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An event so fatal and fraught with consequences for thousands of Italian soldiers – swallowed up by the Russian steppe, plagued by tough Soviet resistance, as well as by adverse climatic conditions – and for their families, often destined to remain unaware of the fate of their relatives, ended up feeding a copious memoir, stimulated by the desire to account for a unique and devastating experience.
It is no coincidence that the Russian campaign – as the historian Maria Teresa Giusti, author of a valuable volume on the subject, pointed out – ended up as “one of the twentieth-century war events with the biggest impact on Italian collective memory”2.
A memory that is certainly uncomfortable, on the one hand, if we consider the fact that the war campaign was still an expression of the aggressive policy of Mussolini, but so disruptive due to the suffering and dramatic conditions of the retreat as to reveal the profound disillusionment with the regime. The bitter acknowledgment of the lack of training marked the participation of the Italian soldiers in the enterprise, which was opposed by the undoubted acts of heroism of those who were lucky enough to survive that terrible experience and return home. In this regard, it is interesting to re-read the authoritative testimony of another veteran, Nuto Revelli, among the first to denounce the dramatic conditions of the soldiers on the Russian front in his memorial writings: