Following a second arrest in March 1932, she led other inmates in singing "The Internationale" in the visiting room and encouraged them to reject poorly paid menial labor in the prison yard.

In November, she travelled to Moscow as a delegate of the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), which assessed the dangers posed by fascism and the threat of war.

Toward the end of 1934, Ibárruri and two others spearheaded a risky rescue mission to the mining region of Asturias to bring more than a hundred starving children to Madrid.

Ibárruri welcomed Dimitrov's speech as a vindication of the PCE's long-standing position and returned home "full of enthusiasm, determined to do the impossible to achieve a consensus among the various workers' and democratic organisations of our country.

[23] The Popular Front's election platform included the release of political prisoners, and La Pasionaria set out to free the detainees in Oviedo immediately.

"[24][25] In the months before the Spanish Civil War, she joined the strikers at the Cadavio mine in Asturias and stood beside poor tenants evicted from a suburb of Madrid.

"[28] She recounted spending many days beside the troops at the front and expressed her concerns about the war's outcome: "It is my hope that in spite of all the difficulties, particularly the lack of weapons, we shall still win."

President Manuel Azaña, an intellectual and writer, was unwilling to flout constitutional or international laws, while Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, a socialist, was reluctant to cooperate with the PCE.

If our appeal remains a voice crying out in the wilderness, our protests are ignored, our humane conduct, if all these are taken for signs of weakness, then the enemy will have only himself to blame—for we shall give vent to our wrath and destroy him in his lair.

[29]On 24 February, Stalin forbade the sending of Soviet volunteers to fight in Spain,[30] but he did not recall Alexander Orlov, an Order of Lenin awardee from the NKVD (secret police).

[citation needed] Orlov and the NKVD orchestrated the May Days, the conflict that erupted between 3 and 8 May in Barcelona between the Popular Front and the Trotskyist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

[34] Ibárruri attributed the events to an "anarcho-Trotskyist" attempt to undermine the Republican government on orders from Franco, acting in concert with Adolf Hitler.

She cited an "order [from the Catalan government] to its forces to control the telephone building and disarm all people whom they encounter in the streets without proper authorization" as part of the anarchist scheme.

The new police chief since May is Ricardo Burillo Stholle, a professional officer and a Mason, who was the commander of the Assault Guards that killed José Calvo Sotelo and who has now joined the PCE.

On 1 March 1943, Stalin established the Union of Polish Patriots, and on 15 May, the ECCI annulled the Third International and granted theoretical independence to each national Communist party.

Even generals Modesto and Líster himself were at one point targeted by the PCE leadership, only to be inadvertently saved by Stalin, who praised them in the presence of Ibárruri, Carrillo, and Anton.

Party documents showed that he was suspected of being a police informant, but historian Lupe Martínez contends that he had been accused of being in contact with Allied forces in helping downed airmen cross into Portugal from France through Galicia.

[56] In her second memoir, Memorias de Pasionaria, 1939–1977, Ibárruri notes that the childhood memories recorded in El Único Camino came to her in vivid detail.

On 10 November 1961, Ibárruri was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Historical Sciences by Moscow State University for her contributions to the development of Marxist theory.

[62] On 22 February 1965, Ibárruri requested that the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Spanish Army, as well as the defence attorney, appear as witnesses at the court martial of former Republican commander Justo López de la Fuente, who had been condemned to twenty-three years in prison.

[69] On 8 November 1972, Ibárruri's estranged husband, 82-year-old Julián Ruiz Gabiña, returned from a workers' clinic in Moscow to Somorrostro, expressing a desire "to rest and die in my land.

She also noted the revolutionary political stance taken by Bishop Antonio Añoveros Ataún of Bilbao, who publicly defended Basque cultural identity and defied Franco's decision to remove him.

"[84] On 25 May, at the presentation of his book Eurocommunism and the State, Carrillo told a reporter that Ibárruri reminded him of Pablo Iglesias as he knew him as a child—a sick, elderly man who participated very little in party activities and often remained silent during meetings.

[88] On 8 June, a full house (6,000 people according to ABC, 8,000 according to La Vanguardia) listened to her at the Palacio de los Deportes in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias.

Her life, along with that of every Communist, was put in danger on 23 February 1981, when Fascist elements of the Spanish armed forces and paramilitary police staged a coup.

[104] Broadly speaking, the remaining years of Ibárruri's life were marked by a series of feminist rallies,[105] political gatherings,[106] congresses of the PSUC and PCE,[107][108] presiding over meetings of the executive committee,[109] and summer holidays in the Soviet Union.

[118] On 16 November, a short cortege carried her body from the PCE headquarters to the Plaza de Colón, where Rafael Alberti and Secretary-General Julio Anguita delivered brief eulogies.

The final version of the monument is a stylized female figure representing Dolores Ibárruri, depicted in a long dress, standing with legs apart and arms raised.

In February 2017, the People's Party of the Basque Country called for a street named after her to be renamed due to her “terrible role in the Spanish Civil War” and her close association with Stalin.

In Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, El Sordo's unit debates La Pasionaria's motives for sending her son to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War while under attack from pro-Franco forces.