Italian Communist Research Articles

Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

<i>Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy</i>. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

Making Caccia Tragica: Giorgio Agliani, Giuseppe De Santis and the Italian Resistance

Giorgio Agliani is almost unknown as an Italian film producer. A former commander in the Resistance, he was placed, soon after the war, in charge of cinema affairs within ANPI, the Italian national association of partisans. Agliani strongly believed that cinema was the perfect medium to build the collective memory of the Resistance. As the executive producer of Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), directed by Giuseppe De Santis, he oversaw the making of a film which explored the tensions between men and women who had taken different sides in the recent conflict. The film won the prize for the best Italian movie at the Eighth Venice Film Festival in 1947. The article explores the tensions and difficulties that accompanied this attempt to make a film outside of conventional industry channels. The production was complicated because of the need to balance political concerns, organizational issues and artistic aspirations. Given the sensitive topic of Caccia Tragica, the Italian Communist Party put great pressure on ANPI leaders to ensure the story was told in a certain way. This impacted on Agliani, who was in charge of coordination, as well as financial and organizational matters, and also on De Santis, who demanded respect for his artistic decisions. Agliani’s personal archive is drawn on to reconstruct the entire story of the making of Caccia Tragica and to disentangle the various issues involved in the production. The article highlights the way political, cultural and economic issues were intertwined as well and sheds light on a ‘mode of production’ that was far from being a capitalistic one.

U.S.-Vatican Relations, 1975–1980: A Diplomatic Study by P. Peter Sarros

Reviewed by: U.S.-Vatican Relations, 1975–1980: A Diplomatic Study by P. Peter Sarros Roy Domenico U.S.-Vatican Relations, 1975–1980: A Diplomatic Study. By P. Peter Sarros. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. 452 pp. $50.00. Peter Sarros is a retired diplomat who served for five years (1975–1980) as the assistant to America's envoy to the pope, the "Personal Representative of the President to the Holy See." Shortly after he left that position, the United States elevated the office, in 1984, to Embassy status and the "Personal Representative" became the Ambassador. While in Rome, Sarros aided three envoys: Henry Cabot Lodge who served from June 1970 until July 1977, David Walters (July 1977–August 1978), and Robert Wagner (November 1978–January 1981). Sarros begins by describing this work as the story of "… U.S. diplomatic efforts to enlist the power of the pope and Vatican diplomacy in support of U.S. foreign policy objectives from 1975 to 1980" (ix). The book does this by examining "eleven specific diplomatic encounters" between the U.S. and the Vatican in which Sarros played a role, devoting each chapter to one of these encounters. Most of the chapters deal with the big issues of the late 1970s. Eurocommunism, the Helsinki process, the neutron bomb and [End Page 89] installation of Pershing missiles in Europe, Östpolitik, the Middle East, the Iran hostage situation, and Liberation theology all receive separate discussions. For two of the less obvious topics, Sarros devotes a chapter to the Holy See's attempt to mediate the Beagle Channel dispute between Chile and Argentina; and another on America's return of the crown of Saint Stephen to Hungary. The reader might approach U.S.-Vatican Relations, 1975–1980 as half study and half memoir. With academic training in international relations, Sarros pursued a career mainly in government and played a key diplomatic role as the events in the book took place, frequently recalling them in the first person. His image appears in most of the book's illustrations. If his acknowledgments give any indication; Sarros went to Rome in 1975 with little background in Vatican or Italian affairs. His view of the Holy See is respectful but anchored in Washington; and he betrays at times a rather "wonky" attitude toward his subject, often writing of the "power of the pope." He says, for instance, on page one: "Although the papacy's territorial and temporal power has significantly decreased since 1870, when the Papal States disappeared, the pope's spiritual power has progressively increased." Such lines might give the reader some pause. Sarros tempers his optimism with some cautions—such as Jesuit disagreements with Washington over Central American policy. Still, he concludes that the Hole See in the late 1970s maintained an "overall pro-U.S. foreign policy orientation" (256), something that must be taken with a grain of salt. Particularly troubling was Sarros' discussion of Washington's (ultimately) aborted development of the neutron bomb. Secretary of State Agostino Casaroli did not buy the U.S. argument that the bomb was a "humane" weapon although in the end, Rome did not condemn it "… to some extent, because of deference to U.S. entreaties but also to the Vatican's overarching commitment for 'balance' of armaments in Europe" (128). Did this illustrate a "pro-U.S. foreign policy orientation"? Perhaps this calls for a little skepticism. [End Page 90] Finally, U.S.-Vatican Relations, 1975–1980 might have benefitted from more rigorous editing. One encounters typographic errors throughout the book. Cardinal Antonio Samore should be Samorè (46). The great basilica in Venice is San Marco, not San Marcos (20). Sarros refers to an African water shortage as "drought" on one line and a "draught" on the next (13). In his discussion on page 65 of Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer's 1977 letter to the bishop of Ivrea, moreover, Sarros almost repeats himself on page 67. The endnotes constitute a more substantial problem. They are quite extensive and often add significant insight to the argument. Sarros, however, fails here to cite adequately the sources. He presents State Department documents in a novel way, like his endnote...

Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory by Ken Hirschkop

Reviewed by: Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory by Ken Hirschkop Craig Brandist Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950: Writing on Language as Social Theory. Ken Hirschkop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 353. $85.00 (cloth). There was not one single "linguistic turn" in the period 1890–1950, but many, and the variety among the "turns" to "language as such" had as much to do with the social and political orientations of thinkers as with their conceptions of mind and language. Theories about language were, in effect, theories about society by other means. This is perhaps the central thesis of Ken Hirshchkop's provocative and engaging new book, which draws together the work of a bewildering variety of philosophers, linguists, literary and political theorists from across Europe. While it is commonplace to recognize that a conception of society, at least at the level of background assumptions, underlies all writing on language, Hirschkop here makes a stronger claim. For a wide range of thinkers, writing in a tumultuous age when the collapse of European Empires under pressures of war and revolution resulted in the rise of mass political democracy, language constituted a "metonym" for society. Questions of linguistic stability and change, authority, and agency were dimensions of wider questions of social and political transformations. The modalities through which this metonym was enacted prove to be complex and instructive. In a brief but stimulating excursus, Hirschkop argues the most "effective metonym" was achieved by Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who drew upon his linguistic training to theorize the struggle for hegemony while incarcerated in one of Mussolini's prisons (246). The bulk of the book is, however, dedicated to showing that theorizing about society was key to a variety of thinkers who at least on the face of it were much less politically engaged: Ferdinand de Saussure through Ernst Cassirer to Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. If one of Saussure's main achievements was, through his treatment of language as a social institution, to show the neogrammarians what they had done, it was linguists in revolutionary Russia (inter alia Sergei Kartsevskii, Grigorii Vinokur, Lev Iakubinskii) who would show what Saussure had done by making language change and standardization primarily a question of politics (105). [End Page 615] Hirschkop is probably best known for his 1999 monograph Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, in which Bakhtin's turn from ethics and aesthetics, to language and sociology in the late 1920s, is shown to circle around questions of democracy that are seldom invoked in any direct way. In the intervening twenty years Hirschkop has published nothing on this scale, but more occasional work, such as the coauthored Benjamin's Arcades Project: An unGuided Tour (2006), suggested some of the areas he was investigating. Linguistic Turns, which has evidently been gestating for a considerable period of time, also discusses Bakhtin, but relatively briefly, as the question of democracy and "collective will" is shown to be a much more general movement, and Bakhtin's discussions of style, carnival, and the novel are shown to be symptomatic of, and particularly illustrative of, wider intellectual currents. It is clear why such work took a long time to come to fruition, for Linguistic Turns displays formidable erudition in a variety of areas, and some serious thinking about how a constellation of concerns manifest themselves in a variety of intellectual traditions and social contexts. The result is a work that will be of considerable interest and value to intellectual historians, social and cultural theorists as well as those concerned with the intersection of linguistic and social theory. Moreover, a set of ideas which are in themselves intellectually demanding and occasionally rather technical, are here presented in an admirably clear fashion with no small measure of creativity, elegance, and wit. The book is structured in two parts with an introduction and conclusion. Part one, "Order," focused on "how a society grounded in 'the people' can be both consensual and orderly," begins with a consideration of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, approached from the apparent side-issue of analogy, which turns out to be much more central than is generally conceived (22). Next, we...

