Nicola Bombacci (24 October 1879 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian Marxist revolutionary and later fascist politician. A leading figure in the Italian Socialist Party during and after World War I, he was inspired by the October Revolution and became a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. After being expelled from the party in 1927, he gradually moved toward fascism, eventually allying with Benito Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic during World War II. He was captured and executed by communist partisans in April 1945.
Biography Early life Nicola Bombacci was born in a hamlet of the Municipality of Civitella di Romagna, in the province of Forlì, on 24 October 1879.Various biographical accounts exist in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Among the many inaccurate ones, the most reliable are Enzo Santarelli's entry "Nicola Bombacci" in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. XI (1969), s.v., and Luciano Casali's entry "Nicola Bombacci" in Tommaso Detti and Franco Andreucci (eds.), Il movimento operaio italiano: Dizionario biografico (1853–1943), Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975, vol. 1, s.v. Bombacci's family made their living farming land owned by the parish of Don Nicolò Ghini, from whom Bombacci took his own name. While still a child, he moved with his family to Meldola, a significant town in the lower Bidente valley, where he finished elementary school and where his family would settle permanently. In 1895, he was enrolled in the seminary in Forlì.
After leaving the seminary for health reasons, he continued his studies at the age of twenty-one at the Giosuè Carducci School in Forlimpopoli to become an elementary school teacher. He was enrolled in the third-year class, the same one attended by Benito Mussolini, who was four years younger. Bombacci later graduated in 1901.Alberto e Giancarlo Mazzuca, Mussolini Bombacci. Compagni di una vita, op. cit. p. 23 It was during this period that Bombacci became involved with the socialist movement.
Teaching career His teaching career began with minor postings in the province of Reggio Emilia. He left the region for his first significant post in Villa Santina in the province of Udine in 1904–1905, then returned to Emilia the following year to a post in Baricella. During this period, he married Erissene Focaccia, who was also a teacher. In 1906, the family moved to Cadelbosco di Sopra, in Reggio Emilia, where they went through a period of financial hardship before he was given substitute-teaching posts, first in and then in Cadelbosco di Sotto. In 1907 he was given a permanent teaching post in Monticelli d'Ongina, in the province of Piacenza.
Entry into socialist politics In 1909 he gave up teaching to devote himself to politics. He became active in the union movement across various areas and cities, working between Crema, Piacenza, and Cesena. There, in 1910, he took on the role of secretary of the socialist federation and the directorship of the weekly Il Cuneo, seizing the opportunity to return to activity near Meldola, where his family still lived. In 1911 he was a member of the National Council of the General Confederation of Labor (CGdL). In May of that same year, Bombacci resigned from the Cesena federation. In the following months, he withdrew from political activity before returning in November 1911 as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro of Modena.
In Modena, during the first world war, he found his springboard, becoming the undisputed leader of local socialism, so much so that Mussolini himself (who had known him since their school days at Forlimpopoli, when both were students) called him "the Kaiser of Modena". Between the Balkan Wars and the Russian Revolution, he simultaneously served as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro, secretary of the Modena provincial Socialist Federation, and director of the socialist periodical Il Domani.
Italian Socialist Party (1917–1921)
In July 1917 Bombacci was appointed a member of the Directorate and vice secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), working alongside party secretary Costantino Lazzari in drafting the famous circulars sent to the party's local branches, and alongside periodical director Giacinto Menotti Serrati in the effort to win over the workers' movement to the Maximalist socialist current. Alongside Lazzari and Mussolini, he became a national leader of the revolutionary wing of the party, known as the .
In 1918, with the arrests of Lazzari in January and Serrati in May, he was left practically alone at the head of the party.Serge Noiret, "Riformisti e massimalisti in lotta per il controllo del PSI, 1917-1918", Italia Contemporanea, n. 190, marzo 1993, pp. 65-103. He himself was arrested for 'defeatism' in January and tried while at liberty, until the subsequent arrest of 31 October 1918 and release on 20 November. A proponent of a strongly anti-reformist line, he centralized and imposed a strict hierarchy on the whole of Italian socialism. The party's provincial federations and the Gruppo Parlamentare Socialista (GPS) became directly subordinate to the PSI's Directorate, which the socialist union and cooperative organizations were likewise tied to.Serge Noiret, Il partito di massa massimalista dal PSI al PCd'I, 1917-1924: la scalata alle istituzioni democratiche, in Fabio Grassi Orsini, Gaetano Quagliariello (cur.), Il Partito politico dalla grande guerra al fascismo. Crisi della rappresentanza e riforma dello Stato nell'età dei sistemi politici di massa (1918-1925), Bologna, Il Mulino, 1996, pp. 909-965.
