Italy

The **Italian Socialist Republic**, or more commonly known as **Italy**, is a Western European country bordering the Mediterranean sea. It borders Switzerland to the North, Socialist Yugoslavia and Cislenthia to the west, and France to the East.

**History:**

In 1936, the Italian Socialist Republic and its syndicalist government sprawled across the north of Italy; from the French border to the Adriatic, from the Po to the Tiber. Its President, Palmiro Togliatti, sat atop the complicated web of trade unions and bureaucrats that had coalesced around his party, the USI. However in January of that very year, the edifice of Italian politics would be shaken by an event in its neighbor; the Glorieuse Nivose, that efflorescence of revolutionary zeal that undid the trade bureaucracy in France. Fearful of a similarly revolutionary wave spreading to Italy, Togliatti’s government implemented a few token reforms, restricting aspects of the bureaucracy and banning the national syndicalists of Mussolini, who fled to the Italian Republic across the River Po.

However, the incomplete nature of the reforms proves incapable of deflecting quite a lot of disdain for Togliatti among the ‘left-wing’ of his party, including his former allies such as Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga, and old rivals like Angelo Tasca. By the end of January 1936, the factions of the USI were broken into three different parties: the Marxists of L’Ordine Nuovo (Gramsci, Bordiga, Tasca, Bombacci, among others) who formed the PCd’I (short for Partito Comunista d’Italia; Communist Party of Italy), the anarchists, syndicalists, and anarcho-syndicalists who kept the mantle and legacy of the USI, and the right-wing of Togliatti that - while dominant - chose to break with the USI and join with the likes of Giacomo Matteotti, Giuseppe Romita, Gaetano Salvemini and Olindo Vernocchi in the PSI.

Publically, President Togliatti stood with the anti-bureaucratic revolution in France, but behind closed doors, the man derided such “rabble-rousing”. He did, however, see the writing on the wall; war was coming, a great revolutionary war that Italy would have to throw its weight into just as its brothers and sisters in France and Britain would. The Italian government, realizing its relatively small manpower pool compared to its very industrialized core for Emilia-Romagna and Torino, chose to focus on building up a small, albeit highly trained, specialized, and mechanized, elite army.

**Second World War:**

By September of 1939, war had broken out in western Europe. The Habsburg monarchy was obligated to join in support of the German war effort, but when the question of the involvement of the Italian Republic came up, President Gronchi staunchly refused. In a public speech during the first month of the war, he declared that no blood would be spilt by Italians fighting amongst themselves. Austria was powerless to directly intervene; if they were to outright invade the Republic or overthrow its government, then the entire population would see the Austrians as their enemy, handing over the land behind the Po to the socialists. In the end, the Po remained peaceful, socialist soldiers eyeing across the river with skepticism. With this free hand open to them, socialist forces marched into the territory controlled by the reactionary Papacy and the German-backed Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. After a year of rugged mountain combat, the whole of the southern Italian boot was under socialist control, with Pope Pius XII dead from the siege of Rome. By late 1940, however, the war stalled, with the combined imperialist navy blocking any attempt at an invasion of Sicily. Unable to progress further, for the time being, the focus of the Italian forces turned to the occupation and establishment of socialism throughout southern Italy. Under their protection, workers’ councils established themselves autonomously throughout the cities and villages of the Mezzogiorno.

Electing not to send Italian troops to the French front with Germany, Togliatti’s decision - though initially viewed poorly by both INFOR high command and Italian politicians, further galvanizing a lot of Togliatti’s opposition - came to an advantage after developments north of the Po unfolded in 1943, with the Italian army poised and prepared to strike quickly. The government of Austria, a crumbling and archaic structure, propped up by the northern Kaiserreich and held together only by compromise after compromise, was finally put out of its misery by the German military government, with a group of Völkisch radicals seizing control of Vienna at the behest of Berlin in 1943. The Habsburgs’ empire began to collapse in on itself, and the already unstable situation in the Balkans plunged into chaos. Italo Balbo, the leader of the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, returned to Milan following the Fiume Declaration of Nations Oppressed by Austria with Poglavnik Ante Pavelic. With the stroke of a pen, control of the Italian Republic was snatched from the unpopular Austrian-backed government, hoping to wage the war against Socialism in their own way. Seizing the opportunity, socialist forces crossed the Po, finally avenging their defeat on that same river more than 20 years ago, and occupied Milan and Venice in the span of slightly more than a month, with Milan falling to socialist workers’ militias rising up against the ANI on the 17th of December, with Venezia following it a month and a day after. The push truly started in earnest at the Alps, with the Arditi del Popolo taking Trento and Bolzano, as the more ‘conventional’ army took portions of Istria.

