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Lenin still has pride of place in a tiny Italian town
Angelo Zinna, New Lines Magazine
last updated: Oct 03,2023
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This essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on September 29, 2023اضافة اعلان
When walking through the northern Italian town of Cavriago, a series of familiar names catch your eye. Steps away from street signs commemorating anti-fascists Giacomo Matteotti and Antonio Gramsci — two recurring figures in the toponymy of Italian cities — there are also Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Gorky and Pushkin.
They mark a territory whose links to Russian literature are not immediately obvious to most visitors. But this seemingly unremarkable town — with a population of fewer than 10,000 in the heart of the Emilia-Romagna region, historically nicknamed “Emilia Rossa” (“Red Emilia”) for its high levels of support for the Communist Party — built bridges between the Soviet Union and Europe over the course of the 20th century.
It is in the town’s center, in Piazza Lenin, that this history is most prominently on display. This is where Italy’s — and, most likely, Western Europe’s — last public bust of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, still stands. The unusual monument was unveiled in 1970. Its roots, however, run much deeper — back to the days of the Russian Revolution, when the first link between Cavriago and the Soviet Union was established.
I read an item on party life in a small locality called Cavriago. … They sent greetings to the Russian “Sovietisti” and expressed the wish that the program of the Russian and German revolutionaries should be adopted throughout the world. … When you read a resolution like that … you have every right to say to yourself that the Italian people are on our side.
Lenin viewed the letter from Cavriago as a good omen. He found a map and looked for the small Italian town, but it wasn’t there. Even better, he thought — if such a hamlet in the Italian countryside showed support for the Soviet cause, it could only mean that his voice was being heard far and wide. No program of the Russian “Sovietisti” existed at the time, but he considered that a minor detail.
It would take half a century before the relationship between Lenin and Cavriago would materialize into the dark bronze bust that still stands, though not without controversy, in the town’s eponymous piazza. And while the Soviet myth may have been the ideological force driving the people of Cavriago to pay tribute to the Russian revolutionary, over time the monument has acquired an entirely new meaning.
To locals, the bust echoes personal memories of partisan victories; grandiose, free-for-all festivals; and the hopeful era of postwar reconstruction. Visitors who make the pilgrimage tend to be fascinated by the irony of having such a provocative icon adorning the urban landscape of a small, middle-class center. Occasionally, members of minor political groups, such as the tiny Partito Marxista-Leninista Italiano, can be seen participating in commemorative celebrations at the bust.
The enduring legacy of the Lenin bust is a story about present-day Italy and the country’s long history of activism — the kind that shaped Cavriago’s identity for over a century and continues to do so — but also about far-right sentiments carving out ever-larger spaces in national politics. After four years of weak and changing governing coalitions, the normalization of anti-immigration sentiments and the absence of a political force able to mobilize the working classes during the current economic decline, Italy has turned to the right. Last year, Giorgia Meloni became the country’s first woman prime minister. She leads its most right-wing government since World War II. This is reflected in Emilia-Romagna, a historically leftist stronghold that has experienced a mind-boggling shift to the right in recent years. In 2018, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party received a little more than 3 percent of votes in the region; four years later, her party reached an unprecedented 25 percent.
In Cavriago, where the center-left Democratic Party is still firmly in control of the local council, Lenin’s monument speaks to those who have contributed to the town’s ideological reconstruction in the postwar decades, despite the hard-to-overcome feeling that a collective vision for the future is slowly fading.
In trying to trace the evolution of a community’s political consciousness, an ordinary timeline is not always reliable. Ideas hardly travel in a linear manner — specific dates and events can offer only a superficial view of their path. But in the early 20th century, the rural center of Cavriago — then populated by little more than 3,000 inhabitants — found itself at the epicenter of what appeared to be an epochal shift.
