Revolutionary Requirements, Etc

Ben Sonnenberg

Revolutionary Requirements, Etc.Author(s): Dorothy GallagherSource: Grand Street, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 226-234Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006721 .

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GRAND STREET

REVOLUTIONARY REQUIREMENTS, ETC.

Dorothy Gallagher

rTOuring my lifetime I have seen just about every

Jthing," said Vittorio Vidali on the occasion of his

eightieth birthday. It was not merely an old man's boast. With equal truth he might also have said that he had done

just about everything too.

Though he traveled widely, Vidali was not generally known outside Italy. A few radicals in the United States remember him as Enea Sormenti; in Russia some Bolshe viks who escaped the purges know him as Carlos; veterans of the Spanish Civil War speak of Carlos Contreras.

Vidali died in 1983, the same age as the century. He was not a tall man, but he was powerfully built, forceful in character, swift to action, intelligent and a riveting speaker. Had he been without politics he would have been an adventurer. As it was, he was an ideologue: by his own

depiction a Stalinist. Last year one of the many volumes of memoirs that Vidali poured out during the last decade or so of his life was translated into English. It is his

Diary of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Lawrence Hill & Co.; translated from Italian by Nell Amter Cattonar and A. M. Elliot), a per sonal document of that momentous event by a revolution

ary to whom Stalin was the embodiment of revolution.

n his long life he had indeed seen just about everything. When Mussolini came to power in 1922, Vidali was

attending Bocconi University in Milan, a student of ac

counting. He was already a communist and he fled Italy. He wandered Europe for a while; at the German frontier he was arrested and sent to prison. He was in Algeria when he learned that the Italian consulate was looking for him; with the help of some sailors he stowed away on the Martha Washington, which docked in New York on

August 22, 1923. Vidali lived in the United States for four years, using

the name Enea Sormenti. Quite soon after his arrival he

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DOROTHY GALLAGHER

became Secretary of the Italian branch of the Communist

Party in New York and editor of its newspaper, II Lavo ratore. Fascism was the overriding concern of Italian

Americans in the early 1920s. Vidali was active in the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America, which began as a coalition of socialists, communists, anarchists and labor unions. By 1926 this precarious unity shattered as the labor delegates withdrew, charging the communists with

setting up fictitious branches in order to increase their

voting strength. Vidali-Sormenti was AFANA's new

Secretary. The Department of Immigration caught up with Vidali

in 1926 and ordered his deportation. Vidali called on nu merous defenders: Clarence Darrow and the American Civil Liberties Union appealed on his behalf, as did Carlo Tresca, the anarchist, Vidali's comrade in AFANA, who wrote that "The cause of Enea Sormenti . . is the cause of liberty of all people." Appeals availed to the extent that Vidali was not returned to Italy, where prison or possibly death awaited him; he was allowed to leave the country voluntarily, which he did in July 1927. He chose Soviet Russia for his destination.

Vidali arrived in Moscow when the Russian party was

already a battleground between Stalin and Trotsky. Two months later he left in a state of exultation. From Riga, he wrote to a friend in America. He spoke of his love for Russia and for its heroic people, of his belief in revolu

tionary Russia's "emancipating function for the interna tional proletariat." He had had, he admitted, some brief disillusionments during his first days in Russia but these were soon stilled by his realization that they were "due to the petit bourgeois atmosphere that still had not dis

appeared from my soul.... One leaves Russia more happy to fight.... One must become an iron revolutionary with a creative mind...." He advised his friend that "a Marxist has got to be a cold rationalizer. A Leninist must aim

straight to his own goal.... In political life you need

strength of will...." Vidali was hardly alone in being stirred by revolution

ary Russia, but his was a nature attracted to absolutes. He "attended the program of one of the best academies" in

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Moscow: "Many go [to Russia] and understand. And those that do not understand return home to fight against her. I have understood," he wrote.

As a revolutionary he went to Mexico where he met,

among others, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and the photographer Tina Modotti. In 1930 Vidali was re called to Moscow; Modotti soon followed.

In 1931 when the Spanish monarchy fell Vidali was sent to Spain. He was there again in 1934, when the iron

miners briefly took control of the province of Asturias, and in 1936 when the military rose against the Popular Front government. Now, as Carlos Contreras, Vidali was a prime organizer and the political commissar of that

most impressive of Communist-led regiments, the Fifth

Regiment. Vidali wrote much about his years in Spain. Not un

naturally he gave himself a hero's role and there is no doubt that he was a physically courageous and power fully persuasive leader. Those journalists who went to

Spain identifying the Soviet Union with the interests of

Spanish socialism admired Carlos greatly. Claud Cock bur described him as a "husky bull-necked man who combined almost superhuman driving power with an unbreakable gaiety... ." Anna Louise Strong quoted him on the formation of the "Steel" Company: "We decided to create a special [military] company which should give an example of discipline.... For this company we estab lished special slogans designed to create an iron unity: 'Never leave a comrade wounded or dead in the hands of the enemy . . .' 'If my comrade advances or retreats without orders I have the right to shoot him. .... '

By 1937 Vidali was known in Spain to be an enforcer of discipline, which meant, given the nature of Stalin's concerns, that he was involved in battles not only against Franco's troops and the Italian fascist army but also

against those leftists in disagreement with Russian aims in Spain. The Spanish anarchists, the POUMists, all de nounced as "Fifth Columnists" and "uncontrollables" by the communists, were, in the words of La Pasionaria, to be exterminated "like beasts of prey."

For Vidali's actual role, there appears to be only anec dotal evidence. Ernest Hemingway told the journalist

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DOROTHY GALLAGHER

Herbert Matthews that the skin between the thumb and index finger of Vidali's right hand was badly burned due to the frequency with which Vidali had fired his pistol in the communist campaign against deserters and fifth col umnists. Matthews later wrote about the massacre of hundreds of prisoners, perhaps a thousand, in Madrid's Model Prison: "I believe myself that the orders came from Comintern agents in Madrid because I know for a fact that the sinister Vittorio Vidali spent the night in the

prison briefly interrogating prisoners brought before him and, when he decided, as he almost always did, that they were fifth columnists, he would shoot them in the back of the head with his revolver."

Enrique Castro, with Vidali a leader of the Fifth Regi ment, later said that Contreras had personally executed Andres Nin, Political Secretary of the POUM. Men who had fought in Spain-Julian Gorkin of the POUM and Gustav Regler, the German communist writer, among them-believed for the rest of their lives that Vidali had a direct role in the murders of leftist dissidents.

In early February 1938, Catalonia fell to Franco's

troops. As the population fled ahead of the approaching army, Tina Modotti, who had been in Spain since 1934, sat alone at an outdoor cafe. According to Modotti's biog rapher, Mildred Constantine, an old friend from Mexico, Fernando Gamboa, passed by and asked what she was

doing. She was waiting for Carlos to come through with the Fifth Regiment, Modotti said. Gamboa walked on, later recalling, "It was more or less about six in the eve

ning, the sun was shining but gave no warmth ... the winter sun, the peasants escaping from the mountains, the

army retreating and the image of Tina, sitting alone ...

sitting alone and waiting . . ." On his eightieth birthday, forty years later, Vidali re

called only communist glory in Spain. Hundreds of fascist

planes had bombed the International Brigade positions at the battle of the Ebro: "We had already begun to say, 'It's all finished. They are all dead. There isn't one soldier left to fight. We have no reserves. This area is lost to us.'

Everyone appeared to be buried in the mud. But sud

denly we saw-living bodies arise from that mud as if from nowhere. Men covered with mud and blood ... And

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those men formed a company and marched once more

against the enemy.... Look, those are the communists; when you think they are dead they turn out to be more alive than ever!"

Vidali was wounded in Madrid when the city fell in November 1938; five months later he and Modotti man

aged to get out of Spain and find their way to asylum in Mexico, where Modotti died in 1942.

