A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  In the Pavese Oltrepò Actionists and Christian Democrats were alarmed at the fact that ‘wherever the brigades stayed for some time there was a rapid re-flowering of democratic institutions, a series of anti-capitalistic measures, [which] while uniting the multitude of poor peasants and artisans to us made the rest of the country hostile to us’.139

  In this document satisfaction is mitigated by concern. In others there is only concern: for example about the ‘socialisation of the rural funds’ which was to occur in the zone of the Mingo division.140 The controversial Romagnolo partisan Libero, whom we have already encountered, promoted ‘agrarian reform and sharing out 75 percent of the harvest’, with the corollary that the owners’ part of the Fascists’ holdings should be used to assist the partisans.141 One command urged the taxing of the well-to-do, above all the Fascists and war profiteers; some councils formed in liberated areas abolished the ‘purely and typically Fascist taxes’.142 And so on.

  There was a risk of the more incisive and summary social measures smacking of brigandage. This, above all, was the interpretation that the anti-Fascist front as a whole tended to give it. A Turin document reads: ‘In the Committee [the CLN] there is the wish to define every determined act that harms the industrialists as brigandage.’143

  That the adoption of red symbols did not signify a precise acceptance of a political program, but adhesion rather to what the word Communism triggered in the imagination, seems to be borne out by those documents containing expressions like ‘apolitical but sympathising with the social conception of the Party’, or ‘sympathy for the social conception of our Party’;144 by those which speak of a ‘spontaneous pro-Communist sentiment in the young’, which was taken by Liberals and Actionists as the ‘fruit of a preordained work of propaganda’;145 and finally by those which justify the fact of having formed party nuclei, ‘because there weren’t any comrades’, with elements who ‘feel themselves to be communists and who are among the best Garibaldi in terms of courage, discipline and intelligence’.146 This force of attraction exerted by Communism, understood as an at once radical and vague mutation, is well described by Moscatelli in a letter in which he remarks on the vast gap between the quantity and quality of the party members and the inclination of the others to call themselves all Communists. The latter, if they could,

  would have the hammer and sickle stamped even on their buttocks. Barbison [Stalin] is a God Almighty. Woe betide anyone who says anything against Russia and above all against the Red Army. They all salute with their fists [but] (almost all of them) have the holy medallion around their necks, the holy image in their wallets. [He, Cino, doesn’t salute with his fist] while I am saluted like that even by priests, by carabinieri, by the whole population indiscriminately.147

  Here, there was, certainly, opportunism, at least in the priests and the carabinieri. But Moscatelli’s conclusion, that it is easier to pick good military leaders than party ones, confirms the existence of red belligerence, where both noun and adjective were real, independently of any ties with the Communist Party, which was nonetheless felt to be the party of revolution. Many years later a Communist partisan from Terni was keen to explain that ‘there were precious few of us whose direction was Communist idealism’, but added:

  I mean, at that moment maybe we’d started heading towards anarchism, complete liberty, because after the oppression there had been in these parts, the poverty, misery, malnutrition, everything, folk no longer bothered to distinguish political leanings. It was almost all a common idea. The only aim was to take up arms and pursue a sacrosanct struggle, as we defined it in those times.148

  Some partisans were convinced that ‘the march on Genoa [was] the definitive taking possession of the city as a proletarian revolutionary movement’.149 Others let slip remarks such as: ‘Damn it, now of all times when we have weapons and ammunition the war is about to finish!’ and were deemed to be ‘clearly politically immature’, but of great fighting spirit.150 From the factories came the response of one who, at an assembly held a few days before the insurrection, said: ‘And it is precisely because the Allies are at the gates that I tell you to get a move on, because we haven’t much time.’151

  These were, so to speak, elementary confessions of the longed-for bond between war and revolution, clearly stated by an ‘extremist’ newspaper – ‘modern war is always revolution’152 – and supported by the observation: ‘so there are a lot of these Garibaldini, then …’.153 Regret and nostalgia for the heroic times were to appear in these words written many years later: ‘The end of the war also meant the end of the authority of the military formations, which represented the revolutionary drive of the movement’, and the partisans ‘practically entered the museum of all veterans. Like the Garibaldini of the Argonne, the Alpini of the Grappa, and the infantrymen of the Piave.’154

