GiantMonkeyMan
Banned
I wrote a really rough outline for a timeline detailing the rise of the Italian Communist Party, the defeat of fascism and the establishment of a communist republic in Italy following the Great War. I'm probably not going to expand upon it but since there's revolutionary US, revolutionary Britain, revolutionary Germany and revolutionary France timelines I felt that there was something sorely missing. It really is quite rough but tell me if you think it's plausible. 
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- Following the defeat at Caporetto, the Italian military conceived of a plan to bolster the public morale by inflicting a blow to Austria, however small, by raiding the port town of Bakar. The operation was lead by Capitano di Fregata Costanzo Ciano and the famous Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a part of the crew. The raid consisted of three MAS torpedo boats, escorted by two destroyers and a scout, and the MAS's were towed to save fuel before eventually moving off towards Bakar alone to avoid detection until they released their torpedos. The torpedos proved ineffective, only one exploded, but it was enough to raise the alarm of the Austrians who alerted the shore batteries at Porto Re. The trio of MAS boats were only in range for a brief moment as they fled the failed attack but a lucky volley hit the boat holding Ciano and D'Annunzio, killing them both instantly.
- What had been conceived as a way of bolstering the morale of the public had turned into a disaster for the image of the old regime and the support for the war faltered. Although the raid was relatively minor and losses low, the death of the famous D'Annunzio couldn't be hidden from the public. The Communist press in particular denounced the adventurism of the Italian military and the war in general. This lead to an argument within the Italian Socialist Party, particularly between the supporters of the war and the internationalists such as Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci. After a particularly heated exchange, Giacomo Matteotti denounced the war and the executive body of the PSI for their support of an imperialist war and he was promptly expelled from the party. Matteotti was a reformist and well liked within the organisation so his expulsion came as a shock to a lot of the members. Soon after Bordiga, Gramsci and other internationalists, such as Angelo Tasca, publically resigned from the organisation to form the Communist Party of Italy. Matteotti and his supporters joined the PCI but were wary of the revolutionary character of the organisation. Eventually, Matteotti's experiences with the PSI and the reactionary forces in the post-war period would convince him of the need for a revolutionary push to sweep away the old order.
- The Italian military had suffered over 600,000 casualties up to this point in the war and realised that they needed to throw back the Austrians or loose the initiative. This lead to the forced conscription of all males over the age of 18, the Ragazzi del '99 named for the year eighteen year olds were born at the time. The move was extremely unpopular and became a focal point for the organising of the fledgling PCI. A series of strikes and mutinies occured, directed by or involving organisers of the PCI or radicals of the PSI who moved against the party line. The trade union organiser Armando Borghi came into the orbit of the PCI in this period after organising some of the anti-conscription movements and finding the discipline and organisational tactics of the PCI effective. Borghi was one of the leaders of the Unione Syndicale Italiana and many of his followers in the union soon found themselves joining the PCI. The militarist factions within the USI, lead by the likes of Alceste De Ambris, broke away at that point but couldn't find ground within the workers movement. The most famous case of avoiding the conscription was Tullio Cianetti who was absconded away by communists and began to tour the nation advocating the end of the war whilst simultaneously having to dodge the authorities.
- Inevitably, the actions and organising of the PCI brought them under the scrutiny and repression of the Italian State. Notably, Claudio Treves, who had left the PSI with Matteotti, was murdered by one of the growing nationalist organisations that supported the war. This lead to a falling out between Benito Mussolini and Maria Rygier who were socialists who supported the war and to Mussolini's eventual political isolation. The murder of Treves convinced many workers and socialists, such as Rygier, that the actions of the Italian government weren't so noble after all, especially in light of the inspiring events of the October Revolution and the call of the Bolsheviks "Peace, Land and Bread!". Italian communists soon took up the cry "Let's follow Russia!" and similarly called for an end to the war despite, in contrast to the Russians, the Italian military, supported by the French and British, successfully repelling the Austrians in an offensive. Rygier and many others who had initially supported the war were drawn into the camp of those opposing it. Bordiga was obstinently against their acceptance into the communist party but Gramsci and Matteotti organised a detailed education programme that trained all new members on the party line. The anarcho-communists in the orbit of the party felt uneasy with the rigourous programme but the excitement of the Russian Revolution brought a huge influx of fresh blood into the party, eager for revolution. The militancy of the movement would eventually contribute to the winning of the eight-hour day, higher wages, recognition of collective contracts and other concessions from the state.