Teresa Noce: an Italian Professional Revolutionary Woman

The role of professional revolutionaries is usually reserved for men. One exception is Teresa Noce, a prominent Italian Communist leader in the (residual) quota reserved for women, who was the wife of Luigi Longo, but with an independence that made her existence an original example of militancy and activism. Both underground and within republican Italy, Noce never adapted to what already existed, but fought to subvert the order, especially in the face of exploitation and discrimination. A member of the ICP, Noce fought against fascism, transporting clandestine material, writing articles for anti-fascist papers, promoting strikes by rice weeders and labourers. In France, she directed partisan movements and, in Spain, she was a militant in voluntary groups against Francisco Franco. After the war, she was elected to the Parliament as a “Constituent Mother”. She also revolutionised the world of labour as the first female Secretary General of the textile trade union.

Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews ed. by Angela Ide De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi

Reviewed by: Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews ed. by Angela Ide De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi Jonathan Impett Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by Angela Ide De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi; foreword by Nuria Schoenberg Nono. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music.) [490 p. ISBN 978-0-5202-9120-1. $85] One of the most extraordinary aspects of this recent publication is that it has taken so long—more than half a century, in some cases—for these texts to be made available in English. An early collection in German was edited by Jürg Stenzl in 1975, a Hungarian edition by István Balázs in 1985, and a more complete selection in French by Laurent Feneyrou in 1993. The present editors—Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi—know these texts better than anyone. They produced a near-complete two volume collection of Nono's writings (in the original Italian or using Italian drafts) in 2001, many of which appeared in a Portuguese version by Paulo de Assis in 2014. The authoritative Italian publication was sadly reduced to a single-volume edition in 2007—La nostalgia del future—although that includes some valuable additional material and editorial insights. Nostalgia for the Future largely presents the content and structure of the 2007 book. The scholarly apparatus of this new edition is impeccable, unsurprisingly, given the editors' vital role in the path of transmission to this point. The reasons for such a delay are complicated and fascinating. Nono was born in 1924 and died in 1990. He was thus of the same generation as Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007); the editors describe the three as 'a hegemonic triad of the new music scene', a highly reductive and disputable view, but not without a basis in common perception then and now. They knew this; when the SüdWestFunk attempted by strategic programming to bring the three together for the 1987 Donaueschingen Festival, they each independently found ways to subvert the plan. Boulez and Stockhausen, however, serve as comparators to illuminate the reception of Nono in the anglophone world. Both became very public figures, their reputations enhanced by being very articulate and engaging English speakers. They relished the presentation of their ideas with the intense unassailable performative logic and conviction of an expert barrister. This, of course, also becomes their weakness: a magnificent brittleness that is also evident in their music. Many of their texts have been available in English for decades, and some—Boulez's Aléa and Possibly, Stockhausen's How Time Passes,for example—are firmly part of the canon of later twentieth-century musical thought. Collected writings by both were published already in the 1960s. Nono did not want to become part of a canon or a club (apart from the Italian Communist Party), and had an ambivalent relationship with the publishing of texts, texts that would inevitably become material for reduction or categorisation. The first text in this new collection relates to a case in point. It refers to an article by Nono intended for a journal edited by Luciano Berio, but they were never able to reach agreement as to how it should be cut, and the article was not published. While an article by Nono did appear in the Darmstädter Beitrage, an issue that Nono should have edited never materialised, and despite his annual presence at the Darmstadt summer school, he does not appear as an author in Die Reihe. Nono was far from being a fluent Englishspeaker. Like Boulez and Stockhausen, he did not appear to give high-profile lecture series in English. But the pragmatic anglophone world kept its distance for other reasons. On the one hand, he had an utterly ill-founded reputation as a formalist, largely the result of misguided reports such as Reginald Smith-Brindle's 1966 book Serial [End Page 381] Composition (London; New York: Oxford University Press). This was exactly the kind of reductive misrepresentation that made Nono reluctant to publish texts on his music. On the other, he was a communist; not a...

