Bolshevik triennium

Used from the study published in 1929 by Juan Díaz del Moral [es], who used the expression "Bolshevist triennium",[1] the denomination is usually used in a restricted way to refer to the revolts, demonstrations, assassinations and strikes that took place in the southern half of Spain, especially in the Andalusian countryside: the expectations aroused by the news that arrived from the Russian revolution in the impoverished masses were felt, depending on the local context, in urban or rural movements.

In peasant areas of Andalusia, La Mancha and Extremadura, where workers' mobilizations had remained at a low level since the great movements of 1903–1904, there was a strong process of politicization of the day laborers, who massively joined the unions (a total of 100,854 affiliated to the Andalusian Regional Confederation of the CNT in December 1919, 23,900 affiliations of agricultural workers to the UGT between October 1918 and July 1919), which initially obtained certain concessions (recognition of the unions and of wage bargaining, abolition of piecework).

[8] The city of Barcelona experienced a period of extraordinary violence, with an escalation of attacks by armed groups (pistolerismo) related to employers and workers, and a policy of harsh repression against them by Governor Severiano Martínez Anido.

[9] To the so-called military problem and the growing difficulties of the colonization of Morocco, which culminated in the disaster of Annual (July 22, 1921), corresponded, from the workers' movement, a historical opposition to militarism (such as that which had been the protagonist of the Tragic Week of 1909).

The political crisis that opened up after Annual led to the coup d'état of General Primo de Rivera (September 13, 1923) and the subsequent period of dictatorship.