Читать книгу Militant Anti-Fascism - M. Testa - Страница 8

The concept of a united front of the more ‘subversive’ groups—socialists, communists, republicans and anarchists—[was] put forward by the anarchist Malatesta.1

On 11th September 1926, Gino Lucetti, an Italian anarchist, attempted to assassinate fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. As the dictator known as Il Duce drove past him, Lucetti threw a grenade, which bounced off the windscreen and exploded nearby, injuring several pedestrians. Lucetti, who was hiding in a doorway, was pounced upon by Il Duce’s bodyguards and severely beaten. He was found to be in possession of another grenade, a revolver loaded with dum-dum bullets, and a knife. As he was arrested, Lucetti said defiantly, ‘I did not come with a bouquet of flowers for Mussolini. I also meant to use my revolver if I failed to achieve my purpose with the bomb’.2 With his usual self-aggrandisement, Mussolini later claimed that the grenade had landed in the car and he had scooped it up and thrown it back at Lucetti before it exploded, but witnesses in the car stated that the windows were closed and Il Duce was most shaken by the event.3

After strenuous interrogation, during which he confused the police with a false name, Lucetti was sentenced to thirty years. His accomplices, Leandro Sorio, a waiter, and Stefano Vatteroni, a tinsmith, were sentenced to nineteen and twenty years respectively. Vatteroni served his first three years in solitary confinement. Lucetti, a lifelong anarchist and anti-fascist activist had been shot in the neck by a fascist during an altercation in a bar, and Perfetti, the fascist, was shot in the ear. Lucetti was unable to find sympathetic medical treatment so was smuggled onto a ship heading for France, where he plotted with exiled anti-fascist comrades to kill Il Duce. The plot had been approved by the influential anarchist Errico Malatesta, and it was agreed that the assassin would allow himself to be arrested, presumably to avoid the fascists rounding up ‘the usual suspects.’ This was not to be: hundreds of anarchists were arrested in reprisals.

Italian anti-fascists have speculated on what would have happened if Lucetti had been successful, but it is clear that the attempt had significant symbolic value: one writer said, ‘It is utterly pointless to debate what the assassination bids might have brought the country to…[but it] helped to keep public opinion alert and to give heart to anti-fascists and to the labour movement opposed to the regime’.4 Lucetti was in prison until September 1943, when he was killed by a shell after escaping.

Lucetti was not the only one intent on killing Mussolini. Shortly after this first attempt on Il Duce, Anteo Zamboni, the fifteen-year-old son of Bolognese anarchists, was stabbed then shot to death by fascist bodyguards under dubious circumstances. He had been accused of shooting at Mussolini, although the shot may have been fired by one of the dictator’s own entourage, extremist fascists who intended to force Mussolini’s hand. As Mussolini was standing in the back of an open topped car the bullet hit him in the chest. In typical style, he later claimed that ‘Nothing can hurt me!’ adding the story to his personal mythology. He forgot to mention the small and not insignificant matter of the bullet proof vest he wore beneath his uniform.5

In 1931, Michele Schirru and Angelo Sbardelotto were arrested before they could even attempt their assassination plan on Il Duce. Schirru was tried and sentenced to be shot. Sbardelotto was caught later and faced the same death sentence. Even approving of an assassination attempt could have severe consequences: after Lucetti’s attempt, two Roman workers were jailed for nine months for allegedly commenting that ‘they still haven’t managed to kill him’.6

Contemporary militant anti-fascists probably see the assassination of their foes as a tad extreme, but Italian fascism was founded in a climate of political violence, and anti-fascists had to resort to the most extreme measures as murders, beatings, arrests, and torturing escalated. Given such a situation, the assassination attempts by Lucetti and others become more understandable.

Italian Fascism

It is Mussolini himself who dates the beginning of fascism in 1914 after he had broken with the socialists and ‘was caught surprisingly off-guard when, during “Red Week” in June 1914, Italy came close to a real revolution with a million people taking to the streets’.7 Martin Pugh writes that ‘the Italian fascisti first appeared during the autumn of 1914. They were largely recruited from patriotic former Socialists who were determined their country should enter the First World War’.8

Although the war caused a political hiatus, by 1919 Italy had become increasingly unstable with factory occupations, the rise of ‘Bolshevism’, and increased militant working-class activity. Opposed to this were the bourgeois and church-based parties, the industrial aristocracy, royalists, mainstream politicians and opportunists like Mussolini who moved from socialism to fascism. The Russian Revolution had frightened European capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, so raising the spectre of communism served as a useful tool for the right wing: Mussolini talked up the ‘Red Peril’ to justify strike-breaking and violence against workers. Following the syndicalist factory occupations of 1920, which some saw as a precursor to social revolution, fascism seemed to present a solution for the Italian mainstream against increased working-class militancy: in September, half a million workers had occupied the factories. Mussolini’s skill as an orator and propagandist (he was a journalist by trade), combined with his natural charisma, gave the impression of a strong man who could lead Italy into the future and away from the disruption.

