California Italian Studies

This essay looks at the four-year period Indro Montanelli spent as a journalist, writer, and Fascist government representative in Estonia, Poland, and Finland between 1937 and 1941: four years during which the map of Europe was permanently redrawn. Much of the research is new. It complements the two-volume life of Montanelli by Sandro Gerbi and Raffaele Liucci (issued as a single volume in 2014 as Indro Montanelli: una biografia (1909–2001), and Marcello Staglieno’s earlier biography, Montanelli: novant’anni controcorrente, from 2001. Montanelli was at times undoubtably a great journalist. The reports he filed from Helsinki on Finland’s 1939–40 Winter War with Russia acquire a bitter topicality today in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine (for the first time since 1945 a state-on-state war has come to Europe.) In Montanelli’s Helsinki dispatches it seems that history—the great unforeseen—was repeating itself already from Tsarist times.

Montanelli was banished to Estonia by the Fascist regime in 1937 as “punishment” for the insufficiently pro-Franco reportage he produced in Civil War Spain. In his Baltic exile he found himself at the crossroads of future East-West antagonisms, for if there is a West Berlin equivalent in today’s so-called “Second Cold War,” it is Estonia, which is vulnerable to Russian attack on NATO’s eastern flank. In his Estonian journalism, Montanelli intuited that Stalin did not think the Soviet Union could survive as an East Slavic superstate and bulwark against German territorial aggression without eastern Poland and the Baltic states subordinate to the USSR. Putin’s own pseudo-Tsarist vision of a Greater Russia one and indivisible—his Russky Mir, “Russian World”—has its roots in the Hitler-Stalin conflict to which Montanelli bore witness.

The essay argues that Montanelli was enamored of certain aspects of Italian Fascism to the end of his days, and that his divorce from Mussolini’s regime after 1937 was not as clean as he cared to make out in later years. Montanelli was often attracted to right-wing demagogues and “strong men” of one stripe or another, among them the Norwegian collaborator Vidkun Quisling and Marshal Mannerheim of Finland (both of whom Montanelli was pleased to meet). New light is shed in the essay on Montanelli’s relationship to Estonia’s fiercely anti-Soviet Baltic German community (of which Hitler’s chief race ideologist Alfred Rosenberg claimed to be a part). The historical archives of La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera—the newspapers for which Montanelli wrote in his Baltic period—have supplied new information on what Estonia and the Estonian people meant to Montanelli.

The bibliography on Montanelli is vast. It includes book-length interviews conducted by Italian journalists with Montanelli himself, as well as Montanelli’s own journalistic memoirs (notably I cento giorni della Finlandia [One Hundred Days of Finland], published in 1940), together with his semi-fictional autobiographies (what we might now call “autofiction”), such as Qui non riposano (Here They Do Not Rest) from 1945. Much of this bibliography has been consulted for the essay. The Italian newspaper archives, however, provided me with the most compelling new information. From them I was able to recreate the details of Montanelli’s movements in the autumn of 1941 in Nazi-conquered Tallinn (which no biography has described). The Estonian state archives yielded previously unseen information on the White Russian source Montanelli used in order to write his extraordinary La Stampa “scoop” on Stalin’s purge of the Red Army in 1937. His name was Boris Engelhardt and, like Montanelli, he was far from straightforward.