Perugia, 11 November 1956: the Pci rally is under way, famous for the presence of Togliatti (national secretary of the Partito comunista italiano), called to celebrate the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Russian Revolution while the revolt of the Magyar people is still going on, the revolt that the Soviet invasion of Hungary is trying to drown in blood. Earlier, in June of that year, there had been the uprising of the Polish workers at Poznan, followed by three days of clashes with the police and an unspecified number of victims.
The rally had been preceded by fierce and repeated controversy, by dozens of strikes in the upper-secondary schools throughout the region (chiefly in the provincial capital, where the organisation and the hegemony of the Giovane Italia moved with confidence), by pronouncements from every party (with the exception of a divided Partito socialista) against the Soviet invasion, by stances and firm condemnations from the Church, by partial work stoppages in the factories, by chains of solidarity to gather funds and medicines for the insurgents.
The police had forbidden the Pci to hold its rally in Piazza IV Novembre and had at the same time prevented demonstrators from reaching Perugia from the region by bus or by train. The ban lay, according to the Ministry of the Interior, in the need to safeguard public order.
At the same time a rally by Edgardo Sogno was also forbidden, [1] the founder of the ferociously anti-communist “Pace e libertà” movement.
Togliatti would deliver his speech in the Sala dei Notari, with no loudspeakers outside, before some two thousand people.
Piazza IV Novembre is completely sealed off and closed by the police even to individual passers-by. The magnificent square, the heart of the city and a privileged witness to its thousand-year history, wears a grim look, underscored by a cloudily black sky, drizzling at intervals, and by the continuous, mournful tolling of the cathedral bell.
The spectral city recalls the feud between the Oddi and the Baglioni and the inevitable spilling of blood. Here, fortunately, there are no dead and no seriously wounded, no victims of savage clashes.
This opposition is the opposition between town and country. On one side, Perugia, the most important city in Umbria, is governed by a narrow elite, made up of professionals and teachers, that represents the countryside (sharecroppers and day labourers), the small villages and a minority working class. This last was composed above all of miners who were fighting a battle against dismissals, a battle they had already lost.
On the other, the city has no representation of the urban centre and no position of institutional power: it feels humiliated and reacts, through its majority social component with its conservative and reactionary vocation, with arrogance and violence.
The anti-communist mobilisation is choral: it runs from the Msi to the Dc, by way of the Pri and the Psdi, and sees the participation of many hundreds of people. Perugia is isolated and garrisoned by the police on a war footing.
The city is in the hands of this anti-communist array. They do not let through the peasants heading for the rally together with the communist activists from all over Umbria, who had reached the city in private cars.
They intercept them at the foot of the Pincio and set upon them with punches, kicks and clubs, driving them back: it is an unequal fight, ten against one.
The demonstrators then block the centre and lay siege to the provincial Pci federation in Piazza della Repubblica, defended (so to speak) by a scant and frightened group of communist militants; only the police, with armoured cars and armed with rifles, manage to drive them off and keep them under control.
They try to force their way into Piazza IV Novembre from Corso Vannucci, but here too they are driven back by the police, who bar their way.
Piazza Matteotti too is overrun by the crowd, which presses on to reach Corso Vannucci and Piazza IV Novembre and clashes with the police; here the lawyer Clementi (a fervent Christian Democrat) careers about wrapped in the tricolour, spurring the crowd on with anti-communist slogans.
The Msi militants, very numerous and mostly young, had come in even from the various centres of the region. Renato Smantelli [2] is one of the most active and resolute; dressed in jeans and a leather jacket and armed with a club, he leads the fascists of the Giovane Italia. He is eighteen, yet he is already acknowledged as a leader.
That day he is tireless: with his men he moves from the Pincio to Via Baglioni, then to the covered market, in pursuit of those communists who, ill-informed, imagine they can reach the Sala dei Notari. Instead they find before them the clubs and the aggression of the reactionaries and the fascists.
Later he is in the front line in the attempts to storm the Pci federation, and for a moment it seemed the objective had been attained, but the resolute intervention of the police drove them back.
Who knows, perhaps in those moments Renato thought himself worthy of his father, a serviceman at a submarine base, who died at La Spezia during the Second World War and whom he regarded as his hero.
Once Togliatti had left, the protest loses its edge, but it does not prevent further incidents in the late afternoon, this time at the hands of small groups of communist militants seeking a bitter revenge: the lawyer Clementi bears the brunt of it too.
Why did the Pci, which had no social base in the city to secure it a public rally, decide to organise the anniversary of the October Revolution precisely in Perugia, in Piazza IV Novembre?