Mussolini’s fascism was essentially placatory, attempting to appease church, state and crown, as well as the bourgeoisie and working class. There was less a rigid ideology and more of a set of multilateral platitudes that Mussolini used with some dexterity to appeal to all those who felt strongly about unity and nation and feared the ‘Red Terror’. He was not exempt from utilising socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric to appeal to the sections of the working class who felt disenfranchised by the triumvirate of God, government and sovereign as and when appropriate. Early fascism attracted professional soldiers, students who had missed out on the fun of war and the Italian futurist art movement (whose Russian counterparts were, on the contrary, pro-Bolshevik), alongside shopkeepers, smaller business owners and some factory bosses. They were initially attracted to fascism’s simple answers dressed up in fancy hats with the chance of a bit of argy-bargy. There was also a strong criminal element, not just the violent, that were attracted (then as now) to fascism, which was exemplified in the later gangsterism of local fascist leaders. Mussolini realised the youthful and adventurist appeal of fascism and began to organize the Squadristi, a fascist militia, into a national organization that eventually usurped local government, police and military control in certain towns and cities. Armed with their manganello clubs, the Squadristi were free to attack the members and organizations of the left.

The years 1919 and 1920 were the years of factory occupations and militant working-class opposition by anarchists, syndicalists, communists and socialists. These became known as the Biennia Rosso, the Red Years, and along with post-war scarcity and unrest, inflation, increased working-class agitation for better working conditions, and the fear of Red Revolution, enflamed the consternation of the bourgeois and capitalist classes. Fascism played on this and presented a strong-armed, patriotic response, an ideology of action not words. Many of the workers’ concerns were economic, but given the strength of militant organizations they took on a revolutionary aspect, particularly ‘by the Anarchist and Anarcho-syndicalists where they were influential in the labour movement in Liguria, Tuscany and the Marche’.9 The factory council movements in militant cities like Milan and Turin also presented a threat to the ownership of the means of production. The most prominent working-class organizations were the Socialist Party of Italy ( PSI), the council communists, and the anarchists and syndicalists, whose voices were heard in Antonio Gramsci’s newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (New Order) and Malatesta’s Umanita Nova, and it was the latter who said prophetically, ‘if we do not go on to the end we shall pay with bloody tears for the fears we are now causing the bourgeoisie’.10 The industrial class and other concerned affected parties, such as farmers and landowners, helped finance the fascist organization who also had the tacit backing of the church, state and crown against the rise of ‘Godless Bolshevism’.

Fascism benefits from either real or perceived crises and plays on the fears of the bourgeoisie and leaders of capital, and Mussolini played on these fears, presenting himself as an antidote to both social and industrial unrest. Political aggression was fetishized by Mussolini and was an inherent part of his fascist ideology of action, of taking control of the situation using might rather than ‘right’, and of attracting moderates and right wingers who were scared of the ‘crisis in law and order and by the increase in violence. On the left, this took the traditional forms of intimidation, connected with strikes, riots and protests in the piazza.’11 The factory occupations of 1920 had proved to be a pivotal moment for the working-class movement, which could not transform the situation into a full-blown revolution. Mussolini capitalised on this as proof of the Bolshevist threat, and the failure of the anarchists, syndicalists and socialists proved to be decisive (the communists were yet to split away from the PSI and were not yet influential in the syndicates).

Although the squads were not overtly active as strike-breakers in this instance it was something they would later become professional at, thus emphasising the anti-working-class nature of fascism. The fascist squads involved themselves in labour disputes, protecting scabs and intimidating socialist councils and other organizations. The squads were active against syndicalists in Genoa in 1922 and broke the union hold over the docks in order to implement scab labour, something that the ship owners no doubt welcomed with relief. In 1922, the Socialists called a general strike, which again roused bourgeois fears of working-class revolt and saw Squadristi actions against militants.

The Squadristi

The whole espirit de corps of the blackshirts was concentrated in the squad.

—Adrian Lyttelton in The Seizure of Power

It is unlikely that Mussolini would have achieved his political success without the use of violent gangs to intimidate the opposition. He had always seen political violence as some sort of redemptive medicine, and this reached its apotheosis in the Squadristi who operated in a gangster, extra-legal manner and became answerable only to the local leaders.

After Mussolini took power in 1923, the squads operated as a paramilitary force to implement the fascist programme—a programme that seemed vague at best and opportunistic and contradictory at worst. Italian fascism, it would seem, was whatever Mussolini wanted it to be at any given point.

The squads were led by the Ras (after the Ethiopian term for boss) and grew in such strength that their local power eclipsed institutional power. Even sympathisers, including Mussolini, worried about their autonomy and had difficulty controlling their violent excesses. The squads organized ‘punitive expeditions,’ usually in trucks lent by military or police sympathisers, against political opposition, and eventually controlled their locality through intimidation and often murder. The squads also occupied socialist cooperatives and forced peasants out of their collectives and back into the hands of the landowners. Typical squad members were students, ex-soldiers and tradesmen, as well as professional criminals, and there was often ‘a loose, informal relationship between a group of adolescents, somewhat resembling that of a youth gang’.12 The squads represented the idealization of fascist action and the embodiment of the political violence that was so central to Mussolini’s ideas—at meetings Mussolini would boast that he preferred weaponry and thuggishness to the more legitimate ballot. However, once the ‘Red Threat’ had been pacified, the Squadristi turned to more lucrative ventures such as extortion, blackmail and drugs.

