Former Fellows

During the First World War about thirty thousands soldiers of the Italian national minority were fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army: sent to the eastern front, around twenty thousands of them fell into captivity and remained in the Russian prison camps until the end of the Civil War. The proposed analysis will provide an interesting litmus test of the effectiveness of both the Italian and Russian nationality policies towards the Italian POWs and even propose a quantification of the different attitudes. The research will then address the question of how the life and the options of the Italian POWs changed after the October revolution: the Communist regime considered the prisoners as possible agents of the revolution abroad and therefore their living conditions and the propaganda towards them meaningfully changed. The memoirs of former Italian prisoners (those who fought with the Bolsheviks and those who fought against) will than provide an interesting opportunity to analyze of how national and political identities intersected with one another and to understand to what extent such choices were due to individual agency or to uncontrollable circumstances.