Distrust of the USSR and the memory of Zimmerwald converged in this position, which, after the German–Soviet pact and the outbreak of the war, came to sound uncannily like the Communist theses about the Second World War as an imperialist war. Indeed, between September 1939 and June 1941 there runs the most tormented phase of the positions of the Italian anti-Fascists concerning the war. The German–Soviet pact had reshuffled all the cards that had been laboriously assembled in the name of international anti-Fascism. Staying out of the war, however it was argued, went against another long-standing tradition – the defence of democracy, bourgeois though it might be. This was, in fact, felt particularly strongly by those, like Nenni, who were deeply nurtured by post-Jacobin political culture. On 31 August 1939 Nuovo Avanti! lost no time in headlining its front page ‘Gli Italiani sono al fianco della Francia’ (‘The Italians are at France’s side’); and, on the third page, hosting an article by Nenni, ‘Il voltafaccia della politica sovietica’ (‘The about-turn of Soviet policy’).17 But the very fact of coming out in favour of the bourgeois democracies at war with Hitler made the PSI all the more eager to stress its own specificity, from a socialist and class point of view, regarding the war. For example, a carefully measured-out dosage of weights and counterweights characterised Nenni’s address to the party leadership on 15 December 1939.
Given the way things stand – he said plainly – the progress of Humanity depends above all on the defeat of Fascism. The task of the proletariat is therefore to support, with all the creative energy of which it is capable, the war for the overthrow of Hitler and the Fascist political system; and he added: ‘The parallelism of aims between the proletariat, which wants to rid humanity of Fascism, and the bourgeois democracies that are at war with the Third Reich, does not influence the fundamental problems of political direction and the aims of the war … Neither defeatism, therefore, nor holy union.’
This conclusion of Nenni’s was formulated with one eye on Daladier’s government and the other on the watchword ‘neither adhere nor sabotage’ of 1915–18. But, when it came to Italy, Nenni was in no doubt. If Mussolini dragged it into the conflict, one’s duty would be to ‘sabotage the Fascist war and transform it into the civil war of workers against their oppressors’. It is particularly significant that Nenni regarded this Leninist invitation of his as valid even if Mussolini, enlisted in extremis by France and England ‘among the crusaders of democracy’, were to enter the war ‘in a possible anti-Bolshevik league’.18
When the USSR was carried completely over into the anti-Nazi camp by the German attack on Russia, the Socialists – above all those who had sponsored the unity-of-action pact – heaved a veritable sigh of relief. But so profound had been the trauma that, as late as 1 May 1944, a PSIUP executive declaration said that, if there had been as strong a Communist party in England as there was in France, that would have favoured Hitler’s victory.19 In the Socialist camp, in any case, there were still those – from Ignazio Silone to Lelio Basso – who were particularly intent on Socialist anti-Fascism’s remaining autonomous from the policy of the great powers, including the USSR.20
As for the relationship with the desire for Fascist Italy’s defeat, the prospect of a third, autonomous anti-Fascist way was undoubtedly a sort of preventive answer to the thesis of the ‘foreigner’s party’, just as the never-to-be-realised creation of a corps of Italian volunteers to fight alongside the Allies would have been.21 On the eve of the war, Eugenio Curiel, a young Socialist active within the party, had put his finger clearly on the problem.22 Speaking in the name of ‘our Milanese comrades and others’, Curiel had declared himself in favour of the creation, in France, of an Italian legion which ‘must represent the Italian people in this oncoming war’. With equal clarity, Curiel had affirmed: ‘We do not want tomorrow’s government to be the government of defeat, the Weimar government’, and had therefore argued that one needed to have the courage to assume the role, within Italy, of disfattista (defeatist), even if ‘tomorrow a handful of scoundrels, in the pay of some residual Fascist, might yell the same old insults at us’. These words can be read as the invitation by a member of the new anti-Fascist generation to a representative of the old guard to profit from the experience of the post–First World War period without allowing himself to be paralysed by it, indeed proudly assuming that epithet disfattista, which still troubled many veterans, and legitimising it by participating in the war on the just side.