AVANTI!

One of the Squadristi’s first acts of outright political violence, led by Marinetti, the Futurist polemicist, was the burning of the socialist Avanti newspaper offices in Milan in 1919. The printing presses were destroyed and this arson attack operated as crude censorship as well as violent intimidation. Avanti was the newspaper at which Mussolini himself had worked between 1912 and 1914 before he donned the black shirt of fascism. A fascist group also attacked a socialist parade with bombs, and the police did very little to stop it: ‘[ Mussolini] took good note that when the victims of street violence were on the extreme left the police would intervene very little if at all.’13

Many students were attracted to the excitement of fascism and Marimotti, the president of the student’s union, was killed in the fascist attack on Turin in 1921. These student groups would smash up the lectures of those they disagreed with and they benefited from the nepotism of right-wing academics who sided with them. They were also involved in violence in Bologna, a socialist stronghold, whose bourgeoisie relied on the support of the student-dominated squads and their ‘departure from legality and the repudiation of the liberal mentality’.14 On May Day, 1920, fascist patrols took to the Bolognese streets, facing no resistance, and later that year joined members of other ‘patriotic’ organizations to oppose ‘the acts of violence which the extremists of the PSU [socialists] and the anarchists were committing in the city’.15

As 1921 progressed, Mussolini’s squads became more openly violent, intimidating socialists, communists and anarchists and continuing to attack their institutions, burning buildings and destroying printing presses. This was seen as acceptable by the state and the bourgeois in order to keep the ‘Reds’ in hand; the industrial class saw fascism as effective against union militancy; and the landowners saw it as a way to suppress the peasants agitating for land reforms. The activities of the squads were very rarely punished by the police, military, government or courts. Sympathetic members of the military trained or armed them, and the police supplied vehicles for the roving squads to attack political opponents. As the Ras became increasingly powerful locally, the squads, which tended to include youthful students or the unemployed, soon became sanctuaries for misfits and criminals, as well as the fiefdoms of gangsters.

Gangsterism and Squadrismo

Moves by the fascist leadership to control the excesses of the squads were met with resistance. Once in control of a town, the fascists could attack with impunity anyone whom they saw as enemies, political or otherwise, and the Ras used the squads to consolidate their local power, so they were hardly likely to give it up. One notorious Ras was Ricci whose squad controlled Massa-Carrara. Ricci had his own private squad, ‘an armed and organized unit of blackshirts, with a uniform elegantly edged in white thread, and supported by another unit of cavalry’.16 This was used to intimidate the local prefect (the highest position of local authority) who turned ‘a blind eye to what is happening in the province…he denies the existence of the disperta (Ricci’s private squad)…he is unable to find those responsible for murders.’17

The Ras were often involved in feuds, and squad members were used to assassinating local rivals. The Ras also created a system of cronyism, and anyone who enjoyed their protection could almost guarantee their immunity from persecution. Local landowners and farmers were forced into protection rackets and, if they refused, they would be beaten up. The Ras also intimidated voters in order to deliver the results that Mussolini and the city fascists required from the regions. As Lyttelton succinctly notes, ‘Patronage and intimidation were mutually reinforcing; the Ras could threaten their enemies because they could reward their friends.’18 In certain areas both fascist and nationalist organizations sought ‘an alliance between the politicians and the forces of organized crime’.19 The centralization of violence and a flexible morality over whom they collaborated with was a characteristic of fascism, and many squads openly recruited known criminals and bored hooligans, despite a warning by fascist leader Achille Starace in 1922: ‘Do not let yourself be led astray by the stupid prejudice that the convicted criminal dressed in a blackshirt is an element of strength.’20

Faint-Hearted Fascism?

The Ras were often caught between their dedication to fascism and their pursuit of local profits and power. Whilst Mussolini sought to placate his political opponents over the direction of fascism, the rural squads remained at liberty to carry on as they pleased and the more faint-hearted fascists increased their demands that these local power bases be curtailed. After the violent incidents in Turin in 1922, even fascist leaders condemned the squads who were involved in the murder of eleven workers. On 18th December, fascists attacked Turin, beating workers and smashing homes. Some anti-fascists were seized, put in trucks, taken away and beaten up. The anarchist Ferrero, who had been involved in the factory occupations, was tied by his feet to a truck, dragged through the streets, and dumped by the roadside. The anarchist Mari had better ‘luck’: he was bound and thrown into the river Po but managed to get back to safety. The incident became known by militants as the massacre of Turin.

