Background
Leo Valiani was born on February 9, 1909, in Rijeka, Croatia. His real name was Leo Weiczen but at eighteen he Italianized his surname into Valiani.
historian journalist politician
Leo Valiani was born on February 9, 1909, in Rijeka, Croatia. His real name was Leo Weiczen but at eighteen he Italianized his surname into Valiani.
Leo Valiani received a Doctor of Political Science.
Moving with his family to Budapest in September 1919, after returning to Rijeka, he witnessed the occupation of the city by D'Annunzio, an experience that later led him to write a memoir on the event. In 1921, on the other hand, he witnessed the burning of a Chamber of Labor by the fascists.
In September 1926, in Milan, he met Carlo Rosselli and Pietro Nenni: the frond and opposition to the regime began, so much so that on 2 March 1928 he was denounced for crime against state security and arrested; in December of the same year he was confined to confinement in Ponza but decided to enroll in the clandestine communist organization of the island. After a year of confinement he returned to Fiume but in February 1931, he was arrested while distributing leaflets in the port of that city and sentenced to twelve years and seven months in prison. He will remain in the Civitavecchia prison until 1936.
In March 1936, out of jail, he was expelled from the Kingdom of Italy and went to Paris, where he became a collaborator of the "People's Cry" which offered him the opportunity to go to the tormented Spain as a correspondent, where he participated in the war in double as a journalist and militant. An experience that for a long time marked his existence, also in consideration of the fact that the French police arrested him in 1939 to shut him up in a concentration camp in the Pyrenees. Meanwhile, his critical reflections on communism are maturing.
Leo decides to leave the Communist Party and to break with the Soviet Union. Also in 1939, in fact, just before the outbreak of the world war, the Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Germans. "That pact - Valiani wrote later in a letter to Paolo Spriano - put an end to my doubts. It proved the innocence of the Trotskyists and the Bucharinians whom Stalin had accused of being agents of Nazi Germany".
Leo enters "Giustizia e Libertà", welcomed by Franco Venturi, to whom he will be bound by close friendship. With the invasion of the Germans after 8 September 1943, Valiani played a leading role in the partisan war on the Milanese front, alongside Pertini, Longo and Sereni. Shortly before the capitulation of the Mussolinian regime he returned to Italy and joined the Partito d'Azione (PdA), in whose "liberal-democratic" area Parri and La Malfa militated.
Then, Valiani became secretary of the PoA for northern Italy. With Pertini, Longo and Sereni he made the decision to shoot Mussolini. From 4 to 8 February he participates in the first and only congress of the PdA. When prominent party members decided to join the Republican Party of Hugo La Malfa or the socialists Pietro Nenni, Valiani watched it. Later, Leo decided to abandon political life, devote himself to journalism and writing historical essays. In 1980, he was appointed senator for life, which led him to the fact that he decided to become an independent member of the Republican parliamentary group. In 1994-96, however, he joined a group of democratic leftists, created and led by Senator Libero Gualtieri, his old friend.
Quotations: "It was natural that I immediately framed myself in the Action Party. It had absorbed the movement of Justice and Freedom, to which I had joined abroad. What in Justice and Freedom he had fascinated me, it was his intellectual audacity, his effort to reconcile, in a higher synthesis, Marxism and the labor movement with the great liberal philosophy of the nineteenth century. In politics, this meant an attitude of European reconstruction, to the beyond the limits set by the existing state structures, and therefore a strong criticism towards all the traditional democratic parties, preexisting to fascism and that fascism had easily overwhelmed."
Leo Valiani was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.