To many on the political left, the unification of Italy in 1861 felt like a failed opportunity for true social change. Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, would decades later describe the birth of the nation as a “rivoluzione mancata” (missed revolution) led by democrats incapable of understanding the needs of the masses. In 1864, as the nascent country was attempting to trace the contours of its national identity, the International Workers’ Association, better known as the First International, was born in London under the leadership of Karl Marx.
The organization — created with the objective of uniting European workers’ movements and leftist political parties — gained particular traction in regions like Emilia-Romagna, where extreme poverty continued to characterize the life of peasants and where the liberal inclinations of the newly established government offered little hope of improving the living conditions for society’s lower strata. The first “Fascio Operaio Italiano,” a clandestine association of workers that would form the basis of the International, had been founded in Bologna in 1871. When the International in Italy was instituted a year later, 30% of its Italian subdivisions were located in Emilia-Romagna.
While, initially, radical groups had mainly operated underground — influenced by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had arrived in Italy in 1863 — by the turn of the century, political work meant party work. Within a short period, as the 19th century came to a close, the Italian Workers’ Party, the Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Italian Workers and the Italian Socialist Party were all born.
As early as 1887, a “circolo socialista” (socialist club) was founded in Cavriago, the first in the province of Reggio Emilia. It was followed by one of the first cooperatives. In the local Napoleonic cemetery, an area was reserved for the graves of atheists and heretics. They are still there today.
A large “casa del popolo” (people’s house) was built in 1906 and, two years later, when the socialist Cesare Arduini was elected as mayor, the work of local cooperatives received a boost. A public slaughterhouse, a rural bank, a community kindergarten and a cinema were built within a few years. The largest initiative of all was the regional Reggio Emilia-Ciano d’Enza railway, the world’s first railroad constructed and operated by a cooperative. In the early 20th century, socialism in Cavriago was becoming less of an abstract philosophy and more of a way of life, a mode of building the future one brick at a time. Those who had viewed the 1861 unification of Italy as a missed opportunity for true social change were looking ahead with optimism.
World War I, however, had created the conditions for a different revolution to happen, some 1,600 miles northeast of Cavriago. On March 15, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule over the Russian Empire. The new regime, formally called the Provisional Government, took control of the country and Lenin returned to St. Petersburg after a decade in exile, ready to establish a Bolshevik-led government. He succeeded — the Provisional Government collapsed months into its rule. Alexander Kerensky, the socialist revolutionary at the head of the Provisional Government, went into exile. Lenin took power.
News of the October Revolution in late 1917 traveled fast throughout Europe, reaching Cavriago. Members of local socialist circles rejoiced — utopian dreams seemed to be becoming reality. On Jan. 6, 1919, members of Cavriago’s Socialist Party decided to publish their message of support in Avanti!, the leading socialist newspaper in Italy. A few dozen men from a minor rural settlement coming together to write a message to the world in support of revolutionaries on the other side of the continent might seem delusional, perhaps even absurd. And yet, the unpredictable happened. The January edition of Avanti! managed to travel across fragmented Europe, enter Russia in the midst of its civil war and — somewhat miraculously — land on the desk of Lenin himself.
When the people of Cavriago learned that Lenin had read their letter during the congress, the town erupted in celebration. Inspired by the Bolsheviks’ achievements, maximalists became a majority within the Socialist Party, opposing the gradualism of the reformists. During the 1920 municipal elections, the local members of the Italian Socialist Party received 80% of the votes in Cavriago. Party members then chose their mayor: the communist Domenico Cavecchi received 15 votes; four ballots were left blank; and one last card carried the name Vladimir Lenin. That election gave birth to a local legend that survives to this day — as the runner-up for the mayor’s office, Lenin has been the honorary mayor of Cavriago since 1920.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the political landscape was transforming rapidly. In 1921, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was born in Livorno after the Italian Socialist Party split. The people of Cavriago joined the new current in large numbers. But 1921 also marked the dawn of a new political force destined to take power through violence. Paramilitary squads known as “squadristi” — adherents of the fascist movement led by future dictator Benito Mussolini — began appearing with increasing frequency in Italian cities, roaming the streets in order to intimidate workers’ organizations, whose calls for revolution were getting louder.