The Weimar nightmare would continue to weigh heavily on the moderate anti-Fascists, who had not swept it away with Curiel’s moral intransigence. From the United States Luigi Sturzo would appear concerned that those ‘who will take up the government will be subjected (as happened with the Weimar democrats in Germany) to all the effects of the mutilation and humiliation that the Allies will cause to Italy’.23 During Badoglio’s forty-five days, with an suffocating calculation of costs and benefits, Alcide De Gasperi maintained, in the same spirit, that of the two questions to settle – Mussolini’s defeat and the Armistice – while the former, which was active, had already been achieved to the advantage of those who had arranged it, in the case of the latter, which was passive, and thus liable to create ‘doleful responsibilities for its negotiators’, it was better not to get involved.24 Unfettered by ties of caution, tradition and obedience, Justice and Liberty and the Action Party were the anti-Fascist groups which, true to the model provided by Rosselli in 1933, unrepentantly and with proud clarity, included, in the passage from pacifism to active intervention against Fascism, the prospect of Italy’s defeat. In 1935 Francesco Fancello wrote from prison, with reference to Germany (though what he said could clearly be extended to Italy): ‘Only in very exceptional cases may the defeat of one’s own country appear a price justified by forecasts of subsequent recoveries.’25 Nazism and Fascism had created precisely one of those exceptional cases in which the force of arms, even when it appeared triumphant, could only be opposed by faith in principles. Faced with the catastrophe of France, Vittorio Foa wrote to his parents from Regina Coeli prison: ‘I know very well that even when in Europe all the institutions in which we found our faith in a tolerable future have collapsed, nothing will be lost again if those institutions remain alive in the consciences of a few thousand Europeans; and against this spiritual tension the German tank divisions have scant influence.’26
This spiritual tension was re-evoked by Altiero Spinelli when, shortly before his death, he testified that in 1940 he and those like him wished for the defeat of Italy, ‘even if 100 percent of the Italians were of Italian origin’.27
Little more than one month after 8 September, La Libertà, the Tuscan organ of the Action Party, wrote:
Not for a single instant did we hesitate to wish for the defeat of our country, infested by Fascism, for the triumph of the ideal of justice and liberty … None of this cost us any effort because we were well aware of what was at stake. But this should be taken as being to our credit, because a man does not reach the point of desiring the ruin of all that is immediately closest to him, for the victory of an idea, without having thought at length, meditated sorrowfully, and without encountering the hostility and contempt of his fellow countrymen.
By now on the eve of its final dissolution, the northern edition of L’Italia Libera would speak of the ‘military defeat suffered in the Fascist war’ as a ‘defeat that we have wished for and considered rightly as a victory’.28 The anti-Fascist party which suffered the greatest travail between September 1939 and June 1941 was certainly the Communist Party.29 But it was a travail frozen by loyalty to the USSR, a drama that involved the consciences of the militants a good deal more than was shown in the official party line. Thus Spinelli describes the Communists imprisoned at Ventotene, on hearing about the signing of the German–Soviet pact, as follows:
Their whole world trembled fearfully but, like Tertullian, they said credo quia absurdum, closed ranks, retreated into themselves, waited, and were rewarded, when the USSR, attacked by Hitler, became the all
y of the democracies and freed their souls, imprinting theological authorisation on their profound desire to fight in the front rank and with fervour in the resistance.30
In fact, the Communists had never associated the struggle against Fascism with the prospect of a war that would necessarily involve the USSR. In August 1935, in his report to the 7th Congress of the International, Togliatti had criticised the workers ‘who think, who have come to the point of thinking, that only war will be able to give their class the chance of taking up the revolutionary struggle again’.31 The defence of peace against the new imperialist war beating at the gates, anti-Fascism, the cause of socialism, seemed firmly united, under the guarantee of the USSR, according to the watchword ‘struggle against the imperialist war, for peace, for the defence of the Soviet Union’ (which is how Togliatti concluded his report to the 7th Congress). The August 1939 pact put paid to these convergences, and peace now came to materialise in the extraneousness of the USSR to the second imperialist war. When Germany attacked the USSR, the German Communist Party was to accuse Hitler of having treacherously violated the pact of friendship between the two peoples.32
As we know, it was in France that the ‘second imperialist war’ thesis had its most tragic consequences. At first the Communists voted for the claims of war, but then immediately came to toe the Comintern line. Togliatti noted with satisfaction ‘the French Communists’ courageous and sincere criticism’ of their initial error of forgetting that ‘today the only just policy for the working class and the Communist party is the courageous struggle against the imperialist war, for peace’, and then reiterated his denunciation of the disorientation and opportunism generated by those who made ‘a sort of sentimental distinction between the two belligerent imperialist blocs’.33 The watchword became, ‘Down with the imperialist war’;34 or again, ‘Between Hitler’s Germany and capitalist England, the workers choose the French Soviet Republic’.35 Not that the party line expressed the conscience of the militants without there being residual divergences. In fact,’What was true for the party was far less so for the individual.’36
But we also need to evaluate the weight of the memory, alive not just in France, of the ‘Socialist’ betrayal of 1914. Again, it was Togliatti who appealed to this, accusing the Socialists of being, as in 1914–18, ‘in the direct service of the imperialist, reactionary and warmongering bourgeoisie’.37 That memory was also recalled by sworn enemies of the Stalinists, such as the Trotskyists and anarchists, convinced in their turn that what was afoot was a new imperialist war.38 Defeat and German occupation made the viability of this position still more arduous for the French Communists. Alongside the watchword, ‘Neither Berlin, nor London,’ there appeared the afterword ‘nor Vichy’;39 but the fundamental theme remained the peace – ‘Only the communists fight against the war!’ – to impose on the creators of the imperialist conflict, whom ‘the traitors of 1940’ had befriended.40 As for Italy, a country occupied by the French from time immemorial, if on the one hand it was still a tricky business squaring the circle, especially after her entry into the war, on the other hand anti-Fascism had become too intrinsic a part of the Communist movement not to remain, in one form or another, in the foreground of party policy. The PCI thus forced itself to keep together the theoretically non-contradictory objectives of ‘revolutionary disfattismo’ and the overthrow of Fascism.41 The prestige of the USSR, which had kept out of the imperialist bloodbath, might even prove to grow from this. In a leaflet, confiscated in Trieste by the carabinieri on 11 June 1940, the war that had just been declared was defined as being ‘like all others, that is serving the interests of the rich and bringing starvation and death to the poor’; and ‘Down with the imperialist war, Down with Churchill and Hitler’ could be seen scribbled on several walls, flanked however by a number of pro-English ones as well.42 This coupling, whether occasional or polemical, symbolised a real contradiction in working-class anti-Fascism, to be dissolved or at least placated with the changed nature of the conflict that was reckoned to have derived from it.43 In fact, as we shall see, the problem of the war–revolution nexus was to return in the course of the Resistance; and in the meantime it interwove with that of the defeat of Italy in the Fascist war.