These attacks on individual anti-fascists often led to fatalities. There are many examples of fascist violence, both frequent and horrific, which never saw any legal redress. In 1921 in Sarzana, Dante Raspolini was beaten with clubs by a fascist gang, then tied to the back of a car and dragged for several miles. Ten years later, his son, the anarchist Doro Raspolini, shot at the fascist boss he held responsible. Doro was arrested and tortured to death. Even when exiled, militants still faced fascist violence: in Paris in September 1923, the anarchist Mario Castagna was attacked by a goon squad although he killed one during the fight. The following February, the anarchist Ernesto Bonomini assassinated a fascist journalist in a restaurant. Years later, Carlo Rosselli, an anti-fascist who had gone on to fight in Spain, was assassinated in France along with his brother. It was the second attempt on his life.

Arditi del Popolo

In the face of such violence, anti-fascists were forced to respond more aggressively, and many organized and fought back. Locally, coalitions of socialists, communists, anarchists and syndicalists organized together in the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Army) and political differences were temporarily put aside. However, in 1921, the leadership of the socialists ( PSI) signed the Pact of Conciliation with the fascists, which led to many socialists withdrawing from the anti-fascist militias, although many independent-minded socialists stayed. The newly formed Italian Communist Party ( PCI) feared the autonomy of local militants siding with syndicalists and anarchists, and ordered communists to withdraw from the fray, thus fragmenting and weakening resistance to fascist provocation. Gramsci later justified the withdrawal of communist militants from the Arditi del Popolo, thus ‘the tactic…corresponded to the need to prevent the party membership being controlled by a leadership that was not the party leadership’.21 The communist move away from non-partisan militant anti-fascism can only have hastened the success of Italian fascism. Anti-fascism is at its most effective when ideological differences are subjugated to the more important overall struggle.

Working-class militants, then as now, could not rely on the reformist party’s opposition to fascism or on the police, and had to defend themselves from fascist violence. They set up militias to protect their printing presses, union meetings and social clubs. In Cremona, the fascists led by Farinacci had mobilised against the socialist city council attacking people and property. Parliamentary opposition to fascism proved inadequate and anti-fascist deputies (MPs) were heavily outnumbered.

In 1922, the Alliance of Labour, an anti-fascist organization that had the support of socialists, communists and anarchists, called a general strike in opposition to fascism, but this turned out to benefit no one but the fascists, confirming the allegations they had made to the middle and upper classes that a Red Italy was just around the corner. The Alliance also saw the fascist squads mobilise to suppress the strike, thus securing the favours of the local boss class.

Working-class organizations were soon put under pressure to fight back against fascist gangsterism. In his essay ‘The Rise of Fascism in an Industrial City’, Tobias Abse describes the Arditi del Popolo as ‘this mass violent resistance to fascism on the part of the urban workers and sections of the petit bourgeois’ and that, perhaps optimistically, Italian fascism could have been defeated ‘if only the leadership of the left parties at the national level had been more responsive’.22 Abse cites the example of Parma in 1922 and ‘the total humiliation of thousands of Italo Babo’s Squadristi by a couple of hundred Arditi del Popolo’.23 Abse is critical of the leadership of both the PCI and PSI for not backing the anarchist militant Malatesta in his call for a united front in the Italian towns and cities where the anarchists had a strong influence, such as Livorno. The communists formed their own defence squads. According to Abse, the Arditi ‘exemplified the most organized, coherent and militant phase in the Livornese working class’s resistance to fascism’.24 The Arditi had a strong connection with the working-class movement and worked with—and were from—local communities engaged in the militant anti-fascist struggle, employing offensive as well as defensive actions. Abse describes them as ‘formidable’ and says they numbered three hundred in Pisa, five hundred in Piombino and eight hundred in Livorno.25

Anti-fascists launched a ‘dramatic attack’ on the Livornese fascists who ‘anxious to retaliate against the Arditi, mounted a punitive expedition’.26 Although the local carbinieri, or police militia, tried to maintain neutrality, they unsurprisingly sided with the fascists, which led to a general strike and more violence. Livorno already had a tradition of militant non-sectarian anti-fascism with the League of Subversive Students (anarchists, socialists and communists) and their Arditi del Popolo dished out a few beatings to recalcitrant fascists in the area. In 1921, local anarchists defended ‘the 17th National Congress of the Socialist Party (at which the Communist Party of Italy was to break away)…by beating off fascist gangs aimed at preventing it’.27 After the fall of Mussolini, anarchists again worked with all organizations who were anti-fascist, including the communists, socialists, and republicans.

Sarzana

In 1921, anti-fascists lived under the constant threat of violence. In Sarzana, fascist squads attacked a meeting place for workers and trade unionists; the following day they murdered an anarchist, and then attacked his funeral a few days after that. Militants began to organize themselves against the increasing savagery of these ‘punitive expeditions’ that targeted working-class organizations. Although the police rarely did much to prevent fascist violence (and militants should never rely on the police to do so), there were occasional deviations from this, such as in June 1921, when the fascist gang leader Ticci was arrested after anti-fascists had repulsed an attack on their organizations in Sarzana. The fascists attempted to release him and wreak revenge on anti-fascist militants, but on arrival they were confronted by the carabinieri who shot at them and told them to leave as it was ‘in their own interests’.28 As the fascists withdrew, they were attacked by a section of the Arditi del Popolo led by local anarchists, and whose ranks had increased with workers and anti-fascists; the attack led to at least twenty fascist fatalities and numerous injuries.

