Nicola Bombacci: from Lenin to Mussolini

By Erik Norling (from the book «Revolutionary Fascism», pages 35-46)

On 29th April 1945 the main fascist leaders were assassinated at the hands of communist partisans. And between those fascists we find, curiously, Nicola Bombacci, former maximum figure of Italian communism, founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), a personal friend of Lenin with whom he was in the USSR during the years of the Revolution, nicknamed the "Red Pope" by the bourgeoisie and finally unconditional follower of Mussolini, whom he joined in the last months of his regime. Is his history a story of betrayal or conversion? Or perhaps, the natural evolution of a national-bolchevik?...

A young revolutionary

Nicola Bombacci is born within a Catholic family (his father was a farmer, a former soldier of the Papal States) from Romagna, in the province of Forli, on 24 October 1879, a few kilometers from Predappio, where four years later would be born the future founder of Fascism.
It is a region marked by fierce worker struggles and by peasants accustomed to rebellion, a land of extreme passions. By father imposition he joined the seminary but quickly abandons when his father died.
In 1903 he joined the anticlerical Socialist Party (PSI) and decides to become a teacher so he can serve the lower classes in their struggle (again the similarities with Duce are evident, having studying in the same college) but quickly devotes his body and soul to the socialist revolution. His ability to work and his organizational skills got him in the staff of the socialist media outlets, allowing him to increase his influence within the labor movement, then becoming Secretary of the Party Central Committee, where he will meet a young guy: Benito Mussolini, who, let us not forget, was the promise of Italian socialism before becoming national revolutionary.

[caption id="attachment_6501" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Nicola Bombacci at the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern. 1920[/caption]

Opposing the moderate line of social democracy, Bombacci along with Gramsci will found the Communist Party of Italy after the internal break up of the PSI and will travel in the early 20's to the USSR, to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had previously been as representative of the Socialist Party and was won over by the Soviet cause. There he befriends Lenin who will tell him in a reception in the Kremlin these famous words about Mussolini: "In Italy, comrades, in Italy there is only a socialist that can lead the people to revolution: Benito Mussolini," and shortly after the Duce would start a revolution, but fascist ...

As leader (Antonio Gramsci was the theorist, Bombacci the organizer) of the newly created PCI, he becomes the authentic "public enemy No. 1" of the Italian bourgeoisie, who nicknames him as "The Red Pope". He will brilliantly revalidate his deputy chair, this time in the lists of the new formation, while the fascist squads begin to take the streets facing the communist militias in bloody combats. Bombacci will endeavor to stop the march of fascism to power but he will fail, from the pages of his newspapers he launches tirades against fascism and claiming the defense of the communist revolution. It is a time when blackshirt squads sing irreverent songs such as: "I don't fear Bombacci / With Bombacci beard we will make spazzolini (brushes) / To brighten the bald of Benito Mussolini". Period when communism is full of internal tensions and Bombacci enters into controversy with his fellow party comrades, being one of the friction points the choice between nationalism and internationalism. He had shown nationalist tendencies before, that did portend his future line. While he was still in the Socialist Party and as consequence of the document protesting against the action of D'Annunzio in Fiume, Bombacci rebelled and wrote about him that he was "Perfectly and profundly revolutionary; because D'Annunzio is revolutionary. Lenin said it in the Congress of Moscow".

The first fascism

In 1922 the fascists march over the capital of the Tiber; nothing can stop Mussolini to take the power, even if he is not absolute during the first years of the regime. As a deputy and member of the Central Comitee of the Party, as well as responsible for foreign relations, Bombacci frequently travels abroad. He participates in the IV International Communist Congress representing Italy and in the Comitee of the Antifascist Action he interviews himself with the russian bolshevik leaders.
He has already half of his life dedicated to the proletariat cause and he is not willing to give up his effort to put in practice his socialist dream. He becomes an enthusiastic advocate of an approximation of Italy to the USSR in the comitee and in the communist press, talking securely in the name of and by instigation of moscow leaders, but using a national revolutionary discourse that disturbs the Party, that is in full disbanding after the fascist victory. The relations with the revolutionary Soviet state would be an advantage to Italy as a nation who also is going through a revolutionary process, even if fascist. He is immediatly accused of being heretic and he is asked to rectify his positions. They can't accept that a communist demands, like Bombacci did, "overcoming the Nation without destroying it, we want it bigger, because we want a government of workers and farmers", socialist without denying that the fatherland is "sacred and undeniable right of every person and of all groups of men". It is called the "Third Position" where fascism revolutionary nationalism meets up with communist revolutionary socialism.

Bombacci is progressively marginalized within the PCI and condemned to political ostracism, although he did not cease contacts with some russian leaders and the russian embassy where he worked at, besides that one of his sons lived in the USSR. He sincerely believed in the Bolshevik revolution and, unlike his italian comrades, the russians had a national sense of revolution and never will deny his friendship with the USSR, even after joining permanently to fascism.

With the expulsion from the party in 1927, Bombacci enters a stage that we can qualify as the years of silence that lasts until 1936, when he launches his magazine called "La Verità" and culminating in 1943 in a gradual conversion to fascism. However it is too easy to consider that Bombacci just changed arms and baggage to fascism as those who want to accuse him of being a "traitor". We will see a slow approach, not to fascism but to Mussolini and the left wing fascist movement, where Bombacci feels cozy and within family, near his revolutionary conceptions, corporatism and social laws of this fascism that "all the postulate is a program of socialism", according to what he said in 1928.

This way we prove that Bombacci was not a fascist, but he supports the achievements of the regime and the figure of Mussolini. He did not approach the fascist party - never signed up for the National Fascist Party - despite his acknowledged friendship with Mussolini, he did not accept jobs and neither renounced his communist origins. His independence was worth more. However he became convinced that the state proposed by the Corporate Fascism was the most perfect realization, socialism put into practice, a state superior to communism. He never concealed his ideals, in 1936 he was writting in the journal "La Verità", confessing his adherence to fascism but also to communism:

"Fascism did a great social revolution, Lenin and Mussolini. Soviet and fascist corporate state, Rome and Moscow. Much had to be rectified, nothing we have to apologise, because today as yesterday we are moved by the same ideal: the triumph of labor."

While this was going on, Bombacci has a long epistolary exchange with Duce trying to influence the old socialist in his social policy. The maximum historian of fascism, Renzo de Felice, wrote about this that Bombacci had the merit of having suggested Mussolini more than one of the measures of the 30's. In one of these letters, dated July 1934, he proposes a program of municipal economy (which Mussolini would put in practise) where Bombacci tells the Duce, that this is him showing his "willingness to work more on what now concerns the interest and the triumph the Corporate State ... ", as also from the pages of his magazine where many times he struggles for an autarky that makes Italy an independent country and able to face the plutocratic powers (read the U.S. but also France and England).
Because of that he strongly supports the intervention in Ethiopia in 1935, but not as colonial campaign but as a prelude to the confrontation between the "proletarian" countries (among whom was Fascist Italy) and the "capitalists" that would inevitably happen, that "world revolution which would restore the global equilibrium". The Italian action would be a "typical and unmistakable proletarian conquest" designed to defeat the "capitalist" powers and whose experience "should be taken as really important ... for the redemption of the people of color that were still under the most terrible oppression of capitalism".

Against Stalin

Between the years 1936 and 1945, hard times for fascism because the armed conflicts were initiated, prelude to the defeat, Bombacci adds his ideological adherence to Mussolini. It is a man with almost 60 years, he has seen how many of his socialist dreams have not been realized, but he is an eternal idealist and is not willing to abandon the struggle for socialism, "this work of redemption and economic upliftment of the Italian proletariat that the socialists of the first hour had started".
His publishing is an economic ruin, his biographers have left constancy of the difficulties and hardships that he suffered. It would have sufficed an opportunistic step to integrate into the official fascism and he would have been provided all the aids of the state apparatus but he does not want to lose his independence although sometimes he accepted grants from the Ministry of Popular Culture.