In mid-1944, with the Alpine forces of the Italian army thrusting into Austria, a window of opportunity, to strike at Palermo, was opened - the order was given to finish off the Bourbon Kingdom of Sicily. In the summer of that year, a new offensive by the Italian, French, and British navies defeated the Habsburg and French-Algerian navies at the Battle of the Strait of Sicily. It broke the back of the German Mediterranean squadron. Without its protection from the fleets of the German-led coalition, the invasion of Sicily proved to be a simple matter.

Now in possession of the most important stepping stone to the liberation of Sardinia and North Africa, the Italian navy began preparations for the great crossing across the Mediterranean. They were met by hellfire, by a great destructive blast on the Sicilian port city of Trapani, a new cruel bomb utilized by the reactionary devils in North Africa in an attempt to stall the push of socialist forces. It was clear that the French nationalists, only in control of backwards colonies and desert sands, could not have developed such a miraculous curse… no, this was born in the laboratories of Germany and South Africa, and handed off to Algiers in secret. The Italian southern fleet was left in need of recovery and repair, slowing INFOR’s attempt to reach Africa.

The Adriatic fleet, although smaller, was able to engage in meaningful military action, assisting the socialist partisans of the Socialist Labour Party of Yugoslavia in their fight against the Ustanici of Ante Pavelic, perceived as a shared enemy by a people who had defeated his ally Balbo. The Dalmatian coast was liberated with the help of the Italian navy, chasing away those forces still loyal to the arch-reactionaries of Pavelic and the dying edifices of Teutonic imperialism. With the fall of Austria's all-important Italian and Slovenian ports, the remains of the K.u.K Kriegsmarine were seized, and there was nothing left to oppose the Adriatic fleet's shore bombardment operations.

At the same time, the Alps gradually fell to the liberating forces, who were increasingly being joined by workers’ militias, and aided by the endlessly compounding strikes and mutinies within the collapsing Habsburg empire. Skirting away from the rampaging Hungarian ultranationalists that saw neither the socialists nor the voynists as allies in their fight against the carcass of the Empire, the Italian first army group overwhelmed the last barriers before Vienna to link up with the revolutionaries and forces who had come to control most of Bohemia. Further to the South, Italian and Yugoslav forces would encounter the Russian-supported soldiers of the Serbian King Aleksandar, as the two Yugoslavias closed around the last above-ground strongholds of Pavelic. Though tense, the meeting was without bloodshed and some gestures of respect were traded. By the time this gesture of begrudging respect had been traded in 1946, the war was over in Europe, with the arch-reactionaries in Yugoslavia squelched and the German Empire finally defeated.

While fighting still continued in Africa, the political face of Italy changed back home. The workers’ councils which sprung up throughout the Mezzogiorno’s urban centres challenged the static regime of Togliatti and the trade unions which dominated the North, and the South’s far more radical mode of organizing was encouraged and embraced by the PCd’I (also called L’Ordine Nuovo after the paper they publish), at their head Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. Although old friends and allies of Togliatti, as staunch revolutionary Marxists they denounced his unchallenged rule in Italy, and remain some of his most fervent opponents.

Rather less revolutionary political figures have also risen to the forefront of Italian politics, such as the liberals and reformists who fled into the country following the ANI coup across the Po. At the head of these “liberal socialists” is Carlo Rosselli, the former opposition leader in the Italian Republic, who has since broken with the PSI, along with its right-wing of Romita, Matteotti, Saragat and Salvemini, and founded the Unitary Socialist Party (PSU; Partito Socialist Unitario).

**Modern Italy:**

In 1950, Palmiro Togliatti remains in power, having been President of the Republic for 24 years now. Though his grip appears to be tight to the outside eye, never has his power and the power of the bureaucratic edifice that undergirds him been weaker, as Gramsci and Bordiga continue to challenge him at every turn. While some are doubtful that he can continue on like this with the dawn of the cold war, and the ever-changing world around him, Il Migliore stays the course, facing betrayals, coalitions and splits head on, while at the same time ‘grooming’ what many see as his successor and ‘heir apparent’ in the young Enrico Berlinguer.