Read an Excerpt

Gramsci in Love

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Serebranyi Bor Sanatorium, Moscow 1922

He sat looking out over fields of spindly silver birch trees and rough scrub, dissected by winding streams and straighter cuts which he imagined served the purposes of irrigation or drainage. They were too narrow for navigation or transportation. The landscape was gently flourishing in late spring bloom. The silver birches were in full new leaf, the scrub was topped by heavy waving clusters of seed, and the streams flowed freely towards the river running through the distant village.

For the moment it presented a scene of easy vigour, full of itself, like a fat smiling peasant. Later in the season, he presumed, it would all dry and wither. With the sudden plunge in temperature and air pressure which heralded the vicious Russian winter, it would hurriedly shed leaves and stalks and viscosity. Everyone talked about it – "When winter comes ..." – as if it punctuated the rest of the year. The trees and scrub would withdraw into their roots for earthy warmth, and the streams thicken and start to freeze over. By late November the ice would be thick enough to skate on.

Or so he imagined, from what he'd heard about the deep prolonged cold this far north, or for that matter about the alien pursuit of ice skating. It was nearly three thousand kilometres from his native temperate Sardinia; five hundred less from his adopted northern Italian city of Turin, where he had spent most of the last ten years. The winters could be hard enough in northern Italy, especially if you had inadequate clothing and nourishment – as he had for many of those years – but he was younger then, and the Italian sun was never too far away.

Here in Russia, even in late spring and early summer, the sun always seemed to be smaller and lower and paler, and somehow more timid, as though it was afraid of getting too close. It was hardly surprising that everyone he met, from the highest official to the lowest orderly, seemed to have cold hands. Russia had that effect, keeping you at a distance, chilling your bones. A troubling thought emerged from within his steady contemplation of the vista: would he still be here at Serebranyi Bor at the onset of hard Russian winter? My goodness, I really can't afford to be out of circulation that long. He was bundled up in layers of heavy blankets against the early evening chill. The attendants had insisted on wrapping him up tightly in his wicker chair, on top of the thick pyjamas and dressing gown he had been issued a week earlier when he had arrived at the sanatorium on the outskirts of Moscow. He had at first resisted their ministrations, in the sunny warmth of the late May afternoon, in his still rudimentary Russian – "I'll be fine without, I'll be fine ..." – but they had fussily persisted. "Comrade Gramsci, you will catch cold! On top of everything else ..."

He detected in their concern for his welfare a deeper concern that they might be called to account for it. As the two burly men tucked the tasselled edges around and underneath him, he pushed against their big strong cold hands for some room to move and breathe. For all his best efforts at self-restraint and politeness, a gasp of exasperation escaped his lips and noticeably moderated their touch. He hated this feeling of swaddled confinement, having spent so much of his childhood bound and restricted, his parents' vain attempt to cure his deformities and straighten him out. This had included strapping him into a kind of corset with rings on it, suspended for hours on end from the kitchen ceiling. The treatment was somehow supposed to dispel the emerging hump on the right side of his back. He could remember slowly twirling, looking down on the bustling assembled family of mother and father and six other young children, like a strange insect or bird or some kind of contraption for drying clothes.

He was glad of the blankets now. They would allow him to defer by at least half an hour the long slow trudge in his Soviet issue slippers back to his gloomy room on the ground floor at the back of the palatial old building. His room reflected, he reckoned, his relatively lowly status in the Communist International as a recently arrived delegate from a minor party. The Bolsheviks might be building a new world of liberty, equality and fraternity, assuming the mantle of the French Revolution as the driving force of history, but that didn't mean they were quite so free, equal and fraternal just yet.

As Marx had always insisted, the material reality of socialism would be based on what had gone before: all those long aching bloody centuries of oppression, exploitation and misery. The explosive power of capitalism created massive inequalities in wealth and status, heaped on top of the rigid stratifications of feudalism, so that every individual was allotted their place in the stultifying social hierarchy. It took concerted collective action by masses of people over many years, guided by the best strategic brains of the age, to break it apart and reorder things.

And as the Russians themselves had been painfully discovering, in the years of civil war and famine and their faltering two-steps-forward-one-step-back construction of the new socialist economy, you couldn't just do away with the old unequal ways by decree or even fire-power. This was a society busily, ferociously, bravely remaking itself, but there was still a long way to go, lives to be led in the meantime, and it all had to be done on the basis of what had gone before. Hegemony was a many-layered, multi-dimensional structure, more of a process really, always shifting and changing, like some kind of geological substratum infused with primordial gases and liquids.

