Humberto DELGADO. Memorias. Edigoes Delfos. Lisboa. 1975. 368 p.

On April 25, 1974, the fascist regime in Portugal fell. "The Portuguese Revolution ended one of the last fascist regimes of our time, led to the elimination of the last colonial empire. It was once again confirmed with all its force: revolution is a powerful lever of social renewal, it frees up huge forces hidden in the people" - this is how General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU L. I. Brezhnev assessed the process of revolutionary renewal taking place in Portugal in the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXV Party Congress .1 The Portuguese people, who threw off the yoke of half a century of fascist dictatorship, cherish the memory of the fighters who gave their lives in the struggle for the liberation of Portugal from fascist tyranny. One of these wrestlers was U. Delgado.

Air Force General Humberto da Silva Delgado appeared on the political scene in 1958, when the right wing of the anti-fascist opposition nominated him as a candidate for president of the country. After the agreement that Delgado concluded on May 30, 1958 with the anti-fascist left, he became a single candidate of all anti-fascist forces. The fascist state apparatus succeeded in perverting the will of the Portuguese people, and according to official data from the rigged election, the opposition candidate won only 23.5% of the vote .2 After the election, Delgado became the target of attacks from the authorities. The head of the Portuguese Secret Police (PIDE), N. Graca, spread rumors that he had a warrant for his arrest, and Delgado, with the help of the Brazilian Ambassador A. de Barros Linsa, who sympathized with the Portuguese opposition, was forced to flee to Brazil.

In January 1961, a group of Portuguese anti-fascists led by Captain E. Galvao seized the transatlantic liner Santa Maria. This operation was developed in the spring of 1960 with the active participation of Delgado. "We are following our secret course and send greetings to Your Excellency, the one who, by the will of the Portuguese people, is the legitimate head of state," telegraphed E. Galvao Delgado (p.311). On January 1, 1962, soldiers of the Beja garrison (in southern Portugal) led by Captain V. Gomez rebelled. Delgado secretly arrived in Portugal to lead the uprising. However, the uprising did not cause a mass movement and was brutally suppressed. "Everyone pays tribute to the courage of the participants in the uprising, which was led by Captain Varela Gomez. Everyone pays tribute to the courage of General Umberto Delgado, who secretly came to Portugal to lead the action. However, courage is not enough. A putschist iskra is not enough to start an uprising anywhere in the country. The ease with which the uprising was suppressed is not due to errors in the details of the execution. It was suppressed because it began at a time when there was no revolutionary situation, " wrote the General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, A. Cunyal .3
In January 1964, at the second conference of the Patriotic Front for National Liberation of Portugal (PFNO), established in 1962, Delgado was elected chairman of its governing body, the Portuguese Revolutionary Junta. However, Delgado soon broke with the PFNO due to differences with the Communists and other Democrats. He insisted on the immediate landing of a handful of patriots in Portugal, so that by their heroic example they would inspire the Portuguese people and rouse them to armed struggle. In February 1965, during another attempt to enter Portugal, Delgado was killed by agents of the Portuguese and Spanish security forces. Angrily denouncing the killing, the PFNO issued a statement saying: "General Delgado is no more. He was killed by PIDE. We do not forget, even at this moment, our political differences with General Delgado. But the fighter fell in battle. We bow down to the one who led the fight against Salazar and sacrificed his life for it. " 4
Delgado's memoirs are interesting not only as a description of historical events, but also from the point of view of studying their author as a poly-

1 "Materials of the XXV Congress of the CPSU", Moscow, 1976, p. 29.

2 G. N. Kolomiets. Essays on the recent history of Portugal, Moscow, 1965, p. 149.

3 A. Kunyal. Path to Victory (Tasks of the Party in the Democratic and National Revolution), Moscow, 1967, p. 209.

4 "Revolution africaine", 30.IV. 1965.