One has to wonder why a careful and prudent politician like Togliatti so stubbornly insisted on holding this rally.
And yet at times certain mistakes, which strike us as, so to speak, crude, later prove winning ones over time.
It is true, it will later be said, that the demonstration to mark the 39th anniversary of the October Revolution had long been in preparation; but faced with the succession of events in Hungary and the mounting protest in Perugia, there was ample time to move the demonstration elsewhere so that Togliatti’s rally need not take place.
Despite everything it was confirmed, and it may reasonably be supposed that the decision was taken by Togliatti himself.
But that celebration was not held in other cities, because the reactionary, conservative and fascist demonstrations would have been countered and held in check by a broad, mass mobilisation of Pci militants (the majority of whom, especially the workers, did not condemn the Soviet intervention but often voiced consent and approval of it).
What would that apologia for the popular repression in Hungary have entailed, in terms of public order, had it not taken place in Perugia?
This is what Togliatti wanted to avoid.
Support for the invasion of Hungary, behind the screen of socialist solidarity, was acceptable (while not sparing, in private, criticism of the conduct of the Soviet party), but without inflaming the Italian situation with pointless street clashes, in the expectation that the protests would subside. And above all without cracking the communist hegemony over broad working-class and popular strata, and the bond with the Soviet Union.
This choice would cost the Pci a loss of image and of support. [3] “Togliatti’s capacity and will to piece the party back together, even through discussions that were anything but simple, to avoid ruptures while arguing to the bitter end, this choice and this will did not manage to prevent an exodus, a diaspora of people, of groups, of individuals, of prominent figures, from the Pci”. [4]
This strategy is undoubtedly made easier by international events; the Hungarian repression proceeds in step with the Suez crisis. [5]
The Anglo/French/Israeli armed intervention is halted only by the resolute reaction and the stand taken by the United States.
In any case it may reasonably be affirmed that the Twentieth Congress of the Pcus, the workers’ revolt at Poznan and the Hungarian revolution, in short the whole of 1956, was the black hole into which, over the years, the Soviet Union’s politics of domination plunged, dragging down with it the theory and practice of the countries of actually existing socialism, and even the very existence of the communist parties of the West.
The present writer had occasion to pass through Budapest on 24 July 1962, together with a delegation of young Italian communists (of which I was part) bound for Helsinki to take part in the International Youth Festival.
During the stopover in the city I met a young Hungarian communist I had come to know in Perugia, where he had attended the Italian-language courses at the University for Foreigners. Out of it had grown a provisional friendship, with exchanges of political views and of curiosity about our two countries and about the many things that joined and interwove the history of Italy with that of Hungary.
After the greetings and a coffee he told me that, if ever I wished, he would take me to visit a place he cared for very much, and he did not hint at the reason. I agreed, and taking the tram we got off after ten or fifteen minutes. We found ourselves in a fairly wide, flat area, where the height of the houses and buildings, or rather of their ruins, reached but a few metres.
I looked at my friend; I was so disconcerted and so afraid of the likely answer that I did not dare ask him anything; he of course understood, and simply said to me “This was a working-class district!” and set off towards the tram stop. Neither of us, on the way back and until we parted, made any mention of that visit or of its meaning.
Some time after I had returned to Italy, one morning at the Pci federation, I was leafing as always through the newspapers at the entrance (as, for that matter, did all the officials who reached the offices fairly early), and there was always some comment or other on this or that article or piece of news.
I do not remember what the occasion was, but with a member of the secretariat, a future provincial secretary, we ended up talking about the socialist countries and the relations that existed between them and the Soviet Union; in this context I gave the example of Hungary (recounting too my own experience in Budapest), which, when it dared to ask for autonomy and independence, driven by the student and worker demonstrations, found Soviet tanks in its house. The discussion grew heated, rose in tone, and at a certain point I heard myself told, harshly, that my young age did not entitle me to believe naively in fairy tales about the political matrix of the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries (which had been established to be reactionary and fascist), and thus to call the party line into question.
Our discussion (about the “events in Hungary”, as the Magyar revolution was then called by the Pci) naturally ended at that moment. In the party, on the other hand, it had ended long before, and it was not taken up again except belatedly, more than thirty years later, in more or less literary forms but far from any serious political analysis.

