Revolutionaries (7 page)

Thirdly, at some time during the 1930s – between 1935 and 1938 – a certain revival of opposition within Italy may be noted. This is most easily documented among the young intellectuals who subsequently made their names both as party leaders (Ingrao, Alicata) and as leaders of the postwar communist hegemony of Italian culture. Spain undoubtedly played an important part in this crystallization of the old and its reinforcement by a new generation of anti-fascists – a new generation which probably, though this is difficult to document, included workers also. At all events the activists in the small and impermanent party cells appear to have been chiefly young people.
⁸
The immediate impact of the Spanish Civil War is attested both by police sources and by anti-fascist informants, and this, significantly enough, at a time when communist propaganda from abroad had not yet begun to pay major attention to Spain.
⁹
(While
Giustizia e Libertà
was immediately aware of the full significance of Spain, it is a curious fact that
as late as the end of September 1936
the Central Committee of the
PCI
– perhaps because of deficient contact with the International, but certainly to its discredit – paid hardly any attention to Spain.)
¹⁰
The initial victory of the Republic over the military rising inspired not only the old anti-fascists, but (according to a police informer in Milan) ‘even some sectors which had appeared to be firmly converted to fascism'. It demonstrated that fascism
was not all-powerful, and hence (as another informer noted in Genoa) raised hopes ‘of some sort of political transformations which would more or less rapidly bring about the capitulation of the authoritarian spirit of fascism'.

Yet Spain was not the only factor. How much of the new anti-fascism among young intellectuals, as like as not students from Sicily, Calabria or Sardinia meeting in the capital, was due to the desire to escape from the heavy provincialism of fascist culture to the wider intellectual world, whose luminaries abroad so visibly supported anti-fascism? To the failure of Italian fascism to establish a cultural hegemony as well as a genuine mass basis? (The sense of international
inferiority
, both cultural and otherwise, was much greater in Italy than in Germany, the sense of cultural isolation more oppressive.) Whatever the reasons, by the end of the 1930s anti-fascism in Italy was no longer based only on the generations which had come to political maturity before 1924. It had begun to generate its own youthful dissidents.

Curiously enough – and this was one of its major weaknesses – the
PCI
seems to have misunderstood the situation, perhaps because of what had by now become an overestimate of the popular strength of fascism. Its policy from 1935 on was that of a broad alliance, but it appears persistently (and in line with international slogans) to have thought in terms of detaching a supposedly large sector of ‘sincere' fascists, disappointed with the betrayal of the original fascist ideal, from the regime; and above all not to hurt the susceptibilities of Italian nationalism, which the Abyssinian war had shown to be a powerful force.
¹¹
But in fact, as both the non-communist anti-fascist emigrants and some of the new internal anti-fascists observed, this was not the main problem. The major effect of the fascism in Italy, observed the youthful Eugenio Curiel, who finally joined the Communists after maintaining contacts with both Socialists and
Giustizia e Libertà
, was not to convert Italians to fascism. It was:

infinite scepticism . . . which kills all possible faith in any ideal, which derides the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the welfare of the community. This is, at bottom, the most conspicuous conquest made by fascism and will remain as its bitterest legacy.
¹²

As it happened, this very scepticism which isolated the tiny minorities of active anti-fascists and kept the much larger body of inactive ones passive, was to turn against the fascist regime when Mussolini drove a reluctant and unenthusiastic Italian people into the second world war. Defeat was to give the anti-fascists their chance to revive hope and human self-respect through action. But the masses they were then to mobilize were not to consist to any great extent of the ‘sincere' fascists, or even of the inevitable and numerous turncoats. They were to consist of the old and young anti-fascists, and above all of the ordinary Italian workers and peasants, whose conversion to an active and militant resistance was to be dramatic.

It was, there can be no doubt whatever, opposition to the war which gave anti-fascism back its mass basis. It is not significant that in July 1941 yet another attempt to re-establish an ‘internal centre' was made. What is significant is that it succeeded. From the autumn of 1941 on the
PCI
functioned in Italy as it had not been able to since the spring of 1932, when the last head of a functioning ‘internal centre' had been arrested in Milan. By the
spring of 1943 mass strikes for bread and peace could be organized in the north. The invasion of Italy and the armistice reinforced the new mass movement with the bulk of the cadre of communist leadership – returning from jail, exile or anti-fascist resistance in other countries, or emerging into the open. Its three components – the old guard of party leaders, the experienced military cadres of the Spanish war, and the young anti-fascists of the 1930s vintage – together formed a body of leadership which had no equivalent among any other anti-fascist group. It not only took the initiative but provided the great bulk of the armed partisan units in central and northern Italy. Probably well over 80 per cent of them were more or less under communist leadership. They succeeded in mobilizing not merely a large body of inactive anti-fascists, or communists who had dropped out of the struggle,
¹³
but substantial bodies of new working-class and peasant militants like the famous seven Cervi brothers in Emilia, sons of a prosperous and modern-minded farmer and good Catholic. The results were dramatic. It is improbable that in 1940 there were even three thousand members of the
PCI
, and most of these were scattered all over the globe or in jail. By the winter of 1944–5 there were four hundred thousand, and the party was growing rapidly. It had established itself in the position which it was never thereafter to lose, as the major party of the left.