- It was only in 1918 that the Italian military would fully be able to challenge the Austrians, much to the annoyance of the Allies, as the Italian Generals knew that with the heavy losses they had sustained that they had to wait for new reinforcements to ensure that any plan would be successful and sustained. Eventually, after a daring push, 250,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers surrendered to the Italians on November 5th and on the next day the Armistace with Austria was signed. Despite the rapid growth of the Italian Communist Party during the last years of the War, the post-war period created a lull in militancy as a wave of nationalism swept the country following the successful annexation of the Italian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Politically, the PSI felt vindicated by their support of the war as more Italians were now united in one stronger nation. In contrast, the communists felt that the war had been a betrayal of the international working class and it ultimately didn't matter which bourgeois state Italian workers found themselves suffering under.
- Disputes in 1918-19 between workers and bosses, peasants and landowners continued nonetheless. Mussolini organised the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento and appealed to disenfranchised soldiers returning from the front, particularly the shock troopers, the Arditi, who became an important core of the movement known as the blackshirts. The blackshirts were particularly well regarded by landowners and capitalists when Mussolini began deploying them to break strikes or occupations of workers in northern Italy. In direct opposition to this reactionary oppression, a movement called the Arditi del Popolo emerged, particularly organised by communist and anarchist shop stewards in Turin, Milan and other cities. The Arditi del Popolo armed themselves to defend strikes, clashing with fascists and police with mounting casualties on both sides. In 1919, industrialists and landowners met in Genoa to plan the dismantling of the labour movement, inviting Mussolini to attend. The Arditi del Popolo had been politically diverse upon its creation, including a range of anarchists, communists, liberal republicans and socialists organising to defend their movement but, with the resurged right-wing attacks directed to break up the organisation, the Arditi del Popolo saw a quick move to become a disciplined and well organised paramilitary force, the Brigate Rosse or Red Brigades, under communist leadership. By 1920, the Brigate Rosse numbered over 30,000 and were active in driving fascist mobilisations away from worker districts and peasant communes.
- The 1919 General Election ended in an electoral mess. The encumbent Liberal Party had entered into a coalition with the Italian Social Democratic Party and the Radical Party but each of the coalition stood independently from each other in certain areas. Their success as a joint list was the fourth largest party but, coupled with their individual success, it would put them as the organisation with the largest number of seats. Giovanni Giolotti had always kept the Liberal Party as a loose organisation to allow flexibility in competing with the extreme left and right wings. Now, he found himself an unpopular Prime Minister at the head of an unpopular coalition of parties. The largest success was in the shape of the People's Party lead by Don Luigi Sturzo which had been advocated by the Pope in order to combat the rise of the Communists and Socialists. The Socialists were the second largest party but the Communists were nipping at their heels and had perhaps more organised support amongst the working class. The results of the election left no-one happy but especially the supporters of the PSI who felt alienated from their leadership which had coalesced behind the young Pietro Nenni, a supporter of the war and an advocate of working with the liberal coalition. The King accepted Giolotti as Prime Minister even as the Italian working class was mobilising.
- The Treaty of Paris further embittered the working class who had supported the war as sections of Dalmatia that the Italian military had occupied and fought for reverted to the control of the newly independent Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In particular, the city of Fiume had a high Italian population but was now under the jurisdiction of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After hijacking a freighter containing weapons and ammunition bound for White Russia, Giuseppe Giulietti and the resurfaced Tullio Cianetti travelled to Fiume with a cadre of volunteers from the Brigate Rosse where they joined with Italian radicals in the city to form a popular militia defending the city from the reactionary forces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The movement was a propaganda coup for the Italian Communist Party, heralded as the second coming of the Paris Commune. Massive numbers of unemployed soldiers joined the Brigate Rosse and were exposed to the ideas of communism. As this was going on, a resurgence of the strike waves of the past few years began anew. During the month of October 1920 a wave of workplace occupations spontaneously erupted. Over a million workers took part in seizing the factories, mills, mines and refinaries that they worked in and it was all co-ordinated by a network of communist agitators and organisers. Peasant workers, particularly in the north, chased land owners from the fields and began collectively organising the work to benefit themselves, co-ordinating with the factory councils in the cities to completely bypass the control of the capitalists and the state.
- The revolution had begun, claimed the leadership of the communist party, but no-one quite knew it yet. Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci collaborated to write their famous pamphlet 'Seize the Factory or Seize Power?' and the Communist Party followed the lead of the Bolsheviks three years prior. Factory councils became staging grounds for revolutionary action. Police were rounded up in Turin and Milan, landowners lynched in Liverno, the Brigate Rosse in Napoli broke into the naval armouries and soon the sailors joined them, barricades erupted across the streets of Rome, the government buildings in Bologna were seized by workers and red flags waved from the open windows. In Sicily, Riccardo Lombardi rounded up known associates of the Italian mafia and fascists and had them executed after a people's trial and in Palermo the industrial sector became of warren of communist organising. The Communist Party emerged as the organ of control throughout the entire affair. The power structures in the Communist Party had lead to a triumvirate of Bordiga, Matteotti and Gramsci - all organisational geniuses in their own rights. Bordiga was officially General Secretary of the Party but Matteotti had been the candidate for Prime Minister in the election two years previously. Gramsci had been voted into the position of Chair, due to his popularity, and had built the democratic structures of the party around himself.
- The King, having learned from the lessons of the Russian monarchy, quickly fled Italy with his advisors and headed for France where he was joined by thousands of Italian refugees and fleeing capitalists. After a bloody and chaotic battle in the Vatican, the Pope was put under the armed supervision of Francesco Trombadori and the Brigate Rosse in Rome, having missed the opportunity to seize the King. Enrico Millo, an Admiral and proclaimed governor of the newly annexed Dalmatia after the war, quickly organised a force from the army units still garrisoned in Dalmatia to drive into northern Italy and purge the communist stronghold. Millo drew into his orbit many of the right-wing officers that had emerged from the war disgusted by the rise of communism and sent Captain Italo Balbo with what remained of the Alpini battalion "Pieve di Cadore" to oust the Communist stronghold of Fiume. In reality, the communists were only provisionally supported in Fiume. Giulietti and Cianetti were seen as outside agitators by many even if they held popular support for insisting on the union of the city with Italy as a whole. Balbo was able to enter the city almost unopposed and after a brief firefight his better trained soldiers were able to break the lines of the Brigate Rosse. Giulietti and Cianetti escaped with a large number of the communist militia but Balbo rounded up trade unionists, socialists and radicals of all stripes and had them executed regardless of their degree of participation in the Fiume Commune. The public perception of the situation in Fiume, despite evidence to the contrary, was that a popular uprising of Italians had just been suppressed by the vicious reactionary forces and more workers and peasants who had been on the fence previously now began to organise to support the revolution to prevent massacre by White Terror.
- Nonetheless, Millo's forces breached northern Italy and the battle lines were chaotic. At one point, Major General Emilio De Bono breached the communist lines and entered the stronghold of Turin thanks to his use of armoured vehicles and tanks but as a result De Bono had stretched his supply lines and found himself isolated in the city without support. The Brigate Rosse pounced on the overextended Whites, killing De Bono and seizing the vehicles. In the south of Italy the lines were more clear with communist strongholds in the cities and certain regions of the countryside whilst the rest of the countryside was mainly under the control of the Whites. The capture of the Pope had stratified Italian society and most of the peasant workers in the south actively agitated against the communists in the region. The communist Onerato Damen was integral in organising the push by communist forces to expel the Whites in southern Italy, uniting communist strongholds in Taranto, Napoli and Bologna. He became the military General famous for storming and seizing the battleship Andrea Doria, stationed in Taranto, and then, after renaming the vessel La Rivoluzione, using it and other ships to suppress shipping to White strongholds and link up with communist strongholds in Sicily. La Rivoluzione famously sunk her sister ship Caio Duilio as it returned from the Black Sea where it had been supporting the Whites in the Russian Civil War and in doing to turning back the transport fleet holding troops from Libya headed to Italy to bolster the Whites. Along with Damen, Carlo Alberto in Bologna, who had been a Lieutenant in the army during the war, convinced many Italian soldiers in the south to side with the communists.
- It was on the cusp of 1922 that Bordiga, Gramsci and Matteotti decided to follow the example of the Bolsheviks and implement the tactic of War Communism, militarising labour and forcefully appropriating land and resources to supply the Brigate Rosse in their offensives to purge the country of the White Guard. In the process, Bordiga organised the suppression of the reformist socialists and the liberal radicals alongside with the fascists and other reactionaries. Bordiga and Gramsci knew that these were the same 'socialists' who supported the imperialist Great War and their anti-communist agitation was a threat to the war effort. Whilst the move met resistance, particularly from the anarchist milieu, it is also credited for giving the communists the organisation and support needed to overcome Millo's northern White army and then push south to unite with the army lead by Damen and Alberto. It was on Febuary 14th, 1923 that the Civil War was declared over and the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Republic of Italy was proclaimed.
