A Civil War (144 page)

The meaning of friendship is extended in the ‘Dichiarazione costitutiva' of the Italian Labour Party: ‘Relations between party members will naturally be those among “friends” who love and respect one another, by virtue of the fact that their lives are inspired by the same ideal and that they have passed through the same sieve.' The rigour of this small group went so far as to sanction these relations between friends economically: all its members ‘recognise the party's right to make use of their private assets, movable or immovable, at any given time, with the exception of articles of everyday use and the house they live in'.
¹⁵
A newspaper published by the group commented that with this ‘direct and immediate testimony … we intend to anticipate, as far as is possible, the kind of society in which we believe'.
¹⁶

The literature about the death camps and prisoner-of-war camps has shown how hard it was to reconcile solidarity with self-protection, when what was at stake was physical survival.
¹⁷
The
resistenti
, in general, were not put to such atrocious tests except when, subjected to torture, they had the lives of their comrades in their hands. Above all in the mountain bands friendship and solidarity became unaffected, cheerful fraternity. This was more a sincerely experienced fact than a carefully worked out programme.

The theoretical degrading that
fraternité
had suffered in the great revolutionary triad was not, in fact, redressed by the Resistance. If, because of its Proudhonian components, Silvio Trentin's
Libérer et Fédérer
had greatly insisted on the theme of solidarity, which was the version of fraternity assimilated by the workers' movement,
¹⁸
Proudhon does not seem to have been given prominent space in the Italian underground press. His name appears in what is at least an anomalous setting,
La Democrazia del Lavoro
, organ of the party of that name, consisting of old and grey, mainly southern, transformists.
¹⁹

Solidarity as a category has been widely used to interpret the relations between the partisans and the population, especially the peasant population. The Allied prisoners who had escaped, above all at the beginning, were astonished
and struck by the welcome they were given by the peasants.
²⁰
An episode of extraordinary symbolic force was that of the Romagna peasant who washed the feet of an Allied soldier and was shot by the Fascists for the ‘moral poverty and irresponsible servility' to which he had ‘taken his sense of hospitality'.
²¹

Friendship reduced the distance between public and private; but the ties established through it could sorely try the distinction, which is always a tension as well, between the two. Just as fraternity could slide towards terror and just as solidarity could represent itself in contorted guise in reprisals, so friendship proved inadequate to establish political relations single-handed. Saint-Just had written the noblest pages on friendship; but his attributing to it the character of a civic virtue had led him to the aberrant conclusion that ‘he who declares that he does not believe in friendship should be outlawed' and ‘if a man commits a crime, may his friends be outlawed'.
²²
Those who saw religion as the foundation of human relations could declare the firm distinction between ‘religious contact' – almost a sublimation of friendship – which ‘occurs on a strictly personal plane, from soul to soul', and politics, ‘which is created by mobilising masses and not individuals': political living is for everyone, political action only for a few.
²³

It is easy to see how in the Communist Catholics this distinction, which was in tune with their conception of politics as ‘tecnica', favoured peaceful coexistence between Catholicism and Communism as well as an implicit appeal to the elitist doctrine of the Leninist party, in which professional revolutionaries must not let themselves be sidetracked by personal affections. ‘I have no one, only my mother. First the Party and then my mother', the Communist Ettore Suatoni had said before the Special Tribunal.
²⁴
Gian Carlo Pajetta later wrote: ‘I often wondered, then, if there were cases when the “private” should be given pride of place over the “political”. I've asked myself the same question at other times in
my life. The answer has always been the same: “Never”.'
²⁵
But one of Fenoglio's characters, an aspiring partisan who became a fervent Garibaldino, replies to the political commissar of the Stella Rossa formation who in the exam that he puts him through includes the question, ‘Would you prostitute your sister?', as follows: ‘Not me … I could never bring myself to use my sister like that, it wouldn't remotely occur to me.'
²⁶

In the Italian Resistance the split between the Communists themselves was partly healed, in the sense that not thinking ‘only of oneself but of others too', seen as the essence of Communism,
²⁷
was achieved not solely through one's dedication to the party. Many of the new adherents started by observing the ‘shortcomings of the individual' and came to affirm the ‘value of communistisation on morality and conscience'
²⁸
– which was a way of expressing, in Communist fashion, what I have earlier called the process of self-reunification. But, in another respect, the divide grew wider. In order not to lose its grip on things, the party ethic, which found itself having to reckon with a far wider and more complex reality than the one it had known in clandestinity, tended to stress some of its more exclusive and severe features, which seemed furthermore to meet military needs extremely well.