  6. THE MYTH OF THE USSR

  ‘We could hear a roaring … it was the voice of Stalin, that cannon there’, recounts a Garibaldino partisan, Meo Bigatti, deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.1 On 3 February 1945 the PCI official in charge of mass labour in Milan wrote a long, highly critical report on the situation in the factories: scant organisation, insufficient activity, conspiratorial slipshoddery, an attesista (wait and see) attitude, distrust of Socialists and Christian Democrats. But ‘right the way along the line morale is high because of the Red Army advance. Everyone hopes … that it isn’t a question of months but of days and then el Barbisun [Stalin] is coming to liberate us.’2

  In these two very different situations, a similar concentration of hopes is displayed in the USSR, the Red Army, and Stalin – symbols of an ideologically and emotionally sanctioned liberation, which carries more weight than the fact in itself of being liberated even from a concentration camp. ‘It was the Americans’, wrote an Actionist held in a lager, ‘and some were disappointed because they were expecting the Russians, and they turned their backs on them and walked off.’3 The arrival in Trieste and eastern Veneto of the ‘armies of Stalin and Tito’ was the hope expressed by the SAP command in Milan.4 In other documents the desire to see the arrival of the Red Army is expressed in what is a sometimes not very circumstantiated but always sure form.5

  Given the difficulty of providing anything more precise than a generic desire for a radical change, and given the parsimonious indications about the future offered by the party, the myth of the USSR and of Stalin proved particularly fitted for filling the void. L’Azione Libertaria, a clandestine paper close to the Communists, realised as much, but in its very title showed the distance it wished to keep. It wrote that in Italy we know what we don’t want and we give what we want the name of Communism and Socialism. But, not knowing really what these ought to be, ‘we turn to Russia and the PC, hoping and trusting that through our spirit of revolt they will bring about Communism: as if someone could do for a people what he can do himself. Only he himself …’6

  The war had made the role of the USSR essential, by virtue of its having been the coadjutant that it had appeared to be to some young people whose anti-Fascism had ripened under the regime.7 From this point of view, the contradictions of PCI policy (its dual soul, its turning a blind eye), which have been extensively analysed at the political and ideological level, turn out to be deeply rooted in the consciousness of the militants and of a vast area influenced by them. This was not ‘a justification of one’s personal passivity’,8 but an objective compulsion, springing from the history of the last twenty-five years and revived by the experience of what was happening at the time.

  The watchword of the years immediately following the Revolution, when among the duties of Communist parties pride of place was given to the ‘defence of the USSR’,9 was reversed. Now it was the USSR that helped, guided, showed the way. The party’s unitary line, which deferred the revolution sine die, accepted it in the meantime insofar as it felt guaranteed by the country of the Revolution and, on behalf of that country, by ‘Barbisun-Baffone’ (‘Stalin’), whose force would, come what may,
safeguard Italy from relapsing into a new Fascism and from the seductions of reformism. Those who hoped for an autonomously Italian revolution (the writers of the small newspaper quoted above, the Actionists of the ‘democratic revolution’, the small group of the PIL, mentioned in the preceding chapters, and some other heretics) were unable to unravel this maze of uncertainties that was deeply implanted in the masses. Indeed, the international situation that was clearly taking shape and that seemed to leave no space for the breaking of that identification between revolution and the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, of which the arrival of the Red Army was the symbol even before it became its effective cause, also helped to reinforce this maze – that is, it fed both the hopes and fears that it aroused. This is borne out by the fact that the dissolution of the Comintern – so significant on the plane of international relations and ideology10 – had no appreciable effect on the force exercised by the myth of the USSR during the Resistance, in Italy and elsewhere.

