Nicola Bombacci

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Nicola Bombacci

Nicola Bombacci (born October 24, 1879 in Civitella di Romagna , † April 28, 1945 in Dongo ) was an Italian politician .

Life

Training and beginnings

Nicola Bombacci was born in Civitella di Romagna in the province of Forlì-Cesena . He briefly attended the seminary , but then became a primary and elementary school teacher. During his time as a teacher, he met the later Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini at the end of 1906 , who was also a school teacher at the time. Towards the end of the 19th century, Bombacci became active in the Italian trade union movement and was active in Crema , Piacenza and Cesena . In 1911, the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGdL), one of the largest Italian trade unions, was elected to the National Council (Consiglio Nazionale) .

Working as a socialist (1914–1920)

During the First World War , Modena began his career as the undisputed leader of political socialism at the local level; Mussolini called him "Il Kaiser di Modena" ("The Emperor of Modena"). During the Balkan Wars and the Russian Revolution he was temporarily secretary of the Italian Chamber of Labor (Camera del Lavoro), secretary of the Socialist Federation of the Province of Modena (Federazione socialista provinciale modenese) and editor of the socialist weekly Il Domani .

In July 1917, Bombacci became a member of the executive committee (Direzione) and deputy secretary (Vicesegretario) of the Socialist Party of Italy (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI). Together with the party secretary Costantino Lazzari he worked on the drafting of the later famous circulars, which were sent to the various party associations and to Giacinto Menotti Serrati , the director of the socialist weekly Avanti! , sent, involved; the purpose of these circulars was to win the labor movement completely over to socialism.

After Lazzari was arrested in January 1918 and Serrati in May 1918, he was practically the only one to remain in the party leadership. Bombacci himself was arrested for “ defeatism ” in January 1918 , but was released again. He was arrested again on October 31, 1918, but released on November 20, 1918.

Bombacci was a proponent of strongly anti-reformist policies. In his view, Italian socialism should be “centralized” and “vertically organized”. The party's provincial associations and the Gruppo Parlamentare Socialista (GPS) should report directly to the party leadership of the PSI; the union federations and the red cooperatives should also be directly connected to the party leadership.

In October 1919 he gave together with Serrati, Gennari and Salvadori the party program of the "Frazione massimalista ", the victorious faction at the XVI. National Congress of the Socialist Party of Italy (XVI Congresso Nazionale del Partito Socialista Italiano) from 5. – 8. October 1919 in Bologna , which wanted to transfer the Bolshevik October Revolution to Italy.

On October 11, 1919 he was elected party chairman (party secretary) of the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI). The following month, in the first general post-war elections in Italy on November 16, 1919, he won the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) candidate with 32.3 percent of the vote and became a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy (Camera dei deputati del Regno d'Italia). He received more than 100,000 votes in the Bologna constituency and became one of the most powerful and well-known figures of “maximalist socialism” in the Biennio rosso .

In January 1920 he submitted the draft for a “ council constitution ” in Italy based on the Soviet model, which, although it triggered little approval and much criticism, at least helped to initiate a theoretical debate about it in the party press.

The non-acceptance of his proposal for a council constitution prompted Bombacci on February 25, 1920 to relinquish the office of party secretary of the PSI and transfer it to Egidio Gennari . In April 1920 he was the first Italian socialist to meet representatives of the Bolsheviks in Copenhagen . In the summer of 1920 he was a member of the Italian delegation that traveled to the Soviet Union to attend the Congress of the Communist International .

In autumn 1920 he was together with Antonio Gramsci , Amadeo Bordiga , Egidio Gennari and Antonio Graziadei founder of the communist parliamentary group (Frazione comunista) of the PSI; at the same time he was director of the weekly Il Comunista . At the XVII. Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (XVII Congresso del Partito Socialista Italiano) from 15. – 21. January 1921 in Livorno he voted decisively for a split and thus became one of the founding fathers of the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia), Section Italy of the Third International (Sezione Italiana della III Internazionale; PCd'I), where he was a member of the Central Committee (Comitato Centrale) was.