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- Following the defeat at Caporetto, the Italian military conceived of a plan to bolster the public morale by inflicting a blow to Austria, however small, by raiding the port town of Bakar. The operation was lead by Capitano di Fregata Costanzo Ciano and the famous Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a part of the crew. The raid consisted of three MAS torpedo boats, escorted by two destroyers and a scout, and the MAS's were towed to save fuel before eventually moving off towards Bakar alone to avoid detection until they released their torpedos. The torpedos proved ineffective, only one exploded, but it was enough to raise the alarm of the Austrians who alerted the shore batteries at Porto Re. The trio of MAS boats were only in range for a brief moment as they fled the failed attack but a lucky volley hit the boat holding Ciano and D'Annunzio, killing them both instantly.
- What had been conceived as a way of bolstering the morale of the public had turned into a disaster for the image of the old regime and the support for the war faltered. Although the raid was relatively minor and losses low, the death of the famous D'Annunzio couldn't be hidden from the public. The Communist press in particular denounced the adventurism of the Italian military and the war in general. This lead to an argument within the Italian Socialist Party, particularly between the supporters of the war and the internationalists such as Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci. After a particularly heated exchange, Giacomo Matteotti denounced the war and the executive body of the PSI for their support of an imperialist war and he was promptly expelled from the party. Matteotti was a reformist and well liked within the organisation so his expulsion came as a shock to a lot of the members. Soon after Bordiga, Gramsci and other internationalists, such as Angelo Tasca, publically resigned from the organisation to form the Communist Party of Italy. Matteotti and his supporters joined the PCI but were wary of the revolutionary character of the organisation. Eventually, Matteotti's experiences with the PSI and the reactionary forces in the post-war period would convince him of the need for a revolutionary push to sweep away the old order.
- The Italian military had suffered over 600,000 casualties up to this point in the war and realised that they needed to throw back the Austrians or loose the initiative. This lead to the forced conscription of all males over the age of 18, the Ragazzi del '99 named for the year eighteen year olds were born at the time. The move was extremely unpopular and became a focal point for the organising of the fledgling PCI. A series of strikes and mutinies occured, directed by or involving organisers of the PCI or radicals of the PSI who moved against the party line. The trade union organiser Armando Borghi came into the orbit of the PCI in this period after organising some of the anti-conscription movements and finding the discipline and organisational tactics of the PCI effective. Borghi was one of the leaders of the Unione Syndicale Italiana and many of his followers in the union soon found themselves joining the PCI. The militarist factions within the USI, lead by the likes of Alceste De Ambris, broke away at that point but couldn't find ground within the workers movement. The most famous case of avoiding the conscription was Tullio Cianetti who was absconded away by communists and began to tour the nation advocating the end of the war whilst simultaneously having to dodge the authorities.
- Inevitably, the actions and organising of the PCI brought them under the scrutiny and repression of the Italian State. Notably, Claudio Treves, who had left the PSI with Matteotti, was murdered by one of the growing nationalist organisations that supported the war. This lead to a falling out between Benito Mussolini and Maria Rygier who were socialists who supported the war and to Mussolini's eventual political isolation. The murder of Treves convinced many workers and socialists, such as Rygier, that the actions of the Italian government weren't so noble after all, especially in light of the inspiring events of the October Revolution and the call of the Bolsheviks "Peace, Land and Bread!". Italian communists soon took up the cry "Let's follow Russia!" and similarly called for an end to the war despite, in contrast to the Russians, the Italian military, supported by the French and British, successfully repelling the Austrians in an offensive. Rygier and many others who had initially supported the war were drawn into the camp of those opposing it. Bordiga was obstinently against their acceptance into the communist party but Gramsci and Matteotti organised a detailed education programme that trained all new members on the party line. The anarcho-communists in the orbit of the party felt uneasy with the rigourous programme but the excitement of the Russian Revolution brought a huge influx of fresh blood into the party, eager for revolution. The militancy of the movement would eventually contribute to the winning of the eight-hour day, higher wages, recognition of collective contracts and other concessions from the state.
