In mid-1917 offensive warfare seemed to link the fate of Italy with that of the Russian Revolution. In order to win favour with Russia’s increasingly concerned allies and to remobilize pro-war sentiment at home, Minister for War Kerensky decided on a new offensive. This began on 1 July when General Alexei Brusilov unleashed thirty-one divisions along a fifty mile front in Eastern Galicia. At first the offensive was an apparent success: 10,000 German and Austrian defenders were taken prisoner and, further south, General Lavr Kornilov captured 7,000 Austrians (Gilbert, 1994: 343; Herwig, 1997: 334). Kerensky could not contain his excitement. He saw in the spirit of the fighting soldiers a confirmation of the remo- bilizing potential of the revolution and the need to defend it against the Germans and Austrians (Lincoln, 1994: 408-9). But Kerensky’s excitement was as misplaced as his conviction that the Russian soldiers could be mobilized by his scintillating but programmatically vacuous and hence socially conservative speeches. On replacing Guchkov he had thought to rebuild the army ‘with charisma as his only offering and words as his only instruments’. There was little of the revolutionary about this offensive, even though ordered by the man who claimed to have been ‘sent by the revolution’ (Lincoln, 1994: 370-71). The offensive had perforce to be played up as a success for reasons of an internal political nature and most especially to challenge the pretensions of the Soviet to controlling military affairs and redefining the character of the war. ‘From the outset of preparations for the offensive’, Trotsky argued, ‘there began an automatic increase of the influence of the commanding staff, the organs of finance capital and [Miliukov’s] Kadet party’ (Trotsky, 1967, II: 118). In his view, moreover, the only way Russian soldiers could have been convinced that the offensive formed part of a revolutionary defensive war was with the immediate abolition of existing socio-economic relations on the land. Failing this, it was destined to assume ‘the character of an adventure’ (Trotsky, 1967, I: 356).
Indeed, when the Austro-German counter-offensive began in mid-July it easily drove back the Russians in the central sector, chasing a retreating army through Galicia and Bukovina and inflicting 40,000 losses (Herwig, 1997: 334-5). As a consequence of the army’s deepening disintegration Kerensky took over from Lvov as Prime Minister on 21 July. He sacked Brusilov and replaced him with Kornilov. In the meantime, mass demonstrations had been held in Petrograd between 17 and 18 July and were quickly transformed into a semi-insurrection. Bolshevik leaders managed, however, to convince protesters that the time to seize power had not yet come. But following the movement’s withdrawal there was an enormous backlash. The Bolshevik press was closed down, Lenin fled to Finland and other Bolshevik leaders and supporters were arrested and imprisoned. By virtue of what was termed a ‘mysterious succession’ of events, that is the coincidence of the dates of the July insurrection and the military collapse, the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular, were labelled as agents of a German plot (Trotsky, 1967, II: Chs 1-4).
