Born July 29, 1883, in Forli; died Apr. 28, 1945, near Dongo. Head of the Italian Fascist Party, of the Fascist government in Italy from 1922 to 1943, and of the Salo Republic, a puppet government, from 1943 to 1945.
A schoolteacher, Mussolini began his political career as a member of the socialist movement and achieved prominence as a journalist and public speaker. From 1912 to 1914 he was editor of Avanti, the central organ of the Italian Socialist Party (ISP). Expelled from the ISP in November 1914 for agitating in favor of Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente, he founded the newspaper Il Popolo d’ltalia, which later became the semiofficial organ of the Fascist Party. In March 1919 he founded an organization of war veterans (the Fasci di Combattimento), which became known as the Fascist movement. Relying on Fascist detachments, Mussolini led an antidemocratic counterrevolutionary offensive, disguising its true character with unrestrained social and nationalist demagoguery. Supported by monopoly capital (Confindustria), the monarchy, and the Vatican, he staged a coup d’etat in October 1922. Despite a grave political crisis that engulfed the country after the Fascists assassinated the Socialist G. Matteotti in 1924, Mussolini managed to cling to power, taking advantage of the passivity of the anti-Fascist opposition (the Aventine Bloc) and invoking a reign of terror.
In 1926, Mussolini began to do away with constitutional liberties and establish an overt Fascist dictatorship. In 1929 he signed the Lateran agreements with the Vatican. By resorting to demagogic pronouncements regarding the feasibility of cooperation between labor and capital under a fascist corporate state, he guaranteed the most reactionary imperialist circles of the Italian bourgeoisie an opportunity for total domination of the economy and unlimited exploitation of the working class. The economy was militarized, and politics was dominated by nationalistic, expansionist objectives. Ethiopia was seized in 1936 and Albania in 1939.
After the establishment of a fascist dictatorship in Germany (1933), Mussolini concluded a political and military alliance with Germany, formalizing the relationship in a series of treaties. In 1940 he drew Italy into World War II on the side of Germany. Defeats suffered by fascist German and Italian troops in the war against the antifascist coalition and the strengthening of the antifascist movement in Italy led to the fall of Mussolini’s dictatorship on July 25, 1943. From 1943 to 1945 the Italian dictator headed a puppet government on Italian territory occupied by fascist German troops. He was captured by partisans near the Italian-Swiss border and executed by sentence of a military tribunal of the Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy.
B. R. LOPUKHOV