This problem comes over particularly clearly in a document written by one of the protagonists (who later proudly vindicated his autonomy as a leader in the absence at that time of directives from Moscow and Togliatti).
²⁹
Pietro Secchia, returning from a visit to the first Garibaldi formations of the Lanzo valleys, sent those comrades a long letter singing the praises of the priority of party organisation over individualism that degenerates into
faso tuto mi
(I do it all by myself). Secchia is unsparing in his criticism of the
famigliarismo
and ‘friendly intimacy' ‘characterising the whole life of this group, who, rather than soldiers, would
seem to be composed of good friends who get together animated solely by the pleasure of being in each other's company'. ‘Discipline', Secchia explained,

Two remarks made by Rino (Sandro Radice, one of the letter's addressees) come under particular fire from Secchia: ‘My conscience refuses to do wrong to Colonel R., with whom I've always had friendly working relations.' Secchia explodes: ‘Never, never let blasphemies like that one come out of the mouths of comrades like you … The Party, the Party before everything and always.'
³⁰

Rino had also said: ‘Give me your hand, otherwise I won't be able to sleep tonight, after your ruthless criticisms.' Secchia was intransigent:

When Stalin had begun his attack on Bukharin, ‘He began by impatiently dismissing sentimental appeals to past friendship (Bukharin had read extracts from intimate letters exchanged): the Bolsheviks were not “a family circle” but a political party.'
³²

The Italian Communists had not always acted in perfect conformity with this line of conduct. Secchia himself, arriving at Civitavecchia jail after the turning-point of 1930, had pointed this out, availing himself of a judgment expressed by Dmitri Manuilski, who ‘had reproached the Italian Communists for their tendency to be indulgent towards the defects of their comrades, and to conceive relations between each other as relations between friends rather than Bolsheviks, that is founded exclusively on loyalty to the Party. All this, however, now, after the turning-point, had to finish.'
³³

But when the very same Secchia – a man, in all other respects, of great humanity – re-encountered Spinelli, who was by that time out of the Party, at Ponza, he treated him with an affection that was reciprocated, because ‘with weakness that was reprehensible for a Bolshevik he ultimately wished to save a friend'.
³⁴
After the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948, it was again Secchia who said to Togliatti: ‘Educate our comrades as friends'.
³⁵
This is a sphere in which the figurative and metaphorical use of words such as friendship, solidarity, fraternity should make us think carefully before judging. It is not in fact easy to distinguish the various planes that intersect, and rarely appear in their pure state, from personal contradictions, cultural superimpositions or political opportunism. In an article about the relations between Togliatti and Longo (a man similar in temperament to Secchia), which
L'Unità
significantly entitled ‘A relationship stronger than friendship', Nilde Jotti wrote: ‘Togliatti said that if you are the leaders of a party you can't have “friends” among those who share the responsibility of running the party with you … This was a highly moral theory but also a very severe one, a sort of philosophy of solitude.'
³⁶

Here there is a curious contamination between the isolation of the man of power – classically, the tyrant – and the model of the full-time militant Bolshevik. So exclusive was this model that on the one hand it recreated, among those who succeeded in practising it to the full, ‘an almost mystical sense of membership of the same family, of mutual devotion', which was particularly evident in underground and prison experience;
³⁷
while on the other hand it seemed to constitute the only ideal of human perfection that one was able to propose, to the extent that those who still failed to meet it completely came to appear rather
like catechumens. The relationship created in the Garibaldi brigades between the party nucleus and the partisans, referred to earlier, almost prefigured the difficult passage from the Bolshevik party to the ‘new model party', as it were. Not everyone agreed in regarding the Garibaldi experience as a mass draft by the party. At a party meeting at the 3
^rd
Lombardia division it was argued that ‘the fact … that the men claim they have the right to belong to the Party solely because they have been fighting as
patrioti
for months shows how much they still have to learn'.
³⁸

All this led to the formation of a sort of advance guard of the advance guard within the bosom of the same party. An eloquent expression of this is the directive sent to a political commissar, where the rhetoric of discipline smacks of Fascist language:

Giovanni Pesce was disconcerted by the easy-going nature of the Milanese Gappists, one of whom said to him: ‘We're all friends. We live in the same block and the same quarter and we've known one another since we were kids.'
⁴⁰

As we have already noted, in the clandestinity of city warfare the sense of ‘unpleasant isolation', which led to the severing of all human relations, reached an extreme level. The old leader Celso Ghini gave Pesce the sensation ‘that the war is too harsh to allow its protagonists to concede anything to friendship'.
⁴¹

The risks attributable to friendship presented themselves in two very
different places. Above all in the mountain bands, which were composed of young and very young men, and in the chiefs who were the expression of the bands. Thus the
ispettore
‘Riccardo' (Alfredo Mordini), with twenty-three years of military life behind him, complained that they could not be granted that absolute trust which, in Italy and abroad, he was accustomed to having in his party comrades.
⁴²
But there were also residual traces of Socialist and Communist culture dating back to the period prior to the ‘bolshevisation' of the party; and, along the same lines as Secchia,
L'Unità
denounced these, criticising those old comrades who tended to ‘take the Party for a little family or a group of friends'.
⁴³
A few weeks earlier a party leader had complained that ‘in some areas things were run along the lines of the patriarchal family; everyone knew everything, including the grandparents, the grandchildren and … the mothers-in-law'.
⁴⁴