La Pasionaria: An Exile Ends

Aeroflot Flight SU 297 from Moscow was slightly ahead of schedule. The blue and white, three-engine Tupolev 154 taxied to a stop on the tarmac some 200 yards from the main terminal at Madrid's Ba rajas Airport. After a brief delay, the doors opened and a frail figure in black descended the forward boarding ladder. At exactly 7:54 p.m. last Friday, Dolores Ibarruri, 81, La Pasionaria* of Spanish Civil War fame and president of the Spanish Communist Party, set foot on Spanish soil for the first time in 38 years.

Up on the observation deck, about 200 Spanish Communists, most of them young, strained to catch a glimpse of their legendary leader. Some waved red flags with the party initials and the hammer and sickle emblazoned in gold. If they had hoped for a chance to greet her, they were disappointed. La Pasionaria was quickly whisked away in a private car to the home of a friend in Madrid. By the time the crowd had run to the baggage claim area, she was gone, leaving the party militants with nothing to do but chant "Si, si, si, Dolores a Madrid."

Spanish security arrangements were the tightest in recent memory. Even as news agencies in Moscow were reporting her departure, the state-run Spanish wire services were claiming that she would remain in the Soviet Union until this week. The secrecy and subterfuge were part of a deal between the Spanish Communists and the government, which, in return for issuing Ibarruri her passport, insisted on discretion to avoid violent reactions from Spanish rightists. In fact, the party would have preferred her to remain in Moscow until this week. Willful as ever, La Pasionaria had long insisted that she would take the first flight home after getting her passport --and so she did.

Bloody Siege. The Spain she returns to bears slight resemblance to the one she fled in 1939 when General Francisco Franco's forces overran the Spanish capital. During the bloody siege of Madrid, she admonished housewives to prepare boiling oil to throw at the invaders, and organized a women's brigade that fought alongside the men at the battlefront. "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees," she shouted. 'They shall not pass!" It quickly became the Loyalists' rallying cry.

Her conversion from devout Catholicism to equally devout Communism grew out of the extreme poverty she saw as a child in the Basque mining country. "I know the terrible pain of days without bread, winters without fire, and children dead for lack of money for medicines," she wrote in her 1966 autobiography, They Shall Not Pass. After joining the fledgling Communist Party in 1920, she rose rapidly in party ranks, eventually becoming one of 17 Communist deputies in the Republican parliament. But her personal life was scarred by tragedy. She has long been estranged from her husband, Julian Ruiz, 87, who was also a Communist. He returned from Soviet exile in 1972 and lives in a Basque village in northern Spain. Four of their six children died in infancy; a son Ruben was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. A surviving daughter, Amaya, is married to a Russian general.

Except for two years in France and Rumania, La Pasionaria has lived in Moscow from 1939 on. There she shared a spacious house, once occupied by Nikita Khrushchev, with her personal secretary, Irene Falcon, and a menagerie of canaries. She devoted most of her years in exile to improving the lot of fellow Spaniards in Moscow. Although formerly a hard-line Stalinist, she differed with her Russian hosts from time to time--notably by condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

La Pasionaria has been nominated by the Spanish Communist Party as a candidate in the June 15 parliamentary elections in her old constituency, the northern mining region of Asturias. If she wins, as she is expected to, her role in party affairs will probably be largely symbolic. She fully supports Secretary General Santiago Carrillo's independent stance from Moscow, and her only aim, she insists, is to work for a democratic Spain. She even accepts the monarchy, on the ground that the crucial choice facing Spain is between democracy and a return to fascism.

The austere black dress, the chiseled features, fiery eyes and mesmerizing voice of La Pasionaria may win over some votes for the Communists, but they may also revive bitter memories among the Franquistas. To many Spaniards she remains closely identified with the civil war and its continuing divisiveness --and some suspect that her view of Communism is much more orthodox than that of her younger comrades. But for those too young to remember the civil war, as Madrid Editor Juan Luis Cebrian puts it, "her return means just one more step toward normalcy in Spain, one more indication that the age of political exiles is drawing to a close."

* Meaning passion flower. Ibarruri first took the name as a nom de plume for a series of newspaper articles for a Socialist weekly in 1918; she soon lived up to it with a passionate involvement in politics both before and during the civil war.

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