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Molly Tambor, Anna Tonelli. Gli irregolari: Amori comunisti al tempo della Guerra fredda., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1698–1699, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1698
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Anna Tonelli’s Gli irregolari: Amori comunisti al tempo della Guerra fredda offers a meticulously researched reconstruction of the private consequences of militancy in the Italian Communist Party in the early Cold War years, confirming a familiar yet enduringly significant historical argument: that the personal is political. While most of the stories here have been told elsewhere, in more and less gossipy formats, the author has linked the details of individuals’ affairs of the heart with a detailed account of the party’s mechanism and justifications for demanding strict adherence to its moral ideology and norms. What emerges is an intriguing attempt to combine political history, the history of emotions, and an analysis of gendered double standards.
The party had long demanded extreme moral rigor from its militants, particularly as a security measure in the years of clandestine resistance to fascism; but the postwar period brought new challenges that continued to suggest caution. The book covers the years from 1945 through the hotly contested national elections of 1948 and 1953, when the party was extremely vulnerable to anti-Communist attacks attempting to portray Communists as godless libertines who would force free love and the breakup of the family on good Catholic Italians. Such pressures had direct political consequences, such as Party Secretary Palmiro Togliatti’s decision to support including Mussolini’s Concordat with the Vatican in the new Republican constitution, along with language affirming the indissolubility of marriage (despite most Communists’ support for legalizing divorce). Tonelli, however, chooses to highlight the indirect political consequences when the party’s continued insistence on the impeccable moral comportment of its leaders exacted heavy tolls on their personal lives.