Perhaps it was best to think of it as a living organism, already rearranged and patched together by previous generations. It could only be taken apart and reconstructed one or at best several pieces at a time, and with great care and skill because every element was separately alive, throbbing and twitching, discomfiting every other. It would always be difficult, and you could never be sure what you would end up with, especially here in Russia, with its primitive society and state, and still largely feudal economy.

He had heard Lenin himself say so to the Comintern just a couple of weeks ago: "It is a terrible misfortune that the honour of beginning the first Socialist revolution should have fallen to the most backward people in Europe." The dictatorship of the proletariat required patience and cunning and compromise, no less than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that preceded it. Were the Russians up to it, with their millions of illiterate peasants barely out of serfdom, tiny urban proletariat and even tinier intelligentsia? How to build a new world on such a narrow base?

The great and glorious October Revolution was only a tentative first step. A clarion cry around the world, no doubt, but always exceptional. Hadn't he inadvertently said so at the time, in an article headed "The Revolution Against Capital"? He meant it as a tribute to Bolshevik decisiveness, in contrast to the plodding reformism of the Second International, all those old men waiting around for change rather than making it happen. But ever since then he had been chided by comrades – for the most part playfully – for his anti-Marxist "voluntarist" heresy. Five years older now, and with first-hand experience of Russian conditions, he could see their point.

The Soviets' isolation proved there was no substitute for the hard graft of political change in the Western European heartland of industrial and finance capitalism. There the revolution would be much more difficult and protracted, and couldn't be rushed unless you wanted to provoke reactionary backlash. The continuities of history were just as important, and in their own dumb way constructive, as its ruptures. You had to work with the grain as well as occasionally hack into it, respect reality as you tried to reshape it, recognise the material you had been given by history to work with. That required careful research, rigorous analysis, and always the desperate mental struggle to understand concrete historical reality. As he thought this through, feeling the pull of his writing desk back in his gloomy room, the fingers of his right hand tapped steadily on the wooden arm of his wicker chair, like a carpenter making guide marks with his chisel.

This building, an old Tsarist summer palace converted into a hospital for the new revolutionary proletarian elite of the Communist International, was proof of all this. As were the obsequious manners and behaviours of the doctors, nurses and attendants who – it seemed to him – had swapped one set of masters for another as easily as they changed their white coats for clean ones. The fact that they addressed the new lot as "comrade" instead of "sir" was progress of sorts, but they were still unquestionably and unquestioningly subordinate. They might be serving a higher and nobler ideal, the cause of world proletarian revolution, but they were still undoubtedly serving.

* * *

Antonio Gramsci had come to Russia from Turin as late spring turned to high summer, departing on 26th May 1922, for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International scheduled to begin in November after many months of intense preparation. He travelled with fellow Partito Comunista d'Italia members and Comintern delegates Amadeo Bordiga (the new party's first leader) and Antonio Graziadei. They took a circuitous route into Russia via Latvia, stopping off along the way in Berlin, where Gramsci called on his old university professor and intellectual mentor Umberto Cosmo, now a diplomat at the Italian embassy. They finally arrived in Moscow on 2nd June, a whole week after setting out, exhausted and (in Gramsci's case) seriously ill.

They had left Italy in a state of turmoil whose outcome was as yet utterly unclear. It was already beginning to feel like a historical tipping-point, the very last of the "red years" of revolutionary agitation following the war, and the very first of the black years of counter-revolutionary Fascism. The surge of reaction began in the countryside, breaking strikes and occupations and besieging whole towns and villages with military precision, spreading north and south through the Italian peninsula like fire in a cornfield. Thousands of disgruntled soldiers – Gramsci's own younger brother Mario amongst them – had come back from a war they were supposed to have won but which felt more like a defeat, and set about exacting revenge on their fellow countrymen, guided by the rabble of histrionic, sneering, ex-socialist intellectuals and disaffected provincial gentry around Benito Mussolini.

It was nasty enough at the beginning, with widespread organised violence and even murders, wrecking and burning of the offices and halls of the left wing parties, trade unions and labour centres, peasant leagues and food cooperatives, and the quashing of whatever counter-strikes the scattered and fractious Italian left could muster in their own defence. But the full institutional horror of Fascism had yet to be revealed and turned into a matter of totalitarian state policy. For now, all that was immediately apparent was the paramilitary violence of the fasci di combattimento, founded in Milan in March 1919 but now active across the country.

At this stage it was widely considered a passing fad, the slow winding-down of one world war rather than the beginnings of another, even among its most immediate victims and implacable opponents on the communist and socialist left. They told themselves it was just a bunch of brutish thugs running around the country causing mayhem in the political vacuum created by the war, another local example of the rag-bag reaction of the unemployed, ill-disciplined, demobilised and traumatised soldiers making trouble in most European countries, allied with marginal, opportunist elements of the old ruling class.

There had always been plenty of that in the Italian countryside, hired hoodlums brought in by the big, largely absentee landowners to beat the peasants into line and make sure they voted the right way in elections. In substantive terms, Fascism was little different to what had gone before, "a natural and predictable stage of development in the capitalistic order", as the Second Congress of the Partito Comunista d'Italia resolved in February 1922. Its leader, Amadeo Bordiga, had called it "... merely a change in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie".

What's more, the comrades said amongst themselves, if Fascism had the effect of sweeping away much of the old corrupt liberal parliamentary circus of long-time Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, so much the better. The purgative "revolution" Mussolini proclaimed as his objective would destroy the ceremonial trappings and niceties of Giolitti's Italietta ("little Italy"). Getting rid of the bourgeois-democratic sham of pluralism, freedom of association and the press, the legal protection of the individual from the state, etcetera – the respectable veneer over the harsh realities of capitalism – would leave the way clear for a properly proletarian revolution and a socialist state on the Soviet model.

If Antonio Gramsci had any suspicions in the summer of 1922 that his ex-Socialist comrade and fellow journalist Benito Mussolini's movement would prove a more durable phenomenon, he kept them largely to himself for now. The very suggestion would undermine the whole notion of the historical inevitability of proletarian dictatorship and international socialism. History could not possibly stop halfway or go backwards, could it? And after all, confined by chronic illness and nervous exhaustion to this Russian sanatorium for the foreseeable future, thousands of kilometres away from the violence and upheaval in Italy, he was in no position to do anything about it.

Grigoriy Zinoviev himself, President of the Communist International, had noticed how frail and tired the new Italian delegate was at the opening meeting of the Comintern in Moscow, and wondered whether he might be suffering from nervous exhaustion, or neurasthenia, like so many others in these years of upheaval. Gramsci had been elected as the Italian representative on the Comintern's Executive Committee, known by the suitably modern and polyglot acronym of Ispolcom, and as a member of its smaller Presidium. Afterwards Zinoviev suggested a recuperative spell in the sanatorium at Serebranyi Bor, so called because it was set in a wood of silver birch trees.

"We pride ourselves," he said, in his oddly clipped and surprisingly quiet voice, his diffidence accentuated by his deployment of cumbersome Italian for the benefit of this new arrival, "on the quality of our care. Our doctors and clinics lead the world in the treatment of neurasthenia. We consider it a distinctly modern illness, symbol and product of the progress of civilisation."

They were walking at some pace down a corridor between meetings. Gramsci found it hard to keep up. He also found it hard to equate Zinoviev's global reputation for terror with the clean-shaven, pale, slightly puffy face looking down and sideways at him from the mop of curly black hair atop his slender round-shouldered frame. There was little of Lenin's resolution; rather, a somewhat brittle affectation of confidence and authority.

"Of course neurasthenia is especially prevalent here, with widespread physical and mental fatigue from two revolutions, the civil war, capitalist blockades and famine, and the massive epidemics that followed. We might have expected it to ease with the prosperity of the New Economic Policy, but if anything it's getting worse. The latest manifestation is a wave of suicides among young men worried about sexual dysfunction as a consequence of excessive masturbation."

Zinoviev stopped abruptly for a moment of contemplation, his fingertips playing with the little tassels of silk cord he wore instead of a tie. Gramsci took advantage of the halt to regain his breath. Then just as abruptly Zinoviev carried on walking and talking.

---

Excerpted from Gramsci in Love by Andrew Pearmain. Copyright © 2014 Andrew Pearmain. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---