The tense atmosphere of 1921 led many socialist mayors around the country to skip the Labor Day celebrations, but in Cavriago the PCI’s proud members wouldn’t bow to the threats. On May 1, red flags adorned the town’s center. Workers held a feast on the streets. “Bandiera Rossa” — the folk anthem of Italian workers — was playing from speakers. But shortly after the parade began, a truck of squadristi showed up, ravaging stalls and killing two proletarians. New elections were held in 1923 — leftists did not participate and the fascist business owner Anselmo Virgilio Bonilauri was elected. A year later, Mussolini, who led the Italian government from 1922 to 1943, would be granted honorary citizenship in Cavriago by the new mayor.
Fascism turned Cavriago’s socialists into clandestine activists forced to operate in the shadows. Guiding the movement was the former town councilor Angelo Zanti, who hosted secret meetings at his home and ran an illegal printing press where copies of the communist newspaper L’Unita were produced. Like many other leaders of the resistance, he would eventually be caught and executed.
In Cavriago, the opposition was always much bigger than elsewhere, and the role of the resistance remains strong in the town’s collective memory. In 1945, at the end of World War II, three women — Bruna Davoli, Rosina Becchi and Clarice Boni Burini — received a silver medal for their role in the resistance, something unique for such a small community. Historian Dario Ferrari Lazzerini tells of the brutality of those dark years, when political activists were put under surveillance, sent to confinement, arrested and killed. “The story of Clarice Boni Burini is the crudest one,” he told me. “She was a coordinator of Cavriago’s clandestine Communist Party’s activities. When she got caught, she was transported to Villa Cucchi, an art nouveau villa outside of town, where she was tortured for 40 consecutive days in ways that I can’t even tell you. I’ve read the reports from her court testimony and, believe me, it makes you vomit. Despite unimaginable abuse, she managed to stay silent, never mentioning the names of the other members of the resistance movement.”
With the end of the war, Cavriago began a slow process of restoration. The local Communist Party quickly returned to its former glory, and official relations with the USSR were quickly reestablished. The anniversary of the October Revolution was publicly celebrated, and even after Stalin’s death in 1953, grand commemorations took place in the town’s square. An odd blend of reformist and revolutionary ideals mixed with a fascination for the Soviet myth characterized the local postwar political scene in the region.
At its peak in 1976, the PCI, the largest communist party on the western side of the Iron Curtain, received the support of over 12 million Italians, some 34% of voters. In Cavriago, from 1946 to its dissolution in 1991, the PCI never fell below 64% in the local elections. Perhaps thanks to a boost given by the economic boom of the postwar years, as the local communist council became more populated with a new generation of 20-something politicians, Cavriago’s section of the PCI began investing in cultural events with growing enthusiasm. In 1963, Cavriago launched the Dancing Caprice, “likely the first nightclub to be run by a communist party,” said Massimo Zamboni, the former guitarist of the punk band CCCP (meaning USSR) and author of a book retracing Cavriago’s recent past.
The late 1960s were also the years of Cavriago’s Festa dell’Unita di Gorganza, an annual festival that within a few years became legendary.
“Every city had its Festa dell’Unita back then, but no one could match Cavriago’s,” said Jones Reverberi, who helped run it, hiding his nostalgia behind dark sunglasses. “Sure, we served tortellini and lambrusco like it’s expected around here. But we also had a stand with oysters and champagne — why not? We had music concerts but also hosted serious scientific debates on GMOs, on cancer, on black holes. We thought that people should be informed about what happens in the world to vote mindfully.”
As 1970 was approaching, the local section of the PCI decided it had to come up with something special. It was an important year — Lenin’s 100th birth anniversary. The council proposed twinning with a Soviet city and the choice fell on Bender, then part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. As a gesture of thankfulness, Bender’s authorities commissioned a bust of Lenin to be gifted to Cavriago. “No other municipality would have been able to appreciate such a gift, but Cavriago said yes right away. Unanimously. In fact, they planned to dedicate an entire square to Lenin,” Zamboni said.
