by Philipp Blom
The relationship between heroes of Italian nationhood such as Garibaldi and the Catholic Church had never been easy and was sometimes marked by outright hostility, but among the many kinds of Catholicism in the peninsula—from the visceral, animist, and intensely superstitious faith of the peasants in the south to the bourgeois rituals in the northern industrial centers—the attachment of large parts of the population to Christian symbolism and rituals was beyond doubt. As a politician and a former journalist, Mussolini was tarred with the brush of the widely perceived failure of the institutions of liberal democracy; as an authoritarian and charismatic leader, he promised renewal; as a man of Providence especially blessed and protected by the Lord, he could represent eternity.
Rival Saviors
MICHELE SCHIRRU HAD NOT BEEN the first to try to slay Il Duce, but a series of failed assassination attempts only served to heighten and confirm Mussolini’s godlike invulnerability. In November 1925, a former socialist deputy had plotted to shoot him during a speech on the balcony of Palazzo Chigi, but the conspiracy had been discovered in time. In April 1926 a mentally unstable Irishwoman had attempted to kill him, but her shot had only lightly grazed his nose. In October of the same year, two anarchists had hurled a bomb at his car but had merely succeeded in wounding eight bystanders.
The effect of these attacks on public opinion had been not only gratifying but also more profound than anything Mussolini could have achieved by normal propagandistic means. The Pope had publicly said that God himself had held his hand over Il Duce, church bells were rung throughout the country on Mussolini’s behalf, and newspapers wrote stories about the great leader beloved by God. After the attack in October 1926, the cardinal of Venice ordered the bells of St. Mark’s to be rung, and in Milan there was a huge demonstration on the Piazza del Duomo. Cinemas in the city suspended their performances to allow everyone to attend. Mussolini’s brother wrote to him: “God protects you, the Italians worship you: two forces that render the criminality of assassins futile.”10
Mussolini’s personal pantheon had space for the veneration of Providence and of himself, but not for any personal God or for his humble representative on earth, the Pontifex Maximus in the Vatican, barely a mile away from Il Duce’s desk. Mussolini had fought tenaciously to curtail the influence and power of Catholic organizations throughout Italy, and he was wary of the Pope’s political agenda and privately had nothing but contempt for his beliefs, but he needed the sanction of the Catholic Church to burnish Fascism with this ultimate stamp of approval and to sink deep roots in the imagination of the faithful.
As it happened, Mussolini held a first-class bargaining chip. Ever since the proclamation of a secular Italian republic in 1861, a succession of popes had effectively refused to recognize the legitimacy of the government and of Rome as the capital of Italy, in which the church held no temporal power under the laws of the republic. Holed up in the Vatican, the furious princes of the church could only look on as their power was eroded. Under the Fascists, this situation had grown even worse, as the work of Catholic institutions and organizations was made more difficult or simply outlawed because they were effectively competing with the equivalent Fascist organizations.
Now Il Duce held out an olive branch: in return for formal recognition of the legitimacy and sovereignty of the Italian state as well as a guarantee that Catholic dignitaries would refrain from direct political involvement, Mussolini’s government, officially acting for the king, was willing to recognize the Vatican as a sovereign state within its own borders. The 1929 Lateran Treaty was advantageous for both sides, as it offered the Holy See political legitimacy and the Fascist government a considerable moral bonus.
The treaty also proved that both sides had found a way of not only tolerating but instrumentalizing each other. On the surface, the Fascist emphasis on violence, war, and the revival of pagan rituals seemed inimical to the demands of the church and its message of brotherly love, forgiveness of sins, and purity of faith. But underneath this surface the two were as similar as fraternal twins. Though intermittently suspicious of each other, their common needs and enemies by far outweighed their disagreements. United in their hatred of communism, both were authoritarian and hierarchical, both despised democracy and liberal ideas, both believed in the supremacy of martyrdom and of faith over reason, and both allotted a subordinate role to women and to all people of other creeds (or, in the case of the Fascists, other ethnic backgrounds).
