Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Abstract

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.

Keywords:

• travel writing
• Soviet Union
• Italian Communist Party
• Calvino
• Viganò
• Aleramo

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Eliana Maestri for her expert help and advice in the translation of the original Italian citations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the legacy of Fascism, the desire for post-war renewal and the myth of the Soviet Union, see Duggan (1995, 1–24).

2. For an overview of Italian writings on the USSR see Di Nucci (1988, 621–677); De Pascale (2001, 134–156); and Pischedda (1995, 161–208).

3. For a comprehensive discussion of the cultural politics of the PCI and its relationship with Italian intellectuals see Gundle (2000); also Ajello (1979).

4. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

5. In the preface to the Italian translation of Political Pilgrims, Hollander admits that his original study neglected the writings of Italian travellers and did not address national and cultural variations (1988, 15). For a critique of Hollander, see David-Fox (2012). Rather than focusing on the uncritical traveller, David-Fox points to Soviet techniques of hospitality and the use of model institutions which were designed to showcase only a selective part of the USSR to the foreign traveller.

6. Polezzi (2014, 203) points to the ‘ex-centric’ position of much of Italian travel writing, which she attributes to Italy’s late unification as a nation-state, its limited colonial period and the country’s problematic relationship with modernity. On the specific nature of Italian travel writing on Russia during Fascism, see De Pascale (2001, 135).

7. See also Ben Ghiat (2004, 38–39).

8. For a detailed biography of Aleramo see Conti and Morino (1981).

9. Carlo Levi’s comments when visiting a textile factory are remarkably similar (1964, 128–129).

10. Andreucci (2005, 213) notes how the juxtaposition of the colours red and black in Viganò’s descriptions is used to symbolise opposing value systems.

11. ‘Was I a Stalinist Too?’ was first published in La Repubblica on December 16, 1979 in a special insert to mark the centenary of Stalin’s birth, then assumed to be December 1879. The citations in this article refer to McLaughlin’s translation in the collection Hermit in Paris (2003).

12. See, for example, Calvino’s essay on Japan, ‘The Old Woman in the Purple Kimono’ (Calvino 2013).

13. On this latter point, see ‘Lightness’ (Calvino 1988).