In October 1919, together with Serrati, Gennari, and Salvadori, he drafted the programme of the Maximalist faction, which won out at the PSI's 16th National Congress (Bologna, 5–8 October 1919).Serge Noiret, "Il PSI e le elezioni del 1919. La nuova legge elettorale. La conquista del Gruppo parlamentare socialista da parte dei massimalisti", Storia Contemporanea, a. XV, n. 6, 1984, pp. 1093-1146. He was elected Party secretary (11 October 1919) and, the following month, in the first general elections of the postwar period (16 November 1919), was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Bologna constituency with over a hundred thousand votes, becoming one of the most powerful and visible figures of Maximalist socialism during the biennio rosso (the "red biennium").By overseeing the political secretariat of the PSI for much of 1918, Bombacci was officially political secretary of the PSI only between 11 October 1919 and 25 February 1920, when he resigned, leaving the position to Egidio Gennari and preferring to keep his parliamentary seat in Montecitorio. In the 1919 general election, Bombacci led the PSI to its best result ever, with the party winning 32.3% of the vote and becoming the largest in parliament.
In January 1920 he presented a plan to establish Soviet councils in Italy,Sezione Socialista di Pistoia, Per la costituzione dei Soviet. Relazione presentata al Congresso Nazionale da Nicola Bombacci, Pistoia, Tipografia F.lli Cialdini, 1920. Il progetto fu anche tradotto in spagnolo e pubblicato a Buenos Aires nello stesso 1920. which received little support and much criticism. But it did help spark a heated theoretical debate in the party press. The rejection of his proposal to establish Soviet councils led Bombacci, on 25 February 1920, to cede the position of secretary of the PSI to Egidio Gennari. In April, he became the first Italian socialist to meet with Bolshevik representatives, in Copenhagen,Serge Noiret, "Le origini della ripresa delle relazioni tra Roma e Mosca. Idealismo massimalista e realismo bolscevico: la missione Bombacci-Cabrini a Copenaghen nell'aprile 1920", Storia Contemporanea, a. XIX, n. 5, ottobre 1988, pp. 797-850. while that summer he was among the members of the Italian delegation that traveled to Soviet Russia, also taking part in the Second World Congress of the Communist International.
Having founded the Communist Faction in autumn 1920 together with Antonio Gramsci, Amadeo Bordiga, Egidio Gennari, and Antonio Graziadei, and having also served as director of the periodical Il Comunista, Bombacci firmly backed the split at the 17th National Congress of the PSI (Livorno, 15-21 January 1921), becoming one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, the Italian Section of the Third International (PCd'I), where he became a member of its Central Committee.Alberto e Giancarlo Mazzuca, Mussolini Bombacci, op. cit. pp. 89-99
Italian Communist Party (1921–1927)
Re-elected as a deputy in the spring 1921 general election for the Trieste constituency, Bombacci, lacking a faction of his own within the new party, found himself somewhat isolated from both Gramsci's, Togliatti's, Terracini's, and Tasca's Ordine Nuovo group and Bordiga's abstentionist faction. He aligned himself with the right wing of the PCd'I alongside Francesco Misiano, favoring a rapprochement with the Maximalists and opposing the sectarian, ideologically rigid party that Bordiga wanted.Serge Noiret, Massimalismo e crisi dello stato liberale. Nicola Bombacci (1879-1924), Milano, Franco Angeli, 1992, cap. IV. Despite his break with socialism, he remained a friend of Mussolini due to their shared past as fellow in the PSI.
Just before the March on Rome, Bombacci became the editor-in-chief of the sole legal edition (dated 10 September 1922) of (Proletarian Kid), a Communist illustrated periodical aimed at children. He was soon pushed out of the Communist Party's leadership bodies, beginning with its Central Committee. The controversy reached the highest levels of the Soviet leadership in November 1923, when the PCd'I's Executive Committee unilaterally decided to expel him without consulting the Communist International. Bombacci, then secretary of the Communist Parliamentary Group, was accused of having suggested a possible union between the two revolutions, that of the Bolshevik one and that of the fascist one, in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 30 November 1923.
In January 1924, Bombacci's term as a deputy in the Chamber ended. He was recalled to Moscow, where he represented the Italian delegation at the funeral of Lenin. There, Grigory Zinoviev decided to reinstate him in the PCd'I.
His estrangement from the Party became evident, and in 1927 the exiled Communist leadership decreed his final expulsion, for embracing a pro-fascist position. His expulsion was formalized with a terse announcement in an issue of l'Unità: "Nicola Bombacci is expelled from the Communist Party of Italy for political unworthiness."
Drift toward fascism
During what have been called the "years of silence,"Guglielmo Salotti, Nicola Bombacci. Da Mosca a Salò, Roma, Bonacci, 1986, p. 87. Bombacci continued to live in Rome with his family, though his collaboration with the Soviet Embassy appears not to have extended much beyond 1930. Given his difficult financial situation and his son Wladimiro's serious health problems, Mussolini granted him some financial assistance for his son's medical treatment and found him a position at the , part of the League of Nations, in Rome.Serge Noiret, "Per una biografia di Nicola Bombacci: contributo allo studio del periodo 1924-1936", Società e storia, n. 25, 1984, pp. 591-631. He never officially joined the National Fascist Party.