Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks are presented as the victorious center of a revolution that seemed to redraw the scale and possibilities of politics. Their example reaches well beyond Russia: it inspires Italian workers and communist delegates, divides socialist strategy, and becomes a point of comparison for fascist claims to national renewal. Yet the narrative does not treat Bolshevik victory as a simple promise of international revolution. Russian military strength and political authority stand beside failed revolutions elsewhere, retreats by western communists, and the subordination of foreign parties to Moscow.

Revolution as a continental expectation

In the months after the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution gives concrete form to the upheaval feared and anticipated across Europe. The narrative places it alongside the brief revolutionary governments in Bavaria and Hungary. In Bavaria, a socialist republic gives way to a Soviet republic, then to a communist government led by Eugen Levine, whom workers hail as the German Lenin; that government, too, soon collapses. In Hungary, Béla Kun and Sándor Garbai proclaim a Soviet republic and ally with Lenin’s Russia. Their government seeks to recover territory lost in the war and intervenes in Slovakia and Romania, but the wider revolutionary moment proves precarious.

For Italian socialists, these events sharpen expectation. At a Milan rally in April 1919, tens of thousands of workers listen to tribunes amid the sense that revolution is approaching. The narrative links this atmosphere to the revolutionary wave already submerging Europe, while showing how anticipation and political mobilization can make a possible future feel imminent. The Bolsheviks matter here not merely as a Russian party but as evidence that an established order can be overthrown—and as the standard against which Italian leaders are judged.

The Red Army and the reach of the Russian example

The Bolsheviks’ influence is also military. In 1919, the red flag flies across at least sixteen fronts, from Vilnius and Samara to Vladivostok. Leon Trotsky’s creation of the Red Army is described as transforming conceptions of warfare: a fluid, expansive conflict whose theater is imagined on a planetary scale. The account stresses the contrast between this sweeping military project and the isolated hopes of Italian workers, whose planned general strike proceeds without the international support its organizers had expected.

That contrast becomes pointed in July 1919. At a Milan gathering, red flags fill the space before the Labor Office on Via Manfredo Fanti, and the crowd waits for Nicola Bombacci to speak. The atmosphere is festive rather than insurrectionary; mounted troops patrol nearby streets but encounter no opposing army. The French and British labor movements have withdrawn their support for the proposed general strike, leaving Italian workers to act in solidarity with their Russian counterparts without a comparable international force behind them. The spectacle of the flags and the actual limits of the strike occupy the same scene.

The projected Italian revolution is then deferred. The narrative contrasts Russia’s winter setting and the Bolsheviks’ seizure of the Winter Palace with Italy’s summer and the repeated postponement of decisive action. The comparison makes the Russian precedent both an inspiration and a reproach: the Bolsheviks had acted, while Italian socialists again told their supporters to wait for another occasion. But the Russian example does not guarantee lasting victory elsewhere. The Hungarian Soviet Republic, which Bombacci and his comrades had praised, collapses within months. In Ukraine, Denikin’s counterrevolutionary forces, allied with the Germans, approach Kyiv, and the decree distributing land to peasants has already been abolished. Revolution’s promise is thus placed against defeat, reversal, and the loss of gains.

A model contested among Italian communists

By October 1922, the Bolsheviks’ influence is institutional as well as symbolic. Bombacci travels to Moscow with a delegation from the Italian Communist Party, which had split from the Italian Socialist Party at Livorno in January 1921. The Italian party itself remains divided. Angelo Tasca leads a minority wing open to renewed cooperation with the socialists; Amadeo Bordiga leads a majority opposed to a united front. Russian Bolsheviks press for a merger, hoping that a unified proletarian bloc could oppose fascism, but Bordiga resists.

The disagreement concerns more than party procedure. Bordiga regards democracy as already belonging to the capitalist counterrevolution and sees little distinction between democratic rule and fascist power. Trotsky, by contrast, insists on the distinctive features of Italian fascism, especially the unprecedented mobilization of the petite bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The narrative makes the dispute consequential: if democracy and fascism are treated as identical, the danger posed by fascist seizure of power may be misread, and the case for a united front weakened. Bombacci sides with Moscow’s effort to rebuild unity. At a Rome congress in February, he argues against the Bordiga faction’s political purism; his position leaves him isolated, mistrusted, and eventually expelled from the party’s central committee. In a letter to Grigori Zinoviev, he describes his political exclusion as an assassination.

Victory, dependence, and memory

The balance of power within the Communist International increasingly favors the Russian comrades. The western parties are depicted as retreating after successive defeats, while the authority of Moscow grows. Bombacci recognizes the unequal position of the Italian communists and describes their advance as following the light of the Russian Revolution despite fear and grief. In the following year, he argues in parliament for Italy to reopen trade with Russia and recognize its government. In this campaign he finds support from industrial magnates such as Ettore Conti, an alliance that the narrative presents as one of the ironies forced on the defeated.

The Russian Revolution also survives as an image. In Moscow, photographs of key moments are displayed in Communist International offices: government troops firing on a crowd in July 1917, armed Bolshevik workers patrolling Petersburg in September, and sailors aboard the cruiser Aurora preparing for battle in October. The most striking image shows Red Guards running toward the Winter Palace on October 25, 1917. Its dark figures cross the snow-covered square toward a formidable stone wall; the composition makes the assault appear at once precarious and unstoppable. For Bombacci and the other Italian delegates viewing it in 1922, the photograph cannot yet signify the victors’ later remorse. It carries instead the regret of those who have been defeated.

The Bolsheviks therefore occupy a double place in the narrative: they are the agents of a revolution that succeeded in Russia and the measure of revolutionary possibilities that Italian movements could not realize. Their example inspires solidarity and strategic argument, while the collapse of allied Soviet republics, military counteroffensives, and the internal divisions of Italian communism prevent that example from becoming a guarantee. As Moscow’s authority grows, the revolution’s international reach appears increasingly inseparable from the uneven power and fortunes of those who seek to follow it.