The March 1944 strikes, however, marked a turning-point in the relationship between struggle in the factory and armed struggle, in the sense that the Communists would set greater store by the latter.25 Essentially, it was a question of re-stipulating the 15 percent norm mentioned above. From Modena ‘in very few weeks dozens of comrades including a great many quadri and three members of the federal committee itself, were invited into the mountains’.26 The Ligurian CLN, anticipating inevitable dismissals, proposed that the industrialists pay several months’ advance wages and that the dismissed workers join the partisans, a prospect made impracticable by the German deportation of 16 June 1944. On the other hand, the San Giorgio workers appeared to have little desire to abandon the factory.27
Many documents indicate the problematic nature of the triumphalist hendiadys ‘with strikes and guerrilla warfare towards the decisive battle’.28 At a meeting of the secretariat of the 2nd Milan sector, held on 15 December 1944, voices opting for internal strikes in which ‘the worker doesn’t abandon his machine’ vie with voices demanding that ‘the mass be given in short the trust of the street’.29
Indeed, as the final showdown approached, military presence in the factories become more frequent, leading to stances that were reproved as being extremist. On 3 March 1945 at Borletti, Garibaldini of the 170th brigade not only held an assembly, not only made those present give one another the clenched fist salute but ‘one Garibaldino forced some hesitant individuals to do it at gunpoint. Finally, they sent a greeting to Stalin and the USSR, and not to the Allies’.30 In Legnano on 24 March the Garibaldini ‘to stir the attesiste [fence-sitting] masses’ threw bombs in one plant.31 On 9 April at the Pavan works, fear of a repetition of this action, which occurred in a Milan factory, prompted the Gruppi della Difesa della Donna (Groups for the Defence of Women) to organise a stoppage of a few hours, though it had no ‘male backing’.32 In Milan it was recorded with satisfaction that ‘the masses are electrified because [they feel] the presence of the Garibaldini’.33 In Turin the April 18th strike, which had armed protection, would then be considered ‘pre-insurrectional’ – and legitimately so.34
The GAPs (Gruppi d’azione patriottica) and the SAPs (Squadre d’azione patriottica) were assigned the specific task of conducting the armed struggle in the cities. The former were the more carefully picked,35 better trained and committed to isolated actions, though having also the ambitious task of ‘organising and directing the great masses of the workers of the plants towards insurrectional combat’.36 We shall return later to several particular features assumed by urban violence as practised by the GAPS, which never consisted of more than a few dozen people living in total clandestinity. This helps explain why in some cases a clear preference was manifested to take to the mountains rather than join the GAPs.37 The composition of the GAPS remained essentially Communist, even if intakes from other parties or of unaffiliated people were not excluded38 – (in Turin two alleged Liberal Gappists were shot).39
The SAPs were organisms recruited from a wider spectrum and for largely defensive purposes. Moreover, the different ways in which their nature and function were interpreted present some interesting features. Though less marked than with the GAPS, there was a Communist presence in the SAPs, at least as regards their intentions, even if it had to be solicited by the leaders: ‘Most of the elements belonging to the SAPs joined the squads out of party discipline and not out of a voluntary wish to fight’.40 Again in Turin, this definition which might be called canonical is given: ‘The SAPS are patriotic mass organisations organised by the PC; they are not PC organisations but supported and organised by it and they depend on the CLN, by whom they are recognised’.41
But a ‘mobilisation order’ issued by the federation of the Ravenna PCI in October 1944, when the Allies were at the gates, baldly stated that the SAPS were an ‘armed organisation of workers and peasants’ and that it was necessary to ‘sapizzare’ the whole party.42 The SAP as a vehicle of alliance between workers and peasants is also mentioned by a Piedmontese document,43 while, again in Turin, the fusion that had occurred between the Communist and Socialist SAPs was hailed as ‘the material and spiritual reinforcement of the proletarian united front’.44
Indeed, in the province of Ravenna, out of more than seven thousand (very poorly armed) members, the great majority were Communists; but there were also 138 Republicans (one of whom declined the post of commander), 19 Actionists and 15 Christian Socialists.45 And an Emilian document says: ‘There are no longer any SAPs organised from elements from other parties, except for a few in the bassa (lowland), in the same old places’,46 which could include Ravenna itself. But rather than mentioning inevitably imprecise figures, it should be noted that in many areas the SAPs came to assume the reductive role of organising, often only on paper,47 all those who intended in one way or another to be in on the scene, with a view to the epilogue. This accounts for the distinction between defence units mentioned in a Turin document, according to which the Communists in the SAPs were only a minority, ‘while the rest are either sympathisers or vague patriots’, and the commander more often than not an ex-army officer. This document also testifies to the peculiar kind of relationship that the SAPs succeeded in establishing with the industrialists: not only to get money out of them, but also to get taken on as ‘surveillance staff, firefighters, guards’48 – a collaboration which was compromising for the SAPs and risky, initially, for the industrialists.
The interweaving between the various forms of sinistrismo and the generational differences, to which I have already drawn attention, produced widely divergent ways of viewing the armed struggle too. It is the older comrades who, throughout the twenty-month span of the struggle, and more or less in all the zones, were reported to be ‘for the most part faint-hearted’, prey to a ‘mood of passive resistance and negative attesisimo’. These are ‘old comrades coming from the Livorno split’ [January 1921 split of the PSI into the PCI], men ‘who refuse to join the bands, or who ‘are scared stiff of employing the young’, who are ‘sectarian, fearful’, and whose attesismo is ‘il punto nero’ (‘the real blot’).49 Speaking of an encounter with an old bordighista in Acqui, shortly after 8 September 1943, Giovanni Pesce recounted: ‘I want to act. He ladles out a fine lesson on the red army.’50
The older men also felt the tradition of the party of quadri, according to which it was indispensable ‘to form the organisation, to educate the quadri, then act’.51 Instead,
Attraverso valli e monti
eroici avanzano i partigiani
per scacciare l’invasore
all’istante e non domani.
[Through the valleys and the mountains
the partisans advance heroic
to drive out the invader
instantly, not tomorrow.]52
An outraged Communist reports the presence in the CLN of Cremona, one of the most attesista of the provinces, together with Mantua, and both in the great tradition of the labourers’ struggle,53 of ‘a phenomenon contrary to what usually occurs in these committees. The representative of Italia Libera is for action, while our representative is a fire-fighter, because he says we’re not yet ready for the offensive.’54
A few months later another Cremonese Communist leader recounted that he had spurred his men to act ‘not only from the military point of view but also from the political point of view; in fact our party is revolutionary because it conceives action as being a means of winning and of keeping oneself healthy’.55 And this, furthermore, paved the way for combative activism, which, as we shall see, in its turn came in for criticism.