The fascist humiliation at Sarzana led to countrywide reprisals that ended with murder. In Pisa, a fascist gang attacked an anti-fascist area but were beaten back. They stopped at a restaurant and murdered an anarchist named Benvenuti. In the ensuing fracas, two fascists were also killed. The squad fled only to return later in a truck supplied by the local carabinieri. They stabbed an anti-fascist’s son to death and threw his body in the river, then set fire to Benvenuti’s house where his two children were sleeping. Other incidents in Pisa included the murder and mutilation of an anarchist printer and the murder of an anarchist schoolteacher. Although the killers were caught, they were later acquitted.

Imola

Imola is another example of anarchists and socialists working together to combat early fascist violence. Anarchists had led an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Dino Grandi, the notorious fascist, earlier in 1920, and the fascists found it initially difficult to suppress militant opposition: ‘the local fascists were squalid figures and in some cases outright lunatics. They found support among the farmers, who praised them and made them drunk with wine and bribes.’29 Anarchists, socialists, and communists had formed Red Guards in order to prevent fascist provocation. On 14th December, trucks filled with fascist thugs descended on Imola and were met by well-organized opposition. Red Guards had occupied strategic points, and anarchist machine guns guarded the entrance to the town. The fascists were persuaded to withdraw by the mayor who feared serious bloodshed.

The fascist squads later returned to Imola and their violence increased. They shot up a socialist meeting, injuring several people, and they attempted to assassinate the anarchist Bassi, but accidentally killed a bystander (a murder for which they tried to frame Bassi). The incident had started with a fascist attack on a local worker who escaped into the pub where Bassi was drinking. The gang followed him in and attacked Bassi, who recalled that ‘the fascist Casella, gun in hand, was almost on top of me and I drew my pistol from the belt of my trousers and shot at him, hitting him in the leg.’30 Although Bassi was wounded he was arrested by the carabinieri and beaten, although he was better off than the fascist in the pub who had been seriously wounded and died.31 This led to armed fascist gangs running through the streets and burning the local offices of anarchists and syndicalists; an anarchist was arrested for shooting a local fascist, and a communist party member was shot in the chest. Shortly after this, a fascist gang attacked an anarchist named Banega in a bar and shot him. Two comrades who were with him escaped, and Banega killed his would-be assassin, ‘a professional thief’.32 This led to more fascist intimidation: they attacked union offices and murdered a disabled anarchist war veteran. Anti-fascists were imprisoned and continuously harassed as organization was made increasingly difficult. Bassi was sentenced to twenty years.

Trieste

By 1920 in Trieste, fascist activity had increased with the local fasci recruiting from the unemployed and disenfranchised, buying their favours with money and cocaine.33 These new members joined the fascists on their days out, attacking militants and destroying offices and printing presses. In Trieste the fascists feared the reaction from the significant Slavic population, the anarchists and the communists, so, with the aid of lorries supplied by sympathetic local military, they began to take the initiative. In 1920, using the killing of two officers as a convenient excuse, the fascists torched the Balkan Hotel, which housed the Slavs’ headquarters, then attacked the local communist party newspaper offices. In response, anti-fascists started a fire at the local shipyard. Other smaller incidents continued to keep anti-fascists busy, such as when fascists tried to storm an anarchist’s house but fled when fired upon. The fascists also tried to take over the Casa del Populo (the People’s House, a leftist meeting place), but were forced to flee yet again after anarchists hastily gathered stashed weapons to rebuff them. In August 1922, fascists attacked an anarchist meeting by throwing two bombs into a café, but they failed to explode. Anti-fascists could also take the initiative, and in July 1921, a group of anarchists and communists attacked a fascist gang with bombs, wounding twenty-eight of them.

Anti-fascists realised that the use of propaganda, along with union organization and strikes, was essential to countering fascist activity, but so, too, was ‘direct action against the gangs and against the rise of fascism’.34 The anti-fascists took militant action against scab labour and shopkeepers who were trying to break strikes. Strike action soon became the only recourse for militant anti-fascism but, with the passing of emergency laws against such activity, these eventually dwindled.

Trieste established a pattern of operation for the squads: mobilization, then provocation, followed by violent action and destruction of leftist infrastructures and organizations. This was wholly connived by the police and local industrialists who supported such operations and thus facilitated the rise of violent fascism in the city. Being better funded and more numerous than the anti-fascists, the fascist gangs soon took control of the streets in Trieste, which led to mass arrests of militants and many anti-fascists going into exile to escape fascist retaliation.

