Solzhenitsyn and the thesis that Franco's regime was not a dictatorship

The day Solzhenitsyn questioned if Franco was a dictator

March 20, 1976. Three months after Franco died in a hospital bed — on December 20, 1975, with the regime still in place — a Russian Nobel laureate sat before the cameras of TVE. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Gulag survivor, uttered a sentence that has been circulating for half a century: 'If we enjoyed your freedoms in the USSR, we would be dumbfounded.' From that appearance, the thesis that has resurfaced periodically was born: that Franco's was not a dictatorship, but a regime of authority.

The problem, as almost always, is one of vocabulary. A regime in which formal power rests with a single person for almost four decades does not need bombastic adjectives to be classified. It is another matter to discuss whether it was totalitarian, authoritarian, or mild. There, nuance matters, and a lot.

Was Francoism a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime?

The discussion starts from a textbook confusion: equating dictatorship with totalitarianism. They are not the same. A dictatorship is the absence of democracy, real opposition, and freedom of expression; totalitarianism adds control over the private sphere, social engineering, and constant surveillance of the individual. By that criterion, some place Singapore's example in the first category and North Korea's in the second.

By that yardstick, the label of dictatorship fits without much fuss. What is debated is the intensity. A regime that lasted 36 years did not behave the same way in the 1940s as in the 1970s, and denying that evolution is as misleading as denying the harshness of the post-war period.

The data used to nuance the narrative

Those who defend the regime-of-authority thesis bring up specific episodes. The rescue of over 60,000 Jews during World War II is cited, attributed to American historian Lawrence H. Feldman in his work on Franco's refugees. It is recalled that Basque, Catalan, and Galician were spoken, and that there was a letter from Clara Campoamor in which the suffragist expressed her wish for Franco to triumph.

These are data that circulate with links to media outlets like ABC or El Debate. Their probative weight is debatable, but they have served to construct a rosy legend that troubles academic historiography. The regime's evolution, the opposing reading maintains, was not a gesture of goodwill: it was forced from outside, by the Council of John XXIII, the religious freedom law of '67, and the need to join the Common Market.

Dictatorship is not synonymous with totalitarianism

The most solid part of the argument is conceptual. All totalitarianisms are dictatorships, but not all dictatorships are totalitarian. Applied to Spain, it allows one to maintain that Francoism was an authoritarian dictatorship — with an authoritarian regime as a subtype — without needing to put it in the same bag as Nancy Germany or the Soviet Union.

Those who defend the label of regime of authority go further: they maintain that authority is exercised with the connivance of popular will, not by force. And they cite as proof that Franco died in a hospital, not overthrown or executed. An argument that confuses the end of a regime with its methods over four decades.

The background of the debate: using it against the present

Much of the exchange spills over into the present. The current situation is compared to that of then, there is talk of a supposed contemporary thought dictatorship, and it is argued that Franco's regime allowed more freedom in some aspects than the current framework. This is the usual offshoot: each side uses 1939 or 1975 to talk about 2024.

The data that is dislocating is not historical, but semantic. Forty years later, we are still discussing what word to put on a regime that governed Spain for 36 years without legal opposition. The label changes; the facts do not.