[1] Edgardo Sogno (Turin, 29 December 1915 – Turin, 5 August 2000). A hero of the Resistance, awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour, a diplomat of undisputed prestige. He had fought in Spain on the side of the coup leaders without being a fascist. During the Nazi occupation he founded the “Franchi”, one of the finest military formations to arise during the Resistance. His most famous exploit was the attempt to free Ferruccio Parri, but he was captured and sent to a concentration camp. After the war he founded the “Pace e libertà” movement, with a very strong anti-communist character. On 4 November 1956, when the Soviets invade Hungary, Sogno reaches the country to organise the expatriation of members of the deposed Nagy government. In February 1971 Sogno founded the Comitati di Resistenza Democratica. In 1974 the magistrate Luciano Violante accused him of having attempted the so-called white coup, “in order to alter the Constitution of the State and the form of government by means not permitted by the constitutional order”: he ended up for a month and a half in the Regina Coeli prison together with Luigi Cavallo. The affair concluded some years later with his full acquittal on the grounds that he had not committed the act.

[2] Renato Smantelli (Perugia, 22 April 1938 – Arezzo, 16 December 1983) is the most prominent leader of the Giovane Italia; indeed, on 12 January 1957 he would be appointed provincial secretary of the whole youth sector of the Msi. In 1969, when a part of the Msi dissidents who looked to the Cson (Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo), led by Rauti, returned to the Movimento Sociale, Smantelli would be one of the eighteen leaders, headed by Clemente Graziani, who did not return to the Msi and gave rise to the Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (Mpon).

[3] The most significant rift came with the manifesto of the 101, signed by writers, professors and journalists; these intellectuals were close to or enrolled in the Pci. Among those who left were Renzo De Felice, Italo Calvino, Fabrizio Onofri, Eugenio Reale and Antonio Giolitti. In Perugia too there were resignations from the Pci by town councillors: Professor Fernanda Maretici Menghini (councillor for education) and Guglielmo Nocera, a teacher of law in the Faculty of Jurisprudence. Giuseppe Granata, a teacher of history and philosophy (and former councillor for education), also resigned. Orfeo Carnevali and Pio Baldelli were ferociously critical, and the latter subsequently left the Pci. Within the communist leadership itself, dissent and condemnation of the Soviet intervention were voiced; the most sensational was that of the head of the Cgil trade union, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, while no less significant proved the stand taken by Fausto Gullo, a leading figure of the Pci. Initiatives similar to those in Rome (the manifesto of the “101”, the dissent of the Fgci students, and so on) took place in other cities such as Turin, Pisa, Mantua and Perugia, although any form of coordination was lacking. In Perugia a wall poster was prepared, bearing at its foot the signature “the communist students”, which opened thus: “Colleagues, comrades and citizens! The tragic events that have bloodied the noble Hungarian republic wound, first of all, us, students militant in the Pci, in the depths of our feelings. We are convinced that in Hungary something identical to the events of Poznan has taken place: not, that is, a counter-revolutionary movement, but a revolt against tyranny and bureaucracy. The errors and crimes of a part of the ruling class have provoked such a laceration within the Hungarian people as to force it once again to take up the struggle to achieve two traditional demands of the working class, of students and of all working people: democracy within socialism, and national independence” (the text was reproduced from a signed article in Micromega).

