A Civil War (98 page)

The Trotskyists' total condemnation of Stalin and Stalinism – ‘Of course! They're Stalinist cadres!', wrote a French Trotskyist about the collaborationist Vlasov
¹⁹⁴
– and their opinion of the USSR, as a socialist state maybe, but a degenerate one, could only stoke the Communist leaders' hate, also given the international network that the Trotskyists, unlike the
bordighisti
, had at their disposal. Individuals with Trotskyist sympathies were reported among the Garibaldini of the Valsesia and the Ossola brigades. Two of the four Trotskyists, in good faith, who arrived in a band were said to have been rehabilitated and the other two, in bad faith, had been ‘treated as they deserved', and hadn't shown their faces again. Naturally, in evaluating these reports we need to bear in mind the extreme suspiciousness of those who made them and the fears shown towards, for example, ‘one of those eternal grumblers who at the moment is very much under the influence of the Trotskyists'.
¹⁹⁵
There is the curious case, governed, it would seem, by the law of ‘an eye for an eye', of the Turinese Socialist leader, a foreman, who, when accused by the Communists of having sabotaged a strike, replied that he had been afraid of playing the Trotskyists' game.
¹⁹⁶

Trotskyists and
bordighisti
were ‘historic' embodiments of dissidence, and drew prestige from this quality, but a heavy legacy of hatred and bloodshed as well. The
anarchici
and
libertari
, who had re-appeared in the zones that had been their traditional hunting-grounds, like the Carrara area, where they established their own partisan bands and entered the CLNs,
¹⁹⁷
fell more into the category of historic diversity than of dissidence. But anarchic diversity, though it had been tragically shattered in the Spanish war, belonged in Italy to what was by now distant history and did not prevent a Communist partisan from recalling Errico Malatesta as ‘a marvellous, truly exceptional man, whom I don't know why the party has isolated'.
¹⁹⁸

Rather more interesting, by virtue of their novelty, were the groups that were formed in those months. Though coming under the influence above all of the Trotskyists, they were in fact adjacent to the PCI, reabsorbable by and to a great extent reabsorbed into it. The absence of anti-Sovietism and, indeed, the frequent exaltation of the USSR and of Stalin favoured this process. This undoubtedly was ‘a spitting image Stalinist policy';
¹⁹⁹
but this observation could equally well apply to many of the Communist rank-and-file. The appeal of these groups, in the eyes of their critics, was the ‘
diciannovista'
(1919) jargon that is such a favourite with the radicalised but politically immature masses: for example, the watchword ‘peace against capital, against the
patria
', etc.
²⁰⁰
A PCI leader wrote of Stella Rossa (an integral Communist party) – a Turin group, but present elsewhere as well, as far as Padua
²⁰¹
– that it was inspired by the criterion of ‘class against class' and that ‘the workers rather like its classicism [
sic
]'.
²⁰²
What they probably liked was the presence in the group of a seventy-year-old – who was given the name of Kurtimes – ‘who says he was with Lenin in Switzerland' and of a fiery Russian student who went under the name of Arnault.
²⁰³
An important role in getting re-absorption of the group under way was played by the ‘Lettera aperta ai
compagni di Stella Rossa' (‘Open letter to the comrades of Stella Rossa'), which appeared in the 10 September 1944 issue of
Il Grido di Spartaco
. The letter was utterly weighted in a ‘Bolshevik' and anti-centrist direction (though obviously condemning opportunism from the opposite side); it rejected accusations of Machiavellianism and stressed the principle that outside the Communist Party,
nulla salus
(nothing is healthy).
²⁰⁴

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 10
^th
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.

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 in 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