This phase coincides with a profound reflection on his past mistakes and a series of attacks on Russian communism that had been sold to the capitalist powers betraying Lenin postulates. So writes Bombacci in November 1937, relations between the USSR and the democratic countries had only one explanation that would reveal everything else "the reason is only one, frivolous, vulgar, but true: the interest, money, business" so this former communist could openly declare that "we proclaim with a clear conscience that Bolshevik Russia of Stalin became a colony the hebrew-masonic international capitalism...".
The anti-semitic allusion is not new in Bombacci nor the socialist theorists of the beginning of the century, because we should not forget that anti-Semitism had its most fervent advocates precisely between doctrinaire revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century, when the Jew embodied the figure of the hated capitalist. In Bombacci we don't find a racialist anti-semitism but rather social, according to the positions of Mediterranean jewish problem differently from German or French anti-Judaism.

When World War II starts, and especially when it starts on the Eastern Front, Bombacci participates fully in anti-communist campaigns of the regime. As communist leader knowledgeable of the USSR his voice is heard. However not deny his ideals, rather deepens the thesis that Stalin and his henchmen have betrayed the revolution. Writes numerous articles against Stalin, about the real conditions of life in the so called "communist paradise", the measures adopted by him to destroy all the successes of Leninist socialism. In 1943, shortly before the fall of Fascism, concluded Bombacci summarizing his position on a flyer:

"Which of the two revolutions, fascist or bolshevik, will make history in the twentieth century and will remain in history as the creator of a new order of the world and social values?
Which of the two revolutions solved the agrarian problem truly interpreting the wishes and aspirations of the peasants and the economic and social interests of the national community?

Rome has won!

Moscow materialistic and semi-barbaric, with a totalitarian capitalism of a state-boss that wants to join with full force (Five Year Plans), leading his citizens to the blackest misery, the industrialization existent in the countries that during the nineteenth century followed a bourgeois capitalist process. Moscow completes the capitalist stage.

Rome is something different.

Moscow, with the reform of Stalin, portrays itself institutionally in terms of any bourgeois parliamentary state. Economically there is a substantial difference, because, while the bourgeois government is formed by representatives of the capitalist class, here the government is in the hands of bolshevik bureaucracy, a new class that is actually worse than the capitalist class because it has full control of work, production and life of citizens."

The Italian Social Republic

When Mussolini was deposed in July 1943 and rescued by the Germans a few months later, the National Fascist Party had already crumbled. The organic structure had disappeared, the party leaders from the privileged strata of society run away en masse to Badoglio government and Italy was divided into two (in the south of Rome the Allies advance towards the north).
Mussolini regroups his most faithful, all of them old comrades from the first hour or young enthusiasts, almost none high-level leader, who still believe in the fascist revolution and proclaims the Italian Social Republic. Immediately fascism seems to return to his revolutionary origins and Nicola Bombacci adheres to the proclaimed republic and gives Mussolini all his support. His dream is to undertake the construction of the "Republic of workers" in which both he and Mussolini have fought together in the early twentieth century. Just like Bombacci, other known leftist intelectuals join the new government: Carlo Silvestri (socialist deputy, after the war a defender of the memory of the Duce), Edmondo Cione (socialist philosopher who will be authorized to create a socialist party apart from the Republican Fascist Party), etc.

The first contact with Mussolini occurs on 11 October, just a month after the proclamation of RSI, and is epistolary. Bombacci writes Mussolini from Rome, the city where fascism collapsed noisily (the Romans destroyed all the symbols of the regime in the streets), but there are still many fascists at heart there, and this is the moment that he chooses to declare Mussolini that he is with him. Not when everything was going well, but in the harsh moments just like the true comrades do.

"Today I am more with you than yesterday" - Bombacci confesses - "the vile betrayal of the king/Badoglio brought ruin everywhere and the disgrace to Italy but freed her of all the commitments to the pluto-monarchists of 22. Today the path is free and in my opinion we can only resort to the socialist shelter Above all: the victory of the guns. But to assure the victory it must have the adherence of the working masses. How? With decisive and radical deeds in the economic-productive and syndical sector... Always at your service with great affection for already thirty years."

Mussolini was harassed by the military situation, but he was more determined than ever to carry out his revolution now that he freed himself from the ballast of the past, authorizes the most radical of the party to take power and begins a phase called "socialization"(name proposed by Bombacci and accepted by Duce) which will result in the enactment of laws with clear socialist inspiration, in relation to the creation of trade unions, co-management of enterprises, distribution of profits and nationalization of industries of importance.

