Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (19 page)

Thus ended, in total failure, the first major experiment in what it was now fashionable to call social engineering. Lenin termed it ‘a defeat and retreat, for a new attack’.
¹⁵⁰
But soon he was dead, and the ‘new attack’ on the peasants was to be left to the bureaucratic monster he left behind him. Lenin believed in planning because it was ‘scientific’. But he did not know how to do it. He thought there must be some magical trick, which in his case took the form of ‘electrification’. Fascinated, as he always was, by Germanic ‘thoroughness’, he greatly admired Karl Ballod’s
Der Zukunftsstaat
, published in 1919. It inspired his slogan: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.’ Electricity would do it! It was the last word in modern science!
¹⁵¹
It would transform stubborn Russian agriculture. Much better to try to electrify everything than to work out a complicated general plan, which was nothing but ‘idle talk’, ‘boring pedantry’, ‘ignorant conceit’.
¹⁵²
He took little interest in Gosplan (1921), the new planning machinery, until it gave top priority to electrification. Then, in his last few active weeks, he became enthusiastic about it: it would build vast power-stations! Thus began a curious cult which has persisted in the Soviet Union to this day, and which has made the heavy electrical engineer the most valued figure in Soviet society (next to the arms designer). Lenin’s legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins. But he went to eternity dreaming of electricity.

Lenin’s confident expectations of Marxist risings in the advanced industrial countries have long since been buried. How would they have succeeded? Lenin’s own revolution had only been made possible by a huge, inchoate, undirected and pragmatic movement among the peasants, which he did not understand and never troubled to analyse. His fellow Marxist revolutionaries in industrial Europe had no such luck. Besides, by November 1918, when the opportunity for revolutionary change in central Europe arrived, the dismal experiences of Lenin’s social enginering – economic breakdown, starvation, civil war and mass terror – already constituted an awful warning, not least to the more moderate socialists. The extremists did, indeed, try their hands, and were burnt in the flames they lit. On 4 November 1918, German sailors and soldiers took over Kiel and formed workers’ councils. Three days later, the Left socialist Kurt Eisner led a rising of the garrison in Munich, and overturned the Bavarian government. But the Social Democrats who came to power in Germany when the Kaiser fled did not make Kerensky’s mistakes. Their military expert, Gustav Noske, turned to the army, which provided a
Freikorps
of ex-officers and
NCOS
. The refusal of the Leninists to seek power by parliamentary means played into his hands. On 6 January 1919 the Berlin Leninists (who called themselves
Spartacists) took over the city. Noske marched on it at the head of 2,000 men. Three days after he took it, Rosa Luxemburg and her friend Karl Liebknecht were murdered by the ex-officers charged with taking them to prison. Eisner, too, was murdered on 21 February. His followers contrived to win only three seats in the Bavarian elections. When, despite this, they set up a Communist Republic on 7 April, it lasted less than a month and was destroyed by the
Freikorps
without difficulty. It was the same story in Halle, Hamburg, Bremen, Leipzig, Thuringia, Brunswick. The Communists could neither win elections nor practise violence successfully.
¹⁵²

The wind of change was blowing in rather a different direction. By the second half of 1919 new types of ‘vanguard élites’ were making their appearance in Europe. They too were socialists. Marx was often in their pantheon. But they appealed to something broader than an abstract ‘proletariat’ which was mysteriously failing to respond – at any rate as an electoral or a fighting force – and their collective dynamic was not so much class as nation, even race. They also had a powerful and immediate grievance in common: dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles. In Austria, one of the big losers, they were called
Heimwehren.
In Hungary, the biggest loser of all, the national temper had not been improved by a putative Communist republic, set up in March 1919 by Lenin’s disciple Béla Kun. In August it collapsed in fire and blood, and the spirit of its successor was increasingly that of the anti-Semitic leader Julius Gömbös, who called himself a National Socialist and appealed passionately for justice, revenge and a purge of ‘alien elements’.
¹⁵³
In Turkey, which had lost its Arab empire and appeared to be losing its western littoral also, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, soon to be ‘Ataturk’, likewise offered national socialism and was already proving that a settlement determined in Paris could not be enforced on the spot. Italy, too, though a big gainer, still had a grievance against Versailles: she had not got the Dalmatian coast. On 11 September, the poet and war-hero Gabriele d’Annunzio led a raggle-taggle force of army deserters into the port of Fiume. It was an impudent bluff: but Britain and France, the custodians of the settlement, backed down – an ominous portent. D’Annunzio, too, was a national socialist.