Working as a communist (1920–1927)

Bombacci was one of the founders and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. In the Italian parliamentary elections in spring 1921 he was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies (XXVI legislature) as a member of the Trieste constituency . Bombacci, who could not find a clear political line in the party, soon felt isolated within the group of L'Ordine Nuovo around Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti , Umberto Terracin and Angelo Tasca . He joined the right wing of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) with Francesco Misiano and advocated rapprochement with the maximalists.

In November 1923, the internal party dispute also reached the upper echelons of the Communist Soviets, when the Executive Committee of the PCd'I decided without consultation to withdraw from the Communist International. Bombacci, now chairman of the Gruppo Parlamentare Comunista, was accused of giving a speech to the Chamber of Deputies on November 30, 1923, suggesting a possible unification of the two revolutions, the Bolshevik and the fascist revolutions. However, on the recommendation of the Russian ambassador to Italy, Jordansky, Bombacci had only proposed an Italian-Russian economic agreement, as requested by the Russian government in the Kremlin . Bombacci was finally overthrown internally, starting from the party's central committee, removed from the party leadership and expelled from the party in 1923.

In January 1924, after being re-admitted to the party in 1924, Bombacci was summoned to Moscow , where he represented the Italian delegation at the funeral ceremonies on the occasion of Lenin's death . Grigory Evsejewitsch Zinoviev , a close companion of Lenin, spoke out in favor of reintegrating the PCd'I, which had been decimated considerably in those months by a wave of arrests by the fascist government under Mussolini, into the Communist International.

Upon his return to Italy, Bombacci began working for the Russian embassy in Rome . As a commercial attaché, he was now a diplomat in the Soviet service. In 1925 he founded the magazine L'Italo-Russa and an import-export company of the same name; however, both projects were short-lived. His detachment and removal from the Communist Party became increasingly clear in the period that followed. In 1927 the party officials abroad decided his final expulsion from the party. In an edition of L'Unità it said succinctly: "Nicola Bombacci è espulso dal partito comunista d'Italia per indegnità politica".

Working in Italian fascism

During the "Years of Silence" Bombacci continued to live in Rome with his family, while the collaboration with the Soviet embassy does not seem to have lasted beyond 1930. The economic needs and health of the child Vladimir, who required costly treatment, led him to seek help from leaders of the fascist regime: Leandro Arpinati , Dino Grandi , Edmondo Rossoni and, most importantly, Benito Mussolini , with whom he was had maintained political relations in the Giolitti period. The "Duce" gave Bombacci some cash grants for the care of his son and got him a job at the Institute for Educational Films of the League of Nations in Rome.

From 1933 onwards, Bombacci turned more and more to fascism , so that from 1935 onwards one can speak of a real membership. At the beginning of 1936, Mussolini allowed him to found La Verità , a political magazine on the positions of the regime which, with a few interruptions from the opposition of the “relentless fascists” Farinacci and Starace , was published until July 1943. Several other ex-socialists such as Alberto and Mario Malatesta , Ezio Riboldi , Arturo Labriola , Walter Mocchi as well as John Bitelli and Renato Angelo Kinn worked with them.

Nicola Bombacci helped Mussolini establish the short-lived Italian Social Republic in northern Italy towards the end of World War II . After Mussolini's influence on the population, especially the workforce, waned, he used Bombacci to demand, for example, the nationalization of industry. Under the influence of Bombacci, who was also a friend of Lenin , Mussolini declared - according to Karl Mittermaier at the time - that the fascism of Salò was, apart from the Soviet Union , the only actually existing socialist system in the world.

death

In April 1945, together with Mussolini, his lover Clara Petacci and other fascists, he was arrested by partisans of the Resistancea and shot shortly afterwards. The bodies were later hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan for public display.

Fonts (selection)

  • Il mio pensiero sul bolscevismo. La Verità, Roma 1941.
  • I contadini nella Russia di Stalin. Novissima, Roma 1942
  • Paradiso o inferno? Vita quotidiana nell'URSS La Verità, Roma 1942.
  • I contadini nell'Italia di Mussolini. Roma 1943.
  • Dove va la Russia? (Dal comunismo al panslavismo). Minerva, Padova 1944.
  • Questo è il comunismo. Edizioni popolari, Venezia 1944.

