At a Confluence of Population Streams: Former Soviet Citizens in the Italian Migratory Context

By the 1970s, Italy already had a long history of accommodating migrants from abroad. Particularly large numbers arrived after World War II. Some were ethnic Italians: diasporic survivors of the fallen colonial empire, often fleeing postwar retaliation in Yugoslavia, Greece, Libya, Somalia, or Ethiopia.Footnote ¹¹ Others, increasingly, were foreigners. Labeled first as “displaced persons” and later as “refugees,” postwar and Cold War migrants came from a variety of origins. In the future, some would arrive from Spain, Greece, and Chile, then governed by dictatorial regimes. Initially modest but growing populations would reach Italy from the Middle East, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. But an especially vast number came right after the war from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In the wake of the Holocaust, Jews moved to Israel via Italian seaports. Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Romanians, or Bulgarians employed a variety of dramatic means to escape their countries and seek asylum in the West.Footnote ¹²

In Italy, the newcomers were commonly placed in special camps named centri di raccolta, centri di assistenza, or centri di accoglienza—“centers of collection,” “assistance centers,” and “reception centers,” respectively. Occasionally, these were located on the premises of former concentration camps or military installations from the Fascist era. Among the largest were the camps of Latina (Province of Latina), Capua (Province of Caserta), Fraschette (Alatri, Province of Frosinone), Padriciano (Trieste, Province of Friuli Venezia Giulia), and Farfa Sabina (Castelnuovo di Farfa, Province of Rieti). Here the migrants awaited a decision on whether they would be granted refugee status and thereby asylum, either in Italy or in another country. The latter was a solution the Italian authorities much preferred.Footnote ¹³ From 1952 until 1990, decisions were made by the so-called Joint Eligibility Committee (Commissione Paritetica di Eleggibilità), a body composed of two members from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and another two from the Italian ministries of foreign affairs and the interior. For weeks or months, people living in the dingy, crime-infested camps awaited a decision on their fate.Footnote ¹⁴

Refugee status was highly coveted, as it gave migrants vital opportunities to settle and earn a living in the new country of residence. The Geneva Refugee Convention of 28 July 1951, on the basis of which the Joint Eligibility Committee was supposed to act, obliges each signatory government to assume responsibilities for anyone it grants asylum. These include protection from expulsion, opportunities for employment, elementary education, public relief, administrative assistance, and, above all, naturalization. When signing the convention in 1952, the Italian government reserved the right to treat these as mere “recommendations,” but later (in 1964 and ultimately in 1990) withdrew most of the reservations.Footnote ¹⁵ Italians also clung to another reservation guaranteed by the convention (Chapter 1, Section B(1)): that each signatory could limit the definition of “refugee” to persons from Europe. Known in Italian bureaucratese as riserva geografica, “geographic reservation,” it remained in force until Italy joined the Schengen area in 1990. Although Italy ostensibly acknowledged refugees recognized as such by the UNHCR, until 1990 most of them, coming from outside Europe, had little to no opportunity to immigrate to Italy and had to seek resettlement elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶

As a result, there were two categories of refugees on Italian soil: those who had received the fateful status and those who had not. The distinction between the “haves” and “have-nots”—refugees de jure and de facto—revealed itself in the vocabulary. The Italian language has two overlapping but not identical terms for “refugees.” One, rifugiati, usually but not always denotes refugees legally recognized as such and thus entitled to benefits prescribed by the Geneva Convention. The other term, profughi, has a broader meaning. While it may describe legal refugees too, profughi more often refers to foreigners whose refugee status has not (yet, or ever) become official, and who are thus entitled to little if anything by way of government support.Footnote ¹⁷ As will be discussed below, it was to this latter category, profughi—the have-nots—that most former Soviet citizens in Italy of the 1970s and 1980s belonged.

Like others, migrants from Russia and the Soviet Union had frequently traversed Italian territory. Branded as “displaced persons” (DPs), many came after World War II. In 1947–1951, the country accommodated at least 106,806 DPs of all origins.Footnote ¹⁸ Although not always neatly counted by background or nationality, about one third of DPs across all countries originated from the USSR and the former Russian Empire. This suggests that in Italy, too, ex-Soviets numbered in the thousands.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1951 alone, 2,191 individuals from Russia or the USSR resided in Italy, either “stably” or not.Footnote ²⁰ Whatever the numbers, postwar Italian odysseys of people from the Soviet Union are a frequent presence in the archives.Footnote ²¹ Later, during the 1950s and 1960s, many emigrants from the USSR surfaced in Italy as well. Among them were Jews with connections to Poland who took advantage of the November 1956 Soviet-Polish repatriation agreement and then left Poland for Israel by way of other European countries, Italy included.Footnote ²² The Italian Ministry of the Interior reported ex-Soviet Jewish transit migrants beginning to arrive in Italy via Austria in 1956.Footnote ²³ In 1961, according to the UNHCR, of more than 25,000 refugees or asylum seekers in Italy, about five percent, or some 1,250 individuals, originated from the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁴ In the same year, though, only 227 individuals from the USSR/Russia were officially Italian residents.Footnote ²⁵ Those figures were quite modest. But in the 1970s and 1980s, with the drastic increase of Jewish emigration from the USSR, the numbers of ex-Soviets on Italian soil skyrocketed.

