Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (Spanish: [isiˈðoɾa ðoˈloɾes iˈβaruɾi ˈɣomeθ]; 9 December 1895 – 12 November 1989), also known as Pasionaria ("the passionate one" or Passion flower"), was a Spanish Republican politician during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and a communist. She is renowned for her slogan ¡No Pasarán! ("They shall not pass!"), which she issued during the Battle for Madrid in November 1936.
Ibárruri joined the Spanish Communist Party (Spanish: Partido Comunista Español) when it was founded in 1920. In the 1930s, she became a writer for the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) publication Mundo Obrero, and in February 1936, she was elected to the Cortes Generales as a PCE deputy for Asturias. After going into exile from Spain towards the end of the Civil War in 1939, she became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain, a position she held from 1942 to 1960. The Party then named her honorary president of the PCE, a post she held for the rest of her life. Upon her return to Spain in 1977, she was re-elected as a deputy to the Cortes for the same region she had represented from 1936 to 1939 under the Spanish Second Republic, holding office until 1979. She lived another ten years in retirement until her death in 1989.
Dolores Ibárruri was born in 1895 as the eighth of eleven children. She had a Basque miner father and a Castilian mother. She grew up in Gallarta but later moved to Somorrostro (Biscay). Gallarta was adjacent to a large siderite mine.
Ibárruri left school at 15 after spending two years preparing for teachers' college at the encouragement of her schoolmistress. Her parents could not afford further education, so she went to work as a seamstress and later as a housemaid. She became a waitress in the town of Arboleda, the most important urban nucleus in the region of Somorrostro. There, she met Julián Ruiz Gabiña, a union activist and founder of the Socialist Youth of Somorrostro. They married in late 1915, two years after the birth of their first child. The young couple participated in the general strike of 1917, which led to the imprisonment of Ruiz. During this time, Ibárruri spent nights reading the works of Karl Marx, Engels and others found in the library of the Socialist Workers' Centre in Somorrostro. Ibárruri wrote her first article in 1918 for the miners' newspaper El Minero Vizcaíno under the pseudonym of "La Pasionaria" ("The Passion Flower"). The article was published during Holy Week and focused on religious hypocrisy, contrasting with the Passion of Christ. Because of the article's theme and timing, she signed it with the alias Pasionaria. In 1920, Ibárruri and the Workers' Centre joined the newly formed Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and she was named a member of the Provincial Committee of the Basque Communist Party. After ten years of grassroots militancy, she was appointed to the Central Committee of the PCE in 1930.
During this time, Ibárruri had six children. Of her five daughters, four died very young. She "used to relate how her husband made a small coffin out of a crate of fruit." Her son, Rubén, died at twenty-two during the Battle of Stalingrad. The remaining child, Amaya Ruiz Ibárruri, outlived her mother. She was married to Stalin's adopted son, Artyom Sergeyev. In 2008, Amaya resided in the working-class neighbourhood of Ciudad Lineal in Madrid. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.
With the advent of the Second Republic in 1931, Ibárruri moved to Madrid and became the editor of the PCE newspaper Mundo Obrero. She was arrested for the first time in September 1931. Jailed with common offenders, she persuaded them to begin a hunger strike to secure freedom for political detainees. 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. She wrote two articles from jail: one published by the PCE periodical Frente Rojo and the other by Mundo Obrero. On 17 March 1932, she was elected to the Central Committee of the PCE at the 4th Congress held in Seville.
In 1933, Ibárruri founded Mujereres Antifascistas, a women's organisation opposed to Fascism and war. On 18 April, Soviet astronomer Grigory Neujmin discovered asteroid 1933 HA and named it "Dolores" in her honour. 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. The sight of the Russian capital thrilled Ibárruri. "To me, who saw it through the eyes of the soul", she wrote in her autobiography, "it was the most wonderful city on earth. The construction of socialism was being managed from it. In it were taking shape the earthly dreams of freedom of generations of slaves, outcasts, serfs, and proletarians. From it one could take in and perceive the march of humanity toward communism." She did not return to Spain until the new year.
In 1934, she attended the First World Meeting of Women against War and Fascism (Rassemblement Mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme) in Paris. Although the meeting was chaired by Gabrielle Duchêne, president of the French branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the separate Rassemblement was an organ of the short-lived French Popular Front. Both the Rassemblement and the Front dissolved in 1939.
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. The parents of these children had been jailed following the failed October Revolution, which was suppressed by General Franco at the behest of the Republican government. Ibárruri succeeded in her mission but was briefly detained in the prisons of Sama de Langreo and Oviedo. To spare her children further anguish, she sent them to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1935.
In 1935, she secretly crossed the Spanish border to attend the 7th World Congress of the Communist International, held from 25 July to 21 August in Moscow. At this Congress, Georgi Dimitrov delivered a keynote speech proposing an alliance with "progressive bourgeois" governments against the fascists. Under this doctrine, the Popular Front would come to power in France in June 1936.
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." At the same Congress, she was elected a deputy member of the ECCI and became the second prominent Communist figure in Spain after José Díaz, the secretary-general of the PCE.
In 1936, Ibárruri was jailed for the fourth time after enduring severe abuse from the arresting officers in Madrid. Upon her release, she went to Asturias to campaign for the PCE in the general elections held on 16 February. In these elections, 323,310 ballots were cast. However, "one ballot, one vote" did not apply; each voter could choose up to 13 candidates simultaneously. The PCE received 170,497 votes, enough to secure one seat in Parliament for Dolores Ibárruri. The Popular Front's election platform included the release of political prisoners, and La Pasionaria set out to free the detainees in Oviedo immediately.
As soon as the victory of the Popular Front in the elections became known I, already an elect member of Parliament, showed up at the prison of Oviedo the next morning, went to the office of the Director, who had fled in a mad panic because he had behaved like a genuine criminal toward the Asturian prisoners interned after the revolution of October 1934, and there I found the Administrator to whom I said, "Give me the keys because the prisoners must be released this very day." He replied, "I have not received any orders", and I answered, "I am a member of the Republic's Parliament, and I demand that you hand over the keys immediately to set the prisoners free." He handed them over and I assure you that it was the most thrilling day of my activist life, opening the cells and shouting, "Comrades, everyone get out!" Truly thrilling. I did not wait for Parliament to sit or for the release order to be given. I reasoned, "We have run on the promise of freedom for the prisoners of the revolution of 1934—we won—today the prisoners go free."