literature

  • Guglielmo Salotti: Nicola Bombacci da Mosca a Salò. (Ital.), Bonacci 1986. ISBN 978-8-875-73103-8 (new edition Ugo Mursia Editore 2008)
  • Arrigo Petacco : Il comunista in camicia nera: Nicola Bombacci, tra Lenin e Mussolini (Le scie). (Italian), A. Mondadori 1996 (1st ed.). ISBN 978-8-804-40305-0
  • Claudio Cabona: Nicola Bombacci. Storia e ideologia di un rivoluzionario fascio-comunista. (Ital.), Liberodiscrivere 2012. ISBN 978-8-873-88388-3
  • Daniele Dell'Orco: Nicola Bombacci, tra Lenin e Mussolini. (Italian), Historica 2012. ISBN 978-8-896-65657-0

Web links

Commons : Nicola Bombacci  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Enzo Santarelli, Nicola Bombacci , in Dizionario biografico degli italiani , vol. XI, 1969, ad nomen ; Luciano Casali, Nicola Bombacci , in Tommaso Detti, Franco Andreucci (cur.), Il movimento operaio italiano. Dizionario biografico (1853-1943) , Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1975, vol. I, ad noun .
  2. ↑ Serge Noiret, Riformisti e massimalisti in lotta per il controllo del PSI, 1917-1918 , "Italia Contemporanea", n.190, March 1993, pp. 65-103.
  3. ↑ Nicolo Bombacci in Dizionario Biografico , Treccani (Italian)
  4. ↑ Serge Noiret, Il partito di massa massimalista dal PSI al PCd'I, 1917-1924: la scalata alle istituzioni democratiche , in: Fabio Grassi Orsini, Gaetano Quagliariello (cur.), Il Partito politico dalla grande guerra al fascismo. Crisi della rappresentanza e riforma dello Stato nell'età dei sistemi politici di massa (1918-1925) , Bologna, Il Mulino, 1996, pp. 909-965.
  5. ^ Serge Noiret, Il PSI e le elezioni del 1919. La nuova legge elettorale. La conquista del Gruppo parlamentare socialista da parte dei massimalisti , "Storia Contemporanea", a. XV, n. 6, 1984, pp. 1093-1146.
  6. ↑ After controlling the PSI party secretariat for a large part of 1918, Bombacci was party secretary from October 11, 1919 to February 25, 1920. Then he resigned from this office, which he handed over to Egidio Gennari in order to concentrate on keeping the parliamentary seat in Montecitorio .
  7. ^ Sezione Socialista di Pistoia, Per la costituzione dei Soviet. Relazione presentata al Congresso Nazionale da Nicola Bombacci , Pistoia, Tipografia F.lli Cialdini, 1920. The plan was also translated into Spanish and, also in 1920, published in Buenos Aires .
  8. ^ Serge Noiret, Le origini della ripresa delle relazioni tra Roma e Mosca. Idealismo massimalista e realismo bolscevico: la missione Bombacci-Cabrini a Copenaghen nell'aprile 1920 , "Storia Contemporanea", a. XIX, n.5, October 1988, pp. 797-850.
  9. ^ Serge Noiret, Massimalismo e crisi dello stato liberale. Nicola Bombacci (1879-1924) , Milano, Franco Angeli, 1992, cap. IV.
  10. ↑ "Nicola Bombacci was expelled from the Italian Communist Party for political unworthiness."
  11. ^ Guglielmo Salotti: Nicola Bombacci. Since Mosca a Salò . Rome 1986, p. 87.
  12. ^ Serge Noiret: Per una biografia di Nicola Bombacci: contributo allo studio del periodo 1924-1936 . Società e storia , 25 (1984) pp. 591-631.
  13. ↑ Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, Andrea Guiso: Fascismo e bolscevismo in una rivista di confine: "La Verità" di Nicola Bombacci (1936-1943) . In: Ventunesimo secolo , Volume II, March 2003, pp. 145–170.
  14. ^ Mark Gilbert, Robert K. Nilsson: Historical Dictionary of Modern Italy . Scarecrow Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-81-086428-3 , p. 67.
  15. ^ The 600 days of Salò , Karl Mittermaier , In: The time of September 3, 1993
personal data
SURNAME Bombacci, Nicola
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian socialist, communist, later fascist politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Civitella di Romagna
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1945
Place of death Dongo