No particular reasons are given for the many instances of reluctance to engage fully in the armed struggle. Here and there one comes across attitudes resembling those of vague attesismo – ‘things will run their course in any case without our participation’56 – or mirroring those of the attesisti of the right, who were awaiting the arrival of the Anglo-Americans; while those of the left put their trust in the victories of the
Red Army.57 In the organisation of the Milan party, ‘incomprehension’ and ‘underestimation’ of the job being done by the military were reported and some comrades even thought that ‘going into the mountains is something of a punishment’.58
The risk also appeared that relations with the partisan commanders were being compromised by ‘party comrades’ behaving like ‘the most tenacious saboteurs of the actions of the Garibaldini’, with the reverse effect that, ‘to the extent that military activity continues to be conducted independently of mass agitation, the factors expounded above will come to affect and diminish the fighting spirit of the Garibaldini’.59 Parallel with this, another document states that the military comrades ‘must support the demonstrations of the masses, and not impose them with methods that upset their feelings … and vice versa, naturally’.60
The important thing was to repeat that the reactionary classes ‘fear the armed populace more than the Germans and Fascists’ – that is how L’Unità put it, and it seemed almost to be echoing the polemic against ‘better Hitler in Paris than the Popular Front in power’.61 Vittorio Foa attributed to the attesisti conservatives the capacity to understand, in fact, that ‘a complete engagement of the masses, and one coming at the present time, even if it be for the purpose of the anti-German war … would liberate new energies, the developments of which would be hard to foresee, but without doubt contrary to the present interests of order and property’.62
Along similar lines, Bandiera Rossa, the newspaper of the ‘Movimento Comunista d’Italia’ answered those who were saying our best comrades are dying and at our expense the bourgeoisie is giving itself an anti-Fascist facelift, that the calculation of the bourgeoisie ‘seems right but isn’t!’, because the bourgeoisie cannot halt our destiny and will pay dearly for every dead comrade.63 Some PCI documents express concern that the bleeding to death of the ‘healthy Communist forces’ was viewed with approval in order to ‘reduce them and wear them out’ and render them ‘innocuous’ for the ‘opportune moment’.64
Traces of what was earlier called ‘red hyper-belligerence’, with mixed shades of satisfaction and concern, occur in many documents, revealing the discrepancy between scant political training and great military audacity.
A report relating to the province of Cuneo reads: ‘There is this characteristic often encountered in the formations: the difficulty of coupling the technical fighting capacity of the partisan war with the political quality of the Command.’65 And in one report about the Alto Monferrato: ‘Very active Garibaldi forces are continually performing marvellous actions, but leave much to be desired when it comes to their political organisation and orientation, their Anglophobia and their sinistrismo. We’re hard at work getting them into step.’66 Often ‘lack of political know-how’ meant no more than a vaguely classist radicalism out of tune with the party line, yet not meriting the precise political definition ‘sinistrismo’.
The Communist quadri often found themselves facing this dilemma: what was to be feared most? What today would be called grass-roots ingenuity or poor indoctrination? A May 1944 report reads: ‘Judging by divers elements who show off their doctrinaire knowledge in theory while being fence-sitters in practice we have to conclude that they are preferable to those comrades who don’t know the principles of Marxism and who have never read Lenin, but who are active in practice.’67
In line with this, before the ‘low political level of the basic comrades and of some quadri too’, one can only ‘hope that the military factor will influence the political one’.68 Or also, commenting on a renovation of political commissars that was conducted, drawing from the new recruits: ‘If the younger ones were untrained they were also free of sectarian and extremist tendencies encountered in the men with greater experience of partisan life.’69
The PCI made every effort to keep the ‘great family of the Proletarian Avant-garde’ under control.70 But this was made difficult both by the formal denial of the political and class character of the brigades themselves, and by the need to appeal to the fighting spirit of the young. This spirit, as we shall see immediately, found in the very colour red the symbol of its identity and a safeguard against being reabsorbed into the merely military and patriotic war.
It has been written of the French Communists that ‘politically they put national fronts etc. into their programs’, but ‘militarily they organise their own troops who don’t fuse with the others even if they cooperate with them’ and even if they remain essentially faithful to the unitary policy.71 In Italy this problem was to be at least formally solved with the unification of the formations sanctioned in the last months of the struggle; but the whole span of the twenty months is shot through with incitements to reinforce the party presence in the Garibaldi formations. In the ‘Directives for the constitution and functioning of the party nucleus within the partisan formations’, issued on 1 March 1944, there is the enjoinder to ‘do your job with tact and ability’, avoiding useless outward manifestations of discord and friction with non-Communists. Should the commander and commissar, who in any case maintain their functions, be party members – the instructions go on to say – they, together with the person in charge of the nucleus, are to ‘form a triangle’, jointly answerable to the party for the progress of the unit. The commander and the commissar, again if they are party members, may be denounced to the superior authorities who shall take opportune measures, including dismissal; but in cases of urgency, the party members in charge may act also on their own initiative.72 It was the dwindling of the historic figure of the political commissar, who after unification was to be called ‘commissario di guerra’ (‘war commissar’), which led to the emergence of the ‘responsabile del nucleo di partito’ (‘person in charge of the party nucleus’).
