1937: Vincenzo Baccala
November 29th, 2018 Headsman
Italian Communist Vincenzo Baccala was executed on this date in 1937 … but not by the fascists.
The blackshirted turn of his country in the 1920s had driven Vincenzo into emigre exile, pursued by an in absentia prison sentence for “subversive propaganda tending to insurrection and incitement of class hatred.” He went first in Paris and then in 1931 to the USSR.
Although present in the fortress of Communism at the Party’s direction, and eventually an outright Soviet citizen, Baccala came into trouble after criticizing Stalin in 1933 and had to leave his family in Odessa as he struggled to find work. Come the height of the purges in the later 1930s, he was predictably denounced.
Baccala’s wife Pia Piccioni swallowed a bitter draught of her own; unable to see her husband or find support amid Stalin’s purges, she returned to her native country, finding little comfort either in Mussolini‘s Italy (for obvious reasons) or in postwar Italy (where red comrades shied from traducing the USSR). She wrote a book about her own and Baccala’s experiences, Compagno Silenzio: Una vedova italiana del gulag racconta.
On this day..
- 1881: Percy Lefroy Mapleton, police sketch milestone - 2019
- 1343: A dozen Breton nobles - 2017
- 1740: Edward Shuel, for a Catholic-Protestant marriage - 2016
- 1986: The Moiwana Massacre - 2015
- 1793: Antoine Barnave, constitutional monarchist - 2014
- 1284: Alice Bowe and her friends - 2013
- 1938: Branislaw Tarashkyevich, Belarusian linguist - 2012
- 1330: Roger Mortimer, usurper - 2011
- 1957: Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas - 2010
- 1781: The slaves of the Zong, for the insurance - 2009
- 1517: Torben Oxe - 2008
- 1941: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya - 2007
- Themed Set: Women Against Fascism - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,History,Italy,Russia,Shot,Torture,USSR
Tags: 1930s, 1937, communism, communists, november 29, odessa, pia piccioni, purge, stalinism, vincenzo baccala
