When Lenin met Mussolini, what was Mussolini's impression of Lenin?
Upvote:-2
I don’t know if Mussolini ever met V. Lenin but I once read that Lenin sent Mussolini a congratulatory telegram after Mussolini’s successful march on Rome in 1922. I’ve tried searching the interweb but can’t confirm. There is an article on Foreign Affairs by Harold Laski titled “Lenin and Mussolini” but is behind a paywall.
Upvote:16
It is disputed whether Mussolini met Lenin during his time in Switzerland.
According to Joshua Muravchik in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Mussolini
left Italy for Switzerland, home to many expatriates, where he lived off friends and odd jobs, and, like so many other revolutionaries, received the occasional subvention from his parents. There are conflicting accounts about whether he encountered Lenin, who was also in exile in Switzerland at the time.
RJB Bosworth's 600+ page book Mussolini makes no mention of the two men meeting. Nor does Simone Visconti in his 32-page chapter A Romagnol in Switzerland: Education of a Revolutionary (in Mussolini 1883–1915).
However, Mussolini did know Angelica Balabanoff, a
close disciple of Lenin’s, who had moved to Italy and was then carrying out socialist agitation among Italians in Switzerland.
Source: Muravchik
so a meeting cannot definitely be ruled out as the times they were in Geneva appear to overlap: Mussolini was in Switzerland sometime before July 1902 to December 1904, spending time in Berne, Geneva (from where he was expelled in 1904) and Lausanne. Lenin was there from 1903 to 1905, living in Geneva (but spent at least some of that time outside Switzerland).
The Traces of War website article on Mussolini says that Mussolini
talked to the Russian Communist leaders Lenin and Trotsky
but does not directly cite the source for this so it's hard to comment on the reliability. The 1940 edition of John Gunther's Inside Europe is the (less emphatic) Wikipedia source for this 'reported' meeting. Gunther wrote:
Mussolini, a bricklayer, apparently met Lenin through Balabanov.
This source also alludes to the Lenin quotation cited by the OP, saying
Years later Lenin rebuked the Italian socialists for having "lost" Mussolini, their best man.
What is clear from practically every source is that Mussolini spent most of his time with Italian socialists.
While Mussolini was clearly an admirer of Lenin, he also criticized him. Roger Kimball notes in his review of Muravchik book,
Mussolini began as a disciple of Lenin and did not so much repudiate Marxism-Leninism as become a self-declared “heretic.”
Although Mussolini initially welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, he was soon condemning Lenin as a "traitor" for undermining the Russian army's fight against the Central Powers and for signing the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Nonetheless, during the November 1919 Italian election campaign, Mussolini referred to himself as the "Lenin of Italy" and
British journalist George Slocombe, who interviewed Mussolini at the 1922 Cannes conference, reported that “Lenin was the only contemporary for whom he would express respect.”
Source: Muravchik
More post
- 📝 Fat jokes in ancient Greek comedies
- 📝 What is the basis for the claims that the word "Israel" means "Exiled for their sins"?
- 📝 How did 19th century politicians discredit rivals?
- 📝 Why were air rifles not used more in combat?
- 📝 Was there ever a type of powered model car/vehicle racing, where the cars were in no way controlled, and were all on the one single shared track?
- 📝 How did production of grain change with Hellenistic Egypt coming under Roman rule?
- 📝 Do we know what ancient Roman music sounded like?
- 📝 PhD dissertations from Nazi Germany
- 📝 Was there a dry dock available to pirate ships during the golden age of piracy?
- 📝 Is there any evidence of heterosexual men being sexually attracted to women breasts pre-Victorian history?
- 📝 Why did the United States drop a uranium bomb instead of a plutonium bomb on Hiroshima?
- 📝 Was the Confederacy (effectively) down to six states after the capture of Vicksburg?
- 📝 Did Muslims swear by "the beard of the Prophet"?
- 📝 Have there been any known cases of governments/military powers PRETENDING to be incompetent, as a sneaky form of security?
- 📝 How did a criminal trial in the Soviet Union work after World War 2?
- 📝 What was the most popular food staple among civilians during World War II?
- 📝 Can you help me identify the rank and patch on this Royal Italian Army uniform?
- 📝 Was the year 2000 a really peaceful time in history for the West?
- 📝 Did significant numbers of Japanese officers escape prosecution during the Tokyo Trials?
- 📝 Did Africans defeat Europeans in battle between 1850 and 1950?
- 📝 Did Roman prostitutes wear purple dresses?
- 📝 Medieval physician Cornelius Shilander?
- 📝 Why does the Philippines have little fossil deposits?
- 📝 How old is the Egyptian winged disk? Is it Assyrian?
- 📝 Did any relevant Mexican authority ever acknowledge the secession of Texas before the start of the Mexican-American War?
- 📝 Where would the first nuke have been dropped in Germany?
- 📝 Why was Stalin surprised by the German attack in June 1941?
- 📝 Was Smedley Butler right when he said 21,000 million/billionaires were created from World War I?
- 📝 Where did the Gaels originate?
- 📝 Can a country only have one indigenous population?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 When Lenin met Mussolini, what was Mussolini's impression of Lenin?
- 📝 What / When was the first use of concentration camps in history?
- 📝 What was lost when the British burned the White House in 1814?
- 📝 What did the Baltic Fleet do in Reval in 1904 and when was it there?
- 📝 When and what was the maximum extent of Nationalist China?
- 📝 What autonomy did Bosnia lose when it was annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908?
- 📝 What other ships were with USS Saratoga when it was hit by a torpedo on 1942 Jan 11?
- 📝 What was the personal relationship between Benito Mussolini and Hitler?
- 📝 When was the last time there were border controls, customs, or border patrols inside what is now the contiguous US?
- 📝 What was the purpose of Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews' flight when he was killed in the Iceland crash on May 3, 1943?
- 📝 What happened to UK national debt when the NHS was created?
- 📝 What evidence is there that Lenin died because he was poisoned?
- 📝 When and where was the term "nigra" used and what was its relation to "nigger"?
- 📝 When was the term "Dravida" first used and what is the context with which it was presented?
- 📝 What happened to people who lived outside a castle when the castle was under siege?
- 📝 What was the attitude of the Scientific community when Hitler accessed power?
- 📝 When Genghis Khan took power, what was the population of Mongolia?
- 📝 What incentives were there for Soviet and Chinese politicians to try climb to the top when there was so much history of deposing their own?
- 📝 How old was Bagoas when he met Alexander the Great?
- 📝 What gift did Saladin send to Richard when he was ill?
- 📝 Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union when he was still busy fighting the United Kingdom?
- 📝 Did Adolf Hitler ever address the fact that his own appearance was almost an exact opposite of what he considered the ideal Aryan appearance?
- 📝 Why did archery not make a comeback when armor was phased out in the 18th century?
- 📝 Was murdering a slave illegal in American slavery, and if so, what punishments were given for it?
- 📝 What was the historical context of the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution?
- 📝 Did it take 3 minutes to reload a musket when the second amendment to the US constitution was ratified?
- 📝 Why was it "acceptable" for Prince Charles to marry a divorced woman, when Edward VIII had to abdicate for marrying divorcee Wallis Simpson?
- 📝 Was Hitler exclaiming "Heil Hitler!" himself when saluting?
- 📝 When did FDR announce he was running a 3rd time, and was there any outrage?
- 📝 During the breakup of the Soviet Union, on what basis was citizenship granted or withheld for each of the fifteen new republics?