Jews never constituted the entirety of ex-Soviet migrants in Italy. Not to mention the artificiality of ethnic attributions, frequent interethnic marriages in Soviet families ensured that even the migration administratively designated as Jewish was not ethnically homogeneous. Cohorts of non-Jewish ex-Soviets, including Pentecostals, Armenians, and occasional Baltic nationals, were moving through Italy as well. Nonetheless, the officially Jewish cohort was the largest, amounting to at least 185,000 transit migrants between 1971 and 1989. For that reason, this population is at the center of my analysis.

The Logistics of the Italian Passage

Initially, Soviet Jewish emigrants were not meant to spend time in Italy. Everyone’s destination was supposed to be Israel, since the declared purpose of emigration was to reunite with family members presumably residing in Israel. However, from the early 1970s, increasing numbers of people began opting out of the Israeli destination, choosing to immigrate to the West—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or other countries. Israel-related relief agencies often rather unflatteringly labeled such people noshrim, “dropouts,” from the Hebrew term for dropping out, neshira. By the end of 1989, “dropouts” comprised over half of Soviet Jewish emigration to date: of more than 360,000 individuals who emigrated on Israeli visas between 1971 and 1989, 176,234 went to Israel, while 184,967 immigrated to other countries.Footnote ²⁶

The most common path from the Soviet Union to the West lay through Austria and then Italy. The first major layover station was Vienna, where the migrants bifurcated into Israel-bound and West-bound streams. Arriving by train or plane, but occasionally by bus or even boat, people were met by representatives of the Jewish Agency for Israel, known as Sochnut, who interviewed them and promptly dispatched those who wished to go from Vienna to Tel Aviv.Footnote ²⁷ When someone did not wish to go to Israel, the Jewish Agency handed them over to the care of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or the Joint). From this point, HIAS would play the principal role, applying on the migrants’ behalf to consular sections of Western embassies for visa admissions and arranging for resettlement. The visa application process took place in Rome, the second major layover station of the journey.

Italy was selected as the main transit hub for several reasons. First, Italy was one of the few countries (along with Austria, Belgium, France, West Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, and Lebanon) where the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service accepted applications for “conditional entry processing” of prospective refugees, the category under which most ex-Soviets immigrated to the U.S., their primary destination.Footnote ²⁸ The second reason was Italy’s relatively low cost of living. This mattered because, while HIAS took care of visas and resettlement, the other agency, JDC, provided migrants with initial housing arrangements, financial allowances, health care, and some cultural-educational activities. Funded largely by the U.S. government, these expenses were substantial, so cutting costs was a priority.Footnote ²⁹

In most cases, migrants left the USSR as “stateless” persons, deprived of Soviet citizenship and possessing no other. The only identification they carried was a pink slip—a Soviet “exit visa”—expressly indicating Israel as the destination. Attached to it was another piece of paper bearing two stamps: an Israeli visa issued at the Dutch embassy in Moscow (Soviet-Israeli diplomatic relations had been severed since 1967, and the Netherlands represented Israeli interests in the USSR) and an Austrian visa, required for the Vienna layover.

There was, however, no Italian visa on those papers, at least not ordinarily. Except for rare instances of direct air travel from the USSR to Rome, most ex-Soviets entered Italy on so-called “collective transit visas,” which they usually did not even see.Footnote ³⁰ Every month, the HIAS office in Vienna compiled a list of migrants who were to proceed from there to Rome. With that list, an HIAS representative visited the Italian consulate in Vienna, which performed a security check and placed a stamp of approval. Together, the list and the stamp constituted a “collective transit visa.” Prior to the introduction of such visas, Soviet migrants had been admitted from Austria to Italy on a letter from the U.S. consulate in Vienna.Footnote ³¹ The collective visa was granted for 180 days, the maximum authorized duration of stay in Italy.Footnote ³² In the 1970s, when this arrangement was being worked out, no more than 400 ex-Soviet individuals per year, and twenty per month, were to be admitted to Italy. Subsequently, the numbers were surpassed many times over, but the procedure remained largely the same. In the late 1980s, some transit visas may have been issued by the Italian embassy in Moscow.Footnote ³³

Listed in this fashion, migrants traveled from Austria to Italy by train, accompanied by an HIAS employee who presented the “collective visa” to the Italian border police (or had the visas telexed in advance). As of 1979, four such trains departed from Vienna every week, each carrying 170 migrants in its last three cars. During the entire journey, the cars were locked. The travel took one day, crossing the Austrian-Italian border at the small Alpine station of Tarvisio. The train, notably, did not go all the way to Rome. About sixty kilometers outside of the Italian capital, usually at the station of Orte, the last three cars were detached, and HIAS workers rushed people into buses, which then proceeded to Rome.Footnote ³⁴ This procedure was designed to make the relocation of Soviet Jews as inconspicuous as possible, guarding against terrorist attacks.Footnote ³⁵