All this was summarized in the 18 points of the first (and only) congress of the Republican Fascist Party in Verona, document drafted jointly by Mussolini and Bombacci, who would serve as base to the Social Republican State. In foreign policy he will attempt to persuade Mussolini to make peace with the USSR and to continue the war against the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy, resurrect the Rome-Berlin-Moscow axis from the geopolitical thinkers of National Bolshevism of the 20s, proposal that seems to have succeeded in Mussolini who will write several articles for the republican press on this issue even though this proposal had a tenacious opposition from a broad sector of the party, particularly Roberto Farinacci. Bombacci travels to the north and reinstalls himself near his friend Walter Mocchi, another veteran communist leader converted to Mussolini fascism who works for the Ministry of Popular Culture.

If for many the last Mussolini was a broken man, puppet of the Germans, it is surprising the adherence he receives from men like Bombacci, a true idealist, of imposing stature, with a beard and a compelling oratory, allergic to everything that meant accommodating or to become bourgeois, whereas it is not even now accepting a salary or stipend (only in early 1945 his name appears on a list of proposed salaries of the Ministry of Economics and as Chief of the Single Confederation of Labour and Technique). Bombacci will become personal advisor and confidant of Mussolini, to attract again the workers to the bases of the party. Proposes the creation of union committees, open to non-fascist militants, free union elections and travels to factories from the industrialized North (Milan-Turin) explaining the social revolution of the new regime and why he joined it.
The old revolutionary fighter seems to rejuvenate again, after a rally in Verona and several visits to socialized companies he writes the Duce on December 22, 1944: "I spoke for one hour and thirty minutes in a theater open and enthusiastic... the audience composed of mostly workers cheered by shouting: yes, we want to fight for Italy, for the republic, through socialization ... in the morning I visited Mondadori who is already socialized and I spoke to the workers who constitute the Board of Management that I found them full of enthusiasm and understanding for our mission".
While the military situation deteriorated, the communist terrorist groups (the tragically famous GAP) had already decided to eliminate him by the danger that his activity represented to their objectives.

But the war is almost over. Benito Mussolini, advised by former Socialist deputy Carlo Silvestri and Bombacci, proposes to hand over the power to the Socialists, integrated into the National Liberation Committee. In April 1945, the German military authorities surrender to the Allies, without informing the Italians, it's the end. Abandoned and alone.

Twilight of a National Revolutonary

[caption id="attachment_6502" align="aligncenter" width="500"] From left to right, the dead bodies of Bombacci, Mussolini, Petacci, Pavolini and Starace in Piazzale Loreto, 1945.[/caption]

During the last months of the ISR, Bombbaci continued to campaign to recover the masses and to avoid them to join by Bolshevism. In late 1944 published a pamphlet entitled 'This is Bolshevism', reproduced in the Catholic newspaper "Crociata Italica" in March 1945.
Bombacci insists in the criticism of the real stalinist communism, deviations that destroyed the true revolutionary syndicalism in Europe with Russian interference. In these last weeks of life of the republican experience Bombacci is alongside those who still believe in a compromise with the enemy so as to prevent the ruin of the country. Loyal to the end, he will stay with Mussolini even when everything is definitely lost.

Prophetically, he talks about this to his workers in one of his last public appearances in March 1945:

"Brothers in faith and fight ... I did not renounce to my ideals for which I fought and for which, if God lets me live longer, I will fight forever. But now I find myself in the ranks of the colors of the Italian Social Republic, and returned again because now it is serious and it is truly decisive to fight for the rights of the workers ... "

Nicola Bombacci, always faithful, always serene, will accompany Mussolini in his last dramatic journey to death. On the 25th of April he is in Milan. The account of Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce, on his last encounter with his father, accompanied by Bombacci, shows us the entirety of him:
"I thought about the fate of this man, a true apostle of the proletariat, at some point staunch enemy of fascism and now alongside my father, without any position or prebend, faithful to two different bosses until death. His calmness served me as comfort."

