The National Conference of the JSU

Once the Madrid front had been stabilised, the JSU executive, appointed in September 1936, established its headquarters in Valencia, which was to serve as the Republican capital until October 1937. The unified youth executive comprised eight communists and seven socialists and Santiago Carrillo was nominated as its general secretary. 1 From Valencia, this new, overwhelmingly pro-communist leadership undertook to consolidate its control over the unified youth organisation. Instrumental in this was the national youth conference, held in Valencia in mid-January 1937.2 The conference, replacing the mooted national congress which had been made impossible by the outbreak of war, served by virtue both of its style and its content to crystallise dissident tendencies within the JSU. The conference format shocked and angered many socialists because it flew in the face of the movement's accepted traditions of internal democracy. All policy directives had been pre-arranged, there was little real discussion, and no voting took place. Both the new national committee and the executive committee were elected indirectly. Socialist hackles also rose at the general style of the conference. The PCE, employing what was to become one of its classic propaganda techniques, flooded the conference with telegrams and messages of goodwill, both from the Spanish sections and from international sympathisers. The overall impression created was that the PCE constituted the vital heart of the JSU.