Big Brawl in Bologna

A leftist rebuke to Eurocommunism

The students and young workers descended on Bologna 20,000 strong. Most were dressed in faded jeans, and T shirts or windbreakers; some had daubed their faces with paint, imitating American Indians on the warpath. They surged through the graceful colonnaded streets into the vast Piazza Maggiore for a first skirmish with their avowed enemy: the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.). As the throngs approached Bologna's huge Renaissance-style city hall, a handful of middle-aged Communist apparatchiks emerged to confront them. "We have been fighting to change things in Italy since 1944," a party militant told a bearded young demonstrator. "What other policy would you have us follow?" The student's quick answer: "A Communist policy." Said another young ultra: "You've given up fighting to change the system, you only want to save it. That's why you're trying to isolate us."

Thus began an improbable three-day conflict between youthful extremists who regard themselves as Marx's true heirs and Europe's largest and most innovative Communist Party. The ultras had come to Bologna from all over Italy for a weekend convention held to protest Communist "repression." They claim that the Communist Party, in its eagerness to share power with the Christian Democrats, has become a pillar of the Establishment and hates them for saying so.

Specifically, the demonstrators suspect Bologna party leaders, who have proudly and smoothly ruled that city for 32 years, of conspiring with the police in the arrest of 100 student leaders last March. The trouble began when an auxiliary policeman killed a student who had joined in a leftist attack on a moderate Catholic group. The boy's death sent thousands of students out of overcrowded Bologna University, whose 60,000 volatile undergraduates face a bleak future in Italy's recession-bound economy. For three days, the students occupied a 20-block commercial area, manhandling citizens, looting stores and burning cars in an orgy of youthful anarchism that was unprecedented, even in Italy.

The riots were deeply mortifying to the Communists, especially since they took place in Bologna, which the party has always pointed to as a paradigm of how it would work within a pluralistic society. Stung by the protests, Bologna party leaders suspected Italy's secret service, the CIA or other foreign intelligence outfits of manipulating extremists in order to discredit the Communists. Party leaders are especially bitter about a Parisian manifesto signed by 26 leftist intellectuals, including Writer Jean-Paul Sartre, accusing the Italian party of brutally putting down the students in Bologna.

The P.C.I. held a mass conclave in Modena on the eve of last week's demonstrations in Bologna. "Let these youths carry their insults against our party," declared Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer. "Bologna will surely not be disrupted by their lies." Berlinguer accused them of regarding "the Communist Party as the enemy to be defeated." In a bitter reference to the French intellectuals' manifesto, he noted that "the right wing often disguises itself as leftist, and cultural idiots at home and abroad fall right into the trap."

The young ultras are far better at saying what they are against than what they are for. They tend to be naive about economics, innocent of history and full of fragmentary Utopian ideas. On the first day of their conclave, 12,000 youths from a dozen factions jammed the Palasport, Bologna's main sports arena, for a four-hour meeting that was billed as a debate but was more like a shouting match. The crowd cheered one self-styled "comrade from Milan" who complained of Communist persecution of independent leftists in his factory. Another speaker concluded: "What we need now is organization. We've already shown we can fight." Already deeply impressed by the demonstrators' fighting capacity, the Italian Parliament is considering a series of tough new bills designed to curb terrorism and rioting.

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