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NO OTHER CIVIL WAR IN HISTORY took place across such an immense expanse. Compared with the Great War, none of the military battles in Russia’s civil war or wars of territorial reconquest were significant in scale, but nonetheless, 8 to 10 million people would perish here between 1918 and 1923.
Back in 1922, Benito Mussolini, despite the fact that his fascist party had won just 35 seats out of 500 in its best showing in open elections, was demanding to be made prime minister, threatening to march on Rome with hordes of Blackshirts known as squadristi. The squads were lightly armed, their numbers exaggerated.142 The proposed “march” was a colossal bluff, an exercise in psychological warfare, and King Vittorio Emanuele III seemed ready to summon the army to disperse the ruffians.
On May 30, Giacomo Matteotti, the son of a wealthy family from the Veneto, a graduate of the law faculty in Bologna, and the leader of the United Socialist party, who had persistently criticized Mussolini and carried tremendous prestige, accused the fascists of intimidation and outright fraud, and demanded that the elections be annulled. “I’ve said my piece,” he concluded. “Now you prepare my funeral speech.”155 Eleven days later he was bundled into a car, stabbed multiple times with a carpenter’s knife, and beaten to death.