Once completed, the bust was delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Rome. Two delegates from Cavriag — milkman Piero Cadoppi, who had a truck large enough to transport the sculpture, and Rodolfo Curti, nicknamed “Pravda” (Russian for truth), for being the only Cavriago resident able to speak Russian — were sent to pick it up. In Rome, the Soviet ambassador welcomed the two men. Waiting for them was a white, chalky figure that barely resembled the revolutionary leader. The two men were lost for words.
Days later, a Soviet delegation from Bender arrived in Cavriago, invited to participate in the inauguration of the new square. The solemn ceremony climaxed with the unveiling of the bust — rather than the white sculpture they all knew had been shipped to Italy, the guests were met with a dark, shiny head of Lenin staring right into their eyes. Under the melody of “The Internationale,” no one dared to say a word.
“I’m still proud that Lenin mentioned Cavriago in that speech,” said Jones Reverberi, former secretary of Cavriago’s Communist Party, concluding a long trip through memories of half a century of political activism. Like him, most of the people I’ve spoken to in Cavriago would not imagine removing Lenin’s bust from Piazza Lenin.
Twice, right-wing activists attempted its removal in the 1970s, first by chaining it to a tractor then by blowing it up with explosives. Following these attacks, party activists agreed to guard the bust day and night, but eventually decided to replace the original with a copy. The copy, standing today in Piazza Lenin, sits on a concrete column anchored underground. Borunov’s original had been resting in the lobby of a city government building, sheltered from its enemies, until March 5, 2023, when it was brought back to the public in Cavriago’s Multiplo Cultural Center.
These days, acts of protests are rare and are typically planned by people who see the bust as a media opportunity. An example is Ignazio La Russa, the current speaker of the upper house of Parliament and a member of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who showed up with cameras in Cavriago in 2019 asking for a street to be named after Giorgio Almirante, former member of the fascist party and the editorial board of the journal “La Difesa della Razza” (“In Defense of Race”).
Neither the wave of statue topplings that crossed Europe in 2020 nor the war in Ukraine has led the people of Cavriago to question whether their Lenin bust has a right to keep standing where it does. Perhaps it’s because the bronze Lenin of Cavriago has evolved into something that has little to do with the Lenin of the October Revolution.
“Lenin’s bust is a reminder that we should not be afraid to face controversy. Looking for heroes to idolize or monsters to condemn is hardly a useful way to interpret the past. Defending the presence of Lenin’s bust means welcoming complexities and accepting the elusive nature of history,” said Cavriago Mayor Francesca Bedogni.
Cavriago’s best-known symbol reminds residents of an ideal that has functioned as the community’s social glue for over a century; it pays tribute to the work of the PCI during the resistance and following World War II; and, ultimately, it calls for an analysis of the past that digs beyond grand narratives, allowing for a closer look into individual lives, dreams and relationships.
Angelo Zinna is a journalist based in Florence, Italy
This article originally appeared on Newsline Magazine
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When walking through the northern Italian town of Cavriago, a series of familiar names catch your eye. Steps away from street signs commemorating anti-fascists Giacomo Matteotti and Antonio Gramsci — two recurring figures in the toponymy of Italian cities — there are also Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Gorky and Pushkin.
They mark a territory whose links to Russian literature are not immediately obvious to most visitors. But this seemingly unremarkable town — with a population of fewer than 10,000 in the heart of the Emilia-Romagna region, historically nicknamed “Emilia Rossa” (“Red Emilia”) for its high levels of support for the Communist Party — built bridges between the Soviet Union and Europe over the course of the 20th century.
It is in the town’s center, in Piazza Lenin, that this history is most prominently on display. This is where Italy’s — and, most likely, Western Europe’s — last public bust of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, still stands. The unusual monument was unveiled in 1970. Its roots, however, run much deeper — back to the days of the Russian Revolution, when the first link between Cavriago and the Soviet Union was established.
