Cavriago statua di lenin biography

Cavriago, a small town of around 9,000 people in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, doesn’t make the news much. But this unlikely settlement has one claim to fame. In the centre of the town sits a bust of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, donated by the Soviet Embassy in Rome in 1970. In fact, it is one of the few — if not only — monuments to Lenin to be inaugurated in a public place in Western Europe during the Cold War.

So how did it get here?

The bust was made by factory workers in the Ukrainian city of Luhansk in 1922, thus also making it one of the few surviving busts of Lenin to have actually been manufactured during the Soviet leader’s lifetime. On 22 July 1942, the bust was stolen from Luhansk by Italian soldiers during Italy’s supportive invasion of the Soviet Union alongside Nazi Germany. The bust followed the soldiers back to Italy and turned up in Tuscany after the War, upon which it was returned to the Soviet Ambassador in Rome. On 22 April 1970 — the centenary of Lenin’s birth — the bust was donated by the USSR Embassy to the town of Cavriago.

Why Cavriago?

Since the founding of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, and indeed long before that, the region of Emilia-Romagna has been a hotbed of left-wing activity.

In 1918, debate was raging among members of the Italian Socialist Party in Cavriago between those who supported the actions of Lenin and Bolsheviks, and those of the more moderate wing. The Bolshevik current won out and published a motion supporting the pro-Lenin line of the national socialist paper Avanti! and its editor Giacinto Menotti Serrati “for the incessant struggle they continually fight […] and for the approval of the program of the German Spartacists and the Soviet of Russia […] and applaud its leader Lenin for his tireless work fighting against the reactionary supporters of imperialism.” This communiqué from a small local Marxist group was published i

When walking through the northern Italian town of Cavriago, a series of familiar names catch your eye. Steps away from street signs commemorating anti-fascists Giacomo Matteotti and Antonio Gramsci — two recurring figures in the toponymy of Italian cities — there are also Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Gorky and Pushkin. They mark a territory whose links to Russian literature are not immediately obvious to most visitors. But this seemingly unremarkable town — with a population of fewer than 10,000 in the heart of the Emilia-Romagna region, historically nicknamed “Emilia Rossa” (“Red Emilia”) for its high levels of support for the Communist Party — built bridges between the Soviet Union and Europe over the course of the 20th century.

It is in the town’s center, in Piazza Lenin, that this history is most prominently on display. This is where Italy’s — and, most likely, Western Europe’s — last public bust of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, still stands. The unusual monument was unveiled in 1970. Its roots, however, run much deeper — back to the days of the Russian Revolution, when the first link between Cavriago and the Soviet Union was established.

A special trip to Cavriago, in the province of Reggio Emilia, to tell about the bust of Lenin and the times that were, in the most pro-Soviet of Western European lands.

Film adaptations of Giovannino Guareschi ’s books have given us the image of an Emilia somewhat stylized compared to the one that emerges from the texts, but nonetheless truthful: an Emilia divided between hard work in the countryside, Sundays at mass and faith in communism. The red Emilia, the region that more than any other in Italy has taken communism seriously, declined, however, of course, in its version with the flavor of lambrusco and gnocco fritto. A communism taken so seriously that in the end, for those who come to these lands and observe them with an analytical eye and without getting carried away, it is impossible to take it seriously. Little has changed from the postwar period to the present: the people of Emilia are still among the most hospitable and generous people in Europe, the spring evenings they spend between a polka and a mazurka in the dance halls at the edge of the fields are still alive, and the villages in the rural areas are the same as they were in Guareschi’s time, and have remained almost identical to how he described them. Clusters of one- or at most two-story houses, with the entrance on the edge of the main road, and where you find everything within a hundred meters: the newsstand, the mechanic, the grocery store, the tobacconist, the church, the party section.

Only the belief in communism is not the same as it once was. Ideology may still be alive in some people’s minds, but naiveté has given way to resignation. Emilia, too, has known administrators who professed to be communist and leftist but did everything but serve the interests of the peopl

Cavriago, a nearby extension of Reggio Emilia, is a dynamic and modern productive town which has experienced considerable economic and social development in recent years.