[4] Thus Luciano Canfora, in 1956 L’anno spartiacque Palermo, Sellerio, 2016. The volume is a careful and well-documented reconstruction of the events that so dramatically marked that year. Of moments later called epochal there were several: from the Twentieth Congress of the Pcus, which set destalinisation in motion, blatantly so with the secret report, made public in the West by the journalist Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times. In the spring the incidents begin on Egypt’s border with Israel; in the elections Nasser takes 99.9% of the vote; the British and the Americans withdraw from the financing of the Aswan dam, and the reply is the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The invasion of Egypt by Israel, France and England takes place while the Hungarian revolt is under way. On 28 June, at Poznan, a bloody repression of the strikes and workers’ demonstrations; afterwards the Polish government took the lesson to heart, to the point that on 20 October Gomulka (in the spring Gomulka had been released from prison, rehabilitated and readmitted to the Communist Party) becomes secretary of the party, despite the threatening opposition of the Soviets. On 23 October the Hungarian revolt breaks out, kindled by a demonstration organised by the “Petofi Circle”, founded by those who had left the organisation of the communist students, calling for free elections and applauding the workers’ and students’ struggle at Poznan. The police fire on the demonstrators, who in the meantime have grown to more than two hundred thousand, causing dozens of deaths; the government proclaims martial law, calls for the intervention of the USSR, and the insurrection blazes up. After some days, as the protest spreads, a new government is formed under Imre Nagy (recently rehabilitated). In the following days Imre Nagy declares withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, neutrality, the abolition of the single-party system, and frees Cardinal Mindszenty from enforced house arrest. Meanwhile the clashes continue, ever more savage and bloody; the hunt is opened for agents of the secret police and for communist militants as well. The Magyar army, risen up alongside the workers and the students, is led by Pal Maleter, who is regarded as the hero of the revolution. The secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, Kadar, together with the Minister of the Interior Munnich, moves to the Soviet embassy. Having obtained the assent of the other communist countries, Yugoslavia included, the Soviet armoured divisions invade Hungary on 4 November at 4 a.m. to crush the Hungarian revolution; despite this the clashes, in a full-blown war, would continue for days and days throughout the country. Imre Nagy and General Maleter (Minister of the Interior) take refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, which would have no scruple in handing the two over to the Soviets, to make them undergo, two years later, a sham trial, followed by hanging. At the same time Soviet diplomacy moves resolutely to denounce the invasion of Egypt at the UN, which it asks to impose the Anglo/French/Israeli withdrawal from Egypt; at the same time it presses the “neutral” countries to take a stand for withdrawal, and above all it enters into dialogue with the United States to avert dangerous drifts in the Egyptian situation. Canfora himself, in his book, cites a conference promoted in Bologna on the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Hungary, at which Miklos Vasarely, former spokesman of the Nagy government, summed up his thinking in an effective and very incisive phrase: “The Russians killed us, America betrayed us”.

[5] The nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Nasser reunited that territory with Egypt, thereby cancelling the Franco-British concession. Nasser’s unilateral decision was the pretext for the occupation of Egypt, and of Port Said in particular, by the Israeli army and, at the same time, by British and French paratroopers. The warning from the Soviet Union and, above all, the pressing and ultimative demand of the United States forced the two colonial powers into a humiliating and definitive withdrawal.

Aldo Peverini has written articles and essays on advertising and on communication, both commercial and political, including a survey/study on the state of advertising in Umbria, later published. For some thirty years he has worked in the field of communication and advertising, commercial as well as institutional and political, founding communication agencies or working as a consultant. He has recently edited the volume Quando la politica era passione a chronicle, of the 1970s in Umbria, recounted, commented upon and furnished with an ample photographic apparatus. He is the author of the text and the screenplay of the Storia di Perugia a fumetti first published in 1980, of which the third edition is now being printed, in a new editorial format. The Storia di Perugia received joint first prize in the children’s section at the first edition of the Premio Letterario Regionale promoted by Umbria Libri in its 2018 edition.

The historical account published here forms part of a new volume in preparation, which retraces the historical itinerary of the Umbrian neo-fascist formations from the second post-war period onward.