Angelica Balabanoff
Angelica Balabanoff (or Balabanov, Balabanova; [Анжелика Балабанова] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)-Anzhelika Balabanova; 1878, Chernihiv - 25 November 1965, Rome) was a Jewish-Italian communist and social democratic activist.
Revolutionary activities
Balabanoff was exposed to radical ideas while a University student in Brussels. She settled in Rome and began organizing workers in the textile industry, joining the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1900, becoming closely associated with leaders such as Antonio Labriola, Giacinto Menotti Serrati, Benito Mussolini (whom she instructed in Marxism; contrary to popular myth, she was not Mussolini's lover) and Filippo Turati.
She moved further to the left during the First World War, becoming active in the Zimmerwald Movement. During the war, she spent a lot of time in exile in neutral Sweden, where she was affiliated with the Left Socialist movement and became a close friend of the Swedish Communist leaders Ture Nerman, Fredrik Ström, Zeth Höglund and Kata Dalström.
Balabanoff joined the Russian Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was secretary of the Comintern in 1919–1920, working with Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Emma Goldman and many others. She broke with the Bolsheviks and left Russia in 1922, siding with the Italian Socialists who joined Serrati in his refusal to accept some of the obedience demanded by the Comintern.
Opposition to Stalinism and Fascism
She returned to Italy, where she led the Maximalist group even after Serrati himself left it in order to rejoin the Communists. The rise of Fascism led her to take refuge in Switzerland. She moved to Paris, and then to New York City, returning to Italy after World War II.
After 1947, Balabanoff sided with Giuseppe Saragat after his refusal to accept the alliance of the PSI with the Italian Communist Party, and she joined his Socialist Workers' Party, which became the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (after including the United Socialist Party).
Trivia
Mussolini had apparently said, at the time when they were already bitter enemies, that he owed Angelica Balabanoff the fact that he was anything more than a mediocre schoolteacher. When he adopted interventionist views during the war, Balabanoff was one of the members who called for his ousting from the Party.
Works
- La mia vita di rivoluzionaria - My Life as a Rebel
- Lenin visto da vicino - Lenin Seen from Up Close
- Poems in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian