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 suppressed by General Franco at the behest of the Republican government. She succeeded, but she was detained briefly in the prisons of Sama de Langre and Oviedo. To spare her children further anguish, she sent them to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1935.