A Civil War (105 page)

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 all, ‘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

Stalin – and testimonies on this score abound – was the symbol that summed up the Soviet myth. He was able to enjoy all the advantages of the charismatic leader without, given his physical distance from the scene, having to endure the drawbacks. In seeking to understand how a figure who emerged as the head of a bureaucratic machinery managed to focus onto his person so much utopian longing, we might get a glimpse from these words of an elderly anarchist who in his turn had gone over to the Italian Communist Party: ‘Pietro Gori was the ideal, Stalin the reality.'
³²
In other words, the figure of Stalin represented the idea made flesh, taking on its burdens and sullying his hands, and, in order to preserve them, reducing the supreme principles to didactic formulae or, as one intellectual puts it, to ‘rarefied logic' breathed ‘with a sense of repose'.
³³

People died crying ‘Viva la libertà! Viva Stalin!' or simply ‘Viva Stalin'.
³⁴
And the fascination of the figure of Stalin could extend also to those who were not Communist. A partisan who enlisted in the Cremona Gruppo di Combattimento of the CIL has recounted: ‘In the battle that we were fighting, in which we were taking a heap of blows from the Germans, and were about to flee, the officer had yelled “Avanti, Savoia!” three times and no one budged. A
comrade – a republican – stood up and said “Avanti Stalin!” The whole company moved.'
³⁵

The USSR was presented as the one who reaches out a ‘fraternal' hand to us (in effect, the USSR tried to benefit from its indirect involvement in the occupation regime in Italy) and as ‘the first paladin and most effective guarantor of the loyal application' to Italy of the resolutions of the Moscow conference.
³⁶
On the thorny question of the fate of the Italian prisoners in Russia, Togliatti personally undertook to ensure that they ‘are living well today. The overwhelming majority of them breathe an atmosphere of condemnation of Fascism and are anxiously awaiting the moment when they will be able to be free to take up arms for the liberation of the
patria
.'
³⁷

The granting of autonomous seats to the Ukraine and Byelorussia in the United Nations, which was being created at the time, was presented as a great conquest of principle, due to the coherent application of the doctrine of Lenin and Stalin to the different nationalities; and the compromising prediction was made that from now on all the Soviet republics would be able to ‘establish their own diplomatic relations with foreign states and levy their own national army, which will however be part of the Red Army'.
³⁸

This article makes explicit and reassuring mention of the Baltic, Karelo-Finnish and Moldavian republics, which were about to be liberated by the Red Army; just as it insists on the ‘independence, liberty, integrity guaranteed by the USSR to Romania'.
³⁹
This was actually a difficult line of reasoning, aimed among other things at nipping in the bud any hint of ‘extremism' which, taking the open and worldwide nature of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics literally (the possibility of acceding to or withdrawing from the Union was provided for by the 1936 Constitution, as it had already been by those of 1918 and 1924), might plead the case for a pure and simple entry into the Union of those peoples who were gradually being liberated from the Nazis and from the
padroni
. This was an utterly unrealistic hypothesis, but one that must somehow have been circulating if Riccardo Lombardi accused the PCI of seeing European unity only as
‘an expansion of the borders of the USSR',
⁴⁰
and if in retort to the South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who had presented entry into the Commonwealth as the sole path of salvation for the countries of the European West,
Avanti!
wrote that if that were the case it would be better to join the Soviet Union, which is ‘another “Common Wealth” which for years has been offering all countries the opportunity to enter and participate, with parity of rights and duties'.
⁴¹

Equally unfeasible was the not entirely new hypothesis, echoed in
Azione Libertaria
, of creating the Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Balkans.
⁴²
It is well-known how vigorously Stalin condemned the project of this kind put forward by Dimitrov and Tito.

Predictions about the novelties that, through enlightened Soviet initiative, were to characterise the post-war international order, should be linked to the hope that the victorious outcome of the severe trial of war, and the loyalty to the regime that the people had demonstrated by isolating cases of collaborationism, would inaugurate a process of democratisation in the USSR. Those who cultivated the myth of the USSR as a foreshadowing of the future did not feel the least need to nurture such hopes. But those who would sincerely have liked to see a more ductile and realistic, politically useful and morally acceptable ‘myth', did in fact put some losing cards on this very prospect. The PSIUP executive did just this in a declaration of 1 May 1944;
⁴³
Franco Venturi argued likewise in one of the most acute and carefully pondered attempts at interpreting Soviet Russia to appear during the Resistance;
⁴⁴
and this too is how Eugenio Colorni already thought during his internment in the prison of Ventotene.
⁴⁵
It was, furthermore, a hope that was internationally widespread in vast socialist circles that were not prejudicially anti-Soviet.
⁴⁶

As far as the Soviet Union itself was concerned, Djilas subsequently wrote:

And note Konstantin Simonov's description in 1958 of the enormous emotion aroused by the speech made by Stalin on the radio shortly after the start of the German invasion. When one of the listeners, a war casualty, heard Stalin address the people using the words ‘Brothers and sisters! My friends!', he asked himself: ‘Was it possible that only a tragedy like war could revive those words and that sentiment?… But what Stalin's speech had left in the souls of everybody was primarily the feverish hope for a change.'
⁴⁸

It is hard to know whether aspirations of this kind were rife among the Russian partisans fighting in Italy, as Michel has suggested that they were in some way present in the partisans fighting in the occupied territories of Russia.
⁴⁹
It is equally hard to understand, if we go back beyond the apologias made after the event, how much the Russian partisans fighting in Italy contributed to feeding the myth of the USSR. Testimonies conflict. The Christian Democrat Ermanno Gorrieri extols their valorous and disciplined behaviour in the Republic of Montefiorino, criticising, if anything, the sycophancy of the Communist press towards them.
⁵⁰
In the Communist documentary sources, along with the many and obvious positive recognitions, expressions of ‘unitary' concern appear, kindled by the fact that the Soviets did not intend to remove the hammer and sickle from their caps. But behaviour of this kind could aid the myth, and in any case it showed that
sinistrismo
was not just a ‘mask of the Gestapo'. Concerns
about social extremism appear, because the Soviets ‘are plundering villas and houses of
signori
only because they are such even if they aren't Fascists, and of small land-owners'. But this too could, in some cases, feed the myth. Finally, there arose what might be called perplexities concerning public morality (
buon costume
), because the Soviets got drunk and made ‘unbridled use' of food, creating problems above all with the peasants.
⁵¹
Iron discipline and lack of restraint were qualities that seemed to coexist in the Russians and Yugoslavians, arousing both admiration and fear. Again, the Soviets' wish to go it alone was not appreciated,
⁵²
while problems were created by the difficulty in distinguishing escaping prisoners from deserting collaborationists, Cossacks and ‘Mongols'.
⁵³

That the name
mongoli
was attributed to all, or almost all, Soviet collaborationists, excluding Cossacks, with whom one came into contact indicates how marked was the tendency to saddle that distant and terrifying Asian people with an undeniable fact that might cast a shadow on the myth of Soviet Russia.
⁵⁴
And it could so happen that Germans and Fascists ‘pretended to be Mongols so as to do what they liked without shame. One Mongol had a southern Italian accent.'
⁵⁵