ABSTRACT
One of the central paradoxes of the Socialist position in 1934 was the role of Indalecio Prieto. Normally a shrewd realist with an acute sense of humour, he was also given to bouts of despair. His dabblings in the revolutionary posturings of the Socialist movement in 1934 were born of that essential despair. Given the ferocity of the rightist attacks on the working class in the wake of the November 1933 elections, he shared the blind outrage which suffused the entire Socialist movement. His case was symptomatic of the senior trade union leadership. In no mood to listen to Azaña’s counsels of reason and perhaps, in their desperation, seduced by the possibility that revolutionary action, or at least the threat of it, might reverse the rightist triumph, Prieto and Anastasio de Gracia, Ramón González Peña and others went along with the Caballeristas in January 1934. As his natural pessimism reasserted itself, Prieto was probably the least convinced of the Socialist would-be revolutionaries, yet, ironically, he would be the one to make the most serious efforts to buy arms. While the young Socialists organised their early morning manoeuvres under the eyes of the police, he at least was determined that there should be some substance to the revolutionary threats.
