it easier to gain control over the other customs posts. The Guardia Nacional Republicana and the Guardia de Asalto ("Assault Guards") were sent to Figueras and other cities in northern Catalonia to replace CNT patrols. In Barcelona, fear began of an outbreak of open warfare between the anarchists and the POUM against the government and the communists. Each side formed weapon caches and secretly fortified its buildings in for fear that its rivals would attack it first. The tense calm continued for one week. May Day, traditionally a day of celebration, was spent in silence, as the UGT and the CNT agreed to suspend their parades, which inevitably would have caused riots. Opposing sides Three main political forces were involved in the events that led to the May Days. Although all parties had as main objective winning the war, the CNT, the Libertarian Youth, and the POUM and other minor groups like the anarchist Friends of Durruti Group or the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain had a clear revolutionary motivation. The participation of these groups in the war, which was decisive in the opening events of the war, was motivated by the defense of the revolution and not the Republic. The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) considered a revolutionary approach inappropriate without winning the war first. There were also groups with other political affiliations that were inclined to return to the Republican legality, the authorities of the Republican Government in Valencia and the Generalitat. They forged an alliance with the aforementioned PSUC and the Republican Left of Catalonia. A third sector was composed by the "possibilist" sector of the CNT, supporting an immediate termination of hostilities between both sides. Although the PSUC was not a bourgeois party, from the point of view of the Republican authorities it presented itself as an alternative to the revolutionary chaos, and it advocated for the strengthening of central government that would replace the local committees. To get this done, they proposed a centrally organized and instructed army, led by a single command. Orwell summarized the PSUC-party line as follows: On the position of the POUM, shared by most of the more radical anarchists, like the Friends of Durruti, Orwell states: Chronology Preliminary events Since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the telephone exchange had been controlled by the CNT-UGT labor union committee, which had collectivized the telephone companies in the geographical areas