In Mexico Vidali was officially attached to the com munist newspaper El Popular; less officially he was a member of the staff of Constantine Oumansky, NKVD chief for North and Latin America. After the Nazi-Soviet

pact was signed in August 1939, the United States Office of Naval Intelligence reported that Vidali was a princi pal contact between Mexican communists and German

agents; and in May 1940, when the first attack was made on Leon Trotsky's life-for which David Alfaro Siquieros was arrested-Vidali's name was openly mentioned as an

organizer of the attempt. No action was taken by the Mexican police, but the story of his involvement was re

peated often-by Jesus Hernandez, once Minister of Edu cation in the Popular Front Government, by Julian Gorkin and by General Valentine Gonzales, El Campesino.

first became aware of Vidali's existence while working on a life of the anarchist Carlo Tresca. The lives of

the two men-both Italian-born, both revolutionaries had been entangled at certain points, so for a time I fol lowed Vidali's career as closely as I did Tresca's. By the

mid-thirties the assassinations of anarchists in Spain and the Moscow trials had caused Tresca to break his rela tions with the communists and become their insistent op ponent. In 1942 he turned specifically on Vidali. In his

newspaper, the Martello, Tresca identified "Commander Carlos" as the head of "a band of assassins [who] work in Mexico for Stalin .. ." Tresca's concern at that moment

was that a communist takeover was being planned in Mexico of the antifascist organizations which would have a voice in the postwar reconstruction of Italy. In Mexico, the communist-led Garibaldi Alliance responded by ask

ing the Italian-language communist newspaper in New York to publish a defense of Vidali, who had been basely

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DOROTHY GALLAGHER

slandered by "Carlo Tresca and other Trotskyites using methods typical of agents of Mussolini, Hitler and Fran co." Tresca was murdered in January 1943, after telling several friends that Vidali was in New York. He had said: "Where he is, I smell murder." Many people accused Vi dali of having a hand in the murder, though my research has convinced me that Tresca's death had its origins in another quarter.

idali returned to Trieste in 1947. After the break be tween Tito and Stalin, Radio Belgrade reported ru

mors that Vidali was planning Tito's assassination. An American journalist interviewed Vidali in 1950 and was told by him, "The Yugoslav people will handle [Tito], not

Vidali." In answer to other questions concerning Trotsky and Tresca he said: "Wherever I happen to be they al ways say I'm organizing agents to kill some anti-Soviet

personality.... I don't believe in killing opponents of the Soviet Union through my own actions. Tresca always had a wild imagination."

Vidali served as a communist deputy from Trieste be

ginning in 1958, and later as a Senator until 1968. Until his health began to fail he often made speeches through out Italy condemning the terrorism of the Red Brigades. As an old man he was an indefatigable teller of stories about his life; he took on the persona of a fierce yet lov able old revolutionary. When the time came to mark his

eightieth birthday, children embraced him, a young girl presented him with a bouquet of flowers. And when he

spoke, it was with some concern for his place in history. "During my lifetime I have seen just about everything. I was thinking about all that in these last few days: this

is the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Leon

Trotsky. And after forty years, the international press continues to peddle the story of my participation in that

murder. They have created a legend which only now, through my books, I am trying to put an end to: the ques tions of the murders of Tresca, of Nin, of Trotsky. And I

will have to continue to write because, as you know slander, slander-they will continue to slander, and some of it will be effective . . . sixty-three years of political activity constitute an enormous volume, and my life is

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an open book... Naturally this book is badly written in some parts, incomprehensible in others, full of errors, erasures, notes.... In these sixty-three years I believe I have always done my duty.... I was a [Stalinist] for

thirty or forty years.... I must still struggle against the remnants of Stalinism in myself... ."

hat is the bare outline of Vidali's life, and it brings me to his Diary, written from notes made contempo

raneously with the Twentieth Congress and first pub lished in Italy in 1974.

Vidali arrived in Moscow in February 1956 with some

foreboding. Neither he nor the other foreign delegates to the Congress would hear Khrushchev's secret speech de

nouncing Stalin, but Vidali knew that something was in the air. He read the signs accurately--no portraits of Stalin at the meeting hall, speeches that referred to a "certain

person" who had fostered the "cult of the individual." Hard as it was for him to believe, it seemed that the master purger was about to undergo a purge himself. Vi dali records the meetings he attended, the movies and

plays he saw. But the essence of his Diary is in his con versations with old comrades and his own musings on earlier days; his recollections only miss being admissions that what he was hearing was not exactly news to him.

