Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (52 page)

In both countries, the government response to such fears was heavy-handed, but effective. After yet another rash of strikes and riots in the autumn of 1947, and some alarming acts of sabotage such as the derailment of the Paris-Tourcoing Express, the French Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch, announced a complete mobilization of the forces of order, including the call-up of all the country’s reserves and conscripts. During a tumultuous debate in parliament the Communist deputy for Hérault was expelled from the chamber, and the government shepherded through a whole series of emergency measures aimed at quelling the unrest.
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In Italy, where Communist indignation was inflamed both by the Party’s heavy defeat at the 1948 election and by the attempted assassination of Palmiro Togliatti that July, civil unrest became even worse than in France. The Communists announced their frustration through a series of strikes, riots, kidnappings, and even the sabotage of the country’s north-south railways.
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In reaction, the Italian government launched a programme of anti-Communist measures in which trade unionists, former partisans and Communist Party members were arrested en masse. This was a blatant attempt at intimidation, as can be seen by the results of the arrests. Of the 90-95,000 Communists and ex-partisans arrested between the autumn of 1948 and 1951, only 19,000 were ever prosecuted, and only 7,000 were found guilty of any crime – the rest were held for varying periods in ‘preventative custody’. It was the hardcore members, and particularly the ex-partisans, who were treated most harshly. Of the 1,697 ex-partisans arrested between 1948 and 1954, 884 were condemned to a total of 5,806 years in prison. Some of them were tried for crimes carried out during the liberation, despite the supposed amnesties that had been granted in 1946. Regardless of whether these people deserved their sentences, this ‘trial of the Resistance’ was far more harsh than the purge of Fascists had ever been. The message was clear: the ‘heroes’ of 1945, who had liberated the north of Italy from Fascist rule, had finally become the new enemy.
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The Myth of the Communist ‘Lost Victory’

Given the strength of fear that prevailed at all levels in France and Italy in the aftermath of the war, the question inevitably arises: just how likely was it that the Communists might have taken power? At the time the threat was obviously taken very seriously, but with the benefit of hindsight it has to be said that such an outcome was never really on the cards. The Communists never managed to win as much as a third of the vote in either country, and even with the socialists at their side only fleetingly came close to winning an absolute majority in France. The only real hope they had of seizing power was to convince their coalition partners to grant them not only the premiership but control of all the important ministries. But as Allied observers in Italy noted in July 1945, the parties of the right and the centre would never have allowed this to happen because they were certain that the Communists were intent on creating a one-party state: ‘To permit the Left to come to power would be equivalent to signing their own death warrants.’
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In both countries the Communists were repeatedly blocked from most of the important positions of government.

The only way that the Communists might have won absolute power, therefore, was through a full-blown revolution. Even if the Italian and French populations had been inclined towards such an outcome, this was not something that the Western Allies would ever have allowed. In the months after the liberation, the British and Americans had huge armies stationed in both countries which were more than capable of putting down a Communist insurrection. Later on, when the Allied presence diminished, America asserted its authority through economic rather than military power. De Gasperi’s expulsion of the Communists from the Italian government was made possible only by a massive injection of aid to the country. Likewise, the French knew that if they were to have any hope of rebuilding their shattered economy they would have to rely on American money.
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The idea that the Communists might have won power, or have been able to seize it, was therefore nothing but an illusion. Both countries were dependent on the Allies, and neither government had any real power without the support of America. The more astute members of the Communist parties in both countries recognized this. As Pietro Secchia, a former member of the PCI’s northern directing committee, wrote in 1973:

Young people today who read certain romanticized histories of our war of liberation have the impression that we held
power,
and that we were unable or worse, unwilling, to retain it (for some unknown reason), to bring about if not the proletarian revolution, which was quite out of the question, at least a regime of progressive democracy. The fact is that on account of the conditions in which the war of liberation developed in Italy and in Europe,
we
(when I say ‘we’ I mean the anti-fascists, the CLNAI) never held power, nor were we capable of capturing it.
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Togliatti and Thorez have been much criticized by left-wingers for their decision to steer their parties down the democratic route after the war. Many of their comrades blamed them for a failure to seize the initiative and bring about the social reform that so many had longed for. But both leaders were realists, and understood that the conditions in France and Italy were not right for violent social revolution. They strongly believed that the democratic route was the only possible way forward for communism in France and Italy, even though that route was unlikely ever to win them any real power.

History appears to have vindicated their decision. For an example of the chaos that might have ensued if they
had
gone down the revolutionary road, one need only turn one’s gaze upon events that were taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Adriatic. In Greece, where Communist politicians did opt to walk out of the democratic arena, a bloody civil war was beginning that would prove even worse than the savage occupation of the Nazis. As I shall show in the next chapter, with British and American help this civil war would culminate in the complete annihilation of the Communist Party in Greece, and a brutal suppression of left-wing politics for the next thirty years.

I began this chapter with a description of the spontaneous land occupations by peasants in the south of Italy in 1943-4, and it seems worthwhile to finish it with an explanation of how those events affected the region in the months and years to come. While not nearly as dramatic as the events in Greece, these land occupations and the reaction to them were perhaps more representative of the sort of thing that was going on across the rest of western Europe. They also demonstrate that, contrary to Marxist doctrine, many of the most important battles between socialists and ‘reactionaries’ would occur not in the cities but in the countryside.