  The PCI could not but foster this myth. But the enthusiasm with which it was fostered could not always be contained within the limits most in tune with the party line. At times the intransigence of Communist principles and the Communist faith, and the need to galvanise the privileged recipients of the message, conflicted with the intention to present the party’s position reassuringly to a vaster public. For example, the celebration of 7 November, a canonical, fundamental date, left an extremely reduced margin of tactical elasticity. If we read the Rome edition of L’Unità for 1943 together with the northern edition, and the manifesto launched for the occasion, we find the following statements: the ultimate cause of the Soviet victories lies in the October revolution; the essential merit of the victory goes to the USSR, which ‘has saved the world from the barbarities of Nazism and Fascism’, stamped its democratic character on the war, and ‘proved capable of linking the nations allied to it to this progressive character’; the army of Marx, Lenin and Stalin is invincible; the Soviet proletariat is ‘the force of humanity’ and ‘the victorious vanguard in the struggle for the liberty of Europe’; Stalin is ‘the genius expressed by the working class in the decisive moment for the fate of humanity’; among his merits is his implacable struggle against ‘social-democratism’ (that is, the pretence of social-democratic feelings): the USSR is the ‘patria of all workers’; the USSR ‘certainly will oppose any measure that aims to suffocate the liberty and progress of the Italian popular forces’.11

  Particularly recurrent is the attribution to the USSR of the essential merit of victory. The Soviet offensive thus finds no more than ‘a useful complement in the offensive of the Anglo-American armies in France and Italy’; and, if the Red Army is ‘glorious’, the Anglo-American armies are only ‘powerful’.12

  In this scenario, the victories of the USSR, and its very existence, acquire a pedagogic value. With a language in which rhetorical gesture does not succeed in stifling sincerity of inspiration, a ‘mural newspaper for the population’ writes of Stalingrad: ‘After the French Revolution a Russian Revolution has arisen in Europe teaching the world once again that the invader can be repelled however strong he may be, if one truly entrusts the destinies of the patria to the poor, the humble, the proletariat, the workers.’13 A local (Alessandria) edition of L’Unità wrote with an emphasis that was no less sincere: ‘Since 7 November 1917, on the vast Soviet territory, the flag of universal brotherhood has been waving. With the victorious Russian Revolution the oppressed peoples exult and begin once again to hope!14 When the Soviet armies entered eastern Prussia, the Ligurian edition of L’Unità commented: ‘On the lands consecrated by the most glorious traditions of Prussian militarism and aristocracy, the armoured columns of the army of workers are advancing victoriously, led by young generals, by marshals who are sons of the people, sons of workers and peasants.15

  On the occasion of previous Soviet victories, L’Unità had exhorted its readers to consider them as ‘examples to study and understand, as the highways to follow’, not least as regards ‘the rapid and ruthless purging of traitors and the fifth column [and] the consequent impossibility of the Germans finding in the USSR a Quisling, a Laval, a Farinacci, a Mussolini’.16

  The lesson provided by the USSR was at once moral, political and doctrinal. Illustrating the democratic regime that ‘must provide the spinal column of our formations’, a Garibaldi command wrote: ‘It is precisely this which is the secret of the marvellous results obtained in Russia and wherever our comrades have been able to act and organise.’17 On the occasion of 7 November 1944, L’Unità repeated that the victories of the USSR were the victories of the ‘superior form of democracy’, the ‘proletarian Soviet’ form; and, extending the notion for Italian use, added that in the Soviet Union democracy ‘is open to the initiative and active participation of the broadest popular masses’.18

  Soviet democracy is often held up as the key for interpreting the progressive democracy championed for Italy by the party;19 and in some cases specific references are made to the Constitution of 1936.20 The lessons devoted to the ‘realisation of Sovietism’ in a ‘short course for commissars’ organised by the 1st Garibaldi-Osoppo divisional command in fall 1944 appear scholastically doctrinaire – though this was the eastern border. It was explained that in the USSR ‘the law of surplus value has been overthrown’.21

  All these suggestions became part of common parlance – or, if one prefers, of the faith of Communists who were signed up party members, but also of those who were not signed up. A Florentine worker recounts:

  Frankly I have never lost my faith: only once have I wept, I swear by my son, when I came out of ‘Galileo’ and saw in La Nazione that word was going around that the Russian war was over and done with: all that remained to be done was grab them and give them you know what … at that moment I wept, but then picked up straight way, and [since then] I have always hoped.22

  The victories of the Red Army demonstrated in fact how well founded this faith was. And it is no accident that the anniversary of the creation of the Red Army was solemnly celebrated in the Garibaldi formations.23

  Another Galileo worker so strongly identified the vision of the Soviet Union with the war of liberation in his memory (‘this new society in which there was no longer man’s exploitation of man, right? This brotherhood, this no more fear of dismissal’) as to make the mistake of saying that he had joined the PCI in 1945, ‘when there were the Germans’, when in fact in that year they had already left Florence. (This is no oversight but an indirect manifestation of regret at not having joined the party at the heroic and unifying moment.)24 The same worker attributes to Radio Moscow the highly popular signature tune of Radio London ‘You could hear, “Tum, tum, tum Moscow speaking, it’s Moscow speaking. Workers of the world unite.” It was Togliatti speaking then.’25 As a snub to Fascist-era dating, a presumably very raw Communist recruit dated his report: ‘5 maggio 1944–XXVII’.26 Enthusiasm for the Red Army advance could be such as to drag Il Grido di Spartaco into gaffes such as that of calling it ‘il rullo compressore’ (‘the steam-roller’), which was what the tsarist army had customarily been called: criticism from the party secretariat was swift and severe.27

  A Terni partisan song, an adaptation from the French of the famous civil war song ‘A l’appel du grand Lénine s’avançent les partisans’, succeeds in concentrating the three motifs of the patriotic war, the civil war and the class war, projecting them onto the Soviet myth which is unambiguously identified with Communism. The enemies are identified as the ‘Fascist puppets’ and the ‘German destroyer’. The appeal is addressed to all Italians, before whom the partisans present themselves as ‘the partisans for your liberty’ (a clear reference to the Fascist hymn ‘Giovinezza’: ‘in Fascism lies the salvation of our liberty’). A particular appeal is, moreover, addressed to the workers and peasants; there is a reference to Filippo Turati’s hymn to the workers (‘Su fratelli su compagni’): but the padroni are never named. Instead the red flag of Communism flutters and, above a
ll, ‘all’appello di Stalin siamo i primi partisan’ (‘we’re the first partisans at Stalin’s roll-call’).28

  This text can be compared with two rather colder reports by party leaders, again in the province of Terni. In the first of these there is the complaint that recruitment has been done ‘not too well’, and this explanation is given: ‘The prevailing mentality is to enlist all those who are for Russia and against Fascism, but in practice these individuals do not give good results.’ The second report complains about the scant political and class conscience, and the cause of this is seen as lying in the lack ‘in the mezzogiorno [sic] of a well-informed and capable organisation of our party, whose function and prestige here is perceived more than anything through revelations of the [‘exceptional’ has been crossed out] economic, strategic possibilities of Russia.’29

  These two party functionaries were guilty not only of a shaky sense of geography but of scant generosity towards their new, enthusiastic and combative comrades, who were practically all, as they themselves wrote, of proletarian and popular extraction. But they also signal the risk that the discourse would slip from ‘Russia is winning because she is right’ to ‘Russia is right because she is winning’. Associating the USSR with a great, ideal loftiness in order to find the strength to level criticisms at it was an antidote – not in fact widely used – to this risk. A Communist who ‘declares himself to be an anarchist and who seems to be in the Party because without organisation you can’t do anything’ expressed his contempt for ‘the Soviet ambassadors in London, because they have been wining and dining while thousands of men are dying on the Russian front’.30 The pro-Sovietism of the Movimento Comunista d’Italia, mentioned earlier, may be taken as being in some measure similarly inspired – forever astonished, as it is, that the PCI fell short of the standard set by the Soviet model, and fond of recalling the words of the Manifesto: ‘Communists disdain to hide their principles and aims.’31