This is a WIP translation/incorporation of text from the Italian Wikipedia entry on Nicola Bombacci

Nicola Bombacci
Secretary of the Italian Socialist Party
In office 11 October 1919 – 25 February 1920
Preceded by	Costantino Lazzari
Succeeded by	Egidio Gennari
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 1 December 1919 – 25 January 1925
Constituency	Romagna
Personal details
Born	(1879-10-24)24 October 1879 Civitella di Romagna, Forlì, Italy
Died	28 April 1945(1945-04-28) (aged 65) Dongo, Como, Italy
Party	Italian Socialist Party (1911–1921) Communist Party of Italy (1921–1927) Republican Fascist Party (1943–1945)
Height	1.74 m (5 ft 9 in)
Spouse	Erissene Focaccia ​ (m. 1905)​
Profession	Politician, journalist, revolutionary, labour unionist

Nicola Bombacci (24 October 1879 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian Marxist revolutionary and later a fascist politician. He began in the Italian Socialist Party as an opponent of the reformist wing and became a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, sitting on the fifteen-man Central Committee. In his career within the left-wing, he was often called Il Lenin di Romagna (Romagna's Lenin).[1] During the latter part of his life, particularly during the Second World War, Bombacci allied with Benito Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic against the Allied invasion of Italy. In April 1945, he was shot by communist partisans, and his body was subsequently strung up in Piazzale Loreto.

Nicola Bombacci was born in a hamlet of the Municipality of Civitella di Romagna, in the province of Forlì, on 24 October 1879.^[2] Bombacci's family made their living farming land owned by the parish of Don Nicolò Ghini, from whom Bombacci took his own name. While still a child, he moved with his family to Meldola, a significant town in the lower Bidente valley, where he finished elementary school and where his family would settle permanently. In 1895, he was enrolled in the seminary in Forlì.

After leaving the seminary for health reasons, he continued his studies at the age of twenty-one at the Giosuè Carducci School in Forlimpopoli to become an elementary school teacher. He was enrolled in the third-year class, the same one attended by Benito Mussolini, who was four years younger. Bombacci later graduated in 1901.^[3] It was during this period that Bombacci became involved with the socialist movement.^{[citation needed]}

His teaching career began with minor postings in the province of Reggio Emilia. He left the region for his first significant post in Villa Santina in the province of Udine in 1904–1905, then returned to Emilia the following year to a post in Baricella. During this period, he married Erissene Focaccia, who was also a teacher. In 1906, the family moved to Cadelbosco di Sopra, in Reggio Emilia, where they went through a period of financial hardship before he was given substitute-teaching posts, first in Villa Argine and then in Cadelbosco di Sotto. In 1907 he was given a permanent teaching post in Monticelli d'Ongina, in the province of Piacenza.

In 1909 he gave up teaching to devote himself to politics. He became active in the union movement across various areas and cities, working between Crema, Piacenza, and Cesena. There, in 1910, he took on the role of secretary of the socialist federation and the directorship of the weekly Il Cuneo, seizing the opportunity to return to activity near Meldola, where his family still lived. In 1911 he was a member of the National Council of the General Confederation of Labor (CGdL). In May of that same year, Bombacci resigned from the Cesena federation. In the following months, he withdrew from political activity before returning in November 1911 as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro of Modena. ^{[citation needed]}

In Modena, during the first world war, he found his springboard, becoming the undisputed leader of local socialism, so much so that Mussolini himself (who had known him since their school days at Forlimpopoli, when both were students) called him "the Kaiser of Modena". Between the Balkan Wars and the Russian Revolution, he simultaneously served as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro, secretary of the Modena provincial Socialist Federation, and director of the socialist periodical Il Domani.^{[citation needed]}

In July 1917 Bombacci was appointed a member of the Directorate and vice secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), working alongside party secretary Costantino Lazzari in drafting the famous circulars sent to the party's local branches, and alongside periodical director Giacinto Menotti Serrati in the effort to win over the workers' movement to the Maximalist socialist current.^{[citation needed]}

In 1918, with the arrests of Lazzari in January and Serrati in May, he was left practically alone at the head of the party.^[4] He himself was arrested for 'defeatism' in January and tried while at liberty, until the subsequent arrest of 31 October 1918 and release on 20 November.^[5] A proponent of a strongly anti-reformist line, he centralized and imposed a strict hierarchy on the whole of Italian socialism. The party's provincial federations and the Gruppo Parlamentare Socialista (GPS) became directly subordinate to the PSI's Directorate, which the socialist union and cooperative organizations were likewise tied to.^[6]

In October 1919, together with Serrati, Gennari, and Salvadori, he drafted the programme of the Maximalist faction, which won out at the PSI's 16th National Congress (Bologna, 5-8 October 1919).^[7] He was elected Party secretary (11 October 1919) and, the following month, in the first general elections of the postwar period (16 November 1919), was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Bologna constituency with over a hundred thousand votes, becoming one of the most powerful and visible figures of Maximalist socialism during the biennio rosso.^[8]

In January 1920 he presented a plan to establish Soviet councils in Italy,^[9] which received little support and much criticism. But it did help spark a heated theoretical debate in the party press. The rejection of his proposal to establish Soviet councils led Bombacci, on 25 February 1920, to cede the position of secretary of the PSI to Egidio Gennari. In April, he became the first Italian socialist to meet with Bolshevik representatives, in Copenhagen,^[10] while that summer he was among the members of the Italian delegation that traveled to Soviet Russia, also taking part in the Second World Congress of the Communist International.