Piombino

Fascism developed more slowly in the militant town of Piombino, where anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists were well organized and made retaliatory attacks on local fascists after Squadristi violence in places like Pisa. The 144th Battalion of the Arditi del Popolo was launched with anarchist, communist and socialist militants to the fore. Following an assassination attempt on a socialist in 1921, militants from the Arditi attacked the local fascists. The Royal Guard came to the fascists’ aid but were disarmed and the Arditi controlled the city for several days. As elsewhere, the Pact of Pacification that the socialist leadership signed with the fascist government fractured anti-fascist militants, weakened the Arditi del Popolo, and ultimately only aided fascism.

The anarchist Morelli was putting up posters against the pact when fascists attacked him. Despite firing back, he was killed. Police arrested two hundred anarchists that night, many of them Arditi militants. The fascists realised their chance and attacked opposition printing presses and offices, only to be confronted by militant anti-fascists and rescued by the ever-sympathetic police. In 1922, fascists again tried to take Piombino but were again repulsed by the well-organized Arditi. In June, using a fascist funeral as a pretext, Squadristi, with Royal Guards from Pisa, destroyed socialist offices and meeting places (despite the pact). They attempted to occupy union offices and the anarchist printers but faced militant responses for a day and a half before taking over the city. Many more anti-fascists faced a future in exile.

The year 1922 was that of Mussolini’s fabled March on Rome, which was accompanied by Il Duce’s declaration that he was prepared to rule by machine gun if need be. Mussolini himself did not march to Rome but caught the train. Fascist violence erupted in the capital, with attacks on radical newspapers and bookshops and with public book-burning. Squadristi attacks on opposition media and their printing presses ensured a one-sided account of events the following day.

Fascist violence continued with the murder of three opposition MPs and savage beatings given out to other opponents. Following the kidnapping, beating and murder of the socialist parliamentarian Matteoti by fascists in 1924, which nearly united oppositional forces against Mussolini, Il Duce increased his control over social and political life in Italy. Socialist and communist deputies such as Gramsci were arrested and their parties banned, so activists were forced to work covertly. Organizations and clubs were illegal ‘and even wine shops suspected of serving as meeting places for “subversives” were closed down’.35 All of these police actions were enthusiastically accompanied by Blackshirt fascist squads and meant that any consolidated anti-fascist activity was going to be extremely difficult in a one-party state.

The consolidation of power by Mussolini did not mean the squads went away, and, in fact, they still proved to be uncontrollable in some parts of the country. Once in power, the fascist squads had no one left to fight, their raison d’etre had vanished, and they resorted to either infighting or found new enemies to bully, which enervated a movement at risk of becoming stale. Some squads were dissolved following party discipline, whilst others simply disguised themselves as leisure associations. Many Squadristi had been calling for a second wave of violence, more out of adventure than political expediency it seems, so they selected new targets in the shape of catholic institutions and freemasons. Leading fascists such as Farinacci wanted to maintain the squads as a bulwark against any possible anti-fascist or industrial agitation as well as to maintain a vital symbol of fascist ideology. However, given the mounting evidence of corruption, blackmail and extortion coming in from the provinces, Farinacci had a difficult case to make; it was obvious to many party functionaries that the Ras were a law unto themselves and very keen on maintaining the status that had elevated them from nowhere men to political somebodies. However, Farinacci, under pressure from Mussolini, was forced to curb the influence of the squads and made moves to suppress them, although, in some areas, they were still used in their traditional scab role of intimidating workers and suppressing working-class organization.

By the 1930s, Mussolini, although hardly exporting fascism in any great measure, was supporting fascist organizations in other countries: the British Union of Fascists benefited from his patronage, as did the Croatian fascists led by Anton Pavelic. In the 1930s. Mussolini supplied men and materiel to Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and he demanded that any captured Italian anti-fascists be deported and executed. Italian fascist mercenaries were humiliated by anti-fascist forces, including Italians at Guadalajara, which proved most embarrassing for Il Duce. He had to satisfy himself by torpedoing neutral ships that he suspected were carrying supplies to the Spanish Republic.

From Prisoners to Partisans!

The anti-fascists who were lucky enough to escape from Italy to France, or even further to America, avoided arrest and imprisonment, whilst those who remained often faced heavy sentences and regular persecution. Many anti-fascists were interned under new provisions for containment of political opposition and were exiled to islands in the Mediterranean. Relations in these camps between anarchists and communists were often fractious, especially with the commencement of the Spanish Civil War. Isolated and in bad conditions, many anti-fascists were stuck there for the rest of their sentences; some had their tariffs extended due to violent insubordination, whilst others remained in the camps until 1943 and the collapse of Mussolini’s regime.

Italian anti-fascists in France faced mixed fortunes: many were arrested and deported back to Italy and the camps, some went to fight in Spain, and others managed to live clandestinely in Vichy after 1941. The difficulty of political activity and life under fascism and in exile is illustrated by the case of Egidio Fossi, an anarchist who, in 1920, was sentenced to twelve years, the first two of which were spent in solitary confinement. Released under a general amnesty in 1925, he was continually harassed by fascists until he escaped to France where he was pursued by the police. Fossi left to fight in Spain in 1936, and in 1940 he was arrested and sent to a German labour brigade. Freed in 1943, he returned to Piombino to join the anarchist struggle. In 1920, another anarchist, Adriano Vanni, was tried with Fossi and, after the general amnesty, fascists attacked him, so left for exile in France. Finding life just as hard there, he returned to Italy where fascist persecution continued. In September 1943, when Italy surrendered, Fossi was a key anarchist organizer in the partisans, and after the liberation he confronted the fascist thugs who had harassed him previously. Incredibly, he did not seek the ultimate retribution.

Pietro Bruzzi was a Milanese anarchist who had lived in Russia and France before fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was deported from France and spent five years on the isle of Ponza. The deposition of Mussolini and his replacement by the Badoglio regime did not mean instant liberation for anti-fascists, especially anarchist ones, and Bruzzi remained in internment. Like others though, he escaped and joined an anarchist partisan group back in Milan, only to be betrayed, arrested and tortured ‘with such ferocity that his face was completely smashed. He gave no information to the Nazis and was subsequently shot. Before dying he still had the strength to shout, “Viva l’anarchia!”’36 Following his death, Milanese anarchists formed the Malatesta and Bruzzi Brigades and fought alongside the socialist Matteoti Brigade to liberate the city. As the partisan struggle intensified in 1943, the local anti-fascists seized weapons including ‘a small calibre piece of artillery,’ which was put to good use by destroying a German truck.37 The Germans eventually took control of the city, but anti-fascists had seized all the weapons from the barracks and the partisan fightback continued for several days. Organization became more difficult as the fascists evacuated the city centre, so partisans moved to the outskirts where farmland made guerrilla activity unfeasible. The partisans formed the revolutionary Livorno Garibaldi Division and continued their armed struggle against fascism. When the American army arrived they demanded that the partisans disarm, which the anarchists refused to do and then ‘set about the elimination of fascist criminals and collaborationists’.38

In 1943, Mussolini established his Salo Republic and adopted a pseudo-radical programme that reverted to the political, anti-capitalist radicalism that Italian fascism had used as a tactic earlier on. According to Deakin, ‘the new regime was republican, but also socialist and revolutionary’.39 Mack Smith stated that

The Mussolini of 1944 reasserted the socialist beliefs of his youth because he now felt that he had been cheated by the world of finance and industry.… To maintain some intellectual coherence he tried to pretend that, notwithstanding appearances, he had never deserted the socialist programme he had put forward for fascism in 1919.40

Hitler was under-impressed and stated that ‘our Italian ally has embarrassed us everywhere’.41 By 1943, it was obvious that the Axis powers could not win the war, and the Italians lost faith in Mussolini who was deposed and arrested as Italy changed sides. Mussolini was rescued from his mountain retreat by a Nazi squad sent by Hitler and led by Skorzeny, a fascist who remained active long after the war. Mussolini’s much reduced empire faced opposition on several fronts: not only were the Allied forces knocking on the door, but on a local level the partisan struggle was intensifying and industrial action was increasing as Mussolini’s power waned. The partisans, often communist-led, began to use more violent terror tactics against the fascist infrastructure, whilst on an industrial level, in November 1943, Turin communists brought out 50,000 workers on strike. The German occupiers could not cope with a city of over 200,000 workers, and many of them aggrieved. A Nazi missive to the beleaguered cops read, ‘The Fuehrer further empowers you to arrest ringleaders and shoot them out of hand as communists.’42 In other cities, clandestine communist squads were active, attacking fascist officials, twenty-eight of whom were assassinated. Reprisals were frequent and brutal. When a leading fascist was assassinated in Ferrara, squads were sent in to exact revenge. Seventeen anti-fascists held in jail were executed. Anti-fascists fired upon the funeral of another fascist assassinated by the communists, to which the fascists retaliated with five thousand rounds of ammunition. To make matters worse for the Axis, deserters and draft-evaders were taking to the hills and swelling the ranks of the partisans waiting there.

In 1944, communist-led strikes in Turin, where the Fiat factories were, spread to Milan and Genoa, and a general strike in March was coordinated with resistance activities and sabotage on the railways that prevented workers from getting to the morning shift. It was a success. The German occupiers recognised the strike was political rather than economic in character and arrested hundreds of strikers. Hitler was so angered that he insisted that twenty percent of all strikers should be deported to Germany. For Deakin, the strikes were a revelation ‘of the extent of progress made by…the National Liberation Committee of the partisan movement, and of the leading part played by the communists’.43 In Turin, the militants continued to have the upper hand and organized further strikes in June. In retaliation for increasing worker and partisan militancy, fascist repercussions maintained their usual brutality: ‘in the valleys infested by the partisans, good results had been achieved by deporting the entire male population’.44 The Nazi Marshall Kesserling issued orders that included:

1. Every act of violence must be followed immediately by counter-measures.

2. If there are a large number of bands in a district, then in every single case a certain percentage of the male population of the place must be arrested, and, in cases of violence, shot.