Whoever launches the biggest Sputnik has solved the problems of society? Technology and futurism for Western European social democrats and communists in the 1950s

ABSTRACTBy analysing the policies and ideas of German social democracy, the British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party, this article explores their attitude towards science and their imagination of the future in the 1950s. Deeply different, social democrats and communists shared a positivist attitude in favour of scientific progress and high modernity. This painted their attitude towards the space race, peaceful nuclear power and automation. Science was conceived as a neutral power to be supported, but it required political guidance to harness it and turned it into social progress. Thus, their disagreement was over the political implications for capitalist societies experiencing growing prosperity. Science was also a powerful rhetorical argument to castigate the conservatives for failing the nation and allowing it to decline and fall behind its competitors. The article combines comparison and transnational history, innovating the latter by introducing the concepts of horizontal, vertical and antagonistic transnationalism.

Forging socialism through democracy: a critical review survey of literature on Eurocommunism

The article provides a critical overview of the latest phase of scholarly engagement with Eurocommunism, firstly, by pointing out the resilience of a 'Cold War framing' in many of the new studies of the phenomenon, secondly, by stressing the resulting blind spots in the assessment of its geographical scope (e.g., the lack of attention paid to Spain, scarce contributions on Eurocommunism's ramifications beyond West Europe). It then proposes a de-centred perspective on the phenomenon that is able to encompass its global roots and outreach, especially regarding the Third World; contrary to the prevalent focus on individual national cases of Eurocommunism, the article calls for a framing of Eurocommunist coordination as a transnational formation, so that both the leading role of Italian communists and the cross-border exchanges that shaped it can factor into a revised scholarly engagement with the topic. From this vantage point, Eurocommunism emerges as a strategy of transition for the global conjuncture of multiple crises that the 1970s represented, one that nevertheless failed to present a viable alternative to neoliberalism, another product of the decade in question. The article concludes by approaching the little explored gender dimension of Eurocommunism, visible in its entanglement with the second-wave feminism.

Migrant Radicalism and Activism in Australia: The Transnational Experience of Pierina Pirisi

ABSTRACTThis article examines the transnational experience of Italian-born Pietrina (“Pierina”) Pirisi, who took an active part in the communist and ethnic rights movements in Australia from 1972 until her return to Italy in 1984. For Pierina, the paths of migration, radicalism and activism intertwined when she moved from her native Sardinia to Sydney and joined the Communist Party of Australia, the Italian Communist Party in Australia, and the Italian Federation of Migrant Workers and their Families. Before emigrating, Pierina had begun developing a radical political awareness, which migration only strengthened. Through Pierina’s story, this article expands our understanding and traces the evolution of the involvement in far-left politics and community-based initiatives of newcomers from Italy who had experienced, or had been inspired by, the movements of “1968”. By shuttling between Australia and Italy’s communist experiences, Pierina’s story complicates our understanding of migrant activism, yet it enriches our knowledge by adding transnational, pre- and post-emigration elements to the history of the politicisation of migrants. This article demonstrates the value of a multifaceted approach to historical analysis and interpretation, and the engagement of multiple sources, from immigration and security files to oral history, when examining post-1968 political activism by and for migrants.

No Country for Revolutionaries: Italian Communists in Sydney 1971‐1991: Their Activities, Policies and Liaison with the Italian and Australian Communist Parties

No Country for Revolutionaries: Italian Communists in Sydney 1971‐1991: Their Activities, Policies and Liaison with the Italian and Australian Communist Parties

Science, Natural Magic, and the Subaltern Worldview in Postwar Italian Historiography

Focusing on the work of the historians of early modern science and philosophy Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg, this essay aims to frame the relationship between science and magic in postwar Italian historiography within the context of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Garin and Rossi investigated the seventeenth-century science’s roots in Renaissance authors. In the same years, De Martino carried out fieldwork on the magical worldview of farmers of southern Italy, aiming to explain how such doctrines had been connected and somehow shaped by the culture of the elites since the Renaissance. Some years later, Ginzburg, explicitly inspired by De Martino’s work, investigated the popular magic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friulan peasants and its relationship with the culture of the elites. This essay aims to show how the ideas of these historians was influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s ideas and how they were connected with the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, which indirectly affected the view of historians on science, magic, popular culture and the culture of the elites, and modernity in postwar Italy. This essay also highlights the differences between contemporary Italian, British, and US historians in light of their different cultural agendas.