How did Mussolini assess the Russian July offensive and its consequences? And what role did he ascribe to his increasingly ‘concrete’ form of national remobilization in Italy via the Russian surrogate? On 5 July, when news of Brusilov’s ‘achievements’ had been received, Mussolini wrote: ‘I kneel before this double victorious consecration, against the Tsar first, against the Kaiser now.’ He saw Brusilov’s triumph as a victory over Lenin and also claimed that the offensive proved that land reform in the here and now was utopian:
The Russian peasant, who had abandoned the trenches to go to the land, to take possession once and for all of the land, has understood, with the profound orientation of those spirits not poisoned by earthly and divine theologies, that a separate peace would be a betrayal and that universal peace is not possible without the defeat of Germany. A mysterious but persuasive voice seems to have said: if you don’t beat off the German threat, the land will never be yours. (OO, IX: 26-8)
Revolutionary social reforms were not, therefore, to be identified with those ‘concrete commitments’ which could be ‘actuated immediately’ and to which he had referred in the 27 June article. Later on in July Mussolini supported Kerensky’s dictatorship. This had been voted for almost unanimously in the Petrograd Soviet on 22 July and was to take the form of a government of public safety with unlimited powers (Trotsky, 1967, II: 120-21). Like Trotsky, but with approval rather than disapproval, Mussolini saw this as a Bonapartist resolution of the February Revolution that would keep Russia in the war. He argued that ‘at a certain moment the French Revolution was [Lazare-Nicolas] Carnot [organiser of the French revolutionary army] and then Napoleon’. His point was that, similar to the transition from Carnot to Napoleon, ‘Russia today is Kerensky.’ Kerensky represented ‘the synthesis which conciliates and annuls opposites’. But while this statement contrasts with Trotsky’s definition of the Bonapartist role which he believed Kerensky was seeking to assume by using his position to adopt force against perpetrators of anti-ruling class ‘anarchy’ but not against reactionaries (Trotsky, 1967, II: 143), in the very same article Mussolini confirmed precisely Trotsky’s definition. He opened the piece by quoting a news agency dispatch from Petrograd, which in turn quoted an appeal from the Petrograd Soviet, which had agreed to Kerensky’s 22 July proposal, to install a dictatorship. The document in question stated that a government of public safety would be formed in full agreement with the Soviet, that it would assume the form of a ‘“revolutionary dictatorship”’ and that it would take ‘“a series of measures aimed at defending and reinforcing the front, pushing back the enemy, introducing democratic and social reforms and re-establishing revolutionary order with an iron hand”’ (our emphasis). Crucially, however, when recalling this declaration later on in the article Mussolini removed one of its cornerstones. He wrote: ‘The task of the dictator is fundamentally two-fold: ‘“a series of measures aimed at defending and reinforcing the front, pushing back the enemy and re-establishing revolutionary order with an iron hand.”’ He did not even insert the suspension points for the reference to ‘democratic and social reforms’ which he had suppressed. The reason for the censorship was made apparent at the end of the article: despite having always theorized that out of the chaos and carnage of war would issue revolution, he actually equated revolution with unacceptable ‘chaos’:
Revolution cannot be chaos, it cannot be disorder, it cannot be the undoing of every activity, of every limit on social life, as some extremist idiots in some countries opine. Revolution has a sense and historic import only when it represents a superior order, a political economic and moral order of an elevated sphere; otherwise it is reaction, it is the Vendee. (OO, IX: 77 8)
One can search Mussolini’s articles in vain for any articulation of the elements that would go to make up this presumed ‘superior political, economic and moral order’. Indeed, when, on 29 July, he returned to the morale of the Italian Army in relation to the lessons to be drawn from Russia, he resorted once more to undefined formulae:
As regards the internal conditions of the Italy of tomorrow we add: a ‘social’ content needs to be given to the war! Go to the soldiers: but not with uncertain promises which for their inherent inconsistency cannot raise enthusiasms, but with ‘facts’ which demonstrate to the men that the whole Nation is with them, that the whole Nation is concentrated in the effort of preparing a new Italy for the army which will return victorious from the re-conquered frontiers. (OO, IX: 82-4)
Even when, in one of the last articles of this period, Mussolini mentioned the land, the statement was innocuous. With reference to post-war demobilization he wrote on 16 August: ‘Once back from the trenches, the peasants, who make up the majority of our army, will find their houses still in one piece and not destroyed as in France and the other invaded Nations. The land will not be devastated, but ready for fecundating labour’ (OO, IX: 116-19).
What really mattered to Mussolini during this period was not social reform but the inter-related issues of the internal enemy and territorial expansion. When he dealt specifically with the collapse of the Russian Army he focused on the influence of the ‘traitor’ Lenin. He declared the need to ‘fight against and give no truce to the Lenins of all countries until the victory’. The Lenins of all countries naturally included Avanti!, the ‘organ of Italian “socialbochery”’ which had given its ‘“unconditional support”’ to Lenin (OO, IX: 74-6). As regards territory, however, international events conspired to undermine Mussolini’s view of Italian war aims. French and British missions to the United States in April and May 1917 had let Wilson know that a secret agreement had been made with Italy in 1915, and had also revealed key elements of its content. Following these missions, Sonnino was more than concerned that the contents of the Pact of London were slipping away across the Atlantic (Rossini, 1991: 473-91). This preoccupation was underpinned by the fact that in April 1917 America did not declare war on Austria-Hungary and in fact teased out a separate peace in secret negotiations (Valiani, 1966a: 387-92).
