Before the fall of the Soviet Union my grandfather was a blur to me, a figure enveloped in legend.footnote¹ This was due to my father, Giuliano, who was a great romantic—a talented musician and composer, and a student of art history, especially that of the Italian Renaissance, of literature and poetry. His favourite author was Leopardi. It was as if my father chose to hide among the classics not only because of his natural leanings but also because the twentieth century, to whose terrors he had been a direct witness, was the site of such painful memories, of which the worst was undoubtedly the loss of the father he had never known but missed so much. For all his education and filial regard, he was someone entirely lacking in political feeling, who would often say: ‘Damned politics, why did he have to get caught up in politics? Why couldn’t he take the advice of his professor, Bartoli, and become a linguist, when he showed such promise in the field?’footnote² ‘But Daddy’, I’d reply, as a joke, ‘you wouldn’t be here if he’d done that!’

Delio, his elder brother, was very different. A colonel in the navy, a ballistics instructor and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he had great political ambitions. It emerges clearly from his family correspondence that during the war Delio seriously considered moving to Italy to become a leader in the Resistance. He wanted to participate in the creation of the future Italian navy, believing as he did that Italy after the fall of Fascism would be socialist. In other words, Delio wanted to further the cause for which his father had given his life. It may be that these ambitions were encouraged by Togliatti, who, as well as organizing a steady flow of assistance for the family, kept up a regular correspondence with Gramsci’s elder son at this time.footnote³ Many years later, when our uncle came to visit, I became an involuntary witness to the sometimes heated disputes between the Gramsci brothers, two men so different from each another. I have to say I got almost nothing out of those discussions. At the time I was very young (when Delio died, in 1982, I was only 17), and had no interest in politics.

I often went with my parents to visit my grandmother Giulia Schucht, who until 1980 lived in a sanatorium for Old Bolsheviks in Peredelkino, outside Moscow. Although bed-bound, she retained her mental faculties to the end and was deeply interested in the lives of her loved ones and in everything that was happening in the world. That said, I don’t ever remember her spontaneously bringing up memories of my grandfather. She talked about him rarely, in letters to Italian relatives and during interviews. While she lived at our house she put together, along with her sister Eugenia, a kind of museum of Gramsci’s personal effects. In a large glass cabinet with four shelves were displayed a traditional Sardinian woven doily and wooden cutlery he had made himself, a cigarette-holder and other objects. I remember those old things, to me so mysterious, as an inexhaustible source for my games of make-believe. Most of them were donated by my family to the Casa Gramsci in Ghilarza in the late seventies and early eighties, but we kept a few things at home as family relics—the ashtray that my chain-smoking grandfather had with him until the end, or his copy of Machiavelli’s Prince, an inspirational presence in the Prison Notebooks.

Twenty years ago the Soviet Union collapsed—a society that, with all its defects, had represented the bastion of actually existing socialism and—paradoxically—helped ease the contradictions of western capitalism. It was around that time that I began to be interested in my grandfather. The Italian Communist party and the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci arranged a trip to Italy for me and my father to celebrate the centenary of his birth. We stayed in Italy around six months, in that time visiting all the places that had strong connections with the life of Antonio Gramsci, from Sardinia to Turi. (One of the most moving highlights of our pilgrimage was the concert I gave for the inmates in the prison in Turi, together with Francesca Vacca.) During those months, full of so many other fascinating events, I steeped myself in Italian culture and realized how important my grandfather is to it. Back in Russia, full of enthusiasm, I started to study Italian systematically and also read what little there was of his writing in Russian translation. My interest in Gramsci’s thought grew more and more strongly as I tried to understand what had happened in my country through the lens of his work. It was thanks to him that I now grasped the destructive role played by our intellectuals, who were responsible for the molecular shift in public opinion in favour of the new regime, which had led to the plunder of Russia, a process already begun during the years of perestroika. I didn’t become a Gramsci scholar—I’m a biologist and a musician—but my mental bearings had radically altered. Speaking of our own time, I can say that it is precisely at this turbulent historic moment that I sense the real need for the rise of an intellectual voice of Antonio Gramsci’s calibre to unite various factions that are divided and ideologically uncreative. These various factions can hardly be called an opposition, fused in the ‘historic bloc’ that alone would be capable of developing a correct strategic line in the struggle against the oppressive forces of the new regime, corrupt and cynical, that has ruled Russia for two decades now.

The decisive step towards my embrace of Gramsci occurred in the 2000s, when, as part of my collaboration with the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, I began to look into the history of his Russian family, not knowing back then that those modest and disconnected attempts at reconstructing Gramsci’s history would turn into a proper research project. With it, I hope to have made my small contribution to the reconstruction of both the history of my country and the life of my grandfather. Giulia Schucht’s family was deeply involved with both.footnote⁴ On the one hand there was the very interesting historical precedent of a part of the Russian intelligentsia, noble in background, betraying its class in the name of Revolution, distancing itself from its social ‘preconceptions’ and attempting to embrace the country’s new value system. On the other hand the Schucht family left a strong mark on my grandfather’s life, both personally and politically. This unusual family became the essential link in the extremely tight bond between Gramsci and revolutionary Russia. And Russia, I argue, is sometimes the key to explaining some of the most important and yet most puzzling episodes in Gramsci’s life. Let me talk about some of these.

The first centres on relations between Gramsci and Lenin. It was already known in the 1970s that the leader of the Bolsheviks had met the future leader of the Italian Communists in 1922. We know from Soviet archive material that the two men met in Lenin’s office at the Kremlin on 25 October 1922. The register of the Biographical Records of Lenin, first published in 1972, includes a list of the matters they discussed, all very important: the specificity of Southern Italy, the state of the Italian Socialist party and the possibility of its fusion with the Communists. At the time when the Records were in preparation, my father was commissioned by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to find other reports of this historic encounter, with the help of Italian Communists. The only letter he received came from Camilla Ravera, who, as well as relaying the detailed report that Gramsci himself had given her, offered the bold hypothesis that it was probably this encounter that inspired Lenin to make my grandfather the leader of the Italian Communists, in preference to Amadeo Bordiga, who had disappointed him with his rigid and sectarian mentality.footnote⁵ But why didn’t Ravera say this in her memoirs, which she published just a few months later? Why have all Gramsci’s biographers missed it, including the eminent Giuseppe Fiori?footnote⁶ And why didn’t Gramsci ever mention this in any letter or article, despite his great admiration for Lenin and the strong bonds of friendship between the Schucht and Ulyanov families? It could be that this strange silence is linked to the modesty my grandfather displayed towards Bordiga, whom he greatly respected as the real founder of the Communist Party, political differences notwithstanding, and valued as a friend. But perhaps the explanation is not so straightforward.

The second matter concerns the attempts to free Gramsci from jail. Here too, despite the efforts of the finest scholars (notably Angelo Antonio Rossi and Giuseppe Vasca in Gramsci tra Mussolini e Stalin, 2007), the truth remains uncertain. Neither did I myself find anything significant reading through our family archive. The most likely hypothesis is that despite giving the prisoner significant material support, the Soviet authorities did nothing serious to free him from his Fascist prison. They replicated the fervid activity in which Tatiana Schucht, probably purposely misled, was also engaged, pursuing endless paperwork to no avail. Here again we have a less than satisfactory explanation. It may be that a better one awaits focused research in the Stalin archive, which remains inaccessible to this day.