Nicola Bombacci

Early life

Nicola Bombacci was born in a hamlet of the Municipality of Civitella di Romagna, in the province of Forlì, on 24 October 1879.^[1] Bombacci's family made their living farming land owned by the parish of Don Nicolò Ghini, from whom Bombacci took his own name. While still a child, he moved with his family to Meldola, a significant town in the lower Bidente valley, where he finished elementary school and where his family would settle permanently. In 1895, he was enrolled in the seminary in Forlì.

After leaving the seminary for health reasons, he continued his studies at the age of twenty-one at the Giosuè Carducci School in Forlimpopoli to become an elementary school teacher. He was enrolled in the third-year class, the same one attended by Benito Mussolini, who was four years younger. Bombacci later graduated in 1901.^[2] It was during this period that Bombacci became involved with the socialist movement.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching career

His teaching career began with minor postings in the province of Reggio Emilia. He left the region for his first significant post in Villa Santina in the province of Udine in 1904–1905, then returned to Emilia the following year to a post in Baricella. During this period, he married Erissene Focaccia, who was also a teacher. In 1906, the family moved to Cadelbosco di Sopra, in Reggio Emilia, where they went through a period of financial hardship before he was given substitute-teaching posts, first in Villa Argine [it] and then in Cadelbosco di Sotto. In 1907 he was given a permanent teaching post in Monticelli d'Ongina, in the province of Piacenza.

Entry into socialist politics

In 1909 he gave up teaching to devote himself to politics. He became active in the union movement across various areas and cities, working between Crema, Piacenza, and Cesena. There, in 1910, he took on the role of secretary of the socialist federation and the directorship of the weekly Il Cuneo, seizing the opportunity to return to activity near Meldola, where his family still lived. In 1911 he was a member of the National Council of the General Confederation of Labor (CGdL). In May of that same year, Bombacci resigned from the Cesena federation. In the following months, he withdrew from political activity before returning in November 1911 as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro of Modena. ^{[citation needed]}

In Modena, during the first world war, he found his springboard, becoming the undisputed leader of local socialism, so much so that Mussolini himself (who had known him since their school days at Forlimpopoli, when both were students) called him "the Kaiser of Modena". Between the Balkan Wars and the Russian Revolution, he simultaneously served as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro, secretary of the Modena provincial Socialist Federation, and director of the socialist periodical Il Domani.^{[citation needed]}

Italian Socialist Party (1917–1921)

In July 1917 Bombacci was appointed a member of the Directorate and vice secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), working alongside party secretary Costantino Lazzari in drafting the famous circulars sent to the party's local branches, and alongside periodical director Giacinto Menotti Serrati in the effort to win over the workers' movement to the Maximalist socialist current. Alongside Lazzari and Mussolini, he became a national leader of the revolutionary wing of the party, known as the Massimalisti. ^{[citation needed]}

In 1918, with the arrests of Lazzari in January and Serrati in May, he was left practically alone at the head of the party.^[3] He himself was arrested for 'defeatism' in January and tried while at liberty, until the subsequent arrest of 31 October 1918 and release on 20 November.^[4] A proponent of a strongly anti-reformist line, he centralized and imposed a strict hierarchy on the whole of Italian socialism. The party's provincial federations and the Gruppo Parlamentare Socialista (GPS) became directly subordinate to the PSI's Directorate, which the socialist union and cooperative organizations were likewise tied to.^[5]

In October 1919, together with Serrati, Gennari, and Salvadori, he drafted the programme of the Maximalist faction, which won out at the PSI's 16th National Congress (Bologna, 5–8 October 1919).^[6] He was elected Party secretary (11 October 1919) and, the following month, in the first general elections of the postwar period (16 November 1919), was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Bologna constituency with over a hundred thousand votes, becoming one of the most powerful and visible figures of Maximalist socialism during the biennio rosso (the "red biennium").^[7] In the 1919 general election, Bombacci led the PSI to its best result ever, with the party winning 32.3% of the vote and becoming the largest in parliament.^{[citation needed]}