Could it have done so but for the war? ‘What would have happened if?', is a question which can never be answered with certainty or even a high degree of probability. It is certain that Italian fascism was a more fragile political structure than German National Socialism, that the Italian economy was both more backward and more vulnerable than the German, and that Italians were poorer and more discontented. Very possibly it
might have begun to break up slowly from within, as the Franco regime in Spain clearly began to do after fifteen years of fairly stable control from the middle 1950s. It is certain that the feebleness of organized anti-fascism within Italy was out of proportion to the strength of potential anti-fascism, old and new. It is also probable that the Italian Communist Party never lost that organic connection with the organized popular movement – whether among the unionized industrial workers or the ‘red' peasants which the
KPD SO
largely lacked. Under the circumstances its heroic and persistent illegal activity would probably have in any case made it into a stronger force after fascism than it had been before. It is also certain that it possessed a coherent body of leaders of remarkably high quality, which succeeded in avoiding the worst of the internal splits and purges which played such havoc with the leadership of the
KPD.
But beyond this all is speculation, and pointless speculation. History is what happened, not what might have happened. What happened was that Mussolini created the conditions which allowed the Communist Party to take the lead in a massive movement of national liberation, at least in central and northern Italy, and to emerge from it as the major party of the left.

¹
The illegality under which several
CPS
have operated for most of their history, and a number still do, makes the assessment of their political strength and influence somewhat speculative.

²
Percentage of communist vote in elections for Chamber of Deputies:

1946
18.9

1948
31.0 (joint list with socialists)

1953
22.6

1958
22.7

1963
25.3

1968
26.9

The 1948 elections almost certainly marked a temporary decline.

³
Three volumes of Spriano's history have so far been published, covering the period until 1941 (Turin 1967, 1969, 1970). Whether the Comintern archives have been closed for technical reasons – until the death of Stalin they appear not to have been even roughly catalogued, and unexpected discoveries can still, one is told on good authority, be made in them – or for political reasons, their inaccessibility is much to be regretted.

⁴
The following passage from Lussu (
Giustizia e Libertà
, 28 August 1936) deserves to be quoted: ‘Our need to go to Spain is greater than the Spanish Republic's need of us. Italian anti-fascism lacks a revolutionary glory . . . We must recognize that we have not known how to do battle against fascism. The small political vanguard of the Italian emigration must generously sacrifice itself in this enterprise. It will acquire experience on the battlefields. It will make its name there. It will become the nucleus that will attract around itself the greater vanguard of tomorrow.'

⁵
Spriano, vol. 3, pp. 226–7.

⁶
G. Berti, ‘Problemi di storia del
PCI
e dell'Internazionale Communista',
Riv. Stor. Italiana
, LXXXII, March 1970.

⁷
We recall that the Russian terrorists at the peak of their effectiveness consisted of probably not more than five hundred individuals.

⁸
Spriano, vol. 3, p. 194.

⁹
Ibid
., pp. 81–4.

¹⁰
Ibid
., p. 99.

¹¹
A curious example: In 1939 the
PCI
detached one of its best military cadres, Ilio Barontini, to establish a guerrilla action in Ethiopia in conjunction with the forces loyal to the emperor. This operation was conducted with the usual efficiency and heroism of good communists, and maintained until May-June 1940. It is entirely to the credit of the party, but until the publication of Spriano's history (pp. 298–9) in 1970, hardly any public reference to this episode was made in the party's publications.

¹²
Spriano, vol. 3, p. 273

¹³
However, with some exceptions such as Arrigo Boldrini, an army officer who appears to have had no contact with the party before the summer of 1943, the partisan leaders were men of the left.

Hermann Weber has added about nine hundred pages to the already long bibliography of German communist history, with his massive work
Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus
.
¹
The first question prospective readers will ask is: did he have to? The answer, on the whole, is yes. These two volumes are a monument of erudition and patient, thorough research – seventeen public archives in Western Germany alone have been consulted – though further research remains to be done. The major sources for the history of the
KPD
in the Weimar Republic are in Moscow, and therefore likely to be inaccessible for quite a while, and in East Berlin, and therefore also inaccessible to researchers without the backing of the Central Committee of the
SED
, among whom Dr Weber is not going to be numbered. He has had to rely essentially on public records, notably police files (when will students of the British left in the 1920s have as much access to relevant material in our Public Records as historians in other countries?), on a few private archives, a mass of interviews and memoranda from survivors of the period, printed sources and the literature. Probably he has not missed very much, but a monograph about six years of
KPD
history designed on this scale
must inevitably suffer far more than a less detailed book from the inability to get at crucial documentation.

Still, let us be grateful for what we have until something even better becomes possible. Dr Weber has written at the very least an invaluable work of reference. The statistical data about the
KPD'S
districts in vol. I and the 300-page who's who of its functionaries in vol. II are enough to make the work indispensable. But there is more here than a mere collection of facts and data, or even one of the comparatively rare histories of German Communism which is free from the embittered personal involvement in past party and Comintern infighting, from which older writers find it impossible to escape. Weber has written a rather sensible book, which throws light on problems which go far beyond the interest of students of the
KPD.

The problem with which he is essentially concerned is what happens to a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation. The
KPD
was founded and grew as a revolutionary party, or at least a party of radical and active rejection of, or rather – to use the correct slang – ‘confrontation' with, the
status quo
. It was founded when the Empire had collapsed, and the German Councils' Republic might reasonably be expected to follow soon, as the Russian October had followed February; and in so doing inaugurate the world revolution. 1919 was an apocalyptic year. Even Lenin, the most hard-headed of revolutionaries, thought it might bring the great breakthrough. The young German
CP
brought to its great tasks an able if small marxist leadership, immediately decimated by the assassinations of Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, but also a rank and file composed largely of the utopian radicals, quasi-anarchist or socially marginal elements who are likely to flood into small and loosely structured nuclei of radical opposition in times of revolutionary upsurge. Most of these ultra-lefts moved away from the
KPD
within a year or two, though not without leaving behind a tendency towards ‘heroic illusions' about the
possibilities of the situation, a certain putschism, and a residuum of ultra-radicalism.