How Putin is Retreading Mussolini’s Path
What Italy’s experience in the First and Second World Wars can tell us about Russia and its invasion of Ukraine today.
Between 1915 and 1943, Italy’s self-interested leaders hurled the country into catastrophic wars three times. In 1915, its elected prime minister plunged Italy into the First World War, a fight that cost the country 1.3 million dead and 700,000 wounded. In 1935, its Fascist dictator initiated eight years of doomed conflict, pursuing failed colonial expeditions across Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe before taking Nazi Germany’s side in 1940. And, in 1943, an interim government turned against Germany, leading to two bloody years of occupation and war throughout the peninsula. By 1945, another half a million Italians were dead. The direct and indirect toll of its actions throughout its colonies was larger still.
Each of these moments of political, military, and personal decisions display recurring patterns. In 2022, the hundredth anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome and the creation of Fascist Italy, they illustrate the relationships between ideology, industrialized warfare, and modern society. Italy’s wars resonate with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Far from replicating Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg, Russia is more closely mimicking Fascist Italy with its miscalculating leaders, chasm between political aims and military means, and poorly led, motivated, and equipped forces deployed against determined opponents.
War begets illiberalism and illiberalism begets war — a tragic lesson that Europe has woken up to once again. Books by Mark Thompson, John Gooch, and Caroline Moorehead describe Italy’s harrowing slide into war and dictatorship and painful re-emergence into democracy. Their stories allow us to comprehend the past and to reconsider the present.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919, Mark Thompson, Basic Books
Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935–1943, John Gooch, HarperCollins
A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism, Caroline Moorehead, HarperCollins
Democracy Lost
Italy’s descent into the First World War was belated but no less bloody. Despite being allied with Austria-Hungary and Germany before the war, Italy did not enter hostilities in 1914 like the rest of Europe. It stood aside to observe, its leaders sensing an opportunity to negotiate its allegiance in exchange for Austrian-held territory in the Italian-speaking northern regions around Trento and Trieste.
Mark Thompson’s The White War begins with the machinations of pro-war Italian personalities like Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, who wanted to use the conflict to strengthen conservative factions in Italian politics, as well as others like the louche poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and then-journalist Mussolini. Despite the bellicose rhetoric, most Italians opposed the war. Yet they could do nothing when Salandra decided Italy’s fate through secret negotiations. Rome secured an alliance with Paris and London based on the latter’s territorial promises, and Salandra now had a pretext to enter the war.
It was the beginning of a military and political disaster. When Italy declared war on Austria in 1915, Salandra’s war plans were so secret that Italy’s generals were unaware of them. This lack of coordination and preparedness would severely hamper Italy’s initial campaigns, leading to three years of bloodshed and to the conditions in which Mussolini could rise to power after the war.
Thompson craftily weaves the longer-term political implications of the war with its immediate effects on the men forced to fight it. Despite the odds and infernal conditions that soldiers faced, The White War displays their humanity in full through extensive reference to soldiers’ correspondence and poetry, expressing how these were individuals clinging to their lives and aspirations, not faceless bodies cast aside.
Years of military disappointments fostered insecurity among Italian politicians even after a hard-fought victory. At the post-Armistice negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando (who had replaced Salandra) increased Italy’s territorial demands to compensate for the country’s losses.
Yet he could not square his claim to non-Italian regions around the Adriatic Sea with Italy’s humbled postwar status on the one hand, and the emerging liberal vision of national self-determination endorsed by American president Woodrow Wilson on the other.
The Italian delegation returned home without achieving its objectives. D’Annunzio first and Mussolini later would build on this self-inflicted wound to oppose the parliamentary regime and gain followers, culminating in Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 through nationalist rhetoric, political violence, the absence of a coordinated opposition, and the complicity of King Victor Emmanuel III. The Fascist era had begun, built on the wartime miscalculations of a series of elected governments.
A Dictatorship of Blood and Fantasy
The Fascist regime was by nature imperial. The first decade of Fascist rule saw its domestic consolidation alongside repressive colonial operations in Libya, which had been under Italian rule since 1911.
By the mid-1930s, Mussolini sought to expand Italy’s foothold in Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia to fulfill Italy’s longtime ambitions in East Africa. This project launched a series of successive and increasingly costly conflicts — escalating into the Second World War — that John Gooch chronicles in Mussolini’s War.