Speaking in Rome in 1927, Mussolini had outlined his vision of the world and of Italy’s place in it in words that could almost have been chosen by the Pope himself: “This is the situation now: in a decadent Europe, weakened by vice, perverted by exotic habits, striving deliriously to attain the dreams of social democratic humanitarianism, the only vital principle is Fascist Italy. Europe no longer has any faith: it does not attach any real importance to religious values, but only to money, to the individual and collective instinct for survival, to the pursuit of enjoyment, and to a peaceful life. Fascist Italy—Catholic, disciplined, warlike—will be able to dominate Europe if it can defend its physical and moral health.”11
While his union with the holy church might be dismissed as a political ruse on Mussolini’s part, the Vatican very obviously had no problem whatsoever in dealing with and dignifying Fascist dictatorships. After the success of the Lateran Treaty, the Pope pursued further international agreements, largely in an attempt to bolster the political legitimacy of the newly created statelet as well as the social influence of Catholic organizations. In 1933 the newly elected Pope Pius XII celebrated two new concordats—with fascist Austria and Nazi Germany—to add to the existing ones.
A Shrine of Martyrs
HAVING MADE THE CHURCH HIS ALLY, Mussolini could make even more effective use of the potency of Catholic symbolism and ritual. In Padua, an eighteen-year-old girl by the name of Maria visited the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, housed in a building whose exterior had been transformed by looming, fifty-foot-high fasces jutting out in front of the elegant nineteenth-century façade. In the Shrine of Martyrs, she and other visitors were particularly impressed:
It is very suggestive and moving. . . . There are a huge number of relics of the fascist martyrs, the Duce’s handkerchief soaked in blood from his wound. With your soul thus prepared for religious feelings, you enter the Shrine of the Martyrs: a dark circular room with illuminated glass rectangles bearing the word “presente” [present] on the top three quarters of the walls. Below, in a purplish blue half-light, are lots of banners. You move silently around a platform with a tall cross rising out of it, while in the far, far distance you hear choirs singing patriotic hymns. You come out slightly dazed, partly also because there are no windows and the heat gets to your head.12
The holy blood from the sacred wound of the savior, the relics, the half-light, the silence, the choirs—the designers of this elaborate staging of the beginnings of a political movement hardly older than its eighteen-year-old admirer did not have far to go in search of an effective template that would resonate with Italians’ collective imagination.
A New Hercules
MUSSOLINI AND HIS FASCIST PARTY were by no means alone in using religious feelings and symbolism to further their cause. After all, fascism as well as socialism and communism can be described as political religions: like religion, they responded to a longing for order, purpose, and meaning that was particularly acute in the atmosphere of fragmentation and nihilism during the 1920s and 1930s.
For obvious reasons Mussolini based his image on Catholic iconography, just as Stalin would increasingly appropriate not only the powers of the tsars but also the cultural and spiritual place they had occupied in Russian culture. The cult of “Little Father Stalin” eventually quite literally usurped the place the Orthodox saints had been allotted in Russian houses, the iconostase, an icon placed in a corner of the living room, illuminated with an eternally burning candle, and decorated with flowers. Now the iconostase showed not the Virgi
n Mary or Christ enthroned but the familiar mustachioed face of the first secretary smiling down on the home’s inhabitants.
In Germany the propagandistic genius of Joseph Goebbels had already begun to sway millions of hearts and minds, and one reason the Weimar Republic never quite became more than tolerated by most Germans was that it failed to win the battle of the images. Perhaps the young democracy simply lacked sufficiently gifted communicators who might have been able to transform its poisoned legacy of disaster in war, the allegation that social democratic politicians had betrayed the victorious army by suing for peace, and the inheritance of an empire buried under the ruins of its own arrogance.
