Italian Communists 'sent comrades to die in the Gulag'

Three hundred Italian Communists who fled to Russia to avoid persecution by the Fascists ended up in Stalin's Gulag, dying in front of Soviet firing squads, many of them falsely denounced by their Italian comrades as Trotskyites or worse.

It is one of the ugliest chapters in the history of the Italian Communist Party and, for decades, it was hushed up on orders from the top. But now the leader of the "Left Democrats", as the party was rebranded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has announced that he will travel to St Petersburg in June to bow his head before a monument honouring the betrayed and slaughtered party members.

The party's decision to come clean about the Soviet nightmare is another milestone in the long march of the Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI, which was, for decades, the biggest in western Europe. From its Stalinist heyday under the vicelike grip of Palmiro Togliatti, founder and undisputed leader from 1927 until his death in 1964, it has moved via Eurocommunism and the steady shedding of Marxist baggage to its imminent immersion in a single "Partito Democratico" (Democratic Party) that is supposed to yoke all Italy's centre-left parties in a single grouping.

Piero Fassino, 57, the gangling, rail-thin secretary of the Left Democrats and a leading light of the Communist Party since his early 20s, made the decisive move after receiving the draft of a book on the forgotten sufferings of Gino de Marchi, a film director and Communist Party member who was executed in the Soviet Union in 1938.

De Marchi was a pioneering Italian Communist and a friend of the great Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, and fled from Italy to the Soviet Union in 1921.

Even before the arrival in power of Mussolini in 1922, Italy was a dangerous place for left-wing revolutionaries, and De Marchi was one of many to escape to the only place on earth where he could expect a warm welcome. With the help of Gramsci and others he found work in Moscow, married a Russian girl and settled down to play his part in the great socialist experiment.

But things began to go wrong almost at once. In 1922, during the occupation of a factory, he was arrested on suspicion of being a spy for the Italian Fascists. He was held in jail for a year, and only released after an appeal to the Soviet authorities by Gramsci, who insisted that De Marchi was a true believer.

Fifteen years later, however, with Stalinist terror in full swing, Gramsci was unable to help him again. On 2 October 1937, he was again arrested in Moscow, this time by the NKVD, Stalin's much-feared secret police. He was accused of belonging to a Trotskyite association secretly funded by the Italian embassy and engaged in spying.

De Marchi denied it all and held out until the following February, when he was slyly advised by a deceiving "friend" to make a false confession and thereby cheat the firing squad.

He declared his willingness to "give the investigators a deposition on my counter-revolutionary activities", and in June 1938 was duly executed by firing squad. His family was informed that he had died of peritonitis.

De Marchi's bitter story was rescued from oblivion by the stubborn efforts of his daughter, Luciana, who - from the age of 13 - refused to be cowed by the Soviet authorities and fought for years for her father's good name. De Marchi was finally rehabilitated in 1956, three months after Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes.

Now, finally, it is the turn of Italy's post-communists to recognise the evil done to their comrades in the Soviet Union, often thanks to the activities of Italian Communist informers. Mr Fassino, who has long been a leading reformer, received the draft of a book on Luciana De Marchi and her father by an Italian historian, Gabriele Nissim.

This week Mr Fassino confirmed he would travel to the town of Levashovo, near St Petersburg, on 29 June for the ceremony of commemoration.

"Reckonings with history must always be made with coherence," he said, using the sort of stilted phraseology that still comes naturally to old compagni (comrades). "That is why at the end of June, I will be in Russia to pay homage to the Italian victims of Stalin's Gulag."

Divided left wing

* SPAIN

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, bitter infighting among the Spanish left broke out in Barcelona, and communist and anarchist militias fought pitched street battles to gain control of the city. The conflict began when communist units under the influence of the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain tried to take over the telephone exchange that was held by anarchist units. The anarchists fired back and set up barricades across the city. Until then, the greatest threat to the republican movement had been Franco's nationalists but many historians argue it was eventually the left's ideological differences that sealed their fate.

* GREECE

By 1941 Greece was split between the occupying armies of Germany, Italy and Bulgaria, and the Greek resistance was born. From the outset it was divided along ideological lines with the right-wing National Republican Greek League (EDES) and the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM-ELAS), fighting the occupiers and each other. British backing for EDES encouraged these divisions, and both sides accused each other of atrocities against civilians. As defeat for the Axis powers loomed and the outlines of the Cold War became clearer, the Greek resistance movements splintered further. The joy of liberation was quickly swept away by a civil war, in which the RAF strafed Greek resistance fighters in Athens and show trials and denunciations saw hundreds executed.