The names of Nikola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Soviet Union and Russia were and remain the streets of several cities, a factory for the production of writing utensils in Moscow and even a sanatorium in the Crimea. But it is unlikely that those who walked along the street with that name to one of the district police departments of Yekaterinburg, drew with pencils or vacationed in Yevpatoria, knew exactly what these two people became famous for. Judging by the surnames, it is clearly of Italian origin.
Anarchists from the Apennines
American anarchists, 30-year-old factory worker Nicola Sacco and 33-year-old fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti, gained worldwide popularity in 1921. Moreover, against their will and desire to become famous. On May 31, 1921, the court in the American city of Plymouth began hearing a criminal case on charges of these Italian immigrants in the murder in the town of South Braintree of a shoe factory cashier who was carrying $ 15,776 and two security guards.
On July 14 of the same year, a jury in the North American state of Massachusetts and Judge Webster Thayer did more than just agree with the prosecutor Ferdinand Katzman's charge against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They also supported his desire to send the defendants to the electric chair. While awaiting execution, Sacco and Vanzetti spent six years in Charleston Prison, until the late evening of August 22, 1927, which became their last.
Those considering the case did not take into account that not a single proven piece of evidence was found against the accused, except for the pistol and cartridges they had found in their possession. But they believed the witnesses who were regularly confused in their testimonies and contradicted themselves. At the same time, all irrefutable proofs of the innocence of Italians, especially Vanzetti, were rejected solely on the grounds that they were presented by other immigrants from the Apennine Peninsula.
The jury and Thayer, in their stubborn desire to accuse the defendants of the murder, were not stopped even by the fact that the gangster Celestino Maderos, who was arrested four years later, was admitted to committing this crime. As well as the fact that neither Nikola nor Bartolomeo was with him during the raid on the car. By the way, later Maderos was not only sentenced to death, but also killed on the same night as the Italians. He was executed for committing a crime, the only accused of which were the investigators under the arm of Sacco and Vanzetti.
But the court was greatly influenced by the almost criminal, in his opinion, belonging of Nikola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to anarchists and their active participation in the American strike movement. That is, the process turned out to be not so much criminal as political. As well as the subsequent harsh sentence, which became a kind of signal for the defeat of all leftist organizations in the country and the forced expulsion of thousands of immigrants from the United States. First of all, immigrants from Italy.
Worldwide resonance
The obvious political and anti-Italian background of the trial, coupled with the real lawlessness in the form of an almost complete lack of evidence and the right of the accused to defense, caused outrage all over the world. During the entire period of Sacco and Vanzetti's stay on death row, hundreds of thousands of people living not only in the United States, but also on the other side of the ocean, in Europe, sought to review the unfair sentence.
Among the protesters against the arbitrariness were, in particular, Albert Einstein, who announced that this tragedy would become an unhealed wound on the conscience of all mankind, as well as the Pope. Mass protest demonstrations took place in Johannesburg, Mexico City, Oslo, Montevideo, Copenhagen, New York. In Boston, London and Berlin, they even escalated into clashes with the police. And in Paris, where unions went on a daily strike, outraged townspeople almost broke into the US embassy.
In America itself, two weeks before the execution, there was even an unsuccessful attempt to seize the prison in which the convicts were held. A committee was created to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, which raised $ 400,000 to pay for lawyers. Unfortunately, the numerous well-grounded arguments of the defenders, the judge and the jury did not even want to listen. The fact that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti did not commit any crime was not officially announced in the United States until 50 years later. This statement was made by the Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, after several examinations and a thorough study of the case by the best lawyers in the country.
Heroes of the Soviet Union
The reaction to what happened in the USSR turned out to be very curious. In a country whose political leadership had a rather negative attitude towards anarchists and foreigners and where repressions against its own citizens had already begun, they suddenly inflamed a strong love for two condemned American proletarians. Moreover, they even decided to hold a real demonstration in Moscow against US imperialism and the lawlessness that is happening in this country.
After the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, several newspaper publications and books were published in the USSR about the fate of the unfortunate Italians who were sent to a martyr's death by the evil bourgeoisie. Several dozen streets and industrial enterprises in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, Novosibirsk, Izhevsk, Mariupol, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk and other cities of the country were named after a footwear worker and fishmonger who had nothing to do with the USSR and the communist movement.