Unlike many other foreigners in Italy, people from the Soviet Union were usually spared the experience of refugee camps.Footnote ³⁶ Leaders of the Joint, with their long experience handling refugees, had decided against the camp method. “You know very well the attitude of all of us in JDC, who hate the idea of having people in camps,” Akiva Kohane (1911–1995), the head of the Joint’s regional office for Europe and North Africa and thus the senior administrator overseeing the Italian operation, wrote to Ralph Goldman (1914–2014), the agency’s executive vice president, in May 1979. The reasons were not so much humanitarian as technical and financial. First, running a camp was expensive.Footnote ³⁷ Second, the ex-Soviet population was too large for the limited Italian camp infrastructure.Footnote ³⁸ Third, Joint experts concluded that processing paperwork in camps was logistically less efficient than doing so through a central office in Rome.Footnote ³⁹

On those grounds, the idea of camps was abandoned in favor of other arrangements. Upon arrival in Rome from Vienna, migrants spent two weeks in basic boarding houses (pensioni) and were then expected to rent apartments on their own. To that end, they were paid monthly allowances and equipped with an Italian-Russian dictionary.Footnote ⁴⁰ The allowances were painfully small. As of 1979, the head of a household received 150,000 Italian lire per month, and each additional family member 75,000 lire. This was very little money. At an exchange rate of about 806 lire to the U.S. dollar, 150,000 lire equaled $186.Footnote ⁴¹ The Joint’s financial assistance to ex-Soviets was two-and-a-half to three times lower than what the Italian government paid migrants in its care. As Kohane acknowledged in June 1979, “Our average daily assistance for a family oscillates between 3000 [$3.60 USD] and 3500 Lire [$4.18 USD] per day, at a time when the Italian authorities give to refugees under their assistance 8,500 lire [$10.16 USD] per day.”Footnote ⁴²

And so, every month a family had to rent an apartment, buy food and other basic items, all on about four dollars a day. Informed officials described the situation as living “on bread, potatoes, and onions.”Footnote ⁴³ The strong smell of cooked onions, a cheap staple bought out of necessity, permeated the premises rented by ex-Soviets and would be remembered by local Italians as one of the most distinctive physical features of this population. Apartments in Rome were expensive, so migrants turned to its seaside periphery, where, as Joint counselors and the grapevine informed them, cheaper housing was available, especially outside the summer vacation season. Thus, in the 1970s, thousands of people from the Soviet Union began to populate the Tyrrhenian coast near Rome. The two places they favored, Lido di Ostia and Ladispoli, were situated in this area.

What also distinguished ex-Soviets was that, unlike many other migrants, they overwhelmingly could not, and did not, seek asylum in Italy. Refugee status was granted, or sometimes denied, to them by a Western country of their destination, but in Italy they were not considered refugees in the legal sense of the word. While being refugees de facto (profughi), they had little chance of becoming refugees de jure (rifugiati). This inability to receive Italian asylum did not result from any legislative provision. Until 1990 (and definitively until 2007), Italy did not have a comprehensive law on asylum, so everything depended on the discretion of government bureaucrats in Rome. But even where legal provisions existed, there were ways to circumvent them—as is usually the case in immigration matters. During the 1970s, based on political circumstances, Italian officials would sometimes bypass even the notorious “geographic reservation” and grant asylum to refugees from outside Europe. This happened, for example, in 1973–1975 with several hundred Chilean escapees from the Pinochet regime, and in the late 1970s with refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, had the Italian government wanted to grant asylum to people from the Soviet Union, this could have been done. The issue, as discussed below, was that Rome did not want this.

Although there were isolated cases of ex-Soviets settling in Italy permanently (usually through marriage to Italians but occasionally via more unusual paths), there is no evidence of a widespread aspiration to do so, or of broad-scale efforts in that direction. What abounds, instead, are narratives of a desire to go overseas—usually to the U.S., Canada, or Australia—countries that these Soviet people imagined as lands of opportunity.Footnote ⁴⁵ The imagination undoubtedly fed on cultural preconceptions, worth analyzing separately, but practical opportunities and a lack of information played a role as well. The agencies that ran this migration channeled it toward countries willing to accept a large mass of ex-Soviets, who, in turn, overwhelmingly went along with the readiest (and often only) algorithm of immigrating to the West. Agency caseworkers in Rome did not convey to them even the hypothetical possibility of applying for asylum in Italy, since the Italian sojourn was programmed as only a temporary layover. This, as we shall see, was a program the Italian government readily endorsed.

“A Very Dangerous Precedent”: Soviet Migrants and Italy’s Middle Eastern Challenges

In their internal correspondence, Italian officials always stressed that former Soviet citizens were not to stay in Italy permanently, and especially not to claim refugee status. Official Rome studiously distanced itself from these migrants’ affairs, denying occasional requests for help.Footnote ⁴⁶ This position aligned with the overall strategy of minimizing immigration and limiting Italy’s role to that of a transit country.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although, again, nothing legally prevented Rome from granting asylum to at least some ex-Soviets, Italian administrators were determined not to add Soviet Jews to the long list of claimants for the benefits mandated by the Geneva Convention.