2. If German soldiers are fired at in villages, the village must be burnt. The criminals or else the leaders must be publicly hanged.45

Killing Mussolini

From his radically diminished powerbase, Mussolini and his remaining sycophants also ordered harsh justice against anti-fascist partisans, demanding that ten should be killed for every dead fascist. As usual, a militia was gathered around the ex-Duce who continued in the remaining territory with ‘a dozen squads…operating in Milan, some of them in receipt of government funds, some composed of criminals running various kinds of protection rackets, some with their own private prisons and torture chambers’.46 Criminality, sadism, and fascism seem to be vicious and frequent fascist bedfellows. One squad, led by Koch, had its own instruments of torture and had profited from their involvement in hard drugs. They were eventually suppressed by the use of the equally psychotic Muti gang whom Mussolini made ‘a fascist legion because of its usefulness in suppressing strikes in a number of factories’.47 In Milan, fifteen people were executed in revenge by the Muti gang for a bomb attack on a fascist truck. After being told they were being deported to Germany, the anti-fascists realised that this was not the case and they attempted to escape but were shot down and left in the sun. The partisans exacted bloody revenge on forty-five Italian and German prisoners. The war was clearly not going to Mussolini’s plan despite his use of the paramilitary Black Brigades, who were ‘an auxiliary corps of Black Shirts composed of Action Squads’.48 These brigades quickly gained a reputation for brutality against political opponents as partisan activity became increasingly successful. Mussolini also encouraged reprisals against partisans and the execution of Italian women and children as well.

Bombast, hyperbole and fabrication were hardly underused by Il Duce, and near the end of 1944 he wrote to Hitler, ‘Even the anti-fascists are no longer waiting with their former enthusiasm…the partisan phenomenon is dying out.’49 It is assumed he meant the partisans that arrested and executed him shortly after. Mussolini’s entourage, and those few willing to fight for him, fled on 28th April 1945 with Il Duce disguised in the back of a truck heading for Austria. He was apprehended on the road by partisans of the (communist) 52nd Garibaldi Brigade led by a Colonel ‘ Valerio,’ who recognised and then arrested them near the amusingly named Dongo. Il Duce, along with his long-term mistress Clara Petacci, and fascist thugs like Farinacci and Starace, were executed by anti-fascists near a village called Mezzegra. Nearby, another group of fleeing fascists were also executed. The bodies of twenty-three fascists were taken back to Milan where they were strung up by the heels in the Piazza Loreto, a symbolic and violent end for a regime that prided itself on its own brutality.

Following the fall of fascism, socialists and communists became assimilated into the democratic political process, and prisoners from these organizations were freed from the islands and camps first. The anarchists were often still detained. During the partisan struggle the allies refused to arm the autonomous anarchist groups, though many anarchists fought side by side with others in groups like the socialist Matteoti Brigade and the communist-dominated Garibaldi Brigade, in addition to forming their own units named after Lucetti and Schirru. The allies also knew that the anarchists would want no part in the organization of the future government, whilst the anarchists did not trust allied command and were rightly mistrustful of the reformist socialists and especially the Stalinist communists following the debacle in Spain. During internment on the island of Ventotene in 1943, the communist leadership had denounced the anarchists for hindering unification of a popular anti-fascist front and as ‘enemies of proletarian unity’.50 Clearly, the communists had little understanding of the reasons why.

Endnotes:

1 David Forgas in Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 74.

2 Maura de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans: Italian Anarchists in the Struggle Against Fascism (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 1999), 4.

3 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 218–219.

4 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 5.

5 Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, 225.

6 Ibid., 242.

7 Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (London: Granada, 1983), 28.

8 Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006), 37.

9 Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism 1919–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995), 23.

10 Ibid., 34.

11 Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), 35.

12 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 244.

13 Smith, Mussolini, 42–45.

14 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 59.

15 Ibid., 60.

16 Ibid., 168.

17 Ibid., 163.

18 Ibid., 169.

19 Ibid., 189.

20 Ibid.

21 Anarchist Federation, Resistance to Nazism (London: AFED, 2008), 26.

22 Forgas, Rethinking Italian Fascism, 56.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 73–74.

25 Ibid., 75.

26 Ibid.

27 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 7.

28 Rivista Anarchica, Red Years, Black Years: Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy (London: ASP, 1989), 6.

29 Ibid., 19.

30 Ibid., 20.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 21.

33 Ibid., 35.

34 Ibid.

35 Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 267.

36 Rivista Anarchica, Red Years, Black Years, 43.

37 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 8.

38 Ibid., 11.

39 F.W. Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 167.

40 Smith, Mussolini, 362.

41 Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini, 207.

42 Ibid., 156.

43 Ibid., 177.

44 Ibid., 187.

45 Ibid., 221.

46 Smith, Mussolini, 357.

47 Ibid.

48 Deakin, The Last Days of Mussolini, 199.

49 Ibid., 234.

50 de Agostini, Prisoners & Partisans, 32.