“Lenin’s handkerchief”, the story of a man who has crossed history signed by Giovanna Cucè

At the end of the 19th century, dozens, perhaps hundreds of Italians, decided to try to find their fortune where today a war as senseless as it is bloody is raging. Ukraine, Mariupol, the granary of Europe which for centuries has fed its inhabitants and all foreigners, like the Bruzzone family. The founder Pellegrino Bruzzone left Liguria and chose that city, also because the descendants of a small Italian community who had settled in those places since the end of the eighteenth century lived in southern Russia.

However, the most significant wave of migration dates back to two successive eras: before the Crimean War of 1853 some Italians had arrived, especially Genoese traders, coming from the kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia; after 1860, however, from Puglia (from Bisceglie and Trani above all) many sailors and farmers (vine growers, fruit growers, horticulturists) had moved towards the Black Sea coasts to buy lands that the tsar was selling at a good price, thus determining the predominantly agricultural character of the community that had been forming. For Pellegrino Buzzone, his family and his little nephew Valentino, however, things are not going in the best way.

The October Revolution stripped them of all possessions, forcing them into a kolkhoz, collective farms where sacrifices and dreams are made. Child “enemy of the people”, the name of Valentino’s parents ends up in the lists of Stalin’s purges: his father killed, his mother in a psychiatric hospital. Valentino will experience the horrors of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the war and liberation, the return to Italy and then to the USSR, in search of a brother and himself.

The story of a man who has crossed history and who is now a Rai journalist Giovanna Cucè has reconstructed, thanks to the testimony of the protagonist, in a book entitled Lenin’s handkerchiefjust released by All Around (160 pages, €18).

If the 1920s passed relatively peacefully also thanks to the New Economic Policy desired by Lenin to relaunch the country’s growth, the country’s fate was radically different after Stalin’s arrival in power in 1928.

As the historian Elena Dundovich writes in the preface, from that moment on, a new slogan was imposed: “collectivise, eradicate, colonize”: “collectivise” agriculture, “eradicating” small and medium-sized landowners, forcing them to give up their lands and to transform into agricultural workers, just as happened to Pellegrino Bruzzone’s family; “colonize” the vast inhospitable spaces of Siberia, the Great North, the Urals and Kazakhstan thanks to the creation of a complex system of forced labor camps (the GULag). This was the beginning of a series of disasters that befell not only the family of Giacinto, Pellegrino’s son, but hundreds of other Italians and Soviet citizens.

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Aware of how much the situation was changing, in 1932 the Pellegrinos left the Soviet Union to return to Italy, abandoning everything. Except for the two daughters Elena and Maria, as wives, the first of a Sardinian communist militant named Salvatore, who worked as a translator at the International Club of the port of Mariupol, the second, however, of a Russian, Jakov Malishev, from whom he had two sons, Eugenio and Valentino. Salvatore and Jakov were both arrested by the Soviet political police in 1938 and never returned.

Shortly afterwards Maria was also arrested in the operation to repress the wives and children of traitors to the homeland”, and died shortly afterwards in unclear circumstances. Their son Valentino, the protagonist of this story and still a child at the time, miraculously managed to be entrusted to Elena, Maria’s sister, and equally miraculously to return to Italy in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War.

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Valentino’s life, marked by an infinite trail of suffering, is told with passion by Giovanna Cucè: now married, he manages to return for a short time to the Soviet Union to once again meet his brother Eugenio, enlisted in the Red Army and given up for long time missing. And then again in Italy where now, thanks to the journalist’s story, he re-emerges in all his strength and in the desperation of seeing his homeland, that Mariupol he loved so much, devastated by a war that seems to never end.