When Greta Garbo Played a Soviet Agent
Today marks the anniversary of Greta Garbo’s death. The 1939 movie Ninotchka gave her a breakout comedy role — but also reflected the grim mood in Hollywood as Europe headed to war.
9 Articles by: Anne Colamosca
Anne Colamosca is an independent writer and book critic.
Carlo Tresca Was an Italian Radical Who Fought Fascism in the United States
In the early twentieth century, Carlo Tresca was one of the most important immigrant labor organizers in the United States. When fascism triumphed in his homeland in 1922, he took up the struggle against its American backers.
Guernica Was a Dress Rehearsal for the Nazi War That Followed
The bombing of Guernica on this day in 1937 wasn’t just part of the Spanish Civil War but a show of Nazi Germany’s military might. When antifascist journalist George Steer uncovered Germany’s responsibility, it prepared the world for the terror that followed.
The Fight for Italian Reunification Inspired the International Left
The first meeting of the Italian parliament in Rome, 150 years ago today, was a symbolic show of national reunification. Yet the battle against foreign domination had raised sharply contrasting ideas of the future Italy — leaving a lasting impact on socialists worldwide.
Fausto Gullo, Italy’s “Peasants’ Minister” Who Fought to Break Landowner Power
Italy’s first postwar agriculture secretary, Fausto Gullo, was a Communist who used his office to redistribute land and give peasants control over their lives. His reforms promised to democratize the South’s deeply unequal economy — only for conservatives to reassert the dead hand of landowner power.
The Many Lives of Ignazio Silone
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
How Italy’s Colonial War in Ethiopia Foreshadowed the Barbarism of World War II
The Booker Prize shortlisting of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the latest sign of rising interest in Fascist Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia. The genocidal violence perpetrated against Ethiopians in 1935–6 was soon turned back onto European soil — and united Italian anti-fascists with the Africans resisting colonial aggression.
Clare Boothe Luce, From Broadway to the Cold War
Author of Broadway hit The Women, the Vanity Fair managing editor Clare Boothe Luce was a dogged anticommunist. As US ambassador to Italy, she worked tirelessly to keep the Left out of office — and set a precedent for Washington’s meddling in democracies abroad.
We Shall Never Be at Peace Again
One of the great Italian novelists of the last century, Natalia Ginzburg was long overlooked in the United States. Yet as Italy turns back toward the far right, this leading voice of the antifascist generation is again calling out to the present.