In the Catalan Generalitat, power was divided between the CNT, PSUC and Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC). Another influential party in Barcelona was the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which espoused an anti-Stalinist far left ideology, and was thus denounced by the PSUC as Trotskyist and Fascist. In turn, the POUM newspaper La Batalla accused the Communists of being counterrevolutionary. On December 1936 the CNT and PSUC agreed to remove the POUM from the Catalan government. This was possibly influenced by Soviet consul Vladimir A. Antonov-Ovseenko who threatened to withdraw arm shipments. The PSUC now sought to weaken the CNT committees through an alliance with the urban middle classes and the rural tenant farmers in the Unió de Rabassaires. They passed a decree banning the committees, but could not effectively enforce it. This was because police power in Barcelona was divided between the CNT controlled patrols under the Junta de seguridad and the Assault and National Republican guards, under police commissioner Rodríguez Salas, a PSUC member. The PSUC and ERC then passed a set of decrees to dissolve the patrols and create a single unified security corps. CNT representatives in the Generalitat did not object, but there was widespread discontent among Anarchists and the POUM. Further decrees by the Generalitat which called up conscripts, dissolved military committees and provided for the integration of the militias into a regular army caused a crisis in which CNT ministers walked out of the government in protest. The POUM also opposed the decrees. Tensions were only exacerbated following the well publicized murders of PSUC secretary Roldán Cortada and Anarchist committee president Antonio Martín. Armed raids and attempts by the Republican guards to disarm the Anarchists and the seizure of towns along the French border from revolutionary committees led the CNT to mobilize and arm its workers.