander, Major Lisardo Doval.
    The Asturias revolution had lasted no more than two weeks, but it cost around 1,000 lives and created enormous damage. Thousands of workers were sacked for having taken part in the rising and several thousand were imprisoned, of whom many were liberated in January 1935 when the state of war was suspended. Altogether twenty people were condemned to death, but only two sentences were carried out, which was extremely lenient for the age, when one considers how Stalin’s or Hitler’s regime would have reacted to a revolutionary rising. Responsibility for the appalling brutality of the security forces lay more with their commanders, especially Yagüe and Franco, than with the politicians in Madrid. Azaña had been unfairly blamed for Castilblanco, but this was on a different level. The Asturias rising inevitably demanded stronger measures, which meant even less possibility of control from Madrid over the actions of the army and Civil Guard.
    The clearer minds on the left saw that the rising had been a terrible disaster. But for the militants, especially Largo Caballero, it had produced an intoxicating whiff of revolution. For the right, on the other hand, it seemed to show, as Calvo Sotelo argued, that the army–the spine of the state–was the only guarantee against revolutionary change. Yet above all, the rising had been a profound shock to the nation as a whole and a near fatal blow to democracy in Spain. There can be no doubt that such a violent insurrection alarmed the centre as well as the hard right. It certainly appeared to confirm conservatives in their belief that they must do everything possible to prevent another attempt to create the dictatorship of the proletariat, especially when Largo Caballero declared: ‘I want a Republic without class war, but for that one class has to disappear.’ 36 They did not need to be reminded of the horrors which followed the Russian revolution and Lenin’s determination to annihilate the bourgeoisie.
    With the defeat of the October revolution the suspension of the Catalan state of autonomy and