When Benito Mussolini learned that the Nazis had begun negotiating Italy’s surrender to the Allies, in the spring of 1945, the fascist dictator jumped into his Alfa Romeo and did not look back. Leaving Milan, he caught up with a group of soldiers heading toward neutral Switzerland. As they passed Lake Como, the company was stopped by anti-fascist partisans, who instantly recognized Il Duce’s iconic profile through his makeshift army disguise and dragged him in front of a firing squad behind a remote farmhouse.
Mussolini’s body was taken back to Milan and dumped at the Piazzale Loreto, the same location where, a year earlier, the German Gestapo had executed 15 civilians. Partisans and fascists alike pounced on their former leader, kicking, spitting, and hurling rotten vegetables. One woman allegedly shot Mussolini five times, one bullet for every son she had lost in the war. Somebody stuffed a dead mouse inside his mouth, urging him to “make a speech.” “Higher! Higher!” the crowd shouted, as the barely recognizable body was hoisted from the girders of a gas station. “To the hooks, like pigs!”
“In those days, it might have been assumed that Fascism was finished,” writes Paul Corner, Emeritus Professor of European History at the University of Siena and former director of its Centre for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in his 2023 book, Mussolini in Myth and Memory, “and that Mussolini’s place in history was assured; he was a failed dictator, a man who had brought death and destruction to his nation.” But time has proven this assumption wrong. During the decades following the Second World War, Mussolini retained his place in the hearts and minds of the Italian moderate and extreme right. Gianfranco Fini, serving as the head of the self-described “post-fascist” National Alliance in the 1990s, called Mussolini the “greatest statesman of the century” in a 1994 New York Times article. Silvio Berlusconi, media tycoon and four-time prime minister of Italy, claimed that the dictator “never killed anyone,” while at the same time comparing his own center-left opponents to Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s current prime minister, began her career as a youth activist for the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a now dissolved neo-fascist party founded in 1946, whose goal, as the historian David Conti told Foreign Policy, “was to gather Mussolini’s veterans and keep their political identity alive and functioning in contrast with democracy.”
More alarming is the extent to which the memory of Mussolini has been rehabilitated in Italian culture at large. According to Corner, his command “has ceased to be seen in totally negative terms … as a reminder of where we don’t want to go.” Mussolini’s coalition with Adolf Hitler is now interpreted as a strategic miscalculation rather than an ideological commitment. Instead of fascismo, there is talk of fascismo bonario and fascismo ad acqua di rosa — a “benevolent” or “rosewater” fascism, remembered not for its death and destruction but for its “firm hand” and unsurpassed ability to “get things done.”
How did we get from “To the hooks, like pigs!” to “Mussolini never killed anyone”? Looking beyond politics and economics, Corner points a finger at memory itself, and the ways it can contort the past to reinforce not just our understanding of the present but also our expectations of the future. Feeling alienated or threatened in their own time, more and more people retreat into what Lev Gudkov, a Russian sociologist and director of the Moscow-based Levada Center (dubbed the “most reputable” nongovernmental research organization in that country by the London School of Economics and Political Science’s European Politics and Policy blog ), calls “phantom utopias.” These are incomplete and at times entirely fabricated historical narratives in which dictatorships compare favorably to the parliamentary democracies that succeed them, when — in reality — they most certainly did not.
Putin is neither Communist nor Socialist. His government almost completely ignored the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, possibly because it did not want to inspire modern revolutionaries to plan an uprising of their own.