It is in the town’s center, in Piazza Lenin, that this history is most prominently on display. This is where Italy’s — and, most likely, Western Europe’s — last public bust of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, still stands. The unusual monument was unveiled in 1970. Its roots, however, run much deeper — back to the days of the Russian Revolution, when the first link between Cavriago and the Soviet Union was established.In March 1919, almost two years after the Bolsheviks swept to power in Russia, Lenin received an unexpected letter from Italy. During the congress for the founding of the Communist International, the Soviet organization that advocated for global communism, Lenin read it aloud to his comrades:
I read an item on party life in a small locality called Cavriago. … They sent greetings to the Russian “Sovietisti” and expressed the wish that the program of the Russian and German revolutionaries should be adopted throughout the world. … When you read a resolution like that … you have every right to say to yourself that the Italian people are on our side.
Lenin viewed the letter from Cavriago as a good omen. He found a map and looked for the small Italian town, but it wasn’t there. Even better, he thought — if such a hamlet in the Italian countryside showed support for the Soviet cause, it could only mean that his voice was being heard far and wide. No program of the Russian “Sovietisti” existed at the time, but he considered that a minor detail.
It would take half a century before the relationship between Lenin and Cavriago would materialize into the dark bronze bust that still stands, though not without controversy, in the town’s eponymous piazza. And while the Soviet myth may have been the ideological force driving the people of Cavriago to pay tribute to the Russian revolutionary, over time the monument has acquired an entirely new meaning.
To locals, the bust echoes personal memories of partisan victories; grandiose, free-for-all festivals; and the hopeful era of postwar reconstruction. Visitors who make the pilgrimage tend to be fascinated by the irony of having such a provocative icon adorning the urban landscape of a small, middle-class center. Occasionally, members of minor political groups, such as the tiny Partito Marxista-Leninista Italiano, can be seen participating in commemorative celebrations at the bust.
The enduring legacy of the Lenin bust is a story about present-day Italy and the country’s long history of activism — the kind that shaped Cavriago’s identity for over a century and continues to do so — but also about far-right sentiments carving out ever-larger spaces in national politics. After four years of weak and changing governing coalitions, the normalization of anti-immigration sentiments and the absence of a political force able to mobilize the working classes during the current economic decline, Italy has turned to the right. Last year, Giorgia Meloni became the country’s first woman prime minister. She leads its most right-wing government since World War II. This is reflected in Emilia-Romagna, a historically leftist stronghold that has experienced a mind-boggling shift to the right in recent years. In 2018, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party received a little more than 3 percent of votes in the region; four years later, her party reached an unprecedented 25 percent.
In Cavriago, where the center-left Democratic Party is still firmly in control of the local council, Lenin’s monument speaks to those who have contributed to the town’s ideological reconstruction in the postwar decades, despite the hard-to-overcome feeling that a collective vision for the future is slowly fading.
In trying to trace the evolution of a community’s political consciousness, an ordinary timeline is not always reliable. Ideas hardly travel in a linear manner — specific dates and events can offer only a superficial view of their path. But in the early 20th century, the rural center of Cavriago — then populated by little more than 3,000 inhabitants — found itself at the epicenter of what appeared to be an epochal shift.
To many on the political left, the unification of Italy in 1861 felt like a failed opportunity for true social change. Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, would decades later describe the birth of the nation as a “rivoluzione mancata” (missed revolution) led by democrats incapable of understanding the needs of the masses. In 1864, as the nascent country was attempting to trace the contours of its national identity, the International Workers’ Association, better known as the First International, was born in London under the leadership of Karl Marx.
The organization — created with the objective of uniting European workers’ movements and leftist political parties — gained particular traction in regions like Emilia-Romagna, where extreme poverty continued to characterize the life of peasants and where the liberal inclinations of the newly established government offered little hope of improving the living conditions for society’s lower strata. The first “Fascio Operaio Italiano,” a clandestine association of workers that would form the basis of the International, had been founded in Bologna in 1871. When the International in Italy was instituted a year later, 30% of its Italian subdivisions were located in Emilia-Romagna.