In January 1920 he presented a plan to establish Soviet councils in Italy,^[8] which received little support and much criticism. But it did help spark a heated theoretical debate in the party press. The rejection of his proposal to establish Soviet councils led Bombacci, on 25 February 1920, to cede the position of secretary of the PSI to Egidio Gennari. In April, he became the first Italian socialist to meet with Bolshevik representatives, in Copenhagen,^[9] while that summer he was among the members of the Italian delegation that traveled to Soviet Russia, also taking part in the Second World Congress of the Communist International.^{[citation needed]}

Having founded the Communist Faction in autumn 1920 together with Antonio Gramsci, Amadeo Bordiga, Egidio Gennari, and Antonio Graziadei, and having also served as director of the periodical Il Comunista, Bombacci firmly backed the split at the 17th National Congress of the PSI (Livorno, 15-21 January 1921), becoming one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, the Italian Section of the Third International (PCd'I), where he became a member of its Central Committee.^[10]

Italian Communist Party (1921–1927)

Re-elected as a deputy in the spring 1921 general election for the Trieste constituency, Bombacci, lacking a faction of his own within the new party, found himself somewhat isolated from both Gramsci's, Togliatti's, Terracini's, and Tasca's Ordine Nuovo group and Bordiga's abstentionist faction. He aligned himself with the right wing of the PCd'I alongside Francesco Misiano, favoring a rapprochement with the Maximalists and opposing the sectarian, ideologically rigid party that Bordiga wanted.^[11] Despite his break with socialism, he remained a friend of Mussolini due to their shared past as fellow Massimalisti in the PSI.^[12]

Just before the March on Rome, Bombacci became the editor-in-chief of the sole legal edition (dated 10 September 1922) of Il Fanciullo Proletario (Proletarian Kid), a Communist illustrated periodical aimed at children.^[13] He was soon pushed out of the Communist Party's leadership bodies, beginning with its Central Committee. The controversy reached the highest levels of the Soviet leadership in November 1923, when the PCd'I's Executive Committee unilaterally decided to expel him without consulting the Communist International. Bombacci, then secretary of the Communist Parliamentary Group, was accused of having suggested a possible union between the two revolutions, that of the Bolshevik one and that of the fascist one, in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 30 November 1923.^{[citation needed]}

In January 1924, Bombacci's term as a deputy in the Chamber ended. He was recalled to Moscow, where he represented the Italian delegation at the funeral of Lenin. There, Grigory Zinoviev decided to reinstate him in the PCd'I.^{[citation needed]}

His estrangement from the Party became evident, and in 1927 the exiled Communist leadership decreed his final expulsion, for embracing a pro-fascist position.^[14] His expulsion was formalized with a terse announcement in an issue of l'Unità: "Nicola Bombacci is expelled from the Communist Party of Italy for political unworthiness."^{[citation needed]}

Drift toward fascism

During what have been called the "years of silence,"^[15] Bombacci continued to live in Rome with his family, though his collaboration with the Soviet Embassy appears not to have extended much beyond 1930. Given his difficult financial situation and his son Wladimiro's serious health problems, Mussolini granted him some financial assistance for his son's medical treatment and found him a position at the International Educational Cinematographic Institute [it], part of the League of Nations, in Rome.^[16] He never officially joined the National Fascist Party.^{[citation needed]}

From 1933 onward, Bombacci moved gradually and increasingly towards fascism, to the point that by 1935 it is fair to speak of a genuine embrace of it. Mussolini, at the beginning of 1936, permitted him to found La Verità (from Pravda), a political magazine financed by the Ministry of Popular Culture with an initial print run of 25,000 copies and aligned with the positions of Mussolini's regime. In the journal, Bombacci expressed his adhesion to both Fascism and Communism, writing: "Fascism made a great Social Revolution. Mussolini and Lenin. Corporate and Soviet fascist state, Rome and Moscow. We have gone far enough to regret it; we have nothing to apologize for, for both in the present and in the past we are driven by the same ideal: the triumph of work."^[17][18] Aside from a few interruptions caused by opposition from hardline Fascist figures such as Roberto Farinacci and Achille Starace, it lasted until July 1943.

A great social revolution is underway. This is the hour of the collective. (...) Today, as yesterday, the same ideal moves us: the triumph of labor. We have fought for this triumph for thirty-five years. (...) Today history places before our eyes the experiment of Mussolini. It is no longer merely a doctrine, it is a new order boldly launching itself onto the main road of social justice.^[19]

Various other former socialists also contributed to the project, including Alberto and Mario Malatesta, Ezio Riboldi, Arturo Labriola, Walter Mocchi [fr], Giovanni and Renato Bitelli, and Angelo Scucchia [it].^[20] By the beginning of the 1940s, Bombacci had officially distanced himself from communism by publishing pamphlets warning the Italian population on the dangers of Bolshevism and how Stalinism had degenerated socialist values.^[21]

Italian Social Republic (1943–1945)

Comrades! Look me in the face, comrades! You are now asking yourselves whether I am the same socialist agitator, the founder of the Communist Party, the friend of Lenin that I once was. Yes indeed, I am still the same man! I have never renounced the ideals for which I have fought and for which I will always fight. I stood beside Lenin in the radiant days of the revolution, I believed Bolshevism was at the vanguard of the workers' triumph, but then I came to realize the deception.^[22]

After the fall of the fascist regime on 25 July 1943 and, in September, the liberation of Mussolini from Gran Sasso and the creation of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), Bombacci decided voluntarily to go to Salò, where he became a sort of advisor to Mussolini.^[23] He joined Mussolini's entourage and frequently visited the dictator at Villa Feltrinelli. According to R. J. B. Bosworth, Bombacci "almost became a friend" for Mussolini at this time.^[24]

He was the author of the economic theory of fascist socialization, prepared for the Congress of Verona. Nicknamed "the Red Pope" by the bourgeoisie, Bombacci told a crowd in Genoa in 1945 that "Stalin will never make socialism; rather Mussolini will."^{[25][failed verification]} During the final months of the war (September 1944 to March 1945), he continued to champion fascism as the one true revolution and the fulfillment of the triumph of labor, giving lectures and speaking to workers in public squares across northern Italy.^{[citation needed]} From then on, the former founder of the Communist Party of Italy enjoyed greater room and visibility, and he devoted himself body and soul to fascism, drawing on his natural gift for oratory and his closeness to the working classes. He published several pamphlets on the dangers of Bolshevism and the Stalinist degeneration of communist principles,^[26] and took part in the Congress of Verona.

The project of socializing businesses and the means of production is attributed specifically to Bombacci. Heavily promoted by the Republican Fascist regime, it was approved by the RSI's council of ministers in February 1944, but it was secretly boycotted by industrialists and strongly opposed by communists. Workers responded with strikes.^[27] The project of socialization overseen by Bombacci was viewed with suspicion and boycotted by the occupying Nazi German forces; it was also unpopular among the Italian proletariat, who responded with huge strikes.^[28] It even descended into farce when it came time to vote for the management councils, with names of celebrities such as Henry Ford and Greta Garbo being put forward as candidates.^[29]

Death

Bombacci, then 65 years old, remained at Mussolini's side until the very end. Partisans captured him on Lake Como, in the same car as the Duce, and shot him along with other fascist hierarchs, including Alessandro Pavolini and Ferdinando Mezzasoma, at Dongo on the lake's shore on 28 April 1945 (Mussolini, by contrast, died at Giulino di Mezzegra). His last words, spoken just before he was shot, were either "Long live Italy! Long live Socialism!" or, in other accounts, "Long live Mussolini! Long live Socialism!", shouted at the firing squad. What is certain, in both versions, is that his final words hailed socialism.^[30][31]

On the morning of 29 April, he was hung by the feet at the Piazzale Loreto petrol station in Milan, alongside Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and several other fascist hierarchs. On the document attesting to his execution, beneath his name was handwritten "Supertraditore" ("Super-traitor").^[32][33][34]

Four days after his death, his old friend and comrade Victor Serge read of the event in a newspaper in Mexico, where he was living in exile, and wrote several pages in his journal concerning him. Engaging in what he called "practical psychology", Serge tried to imagine how a former communist could become a fascist: "Among some Italians, particularly among the ex-Marxists and ex-syndicalists, two visions became apparent: that with the liberal democracies exhausted and socialism weakened, the corporatist regimes were going to impose their new formulas; and that through this narrow gate would pass collectivism, the precondition for a socialism different from that desired by the nineteenth century, ... corresponding better to man's basic nature."^[35]