Abstract

“The Thirties”: here this term has nothing to do with ragtime, long-nosed Bugattis, or Maurice Chevalier. The expression instead designates the period in Europe in which three types of power emerged that, despite numerous and important differences, have one thing in common: the claim to destroy the economic, political and spiritual order by which Europe recognized itself and replace it with a “new order.” It is necessary, truthfully speaking, that we agree to extend what we call “the Thirties” a bit and have them begin in 1926, the date Mussolini sends Gramsci to prison—the most eloquent sign, no doubt, of the Fascist consolidation of power in Italy. The consolidation of National Socialist power in Germany is accomplished, as is well known, in 1934, when Hitler definitively does away with a Weimar Republic that by then had for quite some time been no more than a stage prop, and a shabby one at that. In the meantime, Stalin manages for his part to decimate the Leninist old guard, remove Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, and install the steel age of bureaucratic anonymity under the most accurate of pseudonyms.