From Milan, Mussolini sniffed this new wind and liked it, just as five years earlier he had caught the whiff of wartime excitement, and liked that too. The coming of war and his own determination to bring Italy into it had taken him right out of the official socialist party. It had made him a nationalist, not merely in the romantic-Left tradition of Mazzini but in the acquisitive tradition of the old Romans, whose
fasces
, turned into a radical emblem in the French Revolution, he found a useful symbol, just as Lenin had picked on
the hammer and sickle of the old Social Democrats. It made him hate Lenin for taking Russia out of the war and so jeopardizing Italy’s promised gains. He urged the Japanese to march through Russia with the command
‘Avanti, il Mikado!’
By 1919 Lenin’s economic failure had turned him away from the outright expropriation of industry. He now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the pre-war ‘vanguard élite’ Marxism and syndicalism (workers’ rule) which was to remain to his death the most important single element in his politics. Many other young Italian former socialists shared his radicalism while abandoning their internationalism.
¹⁵⁴
Internationalism had not worked either in 1914, when it had failed to stop war, or in 1917, when it had failed to respond to Lenin’s call for world revolution. But the desire to install a new economic Utopia remained.

On 23 March 1919 Mussolini and his syndicalist friends founded a new party. Its programme was partial seizure of finance capital, control over the rest of the economy by corporative economic councils, confiscation of church lands and agrarian reform, and abolition of the monarchy and senate. In compiling this list Mussolini frequently cited Kurt Eisner as a model.
¹⁵⁵
Eisner’s Bavarian fighting-squads, themselves an imitation of Lenin’s ‘men in black leather jerkins’, served to inspire Mussolini’s
Fasci di Combattimento.
¹⁵⁶
Indeed, he had shed none of the attachment to violent activism he shared with Lenin. Paraphrasing Marx, he pledged himself ‘to make history, not to endure it’. His other favourite quotation was
Vivre, ce n’est pas calculer, c’est agir.
¹⁵⁷
His vocabulary was very like Lenin’s, abounding in military imagery and strong, violent verbs. Like Lenin, he was impatient to get history moving, fast – to
velocizzare I’ltalia
, as the Futurists like Marinetti put it. Indeed he radiated impatience, furiously studying his watch, turning with anger on the agents of delay.

Yet Mussolini was changing. The lean and hungry look had gone with his hair. On his bald head a huge cyst had emerged and a dark oval mole on his thrusting and now fleshy chin. His teeth were the colour of old ivory and widely separated, considered lucky in Italy.
¹⁵⁸
He was handsome, vigorous, well-launched in a sexual career that would bring him 169 mistresses.
¹⁵⁹
He was very vain and ambitious. He wanted power and he wanted it now. D’Annunzio’s success persuaded him that radicalism, even radical nationalism, was not enough. For fascism to succeed, it must invoke poetry, drama, mystery. This had always been a complaint, among the Italian Marxists, about Marx himself: he did not understand human beings well enough. He omitted the potency of myth, especially national myth. Now that Freud had demonstrated – scientifically, too – the
power of dark and hidden forces to move individuals, was it not time to examine their impact on mass-man? D’Annunzio wrote of ‘the terrible energies, the sense of power, the instinct for battle and domination, the abundance of productive and fructifying forces, all the virtues of Dionysian man, the victor, the destroyer, the creator’.
¹⁶⁰
Italy was not short of poetic myths. There was the nineteenth-century nationalist myth of Garibaldi and Mazzini, still enormously powerful, the Realpolitik myth of Machiavelli (another of Mussolini’s favourite authors), and the still earlier myth of Rome and its empire, waiting to be stirred from its long sleep and set to march with new legions. On top of this there was the new Futurist myth, which inspired in Mussolini a vision of a socialist Italy, not unlike Lenin’s electrified Russia, in which ‘life will become more intense and frenetic, ruled by the rhythm of the machine’. Mussolini stirred all these volatile elements together to produce his heavy fascist brew, flavouring all with the vivifying dash of violence: ‘No life without shedding blood’, as he put it.
¹⁶¹

