On Leon Trotsky’s Stroll Through Fascist Italy

Benito Mussolini used to have lunch at the Spysi canteen in Bern, where Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky also regularly dined. Trotsky complained about Mussolini’s expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party, declaring: “You have lost the only serious card, the only man who could have made the revolution seriously.”
In 1937, Trotsky visited Italy under Mussolini’s government, strolling through Naples and Pompeii, as can be seen in footage from the Critical Past channel. Antonio Gramsci once stated that Trotsky was “a prostitute of fascism.”
Grigory Zinoviev, in his final statement in August 1936, said: “My poor Bolshevism turned into an anti-Bolshevism and, through Trotskyism, I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism, and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.”
Nicola Bombacci, who was a friend, assistant, and confidant of Mussolini, made criticisms of Joseph Stalin that somewhat resembled those of Trotsky. In November 1937, Bombacci wrote that the Soviet Union’s relations with democratic countries could only have one explanation: “there is only one reason, frivolous, vulgar, but real: interest, money, business.” Therefore, he stated: “We proclaim with a clear conscience that Stalin’s Bolshevik Russia has become a colony of international-Hebrew-Masonic capitalism.”
With the advent of the Second World War, especially after Operation Barbarossa, Bombacci began participating in the fascist regime’s anti-communist campaigns. As a communist leader who had traveled to the Soviet Union, his voice was still heard; however, he did not renounce his communist ideals, maintaining the thesis that Stalin had betrayed the Russian Revolution. He wrote numerous articles against Stalin, claiming that his measures had destroyed Lenin’s achievements.
In 1943, Bombacci wrote in a propaganda pamphlet:
“Which of the two revolutions, the fascist or the Bolshevik, will leave its mark on the twentieth century and remain in history as the creator of a new order of tangible and social values? Rome has won! Materialist, semi-barbaric Moscow, with a totalitarian capitalism in which the State is the employer, seeks to impose, by forced march (five-year plans), upon its citizens the most extreme misery, through the industrialization of countries that, during the nineteenth century, went through a bourgeois capitalist regime. Moscow completes the capitalist phase. Rome is something entirely different. Moscow, with Stalin’s reform, presents itself institutionally like any other bourgeois parliamentary state. Economically, there is a substantial difference, because while in bourgeois states the government is formed by delegates of the capitalist class, in Moscow the government is in the hands of the Bolshevik bureaucracy, a new class that, in reality, is worse than the capitalist class, since, without any control, it holds labor, production, and the lives of citizens in its hands.”
Bombacci published the pamphlet This Is Bolshevism in 1944, which was reproduced by the newspaper La Crociata Italica in March 1945, where he wrote that the Stalinist deviation from true communism had destroyed authentic revolutionary syndicalism in Europe. Later, he declared:
“Socialism will not be achieved by Stalin, but by Mussolini, who is a socialist — although for twenty years he was hindered by the bourgeoisie, which later betrayed him. But now Mussolini has freed himself from all the traitors and needs the workers to create the new proletarian state.”
And he concluded with a provocation:
“Don’t you find it strange that Trotsky, who claimed to be anti-fascist, strolled through Italy during Mussolini’s government? And don’t you find it strange that Mussolini, who claimed to be anti-communist, allowed one of the communist leaders to walk freely through Italy during his government without being arrested?”
REFERENCES:
https://youtu.be/Ytw_xtPc6uQ?si=XU4h10SxA4de0TLn
Erik Norling, Fascismo Revolucionário.
https://www.isses.it/MussoliniGiudizi.htm
https://www.tempi.it/benito-it....aliano-il-compagno-a