While, initially, radical groups had mainly operated underground — influenced by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had arrived in Italy in 1863 — by the turn of the century, political work meant party work. Within a short period, as the 19th century came to a close, the Italian Workers’ Party, the Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Italian Workers and the Italian Socialist Party were all born.
As early as 1887, a “circolo socialista” (socialist club) was founded in Cavriago, the first in the province of Reggio Emilia. It was followed by one of the first cooperatives. In the local Napoleonic cemetery, an area was reserved for the graves of atheists and heretics. They are still there today.
A large “casa del popolo” (people’s house) was built in 1906 and, two years later, when the socialist Cesare Arduini was elected as mayor, the work of local cooperatives received a boost. A public slaughterhouse, a rural bank, a community kindergarten and a cinema were built within a few years. The largest initiative of all was the regional Reggio Emilia-Ciano d’Enza railway, the world’s first railroad constructed and operated by a cooperative. In the early 20th century, socialism in Cavriago was becoming less of an abstract philosophy and more of a way of life, a mode of building the future one brick at a time. Those who had viewed the 1861 unification of Italy as a missed opportunity for true social change were looking ahead with optimism.
While, initially, radical groups had mainly operated underground — influenced by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had arrived in Italy in 1863 — by the turn of the century, political work meant party work. Within a short period, as the 19th century came to a close, the Italian Workers’ Party, the Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Italian Workers and the Italian Socialist Party were all born.Then, in 1914, the Great War arrived. Over 600 people from Cavriago, mostly peasants, were sent to the front lines to fight for a cause that was not entirely clear. Sixty-three of them never came back. The wave of despair and uncertainty facing Europe interrupted the process of societal transformation.
World War I, however, had created the conditions for a different revolution to happen, some 1,600 miles northeast of Cavriago. On March 15, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule over the Russian Empire. The new regime, formally called the Provisional Government, took control of the country and Lenin returned to St. Petersburg after a decade in exile, ready to establish a Bolshevik-led government. He succeeded — the Provisional Government collapsed months into its rule. Alexander Kerensky, the socialist revolutionary at the head of the Provisional Government, went into exile. Lenin took power.
News of the October Revolution in late 1917 traveled fast throughout Europe, reaching Cavriago. Members of local socialist circles rejoiced — utopian dreams seemed to be becoming reality. On Jan. 6, 1919, members of Cavriago’s Socialist Party decided to publish their message of support in Avanti!, the leading socialist newspaper in Italy. A few dozen men from a minor rural settlement coming together to write a message to the world in support of revolutionaries on the other side of the continent might seem delusional, perhaps even absurd. And yet, the unpredictable happened. The January edition of Avanti! managed to travel across fragmented Europe, enter Russia in the midst of its civil war and — somewhat miraculously — land on the desk of Lenin himself.
When the people of Cavriago learned that Lenin had read their letter during the congress, the town erupted in celebration. Inspired by the Bolsheviks’ achievements, maximalists became a majority within the Socialist Party, opposing the gradualism of the reformists. During the 1920 municipal elections, the local members of the Italian Socialist Party received 80% of the votes in Cavriago. Party members then chose their mayor: the communist Domenico Cavecchi received 15 votes; four ballots were left blank; and one last card carried the name Vladimir Lenin. That election gave birth to a local legend that survives to this day — as the runner-up for the mayor’s office, Lenin has been the honorary mayor of Cavriago since 1920.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the political landscape was transforming rapidly. In 1921, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was born in Livorno after the Italian Socialist Party split. The people of Cavriago joined the new current in large numbers. But 1921 also marked the dawn of a new political force destined to take power through violence. Paramilitary squads known as “squadristi” — adherents of the fascist movement led by future dictator Benito Mussolini — began appearing with increasing frequency in Italian cities, roaming the streets in order to intimidate workers’ organizations, whose calls for revolution were getting louder.