Gooch’s book can be read as a study in the incapacity of Mussolini and his generals to match political ends to military means. The dictator alternated flashes of strategic clarity to impulse-driven blunders. In early 1940, before Italy entered the war, Mussolini correctly concluded that the United States would not allow France and England to collapse under Nazi Germany’s assault. He also knew that Italy needed at least until 1943 to conclude a rearmament program. Yet Germany’s apparent ascendancy and the promise of post-war spoils lured Mussolini to contradict his own assessments and side with Adolf Hitler. Gooch quotes an exasperated Mussolini complaining in May 1940 — just as Germany’s Blitzkrieg was tearing through France — that “If I had to wait for the army to be ready […] I would have to wait years to enter the war, but I have to do it now. We shall do what we can.” Incoherently, the dictator reasoned that “Perhaps Germany might not win [the war] either, but Italy must enter it at some point — to remain neutral throughout would be to reduce her status to that of a second-rate European power.”
Mussolini’s fantasies of action doomed Italy’s military to a fight it could not win through his shortsightedness in both strategy and materials. Rather than appreciating the technological innovations that were transforming warfighting and doctrine around the world, Fascist leaders turned to the idea that spirit mattered more than substance.
As Gooch notes, “In 1930 regulations made technology a second-order issue, declaring that war was in its essence ‘the struggle of spirit and will’.” This led to inadequate recruitment and training and absurd technical proposals: planners considered radars and aircraft carriers unnecessary, and shortages of steel and aluminum led them to suggest building ships from cement and planes from iron and wood. As Italy’s military-industrial base struggled to produce equipment, the country became ever more dependent on German supplies. Italy would face modern European militaries like England and the Soviet Union’s without basic necessities like trucks or transport ships. When Mussolini committed an expeditionary corps to the invasion of Russia in 1941, Italian soldiers had to walk 1,300 kilometers (more than 800 miles) to reach the front from railheads in Eastern Europe.
The first Fascist regime crumbled in 1943 following a series of defeats and the Allied invasion of Sicily. Its personalistic and bureaucratic-military leadership had failed to prepare for a long war against multiple, well-resourced enemies on fronts spanning thousands of kilometers from Gibraltar to the Volga River.
King Victor Emmanuel III and Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio attempted to save themselves by removing Mussolini from power in July and then negotiating for peace with the Allies. Berlin, anticipating Rome’s defection, began to plan a takeover of the peninsula.
Despite knowing this, the king and Badoglio lacked the foresight and character to prepare for Germany’s reaction. So, when Badoglio announced the armistice in early September, he and the king fled Rome for the Allied-controlled south while the Italian armed forces were left without instructions and contingencies to face a vengeful German attack in the north.
Having chronically failed every decision from 1940 onwards, the Fascist regime’s final moves in 1943 did not end Italy’s war. The king and Badoglio’s choices, as poorly conceived and implemented as those that came before, simply opened one more bloody front for the country and its inhabitants.
Democratic Insurgence
Although Gooch’s book ends in mid-1943, Mussolini’s war had two more years left to run. Caroline Moorhead’s A House in the Mountains begins in the chaos and uncertainty of the summer and fall of that year.
“Fascism had rested on two myths — a charismatic leader and an invincible army — and both had collapsed,” she says of the dramatic change in the peninsula. By the end of the year, the Allies — with the king’s discredited regime — controlled Italy’s southern third while the Germans and a reconstituted puppet government under Mussolini controlled the rest. German-occupied Italy would be a warzone between the armistice on September 8, 1943 and liberation in April 1945, 594 days that witnessed the deaths of 100,000 more Italians.
Moorehead tells the story of this dramatic period through the experiences of a dozen young women in Italy’s northwestern Piedmont region. Together with groups of underground political activists, religiously inspired anti-Fascists, and a growing number of armed partisans, these brave women endeavored to create new political consciousness and social networks to accelerate Italy’s liberation and establish the foundations for a democratic future.
As Moorehead explains, they saw an opportunity to regain dignity: “The events of 8 September 1943 took [them], as it took all Italians, by surprise. Lisetta [Giua]’s first thought was that the Italians had finally been given the chance to do better.”
