View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Theses Online 1 LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE BANDIERA ROSSA COMMUNISTS IN OCCUPIED ROME, 1943–44 DAVID BRODER A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2017 2 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 98,085 words. 3 Abstract This study is a social history of communists in wartime Rome. It examines a decisive change in Italian communist politics, as the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) rose from a hounded fraternity of prisoners and exiles to a party of government. Joining with other Resistance forces in the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN), this ‘new party’ recast itself as a mass, patriotic force, committed to building a new democracy. This study explains how such a party came into being. It argues that a PCI machine could establish itself only by subduing other strands of communist thought and organistion that had emerged independently of exiled Party leaders. This was particularly true in Rome, where dissident communists created the largest single Resistance formation, the Movimento Comunista d’Italia (MCd’I). This movement was the product of the underground that survived across the Mussolini period, expressing a ‘subversive’ politics that took on a popular following through the disintegration of the Fascist regime. Standing outside the CLN alliance and the postwar democratic governments, it reflected the maximalism and eclecticism of a communist milieu that had persisted on the margins of Fascist society. In the Occupation period this dissident movement galvanised a social revolt in the borgate slums, which would also trouble the new authorities even after the Allies’ arrival. Studying the political writing of these dissidents, their autodidact Marxism and the social conditions in which it emerged, this study reconstructs a far-reaching battle to redefine communist politics. Highlighting the erasure of the dissidents’ history in mainstream narration of the Resistance, it argues that the repressed radicalism of this period represented a lasting danger to the postwar PCI and the new Republic. 4 Table of contents Preface Chapter One What remembrance forgets 1.1 Myths and martyrs 1.2 The PCI’s partisan legends 1.3 From underground to dissent Chapter Two ‘You just wait till Stalin gets here…’ 2.1. The writing on the wall 2.2. The long journey through Fascism 2.3. Scintilla 2.4. The British ‘bulldog’ spurned 2.5. ‘From the clandestine grouplet to mass work’ 2.6. From Mussolini to Stalin Chapter Three Out of clandestinity – and back again 3.1. 19 July 1943: The war comes home 3.2. The overthrow of Mussolini 3.3. The PCI in Rome after 25 July 3.4. The foundation of the MCd’I 5 3.5. The united front 3.6. 8 September: the chaotic collapse 3.7. Toward a single communist movement? Chapter Four The borgate rise 4.1. A ‘Red Belt’ 4.2. Motors to Resistance 4.3. The MCd’I in Rome and beyond 4.4. The ‘Banda Rossi’ 4.5. Political directives 4.6. 7 November Chapter Five The Allies’ approach 5.1. Insurrectionary plans 5.2. Military contacts and POWs 5.3. Allied anti-communism 5.4. The CLN crisis 5.5. The ‘Committee of Public Safety’ Chapter Six The forces of repression 6.1. The arsenal of repression 6.2. Raids and deportations 6 6.3. Via Rasella and the Fosse Ardeatine 6.4. A retreat Chapter Seven A Soviet foreign-policy move 7.1. The turn before Salerno 7.2. Togliatti’s return 7.3. A narrative of betrayal 7.4. Tito’s alternative 7.5. Doppiezza and Soviet foreign policy Chapter Eight The missing insurrection 8.1. A peaceful takeover 8.2 The moment of liberation 8.2. Open organisation 8.4. The ‘Red Army’ 8.5. From Resistance to insurrection Chapter Nine The constitutional arch 9.1. The anger of crowds 9.2. Holdout partisans 9.3. Criminalisation 9.4. Unity projects 7 9.5. L’Idea Comunista 9.6. A Cold War Republic Chapter Ten The ‘Red Resistance’ and its myths 10.1. The ora X of insurrection 10.2. The new anti-fascism 10.3. The Years of Lead 10.4. The passing of an illusion 8 Preface This study is a social history of communists in wartime Rome. It centres on the period between the Wehrmacht invasion on 8 September 1943 and the Allies’ arrival in the capital on 4 June 1944. These nine months were a decisive turning point in the development of Italian communism, as the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), rose from a hounded fraternity of prisoners and exiles to a party of government. The partito nuovo created through the Resistance was quite unlike the Communist Party that had succumbed to Fascism two decades earlier. Joining with other Resistance forces in the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN), Palmiro Togliatti’s party cast itself as a mass, patriotic force, committed to building a new democracy. So, too, was the PCI’s social profile radically altered, as young Italians without past communist affiliation now flooded into its ranks. This study focuses on the other side of the partito nuovo’s formation: the communists who rejected Togliatti’s approach. For the PCI’s party machine to take form, its cadres had to impose their leadership over a series of communist movements that had emerged outside of their control. This was particularly true in the Italian capital, where dissident communists created the largest single Resistance formation. Their Movimento Comunista d’Italia (MCd’I) was the product of the underground that survived across the Fascist period. Standing outside of the CLN alliance, it expressed the maximalism and eclecticism of a subversive milieu that had long been detached from Party leaders. In the Occupation period and after it galvanised an unruly social revolt in the borgate slums, a proletarian rebellion that clashed with the PCI’s politics of ‘national unity’. Central to our research is the autodidact Marxism that flowered within this milieu, expressed in papers and pamphlets, bulletins and handwritten polemics. A militant minority used this worker-writing to endow its activity with a grand historic mission and a global perspective, even despite its long isolation from the international Left. This thinking drew on earlier Italian communist politics as well as a subculture that had evolved across the Fascist period. As this study shows, these militants’ texts often bore the mark of the conditions of repression in which they were produced. Yet this autodidacticism also stood in defiance of the political illiteracy that Fascism had sought to create. It embodied workers’ and artisans’ 9 attempt to free themselves from the condition of those consigned only to follow leaders and execute commands. These Roman militants’ pursuit of a class-war and revolutionary agenda set them in sometimes sharp opposition to other anti-fascists. In the Occupation period the demands of self-preservation compelled a degree of cooperation among all clandestine militants, whether resisting Nazi raids or sheltering the endangered. Yet in rejecting the idea of a common national interest, the dissident-communists strongly opposed both the CLN alliance and the democratic governments that followed.1 After Liberation they like other dissident partisans continued to build their armed bands, waging expropriations and blackmail, occupying public buildings and even extorting Allied supplies. As Nazi-Fascist2 tyranny gave way to a new government of ‘national unity’, this intransigence drew these militants into open conflict with the new authorities. The Roman dissident movement did not create any lasting political force. Paralysed by Nazi repression and criminalised under the Allies, it represented a Resistance that did not shape the new Republic. Yet even in defeat, its militants left an enduring legacy. The repression of partisan radicalism and a botched defascistisation process left behind bitter weeds of disappointed hope; ‘unfinished business’ that repeatedly returned to the centre of Italian public life. Making their own turn to the underground, new generations of armed militants continued to destabilise the Republic into the 1970s. A study of this history thus sheds light on the tensions at the origin of the postwar PCI and the Republic itself. It highlights the subversive culture that developed across the Fascist era and then re-emerged in the war period and beyond. Each chapter of our study focuses on this fight to shape the Italian communist movement as it emerged from two decades of repression: Chapter One frames this study historically, explaining the blinkers that both official Resistance remembrance and PCI self-mythology have placed on existing 1 ‘Antifascismo’, Disposizioni Rivoluzionarie, 5, 30.4.1944. 2 Nazifascismo, the common Italian term for the overlapping rule of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist régime (the formally independent Repubblica Sociale Italiano, widely called the Salò Republic in reference to its de facto capital) and Adolf Hitler’s control of the country, occupied by Nazi Germany from 8 September 1943 onward.