Alessandro Natta has recently recalled a heated discussion between himself and Gillo Pontecorvo, both pupils of the Pisa Scuola Normale Superiore, before the German attack on Russia. In the name of the PCI line, Pontecorvo considered the cause of peace the first priority, whereas Natta was convinced that war was indispensable to bring about the collapse of Fascism.44 In the Turin workers’ circles, on the one hand, there was clear hostility to entering the war alongside the Germans;45 on the other, according to a Communist leader’s testimony, the view was going around that ‘for our liberation war is needed’.46 These two positions were logically contradictory but emotionally convergent. Without mincing words Vittorio Benni, a painter and decorator from Foligno, wrote in a letter: ‘I wish a greater war would come about to destroy the three leaders who are commanding Italy’, and the Special Tribunal condemned him to five years’ imprisonment for having offended the king, the Duce and the Pope.47
A PCI document of March 1941 recognised that defeat would put an end to the relationship between Fascism and the country.48 The 1 May 1942 appeal by now urged desertion in favour of the USSR, the Yugoslav partisans, ‘et cetera’ (an et cetera which, discreetly, stood for the Anglo-Americans).49
Giorgio Amendola attributes to Concetto Marchesi the radical opinion, which he sets alongside that of Lelio Basso, that the catastrophe of the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and Fascism should be allowed to run its course, making way for Socialist revolution.50 Again, during the forty-five days a Florentine Communist newspaper was to write: ‘About eight years ago Mussolini began what from that point on our Russian comrades called the “beginning of the second imperialist war”.’51 In the same period a party leader criticised the error of those comrades who, after 1941, had not concealed the general anti-imperialist character of the war at the very moment when the USSR ‘was trying, in our view, not to make capitalism anxious and to remain obscure about its own dangerous intentions’.52
Togliatti was to give an ambiguously reductive version of this complex and dramatic trajectory when, in his report to the Fifth Party Congress, he claimed that, ‘with the outbreak of war, we were never for the defeat … but for the salvation of the country’. On that occasion, Togliatti’s purpose may well have been to reassure the ‘unfortunate combatants that we have never despised their sacrifice’; but, through excessive zeal, he impoverished the experience that so many of his comrades and so many Italians had gone through, by adding: ‘It is no pleasant thing to have foreseen the evil that befell the country, even if we did everything in our power to avoid it … This feeling of profound, insuperable bitterness made even the victory of the great democratic nations over Fascism sad for us.’53
I have indicated some of the attitudes that the anti-Fascist militants had to the war in order to identify some of the features that the political culture of anti-Fascism would offer to the way resistenti would behave and think. However, as the war ran its devastating course, the points of view of the moderate forces who were busy reorganising themselves in the country came into play. The first issue of Ricostruzione, which came out in April 1943, read: ‘Today, in the firing line, the soldier still feels the fascination of the flag, the solidarity of his unit, and is dying for a cause he knows to be unjust; knowing, at the same time, that defeat is just … They call us defeatists. But it is they, those responsible for the present ruin, who are the defeatists.’54
This was a far cry from the invitation, come what may, to do your duty to your country in arms, which Giorgio Amendola remembers Benedetto Croce as having made,55 and as Croce himself wrote in a page of his autobiography.56 Defeat and the accumulation of sufferings that had clustered around it, by now utterly intolerable because patently useless, made it insufficient to take refuge in the widespread and resigned slogan, �
�Neither adhere nor sabotage’, which distinguished the deep consciousness of so many Italians during the Second World War. The hope of getting through the gigantic conflict with the minimum of moral compromise and material damage had failed to stand the test, yielding almost to an unexpressed drôle de guerre, which was humiliating for the regime.
A Fascist Party informer wrote from Milan: ‘For many it seems impossible that Italy is at war and they have a job believing it, sunk as they are in the conviction that Germany would have managed things alone or that our intervention would have occurred only to gather the fruits of our political and military support.’57
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