Neither for, nor against Mao: PCI-CCP interactions and the normalisation of Sino-Italian Relations, 1966–71

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s interactions with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the years immediately preceding the normalisation of Sino-Italian relations. The present work highlights three aspects of this dynamic: the PCI’s rewriting of its identity as a foreign policy making actor independent of the US and the USSR, and neither dismissive nor laudatory of Mao; the PCI’s establishment of partnerships with actors at home and abroad to allow for its China-policy blueprints to come to fruition; and the efforts of PCI-affiliated intellectuals toward making a rapprochement between the PCI and the CCP possible.

Perspectives nationale et internationale dans l’étude du PCF et du PCI

Les concepts de « national » et « international » sont primordiaux dans l’étude du Parti communiste français et du Parti communiste italien. Les deux plus grands partis communistes de l’Europe de l’Ouest ont toujours dû essayer de concilier leurs exigences nationales avec les enjeux géopolitiques internationaux et soviétiques. La synthèse n’a pas été toujours évidente, et cette difficulté émerge dans le débat historiographique sur les deux partis. Une approche conflictuelle a été privilégiée par les historiens des deux partis, et ces deux concepts n’ont pas été analysés comme deux aspects d’une problématique globale, mais plutôt par opposition l’un à l’autre. Après avoir examiné les positions de certains historiens, nous proposons une analyse de la problématique plus neutre et organique, en présentant comme cas d’étude l’utilisation des symboles nationaux par les deux partis. On a choisi une approche comparative car la situation géopolitique et historique des deux partis présentait des similitudes et des cas d’analyse similaires, et car dans les deux cas on a vu, a des différents niveaux d’intensité, l’affirmation de deux écoles de pensée opposées et conflictuelles.

On Luigi Nono’s Political Thought: Emancipation Struggles, Socialist Hegemony and the Ethic Behind the Composition of Für Paul Dessau

The musical activism of the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-1990) is one of the most fascinating examples of the relationship between music and politics in the second half of the twentieth century. A member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1952, he considered music as a tool for the establishment of socialist hegemony. In this article, I firstly examine how concepts from Antonio Gramsci underlie Nono’s political thought, the relationship between his conception of social justice struggles and violence, and the ethic behind his compositional practice. Secondly, I analyse how Nono addressed his political and ethical commitment in his last work for magnetic tape, Fur Paul Dessau (1974). This article aims to contribute to the discussion on Nono’s appropriation of Gramsci’s ideas, shedding light on how Nono addressed the memory of antifascism, Cold War politics, and Third World international liberation struggles in works from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

Итальянский марксизм и российский социализм : А. Лабриола, А. Грамши и философско-культурные вопросы революционного движения (1890–1937)

The aim of this paper is to discuss and analyze the relationship between Italian Marxist thinkers Antonio Labriola and Antonio Gramsci on the one side and prominent representatives of the Russian Socialist and Communist movement on the other: Georgiy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. In the history of the Socialist (and Anarchic) movement in Italy and in Russia from the end of 19th to the beginning of 20th century, there are many reasons for a more careful study of the points of contact and coincidence between two countries: first of all, because of the existence of the Italian Socialist Party influential leaders of Russian origin, such as Anna Kulisheva (known in Italy as Anna Kuliscioff) and Angelica Balabanova (Angelica Balabanoff). Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola was a significant moral and theoretical authority in the intellectual formation of the Russian socialistic democrats abroad. The influence of Labriola on the European labor movement and on the debate on historical materialism was enormous, and his rejection of the positivism and reformism in the Italian Socialist Party also had an influence on the discussions in the European socialist parties. Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, assimilated the concept of praxis theory, as well as the rejection of positivism and the reformism of Italian socialism from Labriola; Gramsci’s idea of the creative power of the working class in the revolutionary process derives from Labriola’s arguments about classes in historical materialism. Gramsci’s interest in Labriola is associated not only with the role of the philosopher in the creation of the theory of praxis, or his teaching on historical materialism, but also with his influence on Russian Marxism.

Carlo Salinari, the PCI, and Transnational Exchanges in Il Contemporaneo (1954–1955)

This article investigates from a hitherto neglected transnational angle the cultural strategies developed in the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s literary journal Il Contemporaneo by the editor-in-chief Carlo Salinari in the years 1954 and 1955. In the form of editorial notes, foreign contributions and reviews of foreign literature, Salinari aimed at establishing an intellectual dialogue which would reach across national borders. Analysing the contributions published in the journal, the article explores the extent to which this transnational exchange related with the Gramscian ‘national-popular’ stance and helped to legitimate the journal within the Italian cultural field.