While it’s tempting to focus on everything phantom utopias have forgotten about the past, we can often learn more by looking at what they haven’t. As far as the “ventennio fascista” — the roughly 20-year period Mussolini was in power — is concerned, Italians might not readily recall the omnipresence of the OVRA (the Italian precursor of Nazi Germany’s secret police) or the colonial massacres committed in Ethiopia, but they do remember (and applaud) the draining of the Pontine Marshes and the trains arriving on time, which, Corner notes, has become a metaphor for the regime as a whole. These recollections are based not on facts but on feelings, fears, and frustrations that exist at present. For example, admiration for Mussolini’s extrajudicial campaigns to eradicate the Sicilian Mafia — which did not succeed — may well stem, as Corner writes, from “irritation over the perceived weakness of the democratic state, with its laws passed to benefit individuals, its absurdly lengthy trials, and its prescriptions.” Likewise, interest in Mussolini’s introduction of social welfare, including pensions and health insurance, can be linked to anxiety over Italy’s increasingly unstable job market.
Mussolini in Myth and Memory devotes considerable effort to explaining how and why a phantom utopia, as described by Gudkov, came into existence in Italy, without touching on the equally important question of who is to be held responsible for its creation. A popular belief is that these historical views of supposed fascist utopias are invented through the propaganda of current or aspiring authoritarians, but closer inspection suggests that they also evolve organically and, to an extent, independently of the politicians and pundits whose authority they help solidify. These views are formed not only through top-down indoctrination but also through the daily life experience of ordinary people, which is not and cannot be fully determined by institutions and government.
Detailed examinations of this process can be found in 2013’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize–recipient Svetlana Alexievich, as well as in East German historian Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: Archeology of a Lost World, an English translation of which was published in March 2023. Both of these books, as their titles indicate, revolve not around Italy but Russia, a country where nostalgia for the days of the USSR — expressed in the rising popularity of Soviet food products, television shows, and popular video games such as 2023’s Atomic Heart, set in a steampunk, Soviet research lab — has not only secured the legacy of Stalin but also that of his spiritual successor, Vladimir Putin.
Phantom utopias exist in many countries whose borders, living standards, cultures, and/or sociopolitical institutions have changed drastically in recent memory, such as Narendra Modi’s India or Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. As far as the U.S. is concerned, one could argue that Donald Trump’s “America First” rhetoric builds on ideas introduced by the America First Committee of the 1940s, an isolationist coalition that not only opposed American involvement in the Second World War but also — by way of one of its prominent members, the aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh — opined that Washington should join Hilter and “defend the white race against foreign invasion.” Writing about Russia specifically, most researchers limit themselves to the study of propaganda; Schlögel and Alexievich concentrate on aspects of public and private life that the Soviet government desperately wanted to regulate but never could. The Soviet Century was written after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and traces the origins of contemporary Russian populism through the physical remnants of the Soviet Union, notably its public spaces and the everyday experiences that happened there. Secondhand Time, a mosaic of interviews conducted in the wake of the USSR’s demise, explores the interior lives of Soviet citizens. Neither Schlögel nor Alexievich denies the influence that a state can have on people’s worldviews. Alexievich encountered many Sovoks — a derogatory term for Sovietophiles — who let the ideology of the Communist Party “penetrate them so deeply that there was no separating them.” Schlögel demonstrates the Party’s unrivaled ability to reach its subjects in the most unexpected of places, such as in the pages of encyclopedias that mention Trotskyism but not Leon Trotsky, or on the surfaces of fine china sets decorated with images of wounded tank drivers and military officers with guard dogs from World War II, a moment of enduring national pride for many Russians, who also refer to the conflict as the “Great Patriotic War.”
Still, Schlögel warns that this influence should not be overestimated, arguing that while “the ability of the supercentralised state to force everything into line with its ‘vertical lines of power’ is immense,” it is foolish to “imagine that in a country as vast as Russia, historical knowledge and concrete memories can be totally controlled and coerced into a particular philosophic direction.” A Sovok woman interviewed by Alexievich confirms as much, when she says, “everyone thinks they used to force people into the Pioneers,” the Communist Party’s youth organization. “I’m telling you: no one was forced to do anything. All of the kids dreamed of becoming Young Pioneers. Of marching together. To drums and horns. Singing … ‘My Motherland, I’ll love forever / Where else will I find one like her?’”
In spite of their lifelong exposure to propaganda, Soviet citizens were not machines. They had minds of their own, accepting certain aspects of Communist doctrine while (privately) questioning others. Many adults could recall with clarity the moment they “personally started believing” in what they were spoon-fed as schoolchildren. For that Sovok woman’s father, who’d spent some years in a Russian labor camp because he’d allowed himself to be taken prisoner in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939, that moment arrived in 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew to outer space. “We’re the first!” he’d exclaimed, filled with pride. “We can do anything!”
While dictatorial regimes create false realities through speeches shouted from balconies and posters plastered on the sides of buildings, the phantom utopias that manifest after these regimes’ disappearance are made up of memories — memories of speeches and of posters, yes, but also of everything else that was going on at the time. In Russia’s collective memory, as in Italy’s, interactions with previous dictatorships have become intertwined with more individualized recollections of relationships, breakups, childhood, old age, illness, vacations, food, movies, perfumes, hairstyles, and countless other experiences that, by sole virtue of their place in history, are forever connected to — and sometimes mistaken for — the dictatorships themselves. As one interviewee concludes in Secondhand Time, “It’s not Stalin I remember; it’s our life.…” (This inseparability of the personal and the political-historical is a common theme explored by films from formerly authoritarian countries, two notable examples being Ettore Scola’s A Special Day and Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!).
Inspired by the fatalism that permeates classic Russian literature, Alexievich doubts that Russia — a country, at heart, “built for war” — can survive without some Great Idea to guide its people’s every move.
Schlögel’s Soviet Century features dozens of examples that illustrate this point, the most striking of which is Gorky Park. Schlögel describes the park, situated in central Moscow, as a landscape of both terror and normality, a “totalitarian fairyland” designed by state-approved urban planners to engineer social behavior, but also a “place of small moments of happiness,” where citizens enjoyed themselves for their own sake, not the government’s. Envisioned by the state as a backdrop for productive recreation and self-improvement, many of the activities that actually took place in Gorky Park, from family picnics and evening strolls to impromptu dances accompanied by live performances of Beethoven, were, according to Schlögel, simply the result of people doing their own thing, not the “seductive powers” of the Kremlin.
Another striking example is the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. This widely distributed Soviet cookbook, published in various editions, beginning in 1939, by the USSR’s Ministry of the Food Industry, is remembered less for its foreword, by Comrade Stalin, concerning “the possibility of a life in prosperity and culture,” than for its recipes meant for newborn babies, sick children, pregnant women, and people suffering from diabetes and heart disease. These recipes would have established the state as a benevolent presence in the household and made it an irrevocable part of Soviet family life.
Just as the passage of time can replace negative memories with positive ones, so too can it turn one into the other. Back when the Soviet Union still existed, consumers had access to a single type of wrapping paper. It was grayish-brown in color, had to be smoothed and stored for recycling in periods of scarcity, and was used regardless of whether you were wrapping a necklace for your fiancée or a loaf of bread. Originally associated with the relative poverty and colorlessness of Soviet life, the paper acquired an entirely different connotation once that way of life had ended. Schlögel writes about how many Sovoks prefer it to today’s translucent plastic, which serves only to fetishize the products it envelops. Tinted by nostalgia, even the act of saving paper is transformed from a monotonous chore into yet another charming tradition that has been regrettably abandoned.
Although dictators do not invent phantom utopias, they can still use them to their advantage, to gather support and push their agendas. But as far as Russia is concerned, the Kremlin’s weaponization of Soviet nostalgia appears to make little sense. Although he served in the KGB, the vast security apparatus of the putative “Workers’ Paradise,” Putin is neither Communist nor Socialist. His government almost completely ignored the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, possibly because it did not want to inspire modern revolutionaries to plan an uprising of their own.
These contradictions are resolved upon realizing that Putin does not associate this nostalgia with what the Soviet Union actually was, but with what it represented. Gudkov has characterized Russia’s transition from Communism to oligarchy following the USSR’s collapse as an unlikely continuity, facilitated not only by economic and geopolitical factors but also by the enduring Soviet mentality, its tendency to depend on the state, its “passive, dream-like belief that things will somehow get better,” as well as its citizens’ lack of practical experience in being allowed to assume responsibility for their own private or public lives.
Soviet nostalgia, then, is rooted in a desire for order, security, and national dignity — qualities that conservative Russians, especially Sovoks, feel were lost during the territorial fragmentation and dependency on Western businesses that followed the collapse of the USSR. Continuing where Gudkov leaves off, Schlögel accuses Russia’s leaders of exploiting “postimperial phantom pains, nostalgic yearnings and fears of the loss of social status to pursue an aggressive policy, not excluding war against neighboring states, so as to maintain its power.”
While the Kremlin relies heavily on historical revisionism to sell its message — blaming Poland for the outbreak of the Second World War (when it was actually a false flag operation by the Nazis), and, more recently, denying the statehood of Ukraine (baseless claims now parroted by the Trump administration) — it does not need to condition conservative Russians to convert them to its cause. Far from hijacking a civilization that was getting ready to leave history behind, Putin is preying on sentiments that predate his rise to power. Polls reveal that the year he became president, as many as 75% of citizens regretted what General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had done in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when he attempted to democratize the Soviet Union and, eventually, oversaw its dissolution. Reading Secondhand Time in tandem with The Soviet Century, it begins to seem that commitment to Communist doctrine and newfound appreciation for its memorabilia — including wrapping paper — are psychological responses to the humiliation and hopelessness Sovoks experienced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the world in which they grew up vanished, so did the many sacrifices they had made to it. Worse, Communism — the source of their pride and dignity — was labeled a mistake, and all of its stubborn adherents mistaken. So when Putin refers to the USSR’s collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” that resonates with his audience. Not because they miss Marxism-Leninism but because they crave the feeling of respect the international order had for their nation’s power, as well as the self-respect they experienced in moments like Gagarin’s spaceflight.
The social security programs that Mussolini receives credit for were implemented years before he assumed office, as they were across Europe.
In hopes of getting to the bottom of Russia’s phantom utopia, Alexievich digs even deeper than her subjects do. Evidently inspired by the fatalism that permeates classic Russian literature, she doubts that Russia — a country, at heart, “built for war” — can survive without some Great Idea to guide its people’s every move. “I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth,” one person says to her. “Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.” To Alexievich, this comment reveals not a devotion to Communist ideology as much as it betrays a need for ideology in general. Today, she concludes, that ideology is Russian Orthodoxy: “the Great Empire, the ‘iron hand,’ the ‘special Russian path.’”
Whether guided by collectivism or Christianity, Putin’s Russia increasingly resembles Stalin’s. The former’s invasion of Ukraine is the most significant conflict on the European continent since the latter’s battle with Hitler. Putin’s crackdown on free speech and control of the media rivals the policies of his most paranoid predecessors, while his antagonization of the West has forced non-Russian businesses, such as IKEA and McDonald’s, to close down in that country.
Italy, too, is starting to resemble its Fascist past. The coincidence that Meloni’s electoral victory happened exactly 100 years after Mussolini’s March on Rome has not gone unnoticed — not to her critics, and not to her followers. Like their Russian counterparts, Italian politicians manipulate nostalgia for the ventennio to reach voters. Italy’s phantom utopia, in addition to reflecting the desire for “security, order, international dignity and prowess,” as Corner writes, is closely tied to enduring fascination with the personality of Mussolini himself, and the idea that “HE was looking out for you.” It is for this reason that Ignazio La Russa, Meloni’s right-hand man and the first neo-Fascist to serve as president of the Senate, stated that every Italian was an “heir to Mussolini,” and that their party, the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) had recruited two of Il Duce’s living heirs: his granddaughter, Rachele Mussolini, and great-grandson, Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, named after Julius Caesar.
Trump has also associated himself with Mussolini’s ahistorical reputation as a capable, headstrong statesman. In 2016, the president retweeted a quote from a Twitter account called @ilduce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” After being treated for Covid, in 2020, Trump theatrically removed his face mask on the White House’s Truman Balcony — a stunt numerous commentators, including a former aide, compared to Fascist photo-ops designed to demonstrate Mussolini’s virility and vigor. And one of Trump’s 2024 campaign slogans — “Trump Was Right About Everything!” (now printed on hats and other merchandise) — closely resembles Il Duce’s widely distributed motto “Mussolini Is Always Right.”
Italy’s flirtation with phantom utopias sends it down a path that Russia has already walked. First, interest in Mussolini’s more uncontroversial accomplishments, such as some of his construction projects, will lead to the gradual normalization of his most indefensible actions and opinions: that parliamentary democracy was weak and ineffective, that violence and intimidation were acceptable means to achieve political ends, that the press ought to be a tool of those in power as opposed to a way to hold them to accountability, that Italians have the right to reclaim territories once controlled by the Roman Empire. Since Meloni assumed office, in 2022, the Italian parliament has passed and proposed an array of decrees infringing on human rights, including preventing couples from traveling abroad for surrogacy, limiting open borders and freedom of movement guaranteed by Europe’s Schengen Agreement, extending punishment for participating in demonstrations and opening judicial pathways for jailing nonviolent protesters, and arranging for birth certificates to be registered only under the names of biological parents, regardless of whether they are a child’s primary caretakers. Representatives of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party have also said they want to impose naval blockades to stop immigration, restrict NGOs supporting immigrants, end birthright citizenship, and prohibit abortion and same-sex marriage. “God, homeland, family” was her 2022 campaign slogan, sketching a vision of the kind of country she hopes to create: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian.”
“Regret for the loss … of an authoritarian past,” Corner concludes, “pushes people in the direction of authoritarian solutions to their present problems.” Prepared to direct popular discontent at social institutions she perceives to be standing in the way of realizing Italy’s phantom utopia — specifically, the education and judicial systems, as well as the press — Meloni can deliver a devastating blow to Italy’s fragile bureaucracy. She has already proposed to reform the Italian Constitution, which was written in Fascism’s aftermath for the express purpose of preventing its return by placing inciting hatred and glorifying Fascism outside free speech guarantees, prohibiting constitutional amendments used to abolish the Republic, and ensuring an equal distribution of power among its three branches of government.
Needless to say, phantom utopias should not guide political action, because they are just that — phantoms. In Mussolini in Myth and Memory, Corner methodically explains why the history that underpins common attitudes toward the ventennio is fictive, even when the emotions associated with it are not. The social security programs that Mussolini receives credit for were implemented years before he assumed office, as they were across Europe. And although his regime did drain a part of the Pontine Marshes, it also forcibly relocated and, as a result, ruined the livelihoods of numerous peasants in the area.
Finally, writes Corner, “There is nothing in prison statistics to indicate one of the great legends relating to Fascism — that fascist rigour was successful in reducing crime — has any basis in fact. The numbers incarcerated remain fairly constant through the interwar years, with no evidence of decline. Nor is there any significant change in the number of crimes committed, the only exception being a rise in persons sentenced for theft in the second half of the 1930s — presumably an indication of worsening economic conditions.”
While it may be too late for Russians to escape from their own utopian daydreams, Italians could still turn back. And the rise of authoritarianism in both of those nations are warning shots here at home, as the Trump administration seeks to intimidate the press and cleanse government websites of information about America’s past of slavery and the eradication of Native Americans, never mind trying to erase more recent memories of an insurrection and failed coup. In all of these cases, in order to build a better future, citizens will first have to reconcile with the past. ❖
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in Atlanta. He studied 20th-century European and Russian history at NYU and has written for Jacobin, New Lines, JSTOR Daily, Esquire, and other publications.
