Copenhagen

Copenhagen becomes a political threshold for Nicola Bombacci in the spring of 1920: his first journey beyond Italy brings him face to face with Soviet representatives, but the meetings redirect his hopes for revolutionary solidarity toward the narrower business of state recognition and restored relations.

Arrival in Copenhagen

Bombacci reaches Copenhagen at the end of March 1920, when the city is still under a heavy covering of snow. Forty years old, born in Civitella di Romagna in the Apennines, he has never before left Italy. The journey therefore marks more than a change of place: it brings the self-described internationalist, who dreams of a worldwide proletarian brotherhood, into direct contact with the revolution he has previously known only from afar.

The delegation’s official purpose is a mission arranged by the National League of Cooperatives, promoted by Milan’s socialist mayor Emilio Caldara. It also has the political endorsement of Francesco Saverio Nitti’s Italian government, even though the socialists publicly say that they want to overthrow it. The mission thus carries a contradiction into Copenhagen: Italian socialists are acting with governmental backing while seeking relations with a Soviet state identified with revolution.

The Soviet meetings

On April 7, Bombacci and his delegation meet Leonid Krasin in the rooms of a local socialist port cooperative. Krasin’s mandate is limited: he seeks official recognition of Moscow by the Italian state, and nothing beyond it. The meeting makes clear that the Italian revolution Bombacci wants to discuss is not the priority of the Soviet representative responsible for foreign trade.

Bombacci places greater hope in Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign-affairs commissar and a close associate of Vladimir Lenin. Litvinov receives him with a glass of iced vodka. Bombacci tries to turn the encounter toward an imminent revolution in Italy, but Litvinov answers that, although the Italian Socialist Party is strong, its revolutionary faction is weak. He further doubts that Italian socialists could remain in power for more than two months. His conclusion is pointed: the revolution has already succeeded in Russia, and the urgent task is to resume political and commercial relations with capitalist states.

A revolutionary hope meets diplomatic priorities

Copenhagen brings Bombacci the personal contact he had sought with representatives of Soviet Russia, but not the affirmation he expected. Since December 1919 he had worked to persuade Italy to reopen diplomatic relations with Moscow. Trade discussions seemed secondary to him; he hoped recognition would become a step toward revolution in Italy and wanted to speak directly with men who had made a revolution in Russia. Krasin’s restricted mandate and Litvinov’s blunt assessment instead expose the distance between Bombacci’s international revolutionary ambitions and the Soviet government’s immediate diplomatic priorities.

The episode also places Bombacci between competing currents within Italian socialism. He believes the movement’s large and rapidly growing membership should seek allies rather than remain politically isolated, even considering an alliance with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Yet socialist leaders avoid that alliance, and Bombacci’s confidence that Moscow will understand Italy’s revolutionary possibilities receives no support from the Copenhagen meetings.

Return and political reception

A few days after returning from Denmark, Bombacci reports to the National Socialist Council, meeting in Milan from April 18 to 22. The skepticism he encountered in Copenhagen is followed by mockery at home. In Il Popolo d’Italia, his old friend Benito Mussolini ridicules him for stopping at Copenhagen rather than continuing to Moscow. The journey that had promised Bombacci a direct encounter with revolutionary Russia thus ends, in the immediate Italian political response, as a target of irony as well as a disappointment.