The peasant uprisings demonstrated a new and unexpected assertiveness on the part of the southern Italian peasantry that many found deeply inspiring. In an attempt to capture the mood of the moment, the Italian Minister for Agriculture, Fausto Gullo – a Communist – put forward a programme of agricultural reform. At a stroke, the most exploitative sharecropping contracts were banned. Intermediaries between the peasant and landowner – notorious for exploiting and intimidating peasants – were also banned. In addition, peasants started to be granted a bonus if they sold any excess produce to government granaries (a move that not only ensured a living wage for peasants, but also partially undermined the extremely damaging black market in food). The most crucial decree, however, stipulated that all uncultivated or poorly cultivated land could be occupied and farmed by peasants for a limited period, provided they first form themselves into cooperatives.
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The southern Italian peasantry, ignored and exploited for so long, greatly appreciated being acknowledged by the state at last, and immediately mobilized themselves into cooperatives. Gullo’s land reforms proved to be a massive propaganda success for the Communist Party. ‘Less than a year ago the peasants were completely foreign to us, and to a great extent hostile,’ claimed a report from the PCI federation of Cosenza (Calabria) in the summer of 1945. ‘But now they are coming to us, trustingly, and in great numbers … This is due above all to the extensive action we have carried on in the Province for the assigning of uncultivated lands and over the question of agrarian contracts.’
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This surge in popularity for the Communist Party mirrors what happened in large parts of eastern Europe when land was likewise redistributed from the aristocracy, the church, the middle classes or from Volksdeutsch farmers.

Unfortunately for the Italian peasants, such legal measures to alleviate their abysmal poverty failed completely. Local officials, many of whom remained unchanged since Fascist times, simply refused to implement the social reforms required of them by law. All requests to work uncultivated land had to be heard by a local commission, which was always dominated by the landowners themselves and the local magistrate. As a consequence in Sicily, for example, 90 per cent of requests were denied.
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Frustrated by the failure of the local authorities to abide by the spirit of the law, the peasants of the Mezzogiorno embarked on a second period of land occupations in 1949 that was even more widespread than the first. According to some estimates about 80,000 peasants took part, but the vast majority of them were ejected from the land they occupied even more brutally than they had been in 1943.
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In Caulonia they were threatened by local farmers who brought their own vigilantes to disperse them. At Strongoli the military used tear gas to disperse them. At Isola the father-in-law of the secretary of the Chamber of Works was assassinated as a warning to the peasants. But the worst event occurred near Melissa, where the carabinieri opened fire on an apparently peaceful crowd of about 600, killing an unknown number. According to some reports, the majority of those killed and injured were shot in the back as they were trying to run away.
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In the light of such events it is easy to see why so many left-wing Italians criticized the Communist Party leadership for putting their faith in a corrupt political establishment. During the following decades, despite their continued popularity with voters, the Communists were always sidelined, and the reformist agenda they championed was shelved. The political bullying continued into the next decade and beyond, as did the poverty, particularly amongst the southern Italian peasantry. Togliatti might have spared the country a civil war, but for many Italians the aftermath of the liberation represented a missed opportunity to overturn the injustice of generations.

24

The Greek Civil War

There are some moments in history – thankfully rare – when the fate of millions hangs on the decisions of a single man. One such moment occurred on the evening of 9 October 1944, during a conference between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow. This conference was smaller and less important than any of the ‘Big Three’ conferences at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The Americans were not present, and Roosevelt had telegraphed both Churchill and Stalin to insist that any agreements should be made by ‘the three of us, and only the three of us’. Despite this, Churchill produced what he called a ‘naughty document’ – a half-sheet of paper on which he had written a series of percentages showing the respective spheres of influence of Britain and the USSR in the postwar world. Romania, for example, would be under 90 per cent Russian influence, and only 10 per cent ‘others’. Bulgaria would be 75 per cent Russian and 25 per cent ‘others’. Hungary and Yugoslavia would both be split 50/50. There was only one country that would come firmly under the British sphere: Greece would be 90 per cent British (in accord with the USA) and only 10 per cent Russian. To signify his agreement over these percentages, Stalin reached over and marked the document with a big blue tick.
¹

Much has been made of the seemingly casual way that the postwar fate of these five countries was sealed, but in reality it was simply the culmination of months of secret talks between the diplomats of both countries. Nevertheless, it was extremely significant. I will return to what happened in Hungary and Romania in the next chapter. The important point for the moment is that Stalin was willing to ratify British influence in Greece – a decision that was to have profound effects in that country for the next thirty years.

The British had always been interested in Greece. It dominated the eastern Mediterranean and the approaches to the Middle East and the Suez Canal, and was therefore vital to British strategic interests. Churchill had been willing to risk coming to Greece’s aid when Germany invaded in 1941, and despite a disastrous defeat had always been determined to return. In October 1944, just a few days before the Moscow conference began, the British had once again landed in the Peloponnese. In this respect, Stalin’s big blue tick was merely a recognition of the reality on the ground: British troops were already marching towards Athens.

However, British authority in Greece was not quite the fait accompli that it seemed. The British were not the only force fighting for control of the country. As in Italy and France there were also significant numbers of partisans here – indeed, long before the British arrived these
andartes
already controlled most of the Greek mainland, forcing the German occupiers to stick to the main towns. By far the biggest resistance group was the National Liberation Front, EAM, and its military wing the Greek People’s Liberation Army, ELAS.
²
While these groups ostensibly represented a broad church of
andartes,
in reality they were both dominated by the Greek Communist Party, which in turn owed loyalty to Stalin. The British had tried throughout the war to counterbalance the strength of the left by supplying arms and funds to alternative resistance organizations, but no amount of funding could change the fact that the Communist-led EAM and ELAS were vastly more popular than all the other resistance organizations put together.
³