Terrorism and the Decline of Italian Communism

A succession of public relations disasters, beginning in February 1956 with Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Iosif Stalin, severely damaged the international prestige of the Soviet Union even among Marxists. The Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year greatly compounded the crisis in world Communism. By the time the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Moscow’s ideological hegemony over world Communism had ceased to exist. The Soviet Union remained a military superpower, but Communists the world over looked mostly to other countries—China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam—for an ideal Marxist model. The Cold War history of Italy illustrates the problems created for Communism by the sharp decline of Soviet prestige after 1956. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) had come into existence in 1921 as a replica of the Bolshevik Party. Routed by the Fascist regime, the PCI barely survived in Soviet exile and obediently served its benefactor, Stalin. Palmiro Togliatti, the party boss following the imprisonment of Antonio Gramsci in 1926, became one of Stalin’s most trusted allies. When Stalin died in 1953, Togliatti’s cultural journal, Rinascita, hailed the Soviet dictator as the epitome of Marxist man. Togliatti tried to downplay the significance of 1956 and to keep intact his ideologically variegated two-million-strong party, but he could not prevent a crisis from erupting. Danilo Breschi, a research historian at the Libera Università degli Studi San Pio V in Rome, has written an excellent book about the emergence of the extraparliamentary left in Italy, one of the most important consequences of the post-1956 rifts within Communism. The extraparliamentary left sought to keep alive the revolutionary creed of Marxism-Leninism, in opposition to a PCI ever more inclined to abandon the cause. Togliatti’s party suffered major losses because of its close identification with the Soviet Union. By 1958 more than 200,000 members had dropped out of the party. Its youth organizations were particularly hard hit. The decline of PCI membership continued without interruption for much of the next decade. In 1964, the year of Togliatti’s death, the party had 43 percent fewer cells than in 1956. The percentage of workers in the PCI also dropped sharply during this period. To meet its severe challenges, the party turned first to Luigi Longo and then to Enrico Berlinguer for leadership, but neither man possessed the stature of Togliatti, “il Migliore” (the Best), as the Communist faithful called him. Breschi characterizes the identity crisis of the PCI as a struggle between the party’s reformist and radical elements. The reformists won eventually, but not decisively until long after the 1968 terminal date of Breschi’s study. As the forces of moderation gained the upper hand in the PCI, the extraparliamentary left grew in size and vehemence. Breschi sets out in the book to understand the revolutionary ideological and political forces that led to the great contestation of that year when, on an epic scale and amid mounting violence, radicalized students and workers defied the democratic capitalist status quo. From the extremist fringes of the extraparliamentary left came the scourge of Red Brigade terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s. The PCI always stood at the center of this national drama. From within the party, radicals tried to galvanize its revolutionary Marxist-Leninist soul. From without, diverse extraparliamentary left groups sought the same objective. The Red Brigades, the most notorious of all the extraparliamentary left formations, kept uppermost in mind the political dynamics within the PCI as they formulated their terrorist strategy. Breschi provides a portrait gallery of the radical intellectuals who inspired the extraparliamentary left in Italy. Raniero Panzieri, the chain-smoking Jewish editor of the Quaderni rossi, presided over the seedtime of the movement. Panzieri, a member of the Socialist Party, opposed his party’s post-1956 calls for moderation and fought to salvage Leninism from the scandals then obliterating Stalin’s reputation. From the first issue of the Quaderni rossi, he and his collaborators called on Communists and Socialists alike to recognize the absolute futility of any attempt to seek an accommodation with capitalism. The Marxist-Leninist agenda could become a reality, he thought, only through the revolutionary overthrow of the status quo. Stalin had been a flawed leader, Panzieri acknowledged, but Vladimir Lenin remained for him an unblemished icon. His “Back to Lenin” thesis became the rallying cry for the extraparliamentary left, which viewed the PCI as a weak and vacillating organization, increasingly at home with the Christian Democratic status quo, and disinclined to think seriously any longer about revolution. Panzieri helped to promote Mao Zedong’s China as the most genuinely Marxist society on earth and the rightful heir to Lenin’s vision. Thus began the long period of reverence on the extraparliamentary left first for the glories of the Great Leap Forward and later for the Cultural Revolution. Panzieri died of a cerebral embolism at the age of 43 in 1964. By then he had become marginalized by even-more-radical leaders who criticized him for wasting time with sociological surveys of worker conditions in the factories instead of storming the breastworks of capitalism. Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, who had collaborated with Panzieri on the Quaderni rossi, rejected what they called his excessively theoretical approach to revolution. Following a spectacular 1962 outburst of worker violence in Turin’s Piazza Statuto, Tronti and Negri thought that the time for Panzieri-like surveys had ended. They wanted a revolution along the lines of the Bolshevik October to start immediately. Abandoning the Quaderni rossi, they founded their own journal, Classe operaia, and celebrated operaismo (worker power). Tronti wrote one of the classic left-wing books of the period, Operai e capitale (1966), in which he openly called for subversive practices. The PCI, though still unable to heed once and for all either reformist or revolutionary impulses, had no difficulty deciding that Tronti meant trouble and booted him out of the party. Negri, who by 1962 had embarked on his meteoric career on the political sciences faculty at the University of Padua, also preached revolution to the workers. He and Tronti soon experienced the same kind of rupture that both men earlier had gone through with Panzieri—over the timing of the revolution, with Negri the more impatient of the two. In 1972, Tronti rejoined the PCI, which by this time had made a fairly clear choice to be a strictly institutional party. On high liturgical occasions Communist leaders still invoked the political formulas of Marxism-Leninism, but few in Italy (especially the rabidly anti-PCI elements on the extraparliamentary left) took such incantations seriously. The student movement of the late 1960s and a nearly contemporaneous spate of violent factory strikes appeared to validate Negri’s position. After some initial hesitation, the PCI waded into the turbid waters of the student protest movement. By giving the students their full and enthusiastic support, party leaders hoped to reestablish the prestige of the PCI in the eyes of young people and, at the same time, to thwart the then surging extraparliamentary left. The protestors quickly fell under the sway of leaders who used complaints about university matters, such as overcrowding and examination procedures, to raise much larger questions, in particular what they vehemently denounced as the imperialism of the United States in Vietnam and the exploitation of multinational capitalism. In May 1968, while schools all over Italy erupted in violent protest, Luigi Longo “legitimized the student movement as a social force seriously antagonistic toward the capitalist system” (p. 201). Breschi writes persuasively about “the long Italian 1968,” by which he means that the immediate historical background for this seminal year began with 1956 and the direct historical consequences of it lasted through the terror- ridden 1970s and 1980s. His study of the violent ideology that paved the way for the post-1968 physical violence, he argues in the conclusion, underscores “the exhaustion of the residues of the revolutionary mystique [il rivoluzionarismo] and of the aversion toward industrial modernity [that had been] massively present in Italian political culture” (p. 255). Alessandro Orsini also holds the Marxist left mainly responsible for the “age of lead,” as the period of terrorism is known in Italy. A professor of political sociology at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Orsini adopts a complex theoretical approach in his study of terrorism. Max Weber, A. J. Toynbee, Karl Mannheim, Kurt Lewin, Milovan Djilas, Crane Brinton, and many other thinkers serve him as guides in understanding why individuals and groups turn to terrorist violence. Based on their theoretical insights and his own research, he argues that the fanatical mentality of terrorists is “the same everywhere, without distinction of time and place” (p. 365). Orsini’s thesis calls to mind Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, a book that he cites in his bibliography. Hoffer claimed that intelligent, well-adjusted, and hard-working people do not join fanatical sects or revolutionary groups. He thought that some degree of physical, mental, and psychological malfunctioning would have to be present in a person before the line beyond normal human functioning could be trespassed against and the comforting illusions of ideological certitude be embraced, along with a willingness to kill for them. Hoffer’s book left one very important question unanswered. If it is true, as he says, that all societies produce true believers of one kind or another, why do some societies produce many more of them than others do? Scandinavia ranks very low as a supplier of true believers, the Middle East very high. To explain such wide divergences in the particular results for what Hoffer proposes as a universal law, a historical explanation must supplement his psychological theory. As a case study in the kind of fanaticism that Hoffer writes about, Italy has more in common with the Middle East than with Scandinavia. Almost from its inception as a united country in the mid-nineteenth century, Italy gave rise to powerful extremist cultures on the left and right. Orsini does not survey the entire record of Italy’s historical experience with ideological extremism, but he begins his account well before 1956, Breschi’s starting point. Orsini asks what he knows to be an extremely controversial question in Italy: “Did the Italian Communist party bear any responsibility for the genesis of the Red Brigades?” (p. 197). To answer this question, Orsini surveys the entire post–WorldWar II history of the Italian left. Citing the memoirs and the testimony of the Red Brigadists themselves, he shows how the Marxist-Leninist instruction they received in Communist youth groups exalted the cause of revolution and demonized the Christian Democratic establishment as little more than a continuation of the Fascist dictatorship. The Red Brigadists claimed to be doing nothing more than following the premise of Marxist-Leninist doctrine to its logical conclusion. Orsini passes harsh judgment on the PCI: “In the genesis of the Red Brigades, the Italian Communist party had a most evident ‘pedagogical’ responsibility” (p. 197). With increasing unease, the PCI denounced the Red Brigadists as inauthentic revolutionaries, while clinging rhetorically to the Leninist principle of supporting authentic revolution. This game could not go on forever. The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the former prime minister and long-time Christian Democratic leader, forced the