A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The literature about the death camps and prisoner-of-war camps has shown how hard it was to reconcile solidarity with self-protection, when what was at stake was physical survival.17 The resistenti, in general, were not put to such atrocious tests except when, subjected to torture, they had the lives of their comrades in their hands. Above all in the mountain bands friendship and solidarity became unaffected, cheerful fraternity. This was more a sincerely experienced fact than a carefully worked out programme.

  The theoretical degrading that fraternité had suffered in the great revolutionary triad was not, in fact, redressed by the Resistance. If, because of its Proudhonian components, Silvio Trentin’s Libérer et Fédérer had greatly insisted on the theme of solidarity, which was the version of fraternity assimilated by the workers’ movement,18 Proudhon does not seem to have been given prominent space in the Italian underground press. His name appears in what is at least an anomalous setting, La Democrazia del Lavoro, organ of the party of that name, consisting of old and grey, mainly southern, transformists.19

  Solidarity as a category has been widely used to interpret the relations between the partisans and the population, especially the peasant population. The Allied prisoners who had escaped, above all at the beginning, were astonished and struck by the welcome they were given by the peasants.20 An episode of extraordinary symbolic force was that of the Romagna peasant who washed the feet of an Allied soldier and was shot by the Fascists for the ‘moral poverty and irresponsible servility’ to which he had ‘taken his sense of hospitality’.21

  Friendship reduced the distance between public and private; but the ties established through it could sorely try the distinction, which is always a tension as well, between the two. Just as fraternity could slide towards terror and just as solidarity could represent itself in contorted guise in reprisals, so friendship proved inadequate to establish political relations single-handed. Saint-Just had written the noblest pages on friendship; but his attributing to it the character of a civic virtue had led him to the aberrant conclusion that ‘he who declares that he does not believe in friendship should be outlawed’ and ‘if a man commits a crime, may his friends be outlawed’.22 Those who saw religion as the foundation of human relations could declare the firm distinction between ‘religious contact’ – almost a sublimation of friendship – which ‘occurs on a strictly personal plane, from soul to soul’, and politics, ‘which is created by mobilising masses and not individuals’: political living is for everyone, political action only for a few.23

  It is easy to see how in the Communist Catholics this distinction, which was in tune with their conception of politics as ‘tecnica’, favoured peaceful coexistence between Catholicism and Communism as well as an implicit appeal to the elitist doctrine of the Leninist party, in which professional revolutionaries must not let themselves be sidetracked by personal affections. ‘I have no one, only my mother. First the Party and then my mother’, the Communist Ettore Suatoni had said before the Special Tribunal.24 Gian Carlo Pajetta later wrote: ‘I often wondered, then, if there were cases when the “private” should be given pride of place over the “political”. I’ve asked myself the same question at other times in my life. The answer has always been the same: “Never”.’25 But one of Fenoglio’s characters, an aspiring partisan who became a fervent Garibaldino, replies to the political commissar of the Stella Rossa formation who in the exam that he puts him through includes the question, ‘Would you prostitute your sister?’, as follows: ‘Not me … I could never bring myself to use my sister like that, it wouldn’t remotely occur to me.’26

  In the Italian Resistance the split between the Communists themselves was partly healed, in the sense that not thinking ‘only of oneself but of others too’, seen as the essence of Communism,27 was achieved not solely through one’s dedication to the party. Many of the new adherents started by observing the ‘shortcomings of the individual’ and came to affirm the ‘value of communistisation on morality and conscience’28 – which was a way of expressing, in Communist fashion, what I have earlier called the process of self-reunification. But, in another respect, the divide grew wider. In order not to lose its grip on things, the party ethic, which found itself having to reckon with a far wider and more complex reality than the one it had known in clandestinity, tended to stress some of its more exclusive and severe features, which seemed furthermore to meet military needs extremely well.

  This problem comes over particularly clearly in a document written by one of the protagonists (who later proudly vindicated his autonomy as a leader in the absence at that time of directives from Moscow and Togliatti).29 Pietro Secchia, returning from a visit to the first Garibaldi formations of the Lanzo valleys, sent those comrades a long letter singing the praises of the priority of party organisation over individualism that degenerates into faso tuto mi (I do it all by myself). Secchia is unsparing in his criticism of the famigliarismo and ‘friendly intimacy’ ‘characterising the whole life of this group, who, rather than soldiers, would seem to be composed of good friends who get together animated solely by the pleasure of being in each other’s company’. ‘Discipline’, Secchia explained,

  does not exclude friendship. But it is friendship transformed into teamwork, shared aims, cohesion and union of will for the same end, a bond created in a particular atmosphere that stimulates emulation which brings out the best: so much so that the greatest friends, the true friends, are precisely the best. Because it is a friendship consisting of mutual and profound esteem, not that friendship of ‘compaesani’ which seems, rather, to be the kind that we have noted.