If Berlin was such a fascinating place to be, it was also because there was no single official version of its identity, and many possibilities could flourish in this vacuum. Next to the experimental and creative varieties, however, the rival political religions were imposing themselves on the imagination of a population torn between cynicism and a real hunger for legitimate hope. In the end, Hitler’s messianic narrative succeeded where the difficult negotiations and hesitating attempts of democracy had failed.
The narratives of the totalitarian religions gave ordinary people a sense of transcendence, of touching something that was greater than they were, of essential truth. They offered a sense of the sacred and the immutable laws of Providence, which in the racist vocabulary of fascism invariably meant a sense of one’s own superiority. There is, after all, no variety of racism which arrives at the conclusion that one’s own group is anything but the finest and the most valuable while others are inferior or degenerate and deserve to be suppressed.
But the totalitarian religions, Mussolini’s Fascism being a case in point, also did something else: they restored a sense of hope, a positive future. This future was invariably messianic and inflated in its vast expectations. But especially in times of crisis, in which so many people had so little to lose and so much to gain, they created a space people could inhabit in contrast to the present, which was difficult and even dangerous.
Il Duce was very much alive to the necessity of awakening and nourishing this messianic hope. While the Soviets had built Magnitogorsk and were dreaming up other gigantic programs, Fascist Italy did not lag behind. Mussolini’s answer to Russia’s city of steel was Carbonia in Sardinia, a coal mining town planned from scratch and inaugurated in 1937.
Carbonia was not the only city Il Duce founded; he cast himself as a second Alexander the Great. His largest project by far was the draining of the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, a waterlogged region of three hundred square miles in which a mere sixteen hundred people were eking out a living. In the “battle of the swamps” Mussolini’s government undertook to conquer the malaria-infested region by first building a network of canals and then transforming the marshland for agricultural use. More than 120,000 men worked on the project. It is unknown how many of them died of malaria. The result, however, was a great propagandistic success. “Once a fever-ridden swamp, now a prosperous colony,” crowed a newsreel made by British Pathé in 1934 on the occasion of the first anniversary of the new town of Littoria, built in traditional style with a town plaza dominated by a square bell tower, surrounded by handsome country villas, and settled with reliable Fascist families from the north. In the short film, a cheering, almost exclusively male public salutes Il Duce on the balcony of the city hall.
By drying out the Pontine Marshes, Mussolini had achieved something his Roman predecessors had never managed, allowing him to portray himself not only as the legitimate heir of classical antiquity but also as its completion. He was obsessed with the idea of restoring Roman greatness wherever possible, and his plans for the Eternal City itself were truly astonishing. “In five years Rome must appear wonderful to the entire world, vast, orderly and potent, as she was in the days of the first empire of Augustus,” he proclaimed in one of his many speeches.
Only few of the gigantic building programs he instituted were finished, but among them is another homage to antiquity, the Foro Mussolini (now Foro Italico), with the spectacular Stadio dei Marmi, in which sixty-four marble statues of athletes keep watch over the exploits of their real-life successors. But paying obeisance to the past was only part of the project to captivate the imagination of millions. In order to accomplish this, the future had to be enlisted as well.
Public building programs and new towns created work and effective images for newsreels. To go even further and embrace the aesthetics and technology of modernity, Mussolini only had to turn to one of his most enthusiastic supporters, the poet Filippo Marinetti, whose futurist movement consisted of an orgy of roaring engines, smoking factories, vertiginous speed, and sex. One of the greatest publicity triumphs of the regime was achieved when Fascism literally took to the skies. The futurists had always been infatuated with flying, and even the diminutive proto-fascist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio had proved his courage as a First World War flying ace. Now another Italian air force hero, Italo Balbo, who was minister of aviation from 1929 to 1933, gave Il Duce the international recognition he craved.
In 1931, Balbo succeeded in flying with a squadron of nine seaplanes from Italy across the South Atlantic, successfully advertising not only the heroism of the new Italy but also the power of collective action. In 1933 another and even more spectacular action took place when he guided twenty-four Savoia Marchetti machines across the North Atlantic, arriving in Chicago in front of a huge crowd and accompanied by forty-three American fighter planes spelling out the word “Italia” in the evening sky. Among the mountains of honors heaped on the Italian pilot was honorary membership in the Sioux tribe, and during the triumphal parade on Michigan Avenue the heroes were greeted by a million Americans, many of them with arms raised in a Fascist salute.
Reporting the incident for Italian radio was none other than Filippo Marinetti, who was unable to contain his excitement at the mystical marriage between technology and Fascist manliness:
Listen to the music of the sky, with its mellowed tubes of pride, the buzzing drills of miners of the clouds, enthusiastic roars of gas, hammerings ever more intoxicated with speed and the applause of bright propellers. The rich music of Balbo and his transatlantic flyer hums, explodes and laughs among the blue flashes of the whole horizon. . . . The cruiser Diaz fires salvos. The crowd shouts with joy. The sound mirrors the Italian creative genius. . . . The delirious crowd yells: “here he is, here he is, here it is! Duce! Duce! Duce! Italy! Italy” the rumble, rumble, rumble of the motors that pass a few yards from my head.13
·1932·
Holodomor
“I GREW UP IN A TYPICAL UKRAINIAN VILLAGE, IN THE COUNTY OF Cherkasy, some hundred miles south of Kiev,” Miron Dolot remembered about his childhood.
My village stood on the north bank of the Tiasmyn River, one of the many tributaries of the Dnipro (Dnieper) River, and it was beautiful. Green hills rose in the south behind the river, and the rich tar-black soil of the plains stretched to the north. The plains were divided into strips of fields. Every spring and summer these strips would disappear beneath miles of wheat. Waves of rich grain, green in spring and golden in summer, gently rolled in the summer breeze. After the harvest, the fields again bared their soil as if in mourning for the lost beauty. Near the end of the year, the new cycle of color—winters white—blended with the horizon of the plains into the grey-frosty sky.1
Much of history deals with the big cities and their inhabitants, the centers where the greatest changes take place. Urban areas are focal points of migration and culture and political power, fast-moving and cosmopolitan, centers of enterprise and fashion, of intellect and revolution. The denizens of the countryside often lived their lives away from these great developments. Their habits and their ways of thinking, their poverty and entertainments and work, changed at a different, much slower pace. Of course, tens of millions of country dwellers had moved to the cities and were still moving there, trying to escape the hunger and the harshness of life and hoping for a better dea
l, if not for themselves, then for their children. These mass migrations along with the declining power of the church and the introduction of farming machinery, synthetic fertilizers, radios, communism, and compulsory schooling had already transformed lives in the countryside in many Western European countries, as well as in a number of places within the USSR, but in other areas it almost seemed as if the catastrophes, transformations, and revolutions had passed by without leaving a trace.
Miron’s village was like that. Four thousand people lived there in wooden houses clustering around the church, school, general store, government building, post office, and doctor’s house. His memory of it was clear, if perhaps slightly idealizing:
Most of the houses had only one room which was used for all purposes, including cooking and sleeping. Wooden floors were also rare; like the walls, the floors were made of clay. But no matter how plainly they were constructed, and how primitive our living conditions, the houses were clean and neat. Each home has its plot for flowers and a few fruit trees, and chickens, geese, and ducks were kept in the backyards. Barns housed a horse, one or two cows, and a few pigs. A dog would usually be lounging on the porch or at the gate.2
Having worked hard during the day, the young people in the village used the evening hours as their forefathers had done. They gathered “in neighborhoods at the crossroads and danced, sang, and played long into the night.”3
The small farmers of Ukraine had reason to look into the future with optimism, though life had never been easy. Wedged between Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire, the country had been invaded, carved up, and ruled by foreigners for much of its history. For centuries it was known simply as Little Russia, and its capital, Kiev, was an important spiritual and historic center of Russian culture. With its rich, fertile soils it was also traditionally considered the breadbasket of the tsar’s vast empire, which incorporated Ukraine in 1795.