The Red Julian March

In the elections of May 1921 the communists won 14.3 per cent of the vote in the Julian March, more than in any other Italian province. In January of that year the Julian March was the only region of Italy to give a majority to the communist faction at the Livorno congress. Much of that support came from the Slovenes of the Littoral.

Three paths in 1918

Before the war the workers of Trieste were mostly internationalist. In 1918 the Slovene social democrats split: the “young” around Rudolf Golouh and Josip Ferfolja worked with the nationalists in the National Council and demanded Trieste for Yugoslavia; Henrik Tuma and Ivan Regent, with Valentino Pittoni's Italian socialists of Trieste, advocated an independent Trieste territory where workers of both nations would decide together. When the Italian army occupied Trieste, both paths fell away.

From social democracy to communism

The demarcation line cut the socialists of the Littoral off from the party in Ljubljana. At their regional conference on 6 April 1919 they condemned cooperation with bourgeois parties and adopted a programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the model of the Russian revolution. The leadership included Ivan Regent, Henrik Tuma, Anton Jernejčič, Alojz Štolfa and others. They founded a Higher Cultural Council for the Slovene Proletariat and the review Njiva, and in Trieste a farming and market-garden cooperative that linked peasants from the surrounding villages directly with urban workers.

At a conference on 21 September 1919 the Slovene socialists voted 58 to 1 to join the Italian Socialist Party. Ferfolja and the teacher Hreščak warned them to wait until the border was fixed; the two delegates from Idrija abstained, since under the Wilson line Idrija would go to Yugoslavia. Henrik Tuma announced the accession at the Bologna congress in October 1919. The Trieste socialist Giuseppe Passigli added that the Slovene comrades had repeated “the great heresy: socialists first, Slovenes second”.

From Bovec to Čepovan

In 1920 the socialist movement also peaked in the Slovene countryside. From February the paper Delo appeared, reaching a print run of 16,000 copies in July. Sections sprang up “like mushrooms after rain”: Bovec had 150 members, Kobarid 300, Podgora 120, Čepovan 150. In October 1920 the Gorizia district organisation united some thirty sections from the Karst, the Vipava, Soča and Idrija valleys, the Brda hills and the surroundings of Gorizia. The Trieste labour exchange had 36,000 members, the workers' cooperatives more than 29,000.

Why?

The Italian authorities believed that the Slovenes were merely hiding their nationalism behind socialism. Commissioner Mosconi warned the Italian socialists that the Slavs would pull them “in the most leftward and most violent direction, the direction of communism”. From this grew the propaganda term slavo-comunismo.

The author gives several causes. Economic conditions were bad for peasants too. The occupation regime stifled every free activity, national demands concerning schools and language went unmet, and the Slovene bourgeois parties were isolated, waiting for the peace conference. In the Gorizia region Tuma had drawn attention to the peasant question even before the war; many men back from Russian captivity had seen the revolution at close quarters. Enthusiasm for Soviet Russia was emotional as well: the pan-Slavism Slovenes had cherished for decades turned towards a Russia that had just made a revolution. Ivan Regent, however, warned that anyone who thought people had moved left only for national reasons would be wrong: they were in a revolutionary mood for the same reasons as workers and peasants elsewhere in Europe.

Nationalists and socialists

The nationalist society Edinost at first supported the socialists, but then a gulf opened between the camps. The quarrel flared over Njiva, the People's Stage and above all in August 1920, when the union of Slovene teachers' associations decided to join the socialist labour exchange. Edinost accused the socialists of letting Slovenes “drown” in an Italian party; Tuma replied that the nationalists had no programme and were driven not by love of their homeland but by hatred of their opponent. As the author notes, no one in this dispute managed to link the social struggle with the national one; the communists did that only in the 1930s.

Split and end

In autumn 1920 the Italian Socialist Party split into reformists, unitarians and communists. In the Trieste section the unitarian resolution won in December 1920 by a single vote: 224 to 223. The Slovene sections opted almost unanimously for the communists. Henrik Tuma, who saw the split as a gift to fascism, withdrew from politics after the vote in the Gorizia district committee.

The Communist Party of Italy was founded at the Livorno congress in January 1921. The socialists refused to hand over the printing works of the papers Il Lavoratore and Delo in Trieste, so the communists occupied it by force. On the night of 9–10 February 1921 the fascists burned it down. The socialist leader Aldo Oberdorfer reproached the communists that “your Slavs” had given them their majority; Ivan Regent replied that the Slovene communists had given “heart and blood” to the international struggle and had always fought every irredentism, the Yugoslav one included.

“There is no national liberation without economic liberation.” Dragotin Gustinčič, Socialism and Nationality, 1920 · after Kacin-Wohinz 1972, p. 388

Sources

• Kacin-Wohinz, M. (1972): Primorski Slovenci pod italijansko zasedbo 1918–1921, pp. 175–211, 246–272, 348–372.
• Regent, I. (1958–1961): Poglavja iz boja za socializem I–III. Ljubljana.
• Oberdorfer, A. (1922): Il socialismo del dopoguerra a Trieste. Florence.