  Two remarks made by Rino (Sandro Radice, one of the letter’s addressees) come under particular fire from Secchia: ‘My conscience refuses to do wrong to Colonel R., with whom I’ve always had friendly working relations.’ Secchia explodes: ‘Never, never let blasphemies like that one come out of the mouths of comrades like you … The Party, the Party before everything and always.’30

  Rino had also said: ‘Give me your hand, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep tonight, after your ruthless criticisms.’ Secchia was intransigent:

  And what good do you imagine shaking hands will do? Is it meant to mean simply: friends as before? But scenes like this happen at the theatre, in the family or among friends. But we, beyond being friends, must feel ourselves to be, and to be above all, comrades. It’s not with a friend that I want to be reconciled, it’s with a comrade that I want to come to an agreement over this or that question. And when the comrade is a Party envoy, agreeing with this comrade means agreeing with the Party. This is the point. Afterwards, if you like let’s drink a bottle and shake hands and … embrace. But behind that handshake there is to be not the reconciliation of two friends, but the affirmation of a party line that we are undertaking to follow, because we’re convinced it’s right.31

  When Stalin had begun his attack on Bukharin, ‘He began by impatiently dismissing sentimental appeals to past friendship (Bukharin had read extracts from intimate letters exchanged): the Bolsheviks were not “a family circle” but a political party.’32

  The Italian Communists had not always acted in perfect conformity with this line of conduct. Secchia himself, arriving at Civitavecchia jail after the turning-point of 1930, had pointed this out, availing himself of a judgment expressed by Dmitri Manuilski, who ‘had reproached the Italian Communists for their tendency to be indulgent towards the defects of their comrades, and to conceive relations between each other as relations between friends rather than Bolsheviks, that is founded exclusively on loyalty to the Party. All this, however, now, after the turning-point, had to finish.’33

  But when the very same Secchia – a man, in all other respects, of great humanity – re-encountered Spinelli, who was by that time out of the Party, at Ponza, he treated him with an affection that was reciprocated, because ‘with weakness that was reprehensible for a Bolshevik he ultimately wished to save a friend’.34 After the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948, it was again
Secchia who said to Togliatti: ‘Educate our comrades as friends’.35 This is a sphere in which the figurative and metaphorical use of words such as friendship, solidarity, fraternity should make us think carefully before judging. It is not in fact easy to distinguish the various planes that intersect, and rarely appear in their pure state, from personal contradictions, cultural superimpositions or political opportunism. In an article about the relations between Togliatti and Longo (a man similar in temperament to Secchia), which L’Unità significantly entitled ‘A relationship stronger than friendship’, Nilde Jotti wrote: ‘Togliatti said that if you are the leaders of a party you can’t have “friends” among those who share the responsibility of running the party with you … This was a highly moral theory but also a very severe one, a sort of philosophy of solitude.’36

  Here there is a curious contamination between the isolation of the man of power – classically, the tyrant – and the model of the full-time militant Bolshevik. So exclusive was this model that on the one hand it recreated, among those who succeeded in practising it to the full, ‘an almost mystical sense of membership of the same family, of mutual devotion’, which was particularly evident in underground and prison experience;37 while on the other hand it seemed to constitute the only ideal of human perfection that one was able to propose, to the extent that those who still failed to meet it completely came to appear rather like catechumens. The relationship created in the Garibaldi brigades between the party nucleus and the partisans, referred to earlier, almost prefigured the difficult passage from the Bolshevik party to the ‘new model party’, as it were. Not everyone agreed in regarding the Garibaldi experience as a mass draft by the party. At a party meeting at the 3rd Lombardia division it was argued that ‘the fact … that the men claim they have the right to belong to the Party solely because they have been fighting as patrioti for months shows how much they still have to learn’.38

  All this led to the formation of a sort of advance guard of the advance guard within the bosom of the same party. An eloquent expression of this is the directive sent to a political commissar, where the rhetoric of discipline smacks of Fascist language:

  While conserving what is good in the relationship of sympathy, friendship and particular affection, characteristics shared by the bands and which determine their orientation, we must however convince [the partisans] that today there is only one relationship that towers above everything: iron discipline, which is quick off the mark when it is felt and accepted with determination and enthusiasm. We must make the partisans feel that volunteerism is manifested in discipline more so than in combat.39

  Giovanni Pesce was disconcerted by the easy-going nature of the Milanese Gappists, one of whom said to him: ‘We’re all friends. We live in the same block and the same quarter and we’ve known one another since we were kids.’40

  As we have already noted, in the clandestinity of city warfare the sense of ‘unpleasant isolation’, which led to the severing of all human relations, reached an extreme level. The old leader Celso Ghini gave Pesce the sensation ‘that the war is too harsh to allow its protagonists to concede anything to friendship’.41

  The risks attributable to friendship presented themselves in two very different places. Above all in the mountain bands, which were composed of young and very young men, and in the chiefs who were the expression of the bands. Thus the ispettore ‘Riccardo’ (Alfredo Mordini), with twenty-three years of military life behind him, complained that they could not be granted that absolute trust which, in Italy and abroad, he was accustomed to having in his party comrades.42 But there were also residual traces of Socialist and Communist culture dating back to the period prior to the ‘bolshevisation’ of the party; and, along the same lines as Secchia, L’Unità denounced these, criticising those old comrades who tended to ‘take the Party for a little family or a group of friends’.43 A few weeks earlier a party leader had complained that ‘in some areas things were run along the lines of the patriarchal family; everyone knew everything, including the grandparents, the grandchildren and … the mothers-in-law’.44

