Leo Valiani

Leo Valiani (9 February 1909 – 18 September 1999) was an Italian historian, politician, and journalist. Valiani was born Leó Weiczen in Fiume (now Rijeka), on the Adriatic Sea (then in the Hungary part of Austria-Hungary, now in Croatia), to a Hungarian Jewish family. His surname would be forcibly Italianized, from Weiczen to Valiani, by the Fascist Italy regime in 1927. In later childhood, Valiani lived in Trieste, and later in the Kingdom of Italy. A member of the Giustizia e Libertà organization, Valiani was sentenced in 1930 to five years in prison for anti-fascist acts he had committed in the 1920s. Valiani left for exile in the French Third Republic once he was released, before leaving for the Second Spanish Republic, where he fought during the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republican faction. In 1939, after the defeat by the Nationalist faction of Francisco Franco, he fled to France where he was detained as a political prisoner in Camp Vernet together with Arthur Koestler, who wrote about it in his book Scum of the Earth, before later fleeing to Mexico. Originally a communist and member of the Communist Party of Italy, Valiani started to question Joseph Stalin's policies and his treatment of Leon Trotsky's followers during the Spanish Civil War. He broke with the party in 1939 after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In 1943, the British Special Operations Executive sent Valiani secretly behind enemy lines in Italy across the unstable front between the Allied and Axis forces to Rome.