[lbo-talk] Mussolini, Trotskyist

[Chris Doss]

--- Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Chris and Michael P,
> 
> Goatfuckers and ....niks aside, I've always been
> curious about the storm around
> German-Soviet non-agression treaty (aka "The
> Nazi-Soviet Pact") of 1939.  As
> you pointed out, Chris, the Italian Fascist State
> had signed a non-aggression
> treaty with Nazi Germany early on; might have been
> 1933 or '34. 

The so-called Pact of Steel. FWIW Mussolini in his
memoirs (actually a series of articles written in Salo
shortly before his death) claims that he tried to
prevent the war, which might or might not be true.
Anybody know? His speeches from the beginning of the
war contradict this, but what one says in public and
what one does diplomatically are not the same thing...

And, if I'm not
> mistaken, the Soviets were attempting to get the
> British to sign a kind of
> mutual defense treaty in the very late 30s, but the
> British seemed to be
> dawdling about it, taking ships instead of planes
> and so forth and Stalin
> (never being one to be overly trusting) saw the
> writing on the wall, so he
> turned around and sent Molotov to Berlin to see
> about the negotiating the
> non-agression pact with the Nazi State.  

Mussolini says that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was
concluded "under the noses" off the British, "who had
been on their knees" before Stalin for five months. He
diescribes it as a great geopolitical coup that the
Germans were mad to ruin by invading the USSR.


> Party Congress after Party Congress in the 30s
> warned of the threat in the
> USSR.  And then, of course, there was Hitler's
> STRUGGLE in the public domain.  

My own view, and I'm no historian, is that the R-M
Pact represented the Nazis and the USSR both trying to
get into a better position for the inevitable
conflict. Stalin was supposedly surprised by the
German invasion, but I think that had to do with the
timing, not the fact. I'm willing to be corrected on
this if anybody knows better.

>  
> 
> And as for the subject line of this thread....no,
> Mussolini was no Trotskyist,

It was a joke. ;)

This fear was not
> unfounded as the WWII history of the Crimean
> Tartars, among others had shown.

It seems to have been a general rule -- if you were an
ethnic minority in Nazi-occupied territory, you
collaborated in the hope that you would get
independence (with some exceptions, like the
Ossetians). Then, later Stalin would deport your
people en masse away from the border.

BTW the effects of this are still being felt. For
instance, the Ingush (or lots of them) collaborated
and were deported. Parts of their territory were given
to the Ossetians. In the 1960s, the Ingush were
rehabilitated and sent home, but the territory given
to the Ossetians was not handed back. They fought a
mini-war over it in 1992 that killed a few hundred
people until the Russian Army intervened.


And the director, Eisenstein was
> lauded by Stalin shortly
> after he saw the film, as being a true Bolshevik. 

Yeah, that's a great movie. By the way, according to
Orlando Figes' book Natasha's Dance: A Cultural
History of Russia, Eisenstein originally had a
different ending for "Ivan the Terrible," in which
Ivan (the stand-in for Stalin) weeps at the end at the
deaths he has caused.

BTW, Mussolini mentions the word "Jew" three times in
the entirety of his book, surprisingly considering
that he was writing in German-controlled Italy. The
Trotsky comment has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
The Nazis, not the Fascists, were the Jew-obsessed
people. There were lots of Jewish Fascists, in fact.

When did Italy finally bend to German pressure and
start handing over Jews? It was pretty late, IIRC.
Also IIRC, it did not apply to Jews who were members
of the Fascist Party or their relatives. Anybody know
anything about this?

Nu, zayats, pogodi!


		
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