“Both [Giorgio Diena] and Vittorio [Foa, Lisetta’s husband] agreed that though the Allies would indeed have to provide the military might to expel the Germans from Italy, it was essential that the Italians themselves contribute enough that they could determine their own future once hostilities were over. Resistance, they decided, should also take the form of educating a people for whom political decision-making and independence of thought had been eradicated by the Fascists.”
The women and their partners established clandestine newspapers and political parties, smuggled arms and explosives, provided the Allies with intelligence, rescued Jews and other victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution, and fought Nazis and Fascists. After two decades of Fascist conservatism, the Italian resistance began to restore a degree of egalitarianism and democratic governance to the areas it controlled.
The resistance’s aspirations, however, continuously clashed with ruthless repression by Mussolini’s henchmen and their German allies. Boundaries became blurred:
“As Ada [Gobetti] and her friends saw it, it was war, of every kind: between Allies and Axis, between Italians and Italians, between Italians and Germans; a civil war, a war of liberation and a class war, all of which would play into the future and the culture of Italy itself.”
The conflict offered visions from Hieronymus Bosch’s hell, with Fascist torture dungeons and bodies of fighters and civilians left lying in streets or hanging from trees and lampposts.
Nonetheless, partisan formations grew in size and ambition, reaching a force of between 250,000 and 300,000 in the spring of 1945 and joining the final Allied push to free the entire peninsula. Partisans caught Mussolini while he was trying to flee the country and summarily executed him. Liberation finally came in late April, with parades to celebrate the birth of a new Italy and those who had risked their lives.
Despite the initial joy, the women in A House in the Mountains were perceptive on the political and economic challenges of reconstruction. The resistance had a common foundation of anti-Fascism but lacked a unitary vision for the future, divided as it was among communist, monarchist, Catholic, and other factions.
Without a shared enemy, the women knew that partisans would fragment and that special interests would seek to re-establish old habits and prejudices. It would be a new struggle: less bloody but longer and more lonely, where local democracy would have to cede its authority to national politics and compromises.
The early post-war years were disappointing for Italians who had sacrificed so much for a democratic future — especially for the countless women whose acts of bravery and indispensable role in liberation was erased from the national myth of a country built by (male) freedom fighters. Nonetheless, the newborn Italian republic did avoid a protracted civil war in which disgruntled partisans challenged the new order.
The nation, newly at peace, could not realize the many dreams its citizens had accumulated in wartime. But, after decades of war, peace may have been a sufficient dream itself.
A Legacy of Bloodshed
Even as Italians secured a democratic state, the Fascist regime’s legacy lived on elsewhere. In Spain, Francisco Franco’s cruel dictatorship — which Mussolini’s troops helped to establish in the late 1930s — lasted until 1975. Italy’s overseas colonies in Africa and the Balkans endured brutal rule from Rome, a bloody and neglected history. In Italy’s war-torn era between 1915 and 1945, Rome’s politics and militarism quashed sovereignty and liberty for millions abroad.
A century after Mussolini’s rise to power, today’s events resurrect this past. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin has created a regime founded on a revisionist, autocrat-centered reading of Russian history. It is imperial at home and abroad, using propaganda, violence, and military force to rule domestically and extend its influence internationally. It has established a network of client states and colonial outposts in the Caucasus, Syria, and Ukraine over successive stages of foreign aggression. Putin’s regime is destroying tens of thousands of lives, demanding more and more from the war economy, and transforming society in its leader’s image. All of this, in turn, has energized resistance within Russia, in Ukraine, and around the world.
It’s impossible today to predict how long this will last. What is certain is that war and dictatorship will continue to feed off each other until enough bodies — both living and dead — are stacked against them to create a different future.
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The year 2022 is not 1915 or 1940, if only because nuclear weapons contribute a dangerous differentiator. However, too many patterns recur to avoid noticing some historic rhymes. If there was one lesson to learn from Italy’s experience in the First and Second World Wars, it is that wars begun out of political ambition often escape the grasp of their instigators at great cost to their societies. It is too late for Putin to take this to heart, but it is still in his power to avoid pursuing an even more tragic, even more prolonged conflict.
Putin is not Mussolini, but — like the Italian dictator — he no longer fully controls what he has unleashed on the battlefield. If they aren’t willing to look to history for lessons, he and his people will now have to face the consequences. Those who oppose him can learn from this, too.
