A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  Only partly analogous to the case of Stella Rossa was that of the group that congregated, in the Milan area, around the Venegoni brothers and the newspaper Il Lavoratore (The Worker). This group, as Luigi Longo wrote in Rome, ‘is oriented in an extremist, but not anti-party, direction’, and consequently Longo exempted it from classification under the mask of the Gestapo.205 The group exerted an influence that reached as far as Moscatelli’s Garibaldi formations.206 In it, as in similar groups, there was the conviction that Fascism had been well and truly, in the literal sense, the last card of the bourgeoisie; but, if that was so, the radical class revolt found support in the objectivity of the course of history. It followed that ‘the Italian bourgeoisie, guilty of so many misdeeds, of causing so much grief and so much ruin … must perish together with the monarchy and Fascism’.207

  This optimistic extremism did not, however, come in for any less vigorous reproach than the pessimistic variety. When a Garibaldi paper of the Pavese Oltrepò wrote that on 25 July the bourgeoisie had ably shaken off Fascism, it was tartly rebuked with the reminder that it had been the working class, especially with the March strikes, who had brought about the fall of the regime and there was thus no cause to fear that the fruits of the operation would fall into the hands of the class enemies.208

  Optimistic, to be sure, was the ‘Movimento comunista d’Italia’, which was widespread in Rome and Lazio, and which published the newspaper Bandiera Rossa. Confident in the revolutionary character of the situation, convinced that ‘Fascism has worked for us’ because ‘the period of collaborationism and reformism finished with the establishment of the dictatorship’, sure that September 10th had seen the lowering forever of the tricolore (the Italian flag), full of admiration for Balcania, where they did not content themselves with a ‘melancholy we’ll settle accounts later’, extolling the decisive role of the USSR in preventing a compromise peace between Hitler and the Anglo-Americans, but ready at the same time to remind the USSR of its ‘obligation to defend the world proletariat at the peace table’209 – in its positions the ‘Movimento’ appears as an elementary mixture of ideas and sentiments that were rife in a vaster area than that to which it explicitly adhered, and which invested the Communist rank-and-file itself. The influence of Bandiera Rossa, ‘among certain comrades of ours’ is in fact reported by Communist sources.210 For the ‘Movimento’ the PCI was an organisation distinct from it but not different, ‘because the cause is but one, the goal but one’, and if one sincerely believes in it, it will be encountered in the Revolution.211 In the meantime, however, the ‘Movimento’ put this common sense question to its elder brothers: how ‘can one pretend at one and the same time to enjoy the trust of the adversary who has to be put to sleep and that of the masses who have to be awakened?’212 Precisely by virtue of its popular character, the ‘Movimento comunista d’Italia’, which liked to define itself as ‘subversive’ and showed sympathy for the anarchists,213 did not have wait-and-see (attesistiche) leanings. On the contrary, 186 of its members had been killed (52 at the Ardeatine Caves on 24 March 1944) and 137 arrested and deported;214 and had fought not only in Rome but also in the province of Lazio.215

  The closeness of these movements to the PCI did not prevent their being close to the PSIUP as well – to several of its generic, maximalistic formulae, which when it came to predicting the consubstantial collapse of Fascism and capitalism were no fewer than those of the dissident left-wing groups,216 and above all to the positions that found their most explicit exponent in Lelio Basso.217 In this case there was not so much closeness between militants arising from instinctive sympathy, as an aspiration on the part of the PSIUP’s left wing to ‘polarise the dissenting forces of the mass parties’.218 And it turned out that some of these forces came to see the PSIUP as being a less risky habitat than that offered by the PCI.