The tense atmosphere of 1921 led many socialist mayors around the country to skip the Labor Day celebrations, but in Cavriago the PCI’s proud members wouldn’t bow to the threats. On May 1, red flags adorned the town’s center. Workers held a feast on the streets. “Bandiera Rossa” — the folk anthem of Italian workers — was playing from speakers. But shortly after the parade began, a truck of squadristi showed up, ravaging stalls and killing two proletarians. New elections were held in 1923 — leftists did not participate and the fascist business owner Anselmo Virgilio Bonilauri was elected. A year later, Mussolini, who led the Italian government from 1922 to 1943, would be granted honorary citizenship in Cavriago by the new mayor.
Fascism turned Cavriago’s socialists into clandestine activists forced to operate in the shadows. Guiding the movement was the former town councilor Angelo Zanti, who hosted secret meetings at his home and ran an illegal printing press where copies of the communist newspaper L’Unita were produced. Like many other leaders of the resistance, he would eventually be caught and executed.
In Cavriago, the opposition was always much bigger than elsewhere, and the role of the resistance remains strong in the town’s collective memory. In 1945, at the end of World War II, three women — Bruna Davoli, Rosina Becchi and Clarice Boni Burini — received a silver medal for their role in the resistance, something unique for such a small community. Historian Dario Ferrari Lazzerini tells of the brutality of those dark years, when political activists were put under surveillance, sent to confinement, arrested and killed. “The story of Clarice Boni Burini is the crudest one,” he told me. “She was a coordinator of Cavriago’s clandestine Communist Party’s activities. When she got caught, she was transported to Villa Cucchi, an art nouveau villa outside of town, where she was tortured for 40 consecutive days in ways that I can’t even tell you. I’ve read the reports from her court testimony and, believe me, it makes you vomit. Despite unimaginable abuse, she managed to stay silent, never mentioning the names of the other members of the resistance movement.”
With the end of the war, Cavriago began a slow process of restoration. The local Communist Party quickly returned to its former glory, and official relations with the USSR were quickly reestablished. The anniversary of the October Revolution was publicly celebrated, and even after Stalin’s death in 1953, grand commemorations took place in the town’s square. An odd blend of reformist and revolutionary ideals mixed with a fascination for the Soviet myth characterized the local postwar political scene in the region.
At its peak in 1976, the PCI, the largest communist party on the western side of the Iron Curtain, received the support of over 12 million Italians, some 34% of voters. In Cavriago, from 1946 to its dissolution in 1991, the PCI never fell below 64% in the local elections. Perhaps thanks to a boost given by the economic boom of the postwar years, as the local communist council became more populated with a new generation of 20-something politicians, Cavriago’s section of the PCI began investing in cultural events with growing enthusiasm. In 1963, Cavriago launched the Dancing Caprice, “likely the first nightclub to be run by a communist party,” said Massimo Zamboni, the former guitarist of the punk band CCCP (meaning USSR) and author of a book retracing Cavriago’s recent past.
The late 1960s were also the years of Cavriago’s Festa dell’Unita di Gorganza, an annual festival that within a few years became legendary.
“Every city had its Festa dell’Unita back then, but no one could match Cavriago’s,” said Jones Reverberi, who helped run it, hiding his nostalgia behind dark sunglasses. “Sure, we served tortellini and lambrusco like it’s expected around here. But we also had a stand with oysters and champagne — why not? We had music concerts but also hosted serious scientific debates on GMOs, on cancer, on black holes. We thought that people should be informed about what happens in the world to vote mindfully.”
As 1970 was approaching, the local section of the PCI decided it had to come up with something special. It was an important year — Lenin’s 100th birth anniversary. The council proposed twinning with a Soviet city and the choice fell on Bender, then part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. As a gesture of thankfulness, Bender’s authorities commissioned a bust of Lenin to be gifted to Cavriago. “No other municipality would have been able to appreciate such a gift, but Cavriago said yes right away. Unanimously. In fact, they planned to dedicate an entire square to Lenin,” Zamboni said.