- It was only in 1918 that the Italian military would fully be able to challenge the Austrians, much to the annoyance of the Allies, as the Italian Generals knew that with the heavy losses they had sustained that they had to wait for new reinforcements to ensure that any plan would be successful and sustained. Eventually, after a daring push, 250,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers surrendered to the Italians on November 5th and on the next day the Armistace with Austria was signed. Despite the rapid growth of the Italian Communist Party during the last years of the War, the post-war period created a lull in militancy as a wave of nationalism swept the country following the successful annexation of the Italian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Politically, the PSI felt vindicated by their support of the war as more Italians were now united in one stronger nation. In contrast, the communists felt that the war had been a betrayal of the international working class and it ultimately didn't matter which bourgeois state Italian workers found themselves suffering under.
- Disputes in 1918-19 between workers and bosses, peasants and landowners continued nonetheless. Mussolini organised the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento and appealed to disenfranchised soldiers returning from the front, particularly the shock troopers, the Arditi, who became an important core of the movement known as the blackshirts. The blackshirts were particularly well regarded by landowners and capitalists when Mussolini began deploying them to break strikes or occupations of workers in northern Italy. In direct opposition to this reactionary oppression, a movement called the Arditi del Popolo emerged, particularly organised by communist and anarchist shop stewards in Turin, Milan and other cities. The Arditi del Popolo armed themselves to defend strikes, clashing with fascists and police with mounting casualties on both sides. In 1919, industrialists and landowners met in Genoa to plan the dismantling of the labour movement, inviting Mussolini to attend. The Arditi del Popolo had been politically diverse upon its creation, including a range of anarchists, communists, liberal republicans and socialists organising to defend their movement but, with the resurged right-wing attacks directed to break up the organisation, the Arditi del Popolo saw a quick move to become a disciplined and well organised paramilitary force, the Brigate Rosse or Red Brigades, under communist leadership. By 1920, the Brigate Rosse numbered over 30,000 and were active in driving fascist mobilisations away from worker districts and peasant communes.
- The 1919 General Election ended in an electoral mess. The encumbent Liberal Party had entered into a coalition with the Italian Social Democratic Party and the Radical Party but each of the coalition stood independently from each other in certain areas. Their success as a joint list was the fourth largest party but, coupled with their individual success, it would put them as the organisation with the largest number of seats. Giovanni Giolotti had always kept the Liberal Party as a loose organisation to allow flexibility in competing with the extreme left and right wings. Now, he found himself an unpopular Prime Minister at the head of an unpopular coalition of parties. The largest success was in the shape of the People's Party lead by Don Luigi Sturzo which had been advocated by the Pope in order to combat the rise of the Communists and Socialists. The Socialists were the second largest party but the Communists were nipping at their heels and had perhaps more organised support amongst the working class. The results of the election left no-one happy but especially the supporters of the PSI who felt alienated from their leadership which had coalesced behind the young Pietro Nenni, a supporter of the war and an advocate of working with the liberal coalition. The King accepted Giolotti as Prime Minister even as the Italian working class was mobilising.
- The Treaty of Paris further embittered the working class who had supported the war as sections of Dalmatia that the Italian military had occupied and fought for reverted to the control of the newly independent Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In particular, the city of Fiume had a high Italian population but was now under the jurisdiction of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After hijacking a freighter containing weapons and ammunition bound for White Russia, Giuseppe Giulietti and the resurfaced Tullio Cianetti travelled to Fiume with a cadre of volunteers from the Brigate Rosse where they joined with Italian radicals in the city to form a popular militia defending the city from the reactionary forces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The movement was a propaganda coup for the Italian Communist Party, heralded as the second coming of the Paris Commune. Massive numbers of unemployed soldiers joined the Brigate Rosse and were exposed to the ideas of communism. As this was going on, a resurgence of the strike waves of the past few years began anew. During the month of October 1920 a wave of workplace occupations spontaneously erupted. Over a million workers took part in seizing the factories, mills, mines and refinaries that they worked in and it was all co-ordinated by a network of communist agitators and organisers. Peasant workers, particularly in the north, chased land owners from the fields and began collectively organising the work to benefit themselves, co-ordinating with the factory councils in the cities to completely bypass the control of the capitalists and the state.