Having founded the Communist Faction in autumn 1920 together with Antonio Gramsci, Amadeo Bordiga, Egidio Gennari, and Antonio Graziadei, and having also served as director of the periodical Il Comunista, Bombacci firmly backed the split at the 17th National Congress of the PSI (Livorno, 15-21 January 1921), becoming one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, the Italian Section of the Third International (PCd'I), where he became a member of its Central Committee.^[11]

Bombacci took part in the creation of the Italian Social Republic (RSI).^[12][13] He was convinced that the socialization of the economy represented the fulfillment of the revolution for the workers. He was captured by partisans at the end of World War II together with Mussolini. He was shot at Dongo alongside Alessandro Pavolini in April 1945.

During his adolescence he joined the Italian Socialist Party,(PSI), of which he suddenly became a national leader at the head of the revolutionary wing, known as Massimalisti; other notable members of this far-left wing were Benito Mussolini, who also hailed from the countryside surrounding Forli, and Costantino Lazzari. In 1919, Bombacci became the Secretary of the PSI and led the socialists in the general election of the same year to their best result ever; the PSI won the election with 32.3% of the vote and became the largest party in parliament. The following year, Bombacci resigned as Secretary of the PSI due to some tensions with the right wing of the party, led by Filippo Turati. [citation needed]

In 1921 Bombacci became one of the founding fathers of the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI).[14] Despite this, due to his days in the PSI as a fellow Massimalista, he remained a friend of Mussolini even after the latter had renounced socialism in favour of fascism. Bombacci was eventually expelled from the PCdI in 1927 for embracing a pro-fascist position.[15] From that year onwards, he became an open fascist, although he never officially joined the National Fascist Party; In the journal La Verità in 1936, Bombacci confessed "his adhesion to Fascism but also to Communism", writing: "Fascism made a great Social Revolution. Mussolini and Lenin. Corporate and Soviet fascist state, Rome and Moscow. We have gone far enough to regret it; we have nothing to apologize for, for both in the present and in the past we are driven by the same ideal: the triumph of work."[16][17] By the beginning of the 1940s, Bombacci had officially distanced himself from communism by publishing pamphlets warning the Italian population on the dangers of Bolshevism and how Stalinism had degenerated socialist values.[18]

Just before the March on Rome, Bombacci became the editor-in-chief of the sole legal edition (dated September 10, 1922) of Il Fanciullo Proletario (Proletarian Kid), a Communist illustrated periodical aimed at children.[19]

After Mussolini was ousted as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Italy in 1943, Bombacci remained loyal to Mussolini and tried to help him legitimize the Italian Social Republic and relegitimize Italian fascism.[20] He joined Mussolini's entourage and frequently visited the dictator at Villa Feltrinelli. According to R. J. B. Bosworth, Bombacci "almost became a friend" for Mussolini at this time.[21] He was the author of the economic theory of fascist socialization, prepared for the 1943 Congress of Verona. Nicknamed "the Red Pope" by the bourgeoisie, Bombacci told a crowd in Genoa in 1945 that "Stalin will never make socialism; rather Mussolini will."[22][failed verification] The project of socialization overseen by Bombacci was viewed with suspicion and boycotted by the occupying Nazi German forces; it was also unpopular among the Italian proletariat, who responded with huge strikes.[23]

File:The de,ad body of Benito Mussolini Piazzale Loreto.jpg

Bombacci was shot on 28 April 1945 at Dongo (province of Como),, where he had been captured, along with Mussolini, by Italian communist partisans. He was summarily shot alongside Mussolini. Before his execution, Bombacci shouted out, "Long live Mussolini! Long live socialism!"[24] After his death, his corpse was hung upside down at Piazzale Loreto in a public display, along with Mussolini, Clara Petacci (Mussolini's mistress), Alessandro Pavolini (the secretary of the Republican Fascist Party), Achille Starace and others.[25] Above the body of Bombacci, there was a handwritten sign that read "Supertraditore" (Super-Traitor).[26][27]

Four days after his death, his old friend and comrade Victor Serge read of the event in a newspaper in Mexico, where he was living in exile, and wrote several pages in his journal concerning him. Engaging in what he called "practical psychology", Serge tried to imagine how a former communist could become a fascist: "Among some Italians, particularly among the ex-Marxists and ex-syndicalists, two visions became apparent: that with the liberal democracies exhausted and socialism weakened, the corporatist regimes were going to impose their new formulas; and that through this narrow gate would pass collectivism, the precondition for a socialism different from that desired by the nineteenth century, ... corresponding better to man's basic nature."[28]

• Italo-Soviet Pact
• Jacques Doriot

• In a time of duplicity by Victor Serge
• Santarelli, Enzo (1969). "BOMBACCI, Nicolò". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (in Italian). Vol. 11: Boccadibue–Bonetti. Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-88-12-00032-6.