The English Way to Italian Socialism: The PCI, ‘Red Bologna’ and Italian Communist Culture as Seen through the English Prism

This contribution analyses the British perception of Red Bologna during the seventies and eighties, when politicians in the UK thought of Bolognese Social-Democrats as an example of good government. Maccaferri investigates the way in which the British political debate and the intellectual public discourse (as seen in journals, pamphlets and books) ‘imported’, deconstructed, adapted and appropriated the Italian communist model. The aim is to cast light on an ‘Italy Made in Britain’ that was constructed in the prevalently left-wing British political debate between the mid-nineteen seventies and the late nineteen-eighties, namely until Italian Communism started to search for a new name and a new identity, and, indeed, it liquidated the model itself. This article considers the debate expressed in the pamphlet Red Bologna (eds Max Jaggi, Roger Muller, Sil Schmid, 1977), journals such as Power and Politics and The New Left review, and newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer. Furthermore, it focusses on the resurgence of leftist intellectuals. It deals primarily with Marxism Today’s Italian discourse. By focusing on such a view, Maccaferri reconstructs the way in which, whilst engaging with the Thatcherite period, the English political debate and intellectual discourse perceived and constructed a very different kind of Italy that was simultaneously revolutionary and communist in its ideology and ‘moderate’ and socialist – if not liberal – in its policies.

Paradoxes of the self: the autobiographical construction of the subject in the Italian Communist Party and in Italian neo-feminism

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.

Emergence and evolution of euroscepticism as a political phenomenon in Italy

The article covers the main phases of the evolution of Eurosceptic sentiments in Italy since the very beginning of the country’s participation in the European integration. Although the current state of Euroscepticism is being much examined and discussed in academic circles, until now Russian political science has paid little attention to the analysis of the roots, sources and transformation of Eurosceptic ideas and examination of their main supporters in the historical perspective, especially when dealing with traditionally Europhile states such as Italy. The research is exploratory and its purpose is to trace back the history of the diffusion of Eurosceptic ideas, examine the main reasons for their rise and find the differences and similarities in the party-based Euroscepticism of the First and Second Republic. The author applies a historical method which traces the emergence and evolution of Euroscepticism as a political and social phenomenon in both political circles and society. Besides, the author makes use of comparative analysis in order to distinguish ideological Euroscepticism from strategic one. As a result of the research the author draws a number of important conclusions. Firstly, Euroscepticism as a political phenomenon in Italy dates back as far as the early 1950s, when Italy made a choice in favor of Atlantic and, therefore, European bloc. Secondly, the main advocates of Eurosceptic ideas during the First Republic were Italian communists and socialists whose Euroscepticism was ideological. Thirdly, the end of the First Republic paved the way for new parties which managed to make use of strategic Euroscepticism in order to woo the electorate. Finally, among the main reasons that contributed to the Italians’ disappointment with the EU there are the deepening of integration and at least two serious crises: the financial and the migration one. As for the practical relevance of the paper, its conclusions can be used in order to understand and explain similar processes in other EU member states, forecast further fate of Euroscepticism in Italy and build up relationship between Russian and Italian political parties if common interests are found.

Ernesto Buonaiuti e l'Alleanza democratica per il risorgimento italiano (1945-1946)

In this essay the author aims to analyse the political project proposed by Ernesto Buonaiuti after the Second World War. The Democratic Alliance for the Italian Risorgimento, founded in 1945, tried to retrieve Mazzini’s political program and aimed at the birth of a republican Italy, which should have had a central role in building a united and Christian Europe. The project of Democratic Alliance for the Italian Risorgimento foresaw also the overcoming of the Cold War’s bipolar confrontation and an utopian cooperation between Western and Eastern countries: the Soviet Union itself had to be part, with full rights, in the process of European political integration. Through the periodicals Il Risveglio and, later on, 1945, Buonaiuti sought collaborations with all of the parties willing to share the main points of his plan, from the Christian Democracy to the Italian Communist Party. However, the dialogue with De Gasperi and Togliatti appeared unable to offer concrete results. The only political force which established a constructive relationship with Democratic Alliance was the Italian Republican Party, which shared Mazzini’s message, the constant references to the completion of Italian Risorgimento and the yearning for a united Europe.