But whose blood? Mussolini was a complex and in many respects ambivalent man. Unlike Lenin, he rarely did the evil thing of his own accord; he nearly always had to be tempted into it, until long years of power and flattery atrophied his moral sense almost completely. He was not capable of embarking on a deliberate course of unprovoked violence. In 1919–20 he was desperate for a fighting cause. He spoke forlornly of fascism as ‘the refuge of all heretics, the church of all heresies’.
¹⁶²
Then the socialists, by resorting to violence, gave him what he wanted. Their mentor was a frail young Marxist called Antonio Gramsci, who came from exactly the same intellectual tradition as Mussolini: Marxism, Sorel, syndicalism, a repudiation of historical determinism, a stress on voluntarism, the need to force history forward by an emphasis on struggle, violence and myth; plus Machiavellian pragmatism.
¹⁶³
But Gramsci, though much more original than Mussolini, lacked his aplomb and self-confidence. He came from a desperately poor Sardinian family. His father had gone to jail and Gramsci, who already suffered from Pott’s Disease of the lungs, had begun working a ten-hour day at the age of eleven. He was amazed when his future wife fell in love with him (and wrote her some striking love-letters). Unable to see himself in a leadership role, he drew from Machiavelli not a personal prince, like Mussolini, but a collective one: ‘The modern Prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual: it can only be an organization.’

Thus Gramsci stuck to syndicalism when Mussolini turned to romance and drama, and he preached the take-over of factories. In 1920 the socialists began to follow his advice and soon the Red Flag flew over workshops and offices scattered all over the country. There
was no determined effort to take over the state. Indeed the socialists were divided about tactics, and in January 1921 they split, with a Communist Party (
PCI
) forging off to the left. The take-over accomplished little except to terrify the middle class. As Errico Malatesta warned the moderates: if we do not go on to the end, we shall have to pay with tears of blood for the fear we are now causing the bourgeoisie.’
¹⁶⁴
There was not much violence, but enough to give Mussolini the excuse to resort to it himself. As in Germany, the socialists made a catastrophic mistake in using it at all.
¹⁶⁵
As Mussolini boasted, the fascist leopard could easily deal with the ‘lazy cattle’ of the socialist masses.
¹⁶⁶

The fascist ‘action squads’ were formed mainly from ex-servicemen, but they constantly recruited students and school-leavers. They were much better disciplined and more systematic than the socialists and co-ordinated their efforts by telephone. They often had the passive or even active support of the local authorities and
carabinieri
, who would search a socialist
casa del popolo
for arms, then give the go-ahead to the squads, who would burn it down. The socialists claimed fascism was a class party, and its terror a
Jacquerie borghese.
Not so: there were thousands of working-class fascists, especially in areas like Trieste where a racial element could be invoked (the socialists there were mainly Slovenes). It was in these fringe areas that fascism first got a mass-following, spreading gradually inland to Bologna, the Po Valley and the hinterland of Venice. Mussolini, always sensitive towards people, early grasped the point that Italy was a collection of cities, each different, each to be played by ear. As he got inland, the middle-class element became more dominant. Fascism began to exercise a powerful appeal to well-to-do youth. One of the most important and dangerous recruits was Italo Balbo, who at the age of twenty-five brought Mussolini his home town, Ferrara, and soon became head of the fascist militia and by far the most ruthless and efficient of the
condottieri.
¹⁶⁷
In 1921 he moved through central Italy, like one of the Borgias, leaving behind the smoking ruins of trade union headquarters and a trail of corpses. It was Balbo who first terrified
bien-pensant
Italy into believing fascism might be an irresistible force.