- The revolution had begun, claimed the leadership of the communist party, but no-one quite knew it yet. Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci collaborated to write their famous pamphlet 'Seize the Factory or Seize Power?' and the Communist Party followed the lead of the Bolsheviks three years prior. Factory councils became staging grounds for revolutionary action. Police were rounded up in Turin and Milan, landowners lynched in Liverno, the Brigate Rosse in Napoli broke into the naval armouries and soon the sailors joined them, barricades erupted across the streets of Rome, the government buildings in Bologna were seized by workers and red flags waved from the open windows. In Sicily, Riccardo Lombardi rounded up known associates of the Italian mafia and fascists and had them executed after a people's trial and in Palermo the industrial sector became of warren of communist organising. The Communist Party emerged as the organ of control throughout the entire affair. The power structures in the Communist Party had lead to a triumvirate of Bordiga, Matteotti and Gramsci - all organisational geniuses in their own rights. Bordiga was officially General Secretary of the Party but Matteotti had been the candidate for Prime Minister in the election two years previously. Gramsci had been voted into the position of Chair, due to his popularity, and had built the democratic structures of the party around himself.
- The King, having learned from the lessons of the Russian monarchy, quickly fled Italy with his advisors and headed for France where he was joined by thousands of Italian refugees and fleeing capitalists. After a bloody and chaotic battle in the Vatican, the Pope was put under the armed supervision of Francesco Trombadori and the Brigate Rosse in Rome, having missed the opportunity to seize the King. Enrico Millo, an Admiral and proclaimed governor of the newly annexed Dalmatia after the war, quickly organised a force from the army units still garrisoned in Dalmatia to drive into northern Italy and purge the communist stronghold. Millo drew into his orbit many of the right-wing officers that had emerged from the war disgusted by the rise of communism and sent Captain Italo Balbo with what remained of the Alpini battalion "Pieve di Cadore" to oust the Communist stronghold of Fiume. In reality, the communists were only provisionally supported in Fiume. Giulietti and Cianetti were seen as outside agitators by many even if they held popular support for insisting on the union of the city with Italy as a whole. Balbo was able to enter the city almost unopposed and after a brief firefight his better trained soldiers were able to break the lines of the Brigate Rosse. Giulietti and Cianetti escaped with a large number of the communist militia but Balbo rounded up trade unionists, socialists and radicals of all stripes and had them executed regardless of their degree of participation in the Fiume Commune. The public perception of the situation in Fiume, despite evidence to the contrary, was that a popular uprising of Italians had just been suppressed by the vicious reactionary forces and more workers and peasants who had been on the fence previously now began to organise to support the revolution to prevent massacre by White Terror.
- Nonetheless, Millo's forces breached northern Italy and the battle lines were chaotic. At one point, Major General Emilio De Bono breached the communist lines and entered the stronghold of Turin thanks to his use of armoured vehicles and tanks but as a result De Bono had stretched his supply lines and found himself isolated in the city without support. The Brigate Rosse pounced on the overextended Whites, killing De Bono and seizing the vehicles. In the south of Italy the lines were more clear with communist strongholds in the cities and certain regions of the countryside whilst the rest of the countryside was mainly under the control of the Whites. The capture of the Pope had stratified Italian society and most of the peasant workers in the south actively agitated against the communists in the region. The communist Onerato Damen was integral in organising the push by communist forces to expel the Whites in southern Italy, uniting communist strongholds in Taranto, Napoli and Bologna. He became the military General famous for storming and seizing the battleship Andrea Doria, stationed in Taranto, and then, after renaming the vessel La Rivoluzione, using it and other ships to suppress shipping to White strongholds and link up with communist strongholds in Sicily. La Rivoluzione famously sunk her sister ship Caio Duilio as it returned from the Black Sea where it had been supporting the Whites in the Russian Civil War and in doing to turning back the transport fleet holding troops from Libya headed to Italy to bolster the Whites. Along with Damen, Carlo Alberto in Bologna, who had been a Lieutenant in the army during the war, convinced many Italian soldiers in the south to side with the communists.
- It was on the cusp of 1922 that Bordiga, Gramsci and Matteotti decided to follow the example of the Bolsheviks and implement the tactic of War Communism, militarising labour and forcefully appropriating land and resources to supply the Brigate Rosse in their offensives to purge the country of the White Guard. In the process, Bordiga organised the suppression of the reformist socialists and the liberal radicals alongside with the fascists and other reactionaries. Bordiga and Gramsci knew that these were the same 'socialists' who supported the imperialist Great War and their anti-communist agitation was a threat to the war effort. Whilst the move met resistance, particularly from the anarchist milieu, it is also credited for giving the communists the organisation and support needed to overcome Millo's northern White army and then push south to unite with the army lead by Damen and Alberto. It was on Febuary 14th, 1923 that the Civil War was declared over and the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Republic of Italy was proclaimed.