The stance of deliberate disengagement, however, quickly ran into challenges. One was repeat migration of ex-Soviets from Israel. Almost immediately after the onset of the Jewish exodus from the USSR, people who moved to Israel but failed to adapt to life there, for economic or cultural reasons, began abandoning Israel for Western countries. In the parlance of relief agencies, such repeat migrants were labeled with the Hebrew word yordim—a derivative of yerida(h), “descent,” the term for all emigration from Israel. In the early-to-mid 1970s, thousands of Soviet yordim were relocating from Israel to Europe. Most traveled to Italy, hoping to obtain Western immigrant visas with the help of the same agencies that assisted other ex-Soviets arriving from Austria. These hopes, however, were dashed by concerted international action. Determined to maximize the population influx to Israel, the Israeli government pressured Western governments and Jewish relief organizations to deny help to yordim. In defiance, many people continued to leave Israel. Between 1973 and the early-to-mid 1980s, at least 3,500 to 4,000 (possibly more) ex-Soviet Israelis became dispersed across Western Europe—in Italy, but also in France, Belgium, West Germany, Austria, or Greece—desperately trying to immigrate to any Western country. As of October 1974, at least 1,101 of them were living around Rome.Footnote ⁴⁸ They often settled in the same places, such as Lido di Ostia, as their counterparts from Vienna. Unlike the latter, however, the escapees from Israel enjoyed no financial allowances, no health care provisions, no schooling for children, and few chances of legal immigration. Thus, in the same Italian towns, two categories of Soviet migrants emerged: one relatively privileged, the other completely destitute.Footnote ⁴⁹

Officials in Rome had some trouble understanding which Soviet people came from where, but they watched the yordim crisis with anxiety. In July 1976, Vice Admiral Mario Casardi (1915–1982), the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency, SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa), reported to the Minister of the Interior and future prime minister and president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga (1928–2010), a list of 436 ex-Soviet Israelis living in Rome, including Lido di Ostia. Military intelligence was concerned that they might establish contact with Soviet diplomats who would exploit them for propaganda purposes.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, Moscow reporters in Rome and Vienna gleefully covered the yordim fiasco of Soviet Jewish emigration, publishing interviews with angry, impoverished people.Footnote ⁵¹ In Rome, Soviet consular officials accosted migrants from Israel on the street, addressing them by name and inviting them to return to the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁵² Italians also feared that some desperate yordim might resort to violence.Footnote ⁵³ That did not happen, although protests and hunger strikes did. In May 1976, a group of mothers with children burst into the Roman offices of HIAS and the JDC on Viale Regina Margherita, pleading for help with American visas. Both agencies refused to help, while the Italian police drove the protesters out and then declined to renew their permit to demonstrate outside the building.Footnote ⁵⁴

The government’s main concern, however, was not espionage or protests but, again, the possibility that the yordim might seek refugee status in Italy. Uncommon as that was, eventually some did try this path. In August 1976, Cossiga received an inquiry from Pasquale Bandiera (1924–2002), a member of parliament who headed the Italian section of the International League of Human Rights. Bandiera had been approached by some ex-Soviet Israelis from Ostia who apparently wished to claim asylum in Italy. Not actually intending to stay, they (mistakenly) believed that Italian refugee status could facilitate their eventual immigration to the U.S.Footnote ⁵⁵ In September, the same group appealed to the Pope himself, Paul VI, begging him to intervene on their behalf.Footnote ⁵⁶ A confused correspondence followed between the State Secretariat of the Holy See, the Italian embassy to the Vatican, and the ministries of foreign affairs and the interior. The police were especially alarmed. Although the ex-Soviets wanted refugee status only as leverage to go elsewhere, Cossiga’s ministerial bureaucrats feared that granting asylum to any migrants would encourage countless others, of all origins, to try to stay on Italian soil. Among the concerned was Giuseppe Parlato (1917–2003), who, as the chief of police, oversaw the Ministry of the Interior’s division responsible for handling foreigners: the so-called Foreigner Service, or Servizio Stranieri. In November 1976, Parlato wrote to Cossiga: “…[I]t seems clear that the possible granting of the status of refugees to the group of Jews staying in Ostia Lido […] would not only further aggravate the situation, already precarious in terms of order of public safety—since these people, once they have obtained the ‘status’ of refugees and are aware of being protected by the Geneva Convention, would no longer be encouraged to emigrate to other countries—but it would [also] constitute a very dangerous precedent and an incentive to ask for political asylum for the thousands of refugees who transit through Italy every year.”Footnote ⁵⁷

This “very dangerous precedent” formula, which Cossiga reproduced verbatim in his reply to Bandiera, reflected his ministry’s default skeptical position about granting asylum to any migrants—a longstanding post-World War II approach of the Italian government.Footnote ⁵⁸ In that sense, Cossiga and Parlato did not invent anything new. But several months later, the ministerial bureaucracy found another way to skirt the issue of asylum for ex-Soviet Israelis. When 280 of them again wrote to the Holy See in April 1977, the ministry simply suggested to the Vatican that these people were Israeli citizens, and “the Italian Government has no possibility of interfering, as these are relations between citizens of a democratic state [Israel] with guarantees of freedom […] and another state.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The migrants’ plea was thus batted away. As for human rights issues—for example the fact that this “democratic state with guarantees of freedom” deliberately blocked the emigration of its citizens who did not want to live there and that those citizens were then forced into years of extreme poverty without access to health care—such inconvenient details were not even mentioned.