  Yet it was this very continuity between being friends and being comrades that largely sustained the ethics of the rank-and-file: ‘Those whom today we call comrades, [before Fascism] would have been called friends’, said a worker from Terni; and an old militant, who had known prison and internment, was to complain many years later: ‘The young are no longer brothers and friends as we were. It was enough for us to say: “He’s a comrade” and “ciau”.’45 Even strictly political watchwords like those following the 7th Congress of the International – ‘in his report Georgi Dimitrov says that instead we need to work among all the young’ – could be taken to mean that some space was set aside for human relations and that the internal barriers that had been erected, such as that against dancing with youths wearing the Fascist badge, had now collapsed.46 It was the tissue that formed in a life shared together, as a mark of openness, that certainly counted more than quotations from Massimo D’Azeglio, Silvio Pellico, Cesare Cantù and Herbert Spencer, which were paraded by a Garibaldino newspaper.47

  The corollary in the Communists to the severity of the party ethics, and the hegemonic pride inscribed in those ethics, was their severity towards themselves, their capacity to purge themselves ‘so as not to give the bourgeoisie a pretext for denigrating us’.48 A Communist was expected to refuse the plate of spaghetti offered him by a peasant, when it seemed like a privilege: ‘Even if he was alone, even if the others would never have known.’49 He had to be convinced that the terrible effort of transporting very heavy loads in the mud and rain was ‘the necessary exercise to become revolutionaries’.50 In every field, the Communists had to be the best.51 This, among other things, was the only sure way of recognising each other.52 ‘Made of a special material’, the Communists had to convince themselves that ‘ours is the fault not only for what we ourselves fail to do, but also for what others fail to do’.53

  There was a strong conviction that ‘proletarian firmness, seriousness and morality’54 could be fully achieved only in the party, which thus had the historic task of bearing witness in the name of all the workers, of all the oppressed.55 Nothing in this picture lacked significance: ‘In the life of the Party, in the work of the Party, it is a good rule never to consider anything as “unimportant”, or worse still “without significance”.’56 Or again: ‘If there are comrades who today are finding time to take it easy and enjoy themselves, they are not soldiers, they are not combatants.’57 The idea that for the partisans, too, sloth is the father of all vices is repeated in many documents:58

  So a leader of the Belluno federation was balking at going into the formations as a commissar?: ‘My decision was: to send G. into the mountains (precisely because he doesn’t like the idea).’59 Ludovico Geymonat, in proposing to Anna Cinanni that she be a dispatch-rider, said to her: ‘We don’t promise you anything. If they catch you, you’ll get a bullet from them; if you betray us, you’ll get a bullet from us. Is that clear?’60

  Always deny everything, resist torture: this is

  the only fitting conduct for a Communist militant who is conscious that he is fighting for a great and just cause; it is the only conduct that makes the Communist the worthy emulator of the greatest heroes of mankind; it is the only conduct that can instil fear and respect in the enemy and make him draw back from his criminal intentions.61

  In short, the conviction is that virtue, always, pays.

  Death was preferable to betrayal. A document dictating rules about conspiracy concludes: ‘Whoever talks betrays and as a traitor must answer before tomorrow’s tribunal. If need be, it’s better to put an end to one’s own existence like heroes than live like cowards.’62

  An episode that occurred in Udine tragically sums up the conflict between ethico-political rigour and the bureaucratic spirit in which it could be applied. Thirty Communist partisans, sentenced to death, managed to spirit out of prison their request that ‘their plea for grace and subsequent dev
elopments be seen to’. On 2 April 1945, Franco, on behalf of the federal committee, answered them with a long letter. The first part is shot through with genuine sympathy for the lot of the prisoners, but the conclusion is uncompromising:

  Your fate is painful to us because we love you more than brothers … Comrades, we understand that it’s hard to die because all of us love life. We understand that it’s easy to die as heroes on the battlefield but less easy under the refined moral torture to which the Nazi barbarian and his foul thugs are subjecting you. We understand all this, but … tell the comrades not to ask for grace. You are patriots, you are soldiers. You can and you must demand treatment due to soldiers taken prisoner. But you must not ask for any grace. A gloss jotted at the bottom of the page reads: ‘On 9 April the thirty comrades were shot in the Udine jails.’63

  The Communists and other anti-Fascists jailed during the ventennio can justly boast that they never signed the request for grace, even if this meant risking friction with their relatives. This, then, was the ultimate act of defiance by the condemned against the triumphant regime, a gesture that magnified the value of their testimony. But in the first days of April 1945 Nazi-Fascism was on its last legs, the Allies were about to arrive, the insurrection was at the gates. In such a situation, to apply a principle which in other circumstances had been of the highest value became a manifestation of abstract and indeed bureaucratic coherence, whatever the agony suffered by those who asked for it and those who agreed to submit to it.64 ‘An idea is an idea’, one of the condemned had written from the Udinese prison; and ‘if destiny and misfortune carried me off, I ask all of you for your pardon.’65