Once completed, the bust was delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Rome. Two delegates from Cavriag — milkman Piero Cadoppi, who had a truck large enough to transport the sculpture, and Rodolfo Curti, nicknamed “Pravda” (Russian for truth), for being the only Cavriago resident able to speak Russian — were sent to pick it up. In Rome, the Soviet ambassador welcomed the two men. Waiting for them was a white, chalky figure that barely resembled the revolutionary leader. The two men were lost for words.
As early as 1887, a “circolo socialista” (socialist club) was founded in Cavriago, the first in the province of Reggio Emilia. It was followed by one of the first cooperatives. In the local Napoleonic cemetery, an area was reserved for the graves of atheists and heretics. They are still there today.In the same room, however, stood a second, smaller statue. The bronze bust was made in 1922 in the newly formed Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in a train factory in the eastern city of Luhansk. The sculptor Ivan Borunov was commissioned for the job — a big responsibility, considering this would be one the few statues of Lenin built while the leader was alive. It was captured by fascists during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, taken back to Italy as a spoil of war, retrieved by partisans and returned to Moscow by way of the Soviet Embassy in Rome, where it sat, dusty and forgotten, in its corner. Cadoppi and Curti didn’t think twice. They took the small bust, placed it on the milk truck and headed back home, leaving the embassy staff bemused.
Days later, a Soviet delegation from Bender arrived in Cavriago, invited to participate in the inauguration of the new square. The solemn ceremony climaxed with the unveiling of the bust — rather than the white sculpture they all knew had been shipped to Italy, the guests were met with a dark, shiny head of Lenin staring right into their eyes. Under the melody of “The Internationale,” no one dared to say a word.
“I’m still proud that Lenin mentioned Cavriago in that speech,” said Jones Reverberi, former secretary of Cavriago’s Communist Party, concluding a long trip through memories of half a century of political activism. Like him, most of the people I’ve spoken to in Cavriago would not imagine removing Lenin’s bust from Piazza Lenin.
Twice, right-wing activists attempted its removal in the 1970s, first by chaining it to a tractor then by blowing it up with explosives. Following these attacks, party activists agreed to guard the bust day and night, but eventually decided to replace the original with a copy. The copy, standing today in Piazza Lenin, sits on a concrete column anchored underground. Borunov’s original had been resting in the lobby of a city government building, sheltered from its enemies, until March 5, 2023, when it was brought back to the public in Cavriago’s Multiplo Cultural Center.
These days, acts of protests are rare and are typically planned by people who see the bust as a media opportunity. An example is Ignazio La Russa, the current speaker of the upper house of Parliament and a member of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who showed up with cameras in Cavriago in 2019 asking for a street to be named after Giorgio Almirante, former member of the fascist party and the editorial board of the journal “La Difesa della Razza” (“In Defense of Race”).
Neither the wave of statue topplings that crossed Europe in 2020 nor the war in Ukraine has led the people of Cavriago to question whether their Lenin bust has a right to keep standing where it does. Perhaps it’s because the bronze Lenin of Cavriago has evolved into something that has little to do with the Lenin of the October Revolution.
“Lenin’s bust is a reminder that we should not be afraid to face controversy. Looking for heroes to idolize or monsters to condemn is hardly a useful way to interpret the past. Defending the presence of Lenin’s bust means welcoming complexities and accepting the elusive nature of history,” said Cavriago Mayor Francesca Bedogni.
Cavriago’s best-known symbol reminds residents of an ideal that has functioned as the community’s social glue for over a century; it pays tribute to the work of the PCI during the resistance and following World War II; and, ultimately, it calls for an analysis of the past that digs beyond grand narratives, allowing for a closer look into individual lives, dreams and relationships.
Angelo Zinna is a journalist based in Florence, Italy
This article originally appeared on Newsline Magazine
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