Of course his old comrades had aged a great deal. Ye lena Stasova, once Lenin's secretary, later accused of Trot

skyism by Stalin, tells him that tens of thousands have suffered execution, prison and exile under Stalin's reign.

Of their friends, Stasova says, many are dead; the few still alive are "human wrecks" from the suffering they en dured. Further, she says, the assassination of Kirov in 1934, which Stalin had used to justify the purges, had been

arranged by Stalin in the first place. Vidali finds it difficult to sleep that night. He was "speechless," he writes, "hor rified ... all of this is fantastic, atrocious."

The next day he met with another old Russian friend whom he had known in Spain, and he asked about the Russian officers they had known there: Pavlov, Goriev, Berzin. Dead, almost all of them dead, he is told-though he could not have been in ignorance. "Shot as traitors for

having plotted against the Soviet state." Stalin devastated

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the army, the old Russian says, even though he knew that

Germany would attack Russia. The atmosphere in Moscow has certainly changed since

the old days, Vidali reflects. In those days he and his com rades spent the evenings in talk, singing and drinking until

they "went to bed filled to the brim with sentiments of international solidarity." He is referring to the 1930s here, but it is difficult for the reader to reconcile that happy recollection with Vidali's memory that in 1934, having come under suspicion by Yagoda, deputy head of the secret police, he himself barely escaped Russia alive.

He goes on musing, naming the dead to himself: Willi Muenzenberg, expelled as a Trotskyite, found dead in

1940; Bela Kun, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Rykov, Buk harin, all designated as "monsters" by Stalin; Mayakov sky, whom he met in 1930, shortly before the poet's sui cide. Old comrades from International Red Aid: "I could still see their faces: Shevlova, Lawrence, Eveline . . .

many, many others; all of them had been arrested and condemned, some to death, others ... in prison or con centration camp."

As the Congress goes on, Vidali grows morbid with his

thoughts. He counts the days until he can leave Moscow, though, oddly, he wonders why he is "fed up and de

pressed" when he knows that, after all, the socialist system is going forward. True, Stalin intensified the repression. But, "Was it really necessary to resort to death?" he won ders. "Couldn't they have acted as had been done in Lenin's day? Discuss." Could it be that Arthur Koestler was telling the truth in Darkness at Noon?

Vidali rallies. Who is this Khrushchev, anyway? "Who knew him until recently? ... In fact it was Stalin who discovered [him] and guided him with a fatherly hand." Marx was right. Doubt everything. "And begin by doubt

ing the present critics of Stalin and their actions." Who knows that Stalin would not be rehabilitated some day, just as those he condemned are now being rehabilitated?

Before leaving Moscow to go back home to Trieste, Vi dali met again with his old comrade Stasova. He com

plained to her that not enough guidance was being given to the foreign delegates who, after all, would be required to explain matters when they got home: "We could ex

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plain everything with ... dialectics," he pointed out; "we could justify many things by speaking about history, about

revolutionary requirements, about the struggle of the new

against the old, etc." Vidali regained his equilibrium; dialectics, history,

revolutionary requirements, "etc.," enabled him to explain away what he had been told in Moscow. To his constitu ents in Trieste he said that it was necessary to draw a bal ance sheet on Stalin who, while he undoubtedly commit ted errors, even crimes, had also led the Soviet Union in

triumph through the sieges of history. Vidali's equilibrium is echoed by Robert G. Colodny,

formerly of the Fifteenth International Brigade, who has written the introduction to Vidali's memoir: "That Red Star which in your youth just appeared on the horizon now moves toward its meridian. And in years to come, Carlos, when your grandchildren are as weighted with the years as you are, they will be able to say, there was a

man who spoke; there was a man who pioneered the way." Etc.

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Documents

Revolutionary Requirements, Etc