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a political figure. Delgado calls himself a Republican by birth. When he was four years old, his father, a Republican officer, made his son a green and red Republican flag out of paper and went out with his son to welcome the overthrow of the monarchy (p.17). As a political figure, Delgado is characterized by an understanding of the greatness of the changes that took place in Russia in October 1917. As a bourgeois democrat, he could not naturally welcome the Great October Socialist Revolution in the same way that, as a child, he and his father welcomed the birth of the Portuguese Republic, but the scale and deeply popular character of the revolution in Russia did not leave him indifferent. "Thousands of kilometers away from Portugal, the greatest revolution of all time has taken place. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, " Delgado writes in his memoirs (p. 44). He could not help but be poisoned by the poison of anti-communist propaganda, which is quite natural in the conditions of fascist Portugal. However, unlike Galvao Delgado, who was very close to him, he did not consider communists to be enemies of democracy.

The memoirs are imbued with a burning hatred of the fascist regime and its colonial policies. General Delgado had visited the Portuguese colonies in his line of duty, and what he saw there shocked him. "Poor black girls!" Delgado exclaims, describing how girls from Catholic missions were brought in for the comfort of colonial officers (p. 93). Many pages of memoirs are devoted to describing the terrible, inhumane living conditions of Portuguese workers. All this makes it possible to understand why Delgado became an anti-fascist, why he refused an invitation to join the fascist party (p. 137), why in 1954, as General Director of Civil aviation, he forbade activists of the fascist party to put up campaign posters of Salazarists on the building of the civil aviation administration, why in 1958 he decided to become an opposition candidate for the presidential election. by openly declaring his intention to remove Salazar from the political arena. Delgado cites numerous proofs of the falsification of the 1958 presidential election: denying the opposition the opportunity to obtain copies of electoral lists, declaring the opposition's ballots invalid under various pretexts, openly and publicly destroying these ballots, and, most importantly, preventing opposition representatives from participating in the vote count. Delgado's attempts to appeal to the President of the Republic C. Lopez and the command of the armed forces did not lead to anything.

After the fascist government failed to force Delgado to leave Portugal "in a good way" to study economics in Canada, he became the subject of a wide variety of persecutions. The campaign of harassment, intimidation and open threats by PIDE officials that led to his flight to Brazil reflects the stifling atmosphere of fear that the Portuguese people lived in until April 25, 1974. The pages devoted to this campaign remind us that this must not happen again, calling for the struggle to completely eradicate the remnants of fascism in Portugal, to fight against forces that are trying in vain to restore the old order, to revive old traditions, and to fight for a new Portugal. This is the meaning of Delgado's memories.

The colonial program of the liberal opposition outlined in the memoirs has fallen into the dustbin of history. The Portuguese resolution rejected the plan to create a "United States of Portugal", throwing out of the country the executioner of the peoples of Angola and Guinea-Bissau, former President A. Spinola, who, in order to save Portuguese capitalism, tried to clothe Portuguese colonialism in" decent forms". At the same time, while the liberal opposition ruled out war as a method of resolving the colonial issue, Spinola, in negotiations with President Mobutu of Zaire on the Cape Verde Islands in August 1974, hatched plans to grant Angola "independence" and simultaneously defeat the vanguard of the Angolan people - the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); he was ready to use in the fight against the Angolan people all the same methods that he used when commanding the armored troops of the colonial army in Angola and being the governor of Guinea-Bissau.

Delgado hated the colonial policy of the fascist regime, he fought against it - this is his merit. But he wanted to eliminate the negative features of colonialism, not Portuguese colonialism itself. At the same time, fighting against its odious sides, it objectively undermined the foundations of colonial rule as such; and that of the Portuguese column-

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Lism is no longer there, and we are somewhat indebted to Delgado, who exposed the crimes of the colonialists, advocated the end of the colonial war, against the fascist regime, and gave his life in the fight against it.

If Delgado's errors on the colonial question have already been corrected by history, then the question of whether or not to be capitalism in Portugal, how to rid the country of the heavy legacy of half a century of fascism, and protect the young Portuguese democracy from attempts to restore fascism, is still at the center of the political struggle in Portugal. In the first ranks of the fighters for democracy - the communists, and in the camp of adherents of the old order - the bourgeoisie, the landlords, the Catholic Church.

Delgado gave his life for a democratic Portugal, not for the Portugal of Spinola, Champolimo and other representatives of monopoly capital. His memoirs confirm this conclusion.

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