Shortly thereafter, after Mussolini separated from the column of his last faithful to save them from having the same destiny as him, Bombacci is arrested by a group of communist partisans along with a group of fascists. On the morning of April 28 he was placed against the wall in Dongo, in the north of the country, next to Barracu who was a valiant veteran mutilated of war, Pavolini, the poet-secretary of the party, Valerio Zerbino, an intellectual and Coppola, another thinker.
All of them scream, before the murderous platoon, "Long live Italy!". Bombacci while pelting riddled by bullets from the communists, shouted: "Long live socialism!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH_epzyl5xI

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

1) It's not true that during the twenty years of Regime, fascist economy was capitalist. Any legislative action attests to the continuing aggression by the part of the national state and proletariat on the overwhelming power private. Same corporatism, which has nothing to do with the classist meaning assigned it after by the Marxist dialectics, has been a counter-current experience compared to capitalism, because it focuses on organic unity of society. Capitalism naturally exerted containment against Duce's authoritarian revolution, and although rooted in a logic of action / reaction, the regime still managed to impose on the industrialists relations of harmony between work and capital, between society and individuality. In this logic of harmony developed during that two decades the capital-work relation. That revolutionary work did not stop during the regime. This should be clarified in relation to those who still argue that the regime was bourgeois and capitalist.

2) During the Social Republic the presence of the reaction is low and its specific gravity reduced, so that Mussolini could go further. The capitalist is reabsorbed by the organic social structure, and he remains, except in cases in which this role goes beyond the political sphere, the owner of capital and enterprise. But its role is valid only if it acquires social function, and so that it becomes participating and joint responsible. It is no longer above others, no longer master, but he manages control joint with workers. The marked social vocation is evident. This has a definite economic meaning, but an even more important political issue.

3) Certainly the Social Republic, as he had at birth "meant" to the tragic end, he had to impress more strongly the trace of the true dignity for all the Peoples. As the sun before sunset greets us with a light yet stronger.

4) Socialization (Fascist Socialism) is altruism, is the dignity of Work, and moral and political uprightness of the workers. If you are selfish you will be worse than your masters

5) The enemies of Bolshevism and Fascism were the right wing pluto-monarchist.

6) Capital in the service of work and not work in the service of capital ... The profit in the service of man and not man in the service of profit ...

7) If Lenin, which I have always admired deeply, had he lived, the program of the USSR would have been different. We probably saw Fascism, Nationalism and Bolshevism united against another enemy: the Plutocracy.

8) Dear Comrades *,... I have not changed, are always the same. Comrades! Look me in the face, comrades! You are now wondering if I am the same socialist agitator, the founder of the Communist Party, Lenin's friend that I was before. Yes, I'm still the same! I never denied the ideals for which I fought and for which I will always fight. I was next to Lenin in the beaming days of the Revolution, I believed that Bolshevism was the vanguard of working-class triumph, but then I realized the deception. Socialism shall not be realize by Stalin, but by Mussolini, which is Socialist, even if for twenty years he has been hampered by the high class, who then betrayed him. But Mussolini was freed of all the traitors and he needs you, the workers, to create the new proletarian state!
*words Compagno(communist) and Camerata(fascist) correspond to the same word, Comrade, in english, but they have a very different meaning in italian language!In deutsch: compagno-genosse, camerata-kamerade

9) "I had a great social revolution, Mussolini and Lenin. Soviet and Fascist Corporative State, Rome and Moscow. We have very to correct, but nothing to be forgiven, today as yesterday the same ideal joins us together: the triumph of Work."

10)"Duce, I have already written in "The Truth" - having had a first impression - of what Freemasonry, Plutocracy and the Monarchy were plotting against you. Today more than ever I am with you. The dirty betrayal of the King and Badoglio , which has unfortunately dragged Italy into ruin and dishonour, there has, however, freed you from all the components of a pluto-monarchist right-wing of 1922 ...».

11) To honour a hero like me, the Communist Bombacci, does not need to force to throw into disrepute other heroic figures, however.

[caption id="attachment_6504" align="aligncenter" width="350"] Tomb of Nicola Bombacci in Camp X of the Maggiore Cemetery in Milan[/caption]