  4. STRUGGLE IN SOCIETY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL

  During the Resistance the class struggle stepped out of the factories and the ideological moulds most closely connected with them, above all along two roads. The first of these was that of the struggle for the physical survival of strata of the population far more extensive than those of the workers as such; and in this struggle a particularly important role was played by women.1 It seemed almost like a situation in which ‘the market was reborn as the arena of class war’.2 The second road joined up with the path of armed struggle, in the cities and the mountains. The Communist formula, ‘the struggle against cold, hunger and Nazi-Fascist terror’ attempted, once again, to keep social, patriotic and military objectives together.3 In the social as in the military sphere, the struggle could escape the political picture of national unity in the name of which it was solicited. Traces of social and/or partisan sinistrismo can therefore be identified that do not always coincide with the openly political sinistrismo internal or external to the parties, though often tending to merge with them; and on the other hand, in the struggle for mere subsistence the most general principles of human solidarity and assistance could be invoked that went beyond the class struggle in even the broadest sense of the term. In both cases the hasty observation of an American woman journalist that, faced with cold and hunger, it was not possible to be political was belied.4 That journalist did not take account of how ragged and mobile in that situation the boundaries were between being political and being other things, whatever the intentions and declarations of the protagonists. The Catholic Communists of Rome, while urging that ‘parish committees’ be set up ‘to organise a mass mobilisation – marches, protest demonstrations, parades of women asking for bread and work’, were eager to emphasise that this was not ‘political work, but simply work of Christian charity’.5 In Milan Christian charity could take the form of civic solidarity. In this register, Avanti! reminded the industrialists that national solidarity must also mean social solidarity;6 while ‘una compagna’, sending a letter to L’Unità on 25 December 1944, in which she tells how she has succeeded, regarding the problems of electricity and wood, in setting up a committee ‘di casamento’ (‘a tenants’ committee’), fuses the traditional Milanese civic sense with the political pride of someone who has been able to arouse a democratic initiative from below.

  ‘Occupation by the homeless of empty premises, apartment buildings, hotels, schools, barracks currently occupied by the Germans and the Fascist organisations!’ declared an early appeal in L’Unità.7 ‘All casualties must have a house!’ was the title of an article published still earlier by the Rome edition of the same paper, which urged the population to go ahead and install themselves in the empty houses.8

  It was a short step from these appeals to positions like the one that the intellectual Franco Calamandrei irritatedly registered (‘Infantilismo!’): ‘Tonino [most likely an intellectual too] says that the party will have to urge its comrades to sack the houses of the well-to-do, to guide them and support them in this. I tell him that his is the position of “Bandiera Rossa” ’.9

  In a famished city behind the front, as Rome was – I am still referring to the Communist press – incitements in which the patriotic and anti-Fascist spirit mingle with elementary claims and denunciations are particularly recurrent: ‘The right to live without having to work for the oppressor’; ‘Let us make sure that the Nazi plan to starve out Rome fails’; ‘The German creates famine! Famine creates the black market! The black market is black hunger for the workers’ population!’ ‘Nurses at the end of their tether. What are the waiters waiting for to get organised? Claims of the Garbage Service’; ‘Evacuees demand human treatment. Casualties of Portonaccio evicted by the Fascists and plundered by the Germans. Atrocities against the disabled’; ‘Inhuman life of the FF.SS [State Railways] goods guards. The Railway Administration must come to the aid of the famished porters. An agitation to get bus 210 back into operation. The problem of eggs’ – and so on and so forth.10 The fact that in Rome the PCI took root, immediately after the Liberation, in the hazardous as well as the industrious classes certainly has a premise i
n appeals of this kind, too.11

  But this was not a phenomenon limited to a restricted Roman sphere. In northern Italy too there were manifestations that recall an old tendency towards social rebellion – and bring to light again what has been called the ‘symbolic tie between bread and liberty, rooted in popular culture from time immemorial’.12 The political forces of the left would have liked to make use of these ferments providing that they didn’t slip their grip. Indicative of this were the answers given, at a meeting of the Piedmont regional military command, to the question, put by the Allies, about possible popular uprisings at the moment of the transfer of powers. The GL representative ‘has expressed scepticism as to the maturity of our people and has again raised the question of the police, the need for technical experts et cetera’. The representative of the Garibaldi brigades stressed that, ‘where in certain quarters popular strata were driven by hunger to rash actions, only the partisan police would be capable of calming them in a friendly way without recourse to force. Which is what no technician could do.’ ‘But what if naturally, after such an intervention, the agitation were to continue?’, demanded the general who represented the autonomi. The Garibaldino’s reply was as dogmatic as a manual: ‘In this case we would surely be dealing with Lumpenproletariat, with elements led and instigated by Fascists and troublemakers. And … our partisan police would use arms with the greatest energy.’13

  This reply anticipates the Communist attitude which often, in the immediate post-war period, really did risk throwing into the arms of an unduly feared right-wing sedition the revolts of unemployed, evacuees, ex-servicemen, housewives – in short, all those irregulars that the party was unable to control and who did not fit easily into its ideological picture. Palmiro Togliatti was to express irritation at those who, in the Mezzogiorno, meant by the word ‘popolo’ only the wretched and the ‘sfardati’ (‘the ragged’).14

  A SAP document says: ‘Our greatest concern is to avoid reaching the point of excesses being committed owing to hunger, excesses that the reactionaries can take advantage of to obstruct the establishment of the popular democratic government on the grounds of the immaturity of the masses.’

