COMMUNIST PARTY OF SPAIN

Spanish Partido Comunista de Espaa (PCE) Spanish communist party that was founded in 1921 as a splinter group from the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Negligible at first, the PCE began to attain strength and its first parliamentary representation in the early 1930s, during the polarization of Spanish politics that preceded the Spanish Civil War (193639). Upon that conflict's outbreak the PCE grew extremely rapidly, its membership expanding from 30,000 in early 1936 to almost 1,000,000 by 1937. The PCE became the best-organized, most tightly disciplined, and most militarily effective of all the parties in the Spanish Republic, and it received special amounts of Soviet aid and assistance. The PCE went underground upon the victory of the Nationalists in 1939, and many of its leaders went into exile. Santiago Carrillo became the party's secretary-general in 1956, and under his leadership the PCE adopted a moderate stance and continued its clandestine organization of a major Spanish labour federation. The PCE was legalized in Spain in 1977. The party embraced the Eurocommunist doctrine, pledging adherence to parliamentary democracy at home and independence from the Soviet Union, but the PCE nevertheless lost many voters to the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party over the following years. The PCE received only 4 percent of the vote in the 1982 elections, and by 1986 it had split into several relatively small factions.