By the end of the 1970s, most ex-Soviet Israelis had left Italy, as the gates to the West were closing ever tighter upon them. Some managed to obtain Western visas; others had to return to Israel, vanished without a trace, or, in some cases, died. Cossiga’s “very dangerous precedent”—that of helping impoverished people trapped between borders—never materialized.

Israel, however, remained on the Italian government’s radar. In September 1979, the police learned about ostensibly educational activities that the Israeli government was organizing for the ex-Soviets who kept arriving in Rome from Vienna. Although such activities required authorization from a host country’s government, the Israelis had not obtained any. When Rome requested an explanation, a plenipotentiary minister from the Israeli embassy, Joseph Ravit, visited the director of the Foreigner Service, Vincenzo Parisi (1930–1994). It turned out that eleven Israeli “animators,” as the Italians called them, had indeed arrived in Ostia and Ladispoli “to entertain the visitors and take care of their cultural and religious education according to the historical Israelite tradition.” They had entered Italy as tourists, taking advantage of the recently introduced visa exemption policy between Italy and Israel. This annoyed Italian officials, who felt that, by disguising professional activities as tourism, the Israelis were abusing the relationship of trust between the two countries.Footnote ⁶⁰

More concerning, though, was the likelihood that these activities, while purportedly educational, actually pursued strategic and military objectives. Apparently, the goal was to persuade younger Soviet migrants to abandon their West-bound course and immigrate to Israel, where they would serve in the military. “Despite the declared reasons,” wrote the current chief of police, Giovanni Rinaldo Coronas (1919–2008), to the new minister of the interior, Virginio Rognoni (1924–2022), “the initiative seems to be […] encouraging the migration of young people to the State of Israel with a view to advantages for military personnel.”Footnote ⁶¹

Italian officials became alarmed. An attempt to divert migrants to Israel for military purposes could easily provoke Islamist terrorist attacks on Italian soil. Moreover, Rome anticipated even broader international repercussions from the Israeli initiative. In 1979, Italy was poised to sign the so-called Venice Declaration of the European Council (which it ultimately did sign, in June 1980). The document called for Palestinian self-determination, recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a legitimate party in international negotiations. What the Italians suspected, then, was a Machiavellian scheme: namely, that the promotion of Israel among Soviet migrants was intended to trigger a (possibly violent) Arab reaction, thereby disrupting Italy’s signing of the declaration. One senior police official, likely Parisi, wrote bluntly: “According to confidential sources, the Israeli conduct could also be inspired by the aim of provoking Arab reactions and consequently reversing Italy’s recognition of the PLO.”Footnote ⁶²

Gone were rhetorical pleasantries about “democratic states with guarantees of freedom.” The chief of police ordered his force to exercise “necessary vigilance,” placing the Israeli “animators” under surveillance.Footnote ⁶³ Then, on the morning of 5 November 1979, a confidential meeting took place at the Palazzo della Farnesina, a gigantic building in Rome originally designed to house the headquarters of the Fascist party and later repurposed for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Present, besides the diplomats, were two senior police officials, Parisi among them, as well as representatives of Italy’s intelligence services: military (SISMI, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) and civil (SISDE, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica). It was resolved that the Israeli propagandists were to be removed from Italian territory, “with the aim of averting terrorist activities the presence of these animators could trigger.” Italian officials also rejected the Israeli proposal to authorize extended visits to Israel by ex-Soviet migrants aged fourteen to eighteen, since these visits were “intended to conceal the planned recruitment campaign.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The chief of police remained skeptical, though, suspecting that Israeli persuasion efforts would continue in one form or another.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, they resumed in subsequent years, although ultimately proving unsuccessful: the migrants overwhelmingly refused to abandon their westbound course in favor of Israel.Footnote ⁶⁶

These two episodes—the escapees from Israel, and the Israeli “animators”—highlighted several strategic priorities of the Italian government. First, Rome sought to maintain a restrictive migration regime, avoiding anything that might encourage foreign asylum seekers. Second, the ex-Soviet Jewish transit through Italian territory posed a challenge for Rome’s relations with the Middle East. Situated close to the region and linked to it by important economic ties, notably access to energy resources, Italy valued a stable relationship with the Arab world.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the context of Arab-Israeli confrontation, the transit also raised concern for the physical safety of many people on the Apennine Peninsula. Seeking balanced international relations, Rome avoided intervening in the transit except when necessary to put out a fire.

In the two cases examined here, the fires were quickly put out or gradually consumed themselves (at the migrants’ expense). At other moments, however, the fire grew larger, demanding more robust intervention. To examine those moments, we now turn to local Italian politics.