The tact and ability, the ‘necessary watchfulness’ (as one command interprets it),73 required by the instructions could become so blurred as to render the life of the party in the formations almost clandestine,74 or ‘rigorously secret and illegal’, as one command recommends, out of excessive zeal and conspiratorial viscosity, but also from the need to camouflage themselves in the presence of the Allied missions.75 The political commissar of the Natisone division candidly wrote in his memoirs: ‘From the start I made it a point of honour to succeed in winning over to Communism all the partisans and above all the commanders and commissars of various ranks’;76 and the commander of the Nanetti division would recall the ‘responsabile di partito’ as being
something of the coordinator and controller of the combined action of the commander and the commissar together. Often he performed an excellent democratically inspired action, at other times, if he was one of those elements who were not too well-fitted for the task, he created divergence and discord among the partisans, above all for the fact of being, at least partly, imposed from above.77
In this scenario, the militia of the Garibaldi brigades was seen as an instrument of recruitment and preparation of the ‘quadri for the immediate future’.78 From the partisans, in fact, ‘quadri and popular chiefs must spring who will facilitate things for us immensely in tomorrow’s work of ordering the nation on new bases’.79
For this end, it was indispensable to overcome reticence about opening the party’s doors to the Garibaldini, replacing a party candidature with a partisan one (infiltrating oneself also among the GL partisans), judging the aspirants only ‘as Garibaldini because they’re young and we can’t ask more of them’.80 The party nucleus of the 8th Asti division was to reproach the commanders for having done too little to introduce into ‘the family of the party’ its many sympathisers; and the delegation of the brigades for Veneto levelled a similar rebuke at the ‘Party comrades’ of the Nanetti division.81 In a long article commenting on the conference of the insurrectional triumvirates held at the beginning of November 1944, L’Unità calculated the partisan Communists as being at least fifteen thousand, and sympathisers some tens of thousands, ‘on whom our party can count as much as it can on our comrades’. Contemporaneous wi
th this satisfaction there was however the firm enjoinder to ‘rid the formations of a party character’.82
It is easy to see how hard it was to get the other parties to agree on this last point, and not only because of the composition of the General Command (Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia) and the numerical ratio between Garibaldini and Communists, but because the latter generally held the positions of command, exclusively or almost so.83 Dante Livio Bianco recalls: ‘Then (and, for that matter, subsequently), more than garibaldini, they were generally called Communists’.84 Here Bianco is referring particularly to the Valle Varaita and January 1944; and in fact a few months later a Garibaldi document relating to the same area complained that an Action Party article had spoken of ‘Communist bands’, but then had to recognise that, for their part, the Garibaldini ‘considered the other Badogliani … in the pejorative sense’,85 an accusation that the giellisti (members of GL) certainly did not deserve.
The Communist Party’s denials about its close connection with the Garibaldi brigades were therefore not very credible. But this does not make them any less interesting for the language they use and the reality they reveal, both when they turn outward, and, still more so, when they assume the guise of appeals and rebukes addressed to the brigades themselves. The language is defensive and often considers the label ‘Communist’ given to the brigades an unjust accusation, a speculation, a calumny on the part of their adversaries, an attempt to depreciate and belittle the formations, to deprive them of the sympathy they enjoy among the populations.86 But to whom did one of these documents assign the task of removing every last bit of party varnish from the Garibaldi brigades? To the party nucleus of the brigades.87 And if they were then taken literally, there was the outraged protest that at a meeting to set up the Ligurian unified command, the Socialist and Actionist representatives ‘went so far as to question whether the Garibaldi brigades are truly representative of us, because in them there are elements of every political tendency; but in concrete terms they have been unable to produce any specific facts’.88
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