party to make some either/ or choices in favor of revisionism. Reading Red Brigade communications from the People’s Prison where the doomed Moro met his ghastly fate, the Communist intellectual Rossana Rossanda had the sensation of leafing through “the family album.” They contained nothing less than a restatement of the Marxist-Leninist teachings that the party long had made its own. Orsini wisely supplements his psychological theory about terrorism with a socioeconomic explanation. The Red Brigades appeared in a particular historical context that had been created by the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s. Those years of phenomenal growth put Italy’s traditional peasant culture on the road to extinction and created the foundation for the country’s emergence as a G7 member. The change happened with disorienting suddenness. Such periods in history favor extremist causes, Orsini avers that the Red Brigades “were the messianic response to the trauma caused by an abrupt acceleration of the processes of modernization that within the space of a few years changed the face of Italy” (p. 144). Orsini wants us to understand Italian terrorism as a consequence of psychological, ideological, and economic forces. Men and women psychologically alienated from the emerging consumer society and armed with a revolutionary ideology that enjoyed widespread appeal could plausibly, in the eyes of many thousands of admirers, present themselves as the heroic avengers of Communism. For fifteen years, they inflicted a reign of terror on the upholders of Italy’s democracy. They murdered and maimed policemen, politicians, military officers, university professors, union officials, businessmen, journalists, and judges. No other advanced country of the Western world experienced anything like Italy’s age of lead. The terrorists could not have succeeded for as long as they did and to the extent they did without the approval and support from a politically significant segment of the population. In a 74-page chapter titled “IMaestri delle Br,” Orsini takes the reader on a historical excursion that features famous episodes of terrorism from Thomas Muntzer to the Russian Populists of the late nineteenth century. He presents Lenin in the next chapter, “The Purifiers of the World in Power,” as the most inºuential twentieth-century heir of this Western revolutionary tradition, which contained both religious and secular elements. Lenin’s inºuence extended directly to the Red Brigades. From him they learned what revolutionary fanatics always preach: the world is divided into only two camps, the saved and the damned. The damned must be annihilated if the world itself is to be saved. Orsini summarizes the modern history of terrorism as follows: “Robespierre, Babeuf, Lenin, Mao, and the Red Brigadists think and act according to the same purifying logic. They live to kill” (p. 352). The new Red Brigades, responsible for the murder of pro-globalization economists Massimo D’Antona in 1999 and Marco Biagi in 2002, are the latest group of revolutionary fanatics to appear in Italy. Hoping to exploit resentments in Italy over globalization and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they echo the rhetoric of their predecessors and present themselves as the new vanguard of the Marxist-Leninist revolution that the contradictions of capitalism make inevitable. Orsini warns that they remain a dangerous group, despite the many setbacks they have suffered at the hands of the police. Italy never seems to run out of true believers, he laments. The book ends with a long appendix on Julius Evola and neofascist terrorism. In a study of the Red Brigades, this appendix might appear to be out of place. Yet Orsini makes a good case for its inclusion in the book. He cites a statistic that often goes overlooked in accounts of Italian terrorism: Of the 8,400 terrorist attacks in Italy from 1975 to 1980, 3,000 were perpetrated by extreme right-wingers. This era in Italian history remains badly out of focus unless the radical neofascist contribution to terrorism receives its due. After analyzing representative profiles of right-wing assassins and terror bombers, he concludes: “The brigadists, red and black, belong to the same anthropological type” (p. 393). In other words, both groups lived in the catacombs of their ideological fantasies and sustained themselves with a violent hatred of what they perceived as the soul-destroying Italian imitation of American consumer society. Orsini identifies Julius Evola as the man of ideas most responsible for the ways in which extremists on the right think and act. Evola played the same role on the right that Panzieri and Negri did on the left. Evola, like the far-left theorists of revolutionary violence, did not fire weapons or set off bombs himself. Nevertheless, fanatics in such right-wing terror groups as Ordine Nuovo and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, including some terror bombers and murderers of policemen and judges, interpreted his books as exhortations to a violent assault on the bourgeois status quo. His most famous book, The Revolt against the Modern World, was a breviary for them. The Evolian injunction, “to blow up everything” (far saltare tutto in aria), gave the neofascist bombers and killers their marching orders, according to Orsini. In Evola’s books, they found their “psychological refuge” (p. 416). Breschi and Orsini have presented us with two books of high scholarly distinction. Orsini is the more theoretically ambitious of the two authors. Anatomia delle Brigate Rosse is a tour de force of intellectual history and a major attempt to explain both the Italian experience with terrorism and terrorism in general. Breschi aims at a smaller target, the lead-up to the peculiar Italian experience in 1968 and its tragic aftermath. His monograph will take its place among the essential studies of this subject. The different though complementary reflections of these two young scholars deserve a wide readership.