The Crisis of Migrant Overcrowding on the Tyrrhenian Littoral

The trouble with Soviet emigration was its unpredictability. One could never tell how many people would leave the USSR at a given time, how quickly consular officers in Rome would process immigration papers, and, consequently, how long migrants would remain in Italy. When the migratory flow was light, the infrastructure could accommodate a limited number of stragglers, but at times when the Soviet authorities relaxed their grip on emigration, thousands would populate the Vienna-Rome channel, threatening an overflow. Two such crises occurred: one at the twilight of the Brezhnev détente, in 1978–1979, and the other a decade later, at the height of Gorbachev’s reforms. Here I will mainly focus on the first crisis.

The year 1979 marked the highest peak of Soviet Jewish emigration to date. As of April, an average of 4,000 individuals were leaving the USSR each month.Footnote ⁶⁸ From January through April, 16,274 people arrived in Austria—more than twice as many as over the same period in 1978.Footnote ⁶⁹ Each month, between 61.8 percent and 70.1 percent of these declared an intention not to go to Israel and, from Vienna, headed to Italy.Footnote ⁷⁰ Of the 51,331 individuals who left the Soviet Union with Israeli visas in 1979, two-thirds—34,053, or 66.3 percent—bypassed Israel, heading to the West.Footnote ⁷¹ At this rate, the mass of transit migrants began to exceed the capacity of HIAS and some of the consulates in Rome. A growing backlog of applications forced people to await visas for months. By 20 April, Rome and its vicinity had accumulated a record number of 10,251 ex-Soviets. By December, officials feared, the number might rise to between 15,000 and 17,000.Footnote ⁷²

As mentioned above, most migrants were concentrated in two locations on the Tyrrhenian coast: Lido di Ostia and Ladispoli. The two were very different. Ostia, administratively not a city but “District 13” (Circoscrizione XIII) of Rome, had a population of about 100,000 that swelled to a million during summer vacation season. Ladispoli, on the other hand, was a separate and much smaller municipality (comune) of only about 11,000 residents.Footnote ⁷³ Despite that, in late April 1979, Ladispoli housed more ex-Soviet migrants than Ostia did: over 5,000 as compared to 3,000.Footnote ⁷⁴ The newcomers, therefore, constituted about one-third (31.25 percent) of the town’s de facto population. In February 1979, Akiva Kohane thus described his visit to Ladispoli: “Walking in the street at 11 a.m. at a time when all Italians are at home or working, practically all the people in the streets have been only Russians. They completely dominated the town scene, including already three markets.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The markets are worth mentioning. Given how meager migrants’ finances were, small-scale trade became a means of survival. Everything was for sale. Cameras, watches, compasses, jewelry, postcards, and the ubiquitous nesting dolls, the matryoshkas, all found their way to these town markets to bring the seller a little extra cash. It was common to carry items for sale all the way from the Soviet Union. Successive waves of migrants were in contact with families and friends back home by mail or telephone, so people knew that tough times awaited them in Italy. Obviously, such peddling was illegal: stateless ex-Soviets were prohibited from employment in Italy. And yet, at the risk of confrontation with law enforcement, they persisted. Some even began buying fresh fruit and reselling it on the streets, to the dismay of the Joint’s observers, who feared a clash between these budding entrepreneurs and local grocers. Many took up illicit work as car washers, shop and garage hands, waiters, or cleaners.Footnote ⁷⁶

Such a tale of poverty and subterfuge has been told in many contexts by many a migrant, from whom the Soviet people in Italy were not very different. What is less known is that this massive influx of newcomers also created material difficulties for local Italians. For a town of eleven thousand residents, five thousand migrants presented a major demographic and economic challenge.

Transportation posed one set of issues. Ladispoli is located about forty-two kilometers from Rome, and thousands of ex-Soviets frequently traveled to the capital and back by bus or train to handle visa paperwork or peddle at Roman markets, notably the famous Porta Portese. This placed a burden on public transportation. Jam-packed from the start of a ride, buses often failed to stop at villages between Ladispoli and Rome, leaving local commuters stranded. On several occasions, such as on 19 April 1979, outraged locals, who faced either missing the bus or standing on their feet all the way, blocked the road and protested loudly.Footnote ⁷⁷ To appease them, the Joint rented two additional buses for migrants, but this did not resolve the problem.Footnote ⁷⁸ Often, ex-Soviets did not purchase tickets, or they forged monthly passes.Footnote ⁷⁹ Authentic passes were borrowed by one person from another, a practice acceptable in the Soviet Union but illegal in Italy. Safety was a concern, too: because migrants could not read Italian signage, railroad signs had to be duplicated in Russian to prevent people from crossing the tracks.Footnote ⁸⁰

The post office presented another problem. Mail communication remained intense between those who had embarked on their Italian odyssey and their families and friends in the USSR. This drove Italian postal workers to despair: not only did they face long lines of customers speaking an incomprehensible language, but the Cyrillic addresses on thousands of envelopes and parcels were illegible to them. Deliveries were constantly bungled.Footnote ⁸¹

Housing was perhaps the biggest issue. The massive population increase and high demand for living space drove up rents and depleted the local housing market. Landlords and real estate agents knew this well. Although each migrant family usually had little money, families were quick to join forces and rent apartments together, sometimes paying quite a hefty combined rent. Several families lived tightly side by side, one room per family. There was a revolving door system, too: as some departed, others inherited their room. And so, in Italy of the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet migrants recreated a housing phenomenon from their country of origin: the proverbial communal apartment. The reverse side of this anthropological innovation was a shortage of housing for Italian renters.Footnote ⁸²

More alarming incidents began to occur, too. The police reported prostitution among ex-Soviet women targeting Italian men in bars.Footnote ⁸³ Some migrants engaged in extortion, forcing valuables (usually gold and jewelry) from their fellow nationals through a variety of schemes, which often involved false promises to expedite visa processing. There were instances of drug dealing, violence, and even murder. On 8 July 1979, what Italian journalists described as a “bloodbath” (bagno di sangue) in Ostia left two ex-Soviets dead and two more severely wounded. A police investigation uncovered a dark world of intimidation, extortion, and torture that the gang’s members, themselves migrants, imposed on their terrified ex-compatriots.Footnote ⁸⁴

The evidence presents a mixed picture of how local Italians reacted to this influx of foreigners. While some grumbled, others benefited. Among the beneficiaries were landlords and hotel owners, who occasionally even asked the Joint to send more migrants.Footnote ⁸⁵ One entrepreneurial Ladispolan bought up hotel space in town and signed a contract with the Joint whereby the agency would send him “at least one transport a week.”Footnote ⁸⁶ A few shopkeepers did worry about illegal trade, but others profited from the new demand for consumer goods. Grocers and bakers “spoke with praise about transmigrants, and many […] put out signs in Russian to attract new customers.”Footnote ⁸⁷ A letter from an “Autonomous Association of Merchants of Ladispoli,” dated January 1979 and addressed to the municipal authorities, stated that the association had “never received complaints […] regarding the stay of Russian refugees in our municipality, and therefore does not believe it necessary to end the hospitality extended to them.”Footnote ⁸⁸ That said, vacationers frowned as apartments became scarce and rents rose; users of the strained municipal services grew annoyed; and, given Italy’s already high unemployment, the unemployed and the trade unions hardly appreciated the illicit competition in the job market.Footnote ⁸⁹

On balance, former Soviet citizens and local Italians were on fairly amicable terms. However, as migrant overcrowding worsened over the winter and spring of 1979, that amicability threatened to expire. Graffiti on the walls told an alarming story. Just beside the local marketplace in Ladispoli, with its bustling trade in watches, cameras, and matryoshkas, “tremendous” graffiti read, “Go home, stinking Russians” or “Dirty Russians, have a bath.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The references to odor and physical cleanliness may have reflected not only racial prejudice but also migrants’ use of cheap yet pungent cooking ingredients, such as the aforementioned onions. The graffiti did not seem to deter either the peddlers or their Italian customers, and yet one might wonder how long peace would last. In Ostia, too, graffiti proliferated. One read: “We need the houses! Russians go away” (Le case ci servono! Via i russi). The situation began to draw press attention. In mid-March, the influential Roman newspaper Il Messaggero reproduced the graffiti while discussing housing tensions between migrants and locals.Footnote ⁹¹ In reality, three or four thousand ex-Soviets could not seriously disrupt the housing market in a locality of Ostia’s size, which accommodated up to a million vacationers. Anti-migrant sentiment fed on the conspicuousness of the aliens rather than any real economic threat they posed.

Antisemitism reared its head, too. The Joint, whose local employees closely followed the situation, was quick to insist that the graffiti were generally “xenophobic” rather than specifically antisemitic in character.Footnote ⁹² This was not quite so. On the one hand, indeed, any Jewish identity of the migrants barely registered with most Italians, who kept referring to them as “Russians.” On the other hand, as the number of “Russians” grew, their Jewishness became increasingly noticed. The same article in Il Messaggero mentioned swastikas painted on the walls.Footnote ⁹³ “I have seen many Fascist and Nazi graffiti, including inscriptions in German ‘Heil Hitler,’ swastikas, etc.,” Kohane commented upon visiting Ladispoli in January–February 1979.Footnote ⁹⁴ In July, more menacing graffiti appeared in Ostia. One read: “Let Us Burn the Russian Termites,” while another left no doubt about its author’s antisemitism: “For the Jews, neither schools nor hospitals but extermination camps.”Footnote ⁹⁵ On 21 November, two young men placed a note at the HIAS office in Rome. Handwritten in three languages—with the main body in Italian but opening with a Nazi “Sieg Heil!” in German and signed in English, “Warriors”—the note was unmistakably antisemitic, referring to “Russian Jews” as insects infesting the premises.Footnote ⁹⁶

The writing was on the wall, in this case literally, and a violent outburst appeared to be only a matter of time. This was clearly the perception of Italian authorities, since at that point they did intervene. Over the course of 1979, officials from the mayor of Ladispoli to high-ranking police officers and diplomats in Rome invited the regional directors of HIAS, the Joint, and other relief agencies to a series of meetings. The Italians insisted that the overpopulation crisis be resolved urgently. Violence and terrorist attacks were the most notable concerns. Terrorism could be international: the last thing Italian officials wanted was an attack by radical Islamists against Soviet Jews somewhere in Ladispoli. But an attack could also be of domestic origin, given the scale of political violence in Italy’s streets at the time.

Some observers felt that the migrants’ presence had become a wedge issue in Italian electoral politics. Journalists speculated that the antisemitic inscriptions might have been produced by adherents of the small neo-Fascist party, Giorgio Almirante’s (1914–1988) Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano).Footnote ⁹⁷ The Joint eyed the upcoming parliamentary election of 3 June 1979, suspecting that rival parties might exploit discontent over the “Russians.” Indeed, in the spring some “Christian Democrats of Ladispoli” spread a leaflet blaming the municipal administration, then controlled by Communists, for using the “Russians” as an excuse for administrative incompetence.Footnote ⁹⁸ After the 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, the Communists were under attack, and their opponents seized on any opportunity to press the point. The head of the Foreigner Service, Parisi, remarked: “The right accuses the refugees from ‘Red Paradise’ of causing trouble, and the left says they are a rightist group who abandoned the Soviet Homeland.”Footnote ⁹⁹

That said, Rome never regarded the migrant overcrowding as merely a card in political games. Parisi, for one, considered the problem so grave that one night, after working hours, he visited the Joint’s Roman office in “great secrecy” to discuss what to do.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Meetings at high levels also continued after the 3 June election, further evidence that the government took the situation seriously. On 22 June, diplomats and senior police officials met with the regional directors of six international migrant relief agencies operating in Italy—HIAS, the JDC, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the Tolstoy Foundation, the World Council of Churches (WCC), and the Central Office for Italian Emigration (Ufficio Centrale per l’Emigrazione Italiana, UCEI). Officers of military and civil intelligence (SISMI and SISDE) attended as well. Italian officials, Parisi most vocally, demanded that the issuance of transit visas in Vienna be regularized (i.e., limited); that migrants’ financial allowances be raised; and that migrant concentrations in Ostia and Ladispoli be dispersed to other towns to reduce tensions.Footnote ¹⁰¹

This was easier said than done. Geographic dispersal was originally requested by Ladispoli’s Communist mayor, Crescenzo Paliotta, who communicated the idea to Minister of the Interior Rognoni and his deputy, Undersecretary of State Nicola Lettieri (1923–2004).Footnote ¹⁰² The ministry supported the idea but was reluctant to create a plethora of ex-Soviet Jewish colonies across Italian towns. In one candid conversation, Parisi confided in Kohane his worries about a “ghetto syndrome” and “transplanting the anti-Semitic and xenophobic attitude of Ostia and Ladispoli to other places.” Rather than dispersing Soviet Jews, he suggested hiding them in plain sight: in Rome itself, where, diluted in the vast city, they would be less conspicuous. This did not happen, but the suggestion indicated that police considered antisemitism in Italy a real threat.Footnote ¹⁰³

The main obstacles, though, were logistics and money. The Joint argued that a “decentralization of caseload” would impede paperwork processing. It was simply more convenient to have migrants concentrated in Ladispoli than to chase them across a multitude of towns and villages.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As for raising allowances, doing so to the point where people would not need to resort to illegal employment or peddling would require an investment that, according to the Joint’s office director in Rome, Loni Mayer, would have to “run into very high numbers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Meanwhile, much of the funding for the Italian operation came from the U.S. government, and a major increase was unlikely.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Thus, little if any improvement was in sight. On 15 September 1979, the Joint counted about 6,500 ex-Soviet migrants in Italy, most still in Ostia (2,350) and Ladispoli (3,000)—fewer than in April, but still conspicuous.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ What particularly concerned Italian officials was that the numbers were projected to grow. On 20 November, in a communication marked “urgent,” Minister of the Interior Rognoni informed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that he had learned “from a confidential source” of a “cleverly formulated” American proposal to increase the ex-Soviet transit to 40,000 or 45,000 individuals a year. Italy, Rognoni insisted, ought to stand against such “massive transits, given the dangers they conceal for the security of the State in view of undesirable infiltrations and the attraction […] for terrorism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The numbers, of course, depended not only on how many people Washington would admit but also on how many Moscow would let leave, yet Italian officials focused, somehow, on the American side of the equation. It was decided to ask the U.S. not to increase the transit. Should the Americans proceed regardless, Rognoni hinted at “specific decisions” to be made “with the assumption of consequent responsibilities.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rome was clearly preparing for action to minimize ex-Soviet presence in Italy.

In the eleventh hour, action turned out to be unnecessary. A few weeks later, in December 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan signaled the end of détente. In the new geopolitical climate of the early 1980s, the Soviet government sharply curtailed Jewish emigration, rendering any talk about increasing transits moot.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For now, the issue of migrant overcrowding appeared to be resolved.

When the Floodgates Opened: Italy and the Transnational Migrations of the Late 1980s

It all came back just a few years later. In 1988–89, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms removed most restrictions on Jewish emigration from the USSR, the numbers in the Vienna-Rome transit skyrocketed again. Be it by word of mouth