Dolores Ibárruri

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez was born on 9 December 1895 in Gallarta, in the middle of the iron-mining district of Biscay. Her father was a miner and a Carlist, her mother had herself worked in the mines until her marriage; the family was strictly Catholic. Dolores was a good pupil and began the preparatory course for teacher training, but had to give it up at fifteen because there was no money.

After years as a seamstress and housemaid she married Julián Ruiz in 1916, a socialist miner who was imprisoned after the general strike of 1917. The poverty of those years, in which four of her six children died, and the books in the library of the Casa del Pueblo in Somorrostro made her a Marxist. In 1918 her first article appeared, during Holy Week, under the pseudonym 'Pasionaria' (passion flower).

Ibárruri was above all a speaker and organiser. In Madrid she led the party's work among women from 1931 and wrote for Mundo Obrero; in 1933 she founded the organisation Women against War and Fascism. As deputy for Asturias she campaigned in 1936 for the release of the prisoners of the 1934 rising. Her radio speech of 19 July 1936 made '¡No pasarán!' the slogan of the defence of Madrid.

During the war she visited the front, spoke in Paris for support for the Republic and sat in the party leadership that bound the Republic ever more closely to the Soviet Union. In exile she led the party from 1942 and was associated with Radio España Independiente, the station that broadcast to Spain from the Eastern bloc from 1941 to 1977. In 1960 she handed day-to-day leadership to Santiago Carrillo and became party president.

The Basque mining district of her youth was one of the earliest industrial regions of Spain, with long working days, low wages, slums and a strong socialist trade-union movement. Women had few rights and hardly any access to education or politics; only the Republic gave them the vote, in 1931. For a working-class woman to become a national political leader was highly unusual in the Spain of that time.

The Communist Party was small when the war broke out but grew quickly because the Soviet Union was the only great power to supply arms. The Comintern and Soviet advisers thereby gained great influence, including over the persecution of dissenting groups on the left. Ibárruri's career unfolded within that Stalinist framework: discipline towards Moscow was regarded as a condition of the struggle against fascism.

For supporters of the Republic 'La Pasionaria' was the voice of resistance: her speeches were spread by radio, newsreels and posters and reached volunteers of the International Brigades from more than fifty countries. Sayings attributed to her, such as 'better to die on your feet than to live on your knees', became known internationally.

For the Franco regime she was the emblem of 'red' Spain; for decades slanderous stories about her appeared in the press. On the left her role has been debated just as much: the party she helped to lead supported the banning of the POUM and the persecution of its leaders in 1937, and in the years of exile opponents within the party were expelled as traitors.

After Franco's death and the legalisation of the Communist Party in April 1977 she returned after 38 years. As one of the oldest members she helped to preside over the opening session of the first freely elected parliament in July 1977, together with the poet Rafael Alberti. She died in Madrid on 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall; thousands of people attended her funeral.

Streets, schools and monuments in Spain and beyond bear her name; in Glasgow a statue honouring the British volunteers in Spain depicts her. Historians today describe her as an exceptional orator and a symbol of the labour and women's movements, and at the same time as a leader who never openly renounced the Stalinist line of her party.