France was also prepared to countenance this latter prospect. Even before American intervention, the Emperor Karl’s brother-in-law, Prince Sisto of Bourbon-Parma, had contacted the French government with a view to opening discussions based on the proposal to evacuate Belgium, return Alsace-Lorraine and allow Serbia an outlet to the sea. No territorial concessions to Italy were foreseen during these contacts (Valiani, 1966a: 395-6; Pieropan, 1988: 262; Vivarelli, 1991, I: 186). These negotiations came to nothing, but they showed that France was not hostile to the idea of a separate peace. As for Britain, on 8 June, in the wake of the French mutinies, Lloyd George proposed to suspend the imminent British offensive in Ypres and to seek instead to isolate Germany militarily by negotiating a separate peace with Austria-Hungary (Gilbert, 1994: 338). He lost, but this did not thwart British hopes of getting Austria-Hungary to draw separate peace conclusions. Indeed, on 30 July British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour made a speech in the House of Commons which focused only on the righteousness of France’s territorial claims to Alsace-Lorraine, subordinating all other (undefined) commitments, and hence respect of the terms of the Pact of London (unmentioned), to military considerations. A detailed account of this speech was reproduced in the Italian press (for example on the front page of IL Corriere della Sera on 2 August). In the meantime, the southern Slavs were also moving. On 20 July, Pasic and Trumbic had signed an accord in Corfu which to all intents and purposes declared the birth ofYugoslavia (Bannan and Edelenyi, 1970: 256-61). Finally, in a note dated 1 August Pope Benedict XV urged the governments of the belligerent nations to put an end to what he termed the ‘useless massacre’. The note was made public on 16 August and published in the papers the following day.
These world meetings, documents and statements informed Mussolini’s territorial writings during the tumultuous period of the July days in Russia. As regards Britain, on 10 July he wrote that ‘hundreds of thousands of treatises have been freely distributed and it has already been seen that certain currents of public opinion, especially in England, have been influenced by the Yugoslav thesis’ (OO, IX: 39-41). On 15 July he responded to French Freemasons who in Les Temps had declared that there were ‘no doubts’ about Italy’s rights to the Trentino, whereas Mussolini was, of course, also interested in South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass (OO, IX: 49-51). On 3 August he conceded that Balfour had been forced to keep to abstract declarations, but he argued that the British Foreign Secretary had spoken rather flatteringly of Austria-Hungary when referring to it as ‘old and great’ (OO, IX: 93-6). Four days later he suggested that the Entente powers were privy to the Pact of Corfu and had effectively sanctioned it (OO, IX: 104-7). Out of hospital since 11 August, Mussolini was flabbergasted by the Pope’s territorial proposals which were limited to the evacuation of Belgium and the French provinces, and negotiations as regards Alsace-Lorraine and the Italian irredentia. Mussolini affirmed that ‘the peace proposed by Benedict XV is an Austro-German peace’ (OO, IX: 120-22).
In short, Mussolini’s programme of territorial expansion could not stand the test of the changed international scene on the one hand, and his refusal to envisage internal social reform as an element of mobilization on the other. At the level of representations this was expressed by an intensification of both poles of his ‘war culture’, that is with an increasingly demonized cosmology of ‘enemies’ who were cropping up everywhere: German subjects were wandering freely on Italian soil and conspiring against the Italian Army; Leninists in Russia were in the pay of the Kaiser and by inference so, too, were the socialist ‘boche’ of Avanti!; British and French allies were falling foul of Austrian-instigated ‘Yugoslav imperialism’ and heading ineluctably towards a dishonourable betrayal of the 1915 territorial accord; finally, the Pope was doing timely favours for the Central Powers and effectively acting as their spokesman. Would not a major success on the Isonzo put paid to all of these internal and external ‘Austrian’ contrivances?