Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

It is both a vow and a warning: Spain will not become another Russia. Frederica Montseny is speaking as an anarchist leader who has watched the Soviet model turn revolution into a machinery of repression, where “discipline” becomes a polite word for prisons, purges, and the slow strangling of independent movements. The sentence is built like a political firewall. “Never” isn’t rhetorical flourish; it’s an attempt to draw a hard boundary inside a coalition that, in Spain’s Civil War, was always one crisis away from devouring itself.

The subtext is aimed less at Franco than at supposed allies on the left. Montseny’s “they have been and are” deliberately keeps Russia in the present tense: the suffering isn’t a historical misstep, it’s an ongoing system. That temporal choice matters because it denies the usual excuse that repression is a temporary emergency measure on the way to a better future. She’s saying: we know where this road leads because it’s already paved.

Context sharpens the stakes. Montseny served in the Republican government in 1936, a shocking move for an anarchist, precisely as anti-fascist unity was being bargained against revolutionary autonomy. Communist forces, backed by the USSR, gained leverage through arms and logistics, often demanding central control and targeting anarchists and POUM as threats. Her line works because it reframes a tactical dispute as a moral red line: if the revolution survives by crushing its own insurgent conscience, it’s already lost.