  Yet the situation was such that in the very same document, alongside the denunciation of sinistrismo as the ‘main danger … which defeated but not completely eliminated Fascism might exploit’, the ‘preparatory actions’ listed include the following: ‘Raiding of town council treasuries, custom-houses, registry offices, and destruction of all the files relating to taxes, stockpiles, rallies, agrarian censuses and anything that might be useful for control of production and for possible withdrawals. The fruit of the taxes, the proceeds from duties, et cetera can be withdrawn.’15

  At about exactly the same time L’Unità published the following appeal: ‘The workers have asked for bread and coal. The enemy has replied by starving and arresting them. There is only one answer: to raid the provisions and fuel depots.’16 The reports of the republican National Guard ‘are dense with news of sackings of and raids on the stockpile granaries and on goods trains, grocers’ shops, bakeries’.17 The correspondence censored by the RSI confirms the malaise, the discomfort, the anger at a situation that raised the prospect of ‘black-market trade that is the ruin of us poor workers. Even the Germanic Authorities are incapable of purging these irresponsible rascals; they will pay for it at the end or after the war, but meanwhile we’re the ones to suffer and class hatred is growing.’18

  Social revolt could leave even a young Action Party intellectual greatly perplexed. Emanuel Artom wrote in his diary: ‘Many lads interpret communism as a system of anarchy, disobedience and looting. The day before yesterday one was declaring that there are no longer any officers and soldiers, while another was intending to appropriate one of Agnelli’s villas for himself … I try to calm them down in the name of the Fronte Nazionale.’19

  The fact is that, outside the factory, old drives towards social revolt emerged, while inside the factory they were incorporated in the class spirit. As was often the case, some Communist leaders lost no time in spotting this slide. Secchia wrote: ‘Revolt of the weak against the strong?… That’s a language and a formula that has nothing in common with our doctrine.’20

  What was really at work was the drive to identify the Nazi-Fascists not so much with the rigorous but circumscribed category of owners of the instruments of production, as with that, full of ancient echoes, of the rich and strong, whom one finally felt able to oppose on an equal footing. The ‘insurrectional plan’ of a Garibaldi brigade reads: ‘The numerous rich are totally behind the Nazi-Fascists and are tough. The poor are totally behind the patriots and they too are tough.’21

  In the Belluno area, the Garibaldini of the Nanetti brigade got a hearing above all ‘among the poor folk’, to whom they spoke ‘of a world and a future society that would put an end once and for all to all the acts of oppression, injustices and privileges of the ruling classes, that is say all those evils which for centuries have afflicted the populations of our country’.22 On 9 April 1945 the provincial agitation committee of Asti addressed a manifesto full of pathos to the hungry: ‘In your unity lies your force, learn to know the force of your hunger and your wretchedness … The good words of your padroni today will certainly be of no use to you tomorrow to season your food.’23

  A young man of twenty-three enrolled in the Communist Party because ‘he has always wished to be part of a class of men who defend the interests of the oppressed against the tyrants’. Another, of nineteen, ‘is a poor labourer, he has understood the injustice of this infamous world and wants too to be among the defenders of human rights. He is mild, good, just, he has a big heart, an unshakable faith: he’s a Communist!’ Or again: ‘Although they are serving in an autonomous formation they almost all declare themselves Communists … For them Communism signifies social justice and radical, intransigent anti-Fascism. One of them believes in Communism as the first Christians believed in the life eternal.’24

  In many of these declarations there is a full-bodied and almost religious sense of social antagonism. The rich acquire a meaning that goes beyond their identification with the enemies of the country, as they are seen by a tradition present in an underground French newspaper where these words of Robespierre’s are quoted: ‘Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourge of the people, the people’s interest, their particularly interest’.25 The Communist attempt to classify behaviour smacking of social revolt in terms of the pauperisation brought about by the Fascist war, which has afflicted ‘peasants, artisans, intellectuals, office workers, professional people’ – that is, all the allies, real or presumed, of the working class – appears doctrinaire.26

  The intellectuals’ dislike of the rich resembles, rather, certain of Malraux’s characters, who directed it not ‘so much against the possessors as against the stupid principles they spout to defend their possessions’, and who did not hate ‘the happiness of the rich, but their good opinion of themselves’.27 It was unlikely that an intellectual or professional person, however impoverished or desperate, would set about burning the municipal archives; if anything, it would have made him ‘happy like a boy finally burning his school-books’.28 By contrast, the partisan bands, which had many peasants in their ranks, could do so in an altogether different spirit.29

  ‘Town Hall: burn the papers relating to the innumerable Fascist acts of harassment (contribution of wheat, cattle etc.), but respect the registry office ones which are necessary for the normal life of the population’, a Garibaldi command urges.30 A patrol occupying the town of Fosdinovo in the Lunigiana area reported that it had executed three Fascists, and that in the town hall not only pennants and other ‘black stuff’ were destroyed but ‘the tax registers on cattle, the draft lists, the food checks and other bumf were torn up’.31 In a village in the Romagna Appenines a carabinieri barracks was occupied and ‘having carried off the weapons and smashed the telephone installation the lurid mass of paper is set fire to’.3
2 The town council offices of Sorico, ‘which in the twenty years of Fascism have become the centre for the irradiation of every act of harassment for the local country folk’, is the target of raids by a partisan band: ‘a general clean-out was made of the draft lists, cattle stockpile distribution lists, wheat production lists, various documents, various stamps, a typewriter, shoes’.33 In the town hall of Frassinoro (Modena), ‘the partisans burned the archive and the material of the fascio. They then distributed the stockpile wheat to the population.’34 In 1876 the (anarchist) band of the Matese (near Benevento) would have done no differently in terms of the destruction of instruments and symbols of power, and acts redressing wrongs done to the population.

  A Bolognese leaflet urged the distribution of wheat ‘to individual families … to all the categories of citizens, excluding no one’.35 The salvaging of wheat from the Nazi raids – distribution of the stockpiles to the masses was considered the premise of these raids – represented above all the counterpart of the food contributions that the partisans asked for from the peasants and that, as we have seen, gave rise to manifestations of solidarity but difficulties in relations as well. In the second place, salvaging became the central motive of what was called ‘the battle for wheat’: with a degree of linguistic reserve on the part of the CLNAI, which felt it fit to add the adjective vera (‘this is the true battle for wheat’);36 or without any such inhibitions engendered by the use Fascism had made of that formula, in other documents, as in the following leaflet: ‘The Ferrarese peasants have won the wheat battle.’37 For that matter, in France too filching wheat from the Krauts and from Vichy is called ‘la bataille du blé’.38

  An ambiguous relationship existed between behaviour that bespoke social revolt and that denoting political sectarianism – not least because at times it was the party documents themselves that, as we have seen, called for social extremity, while trying duly to lead it back onto the straight and narrow of the official line.39 At times social subversion found in sectarianism an elective channel of expression, and at other times it was, on the contrary, repressed by it; at still others it appeared to be compromised by it, in the sense that political sectarianism dried up the source of popular sympathy that only subversion could feed off. The political commissar Federici [Virginio Barbieri] was criticised for having set his men along the road ‘towards a certain extremism both in word and action’, which necessarily went hand in hand with ‘a certain rigidity in dealing with the population’.40 ‘Sectarian and extremist conferences which have somewhat frightened the population’ and had prompted the parish priest to escape were reported in the area of Zavattarello.41 Anti-Catholic and anti-religious demonstrations, which ‘place the Catholics on the same level as the enemies’, were particularly scandalous forms of these attitudes. The first of the two documents mentioned above attributed this phenomenon to the isolation and narrowness in which the party had been compelled to live for twenty years, but also to the ‘residue of the 1919 and 1920 mentality’ – that is to say, to a longer wave than that of the life of the party.42 The Modenese Christian Democrats were suspected of, and had to deny, circulating Il Contadino, one of those apocryphal Communist rags whose paternity was generally attributed to the Fascists or the Germans:43 the paper illustrated ‘that ideological complex which Fascism has always attributed to Communism in matters of religion, the family, etc.’44 The sectarianism of the political commissar Davide – again in the province of Modena – combined with the presence of ‘a politically backward mass, animated only by the class instinct’, is blamed for the loss of the populations’ sympathy as well as the total hostility of the clergy suffered by the Modena division, which had in fact passed under Christian Democrat control. It is a sign of a curious inversion of evaluative criteria that the Christian Democrat commander Claudio attributed Davide’s initial successes not to the ‘class instinct’ but to the ‘vague anarchicorebellious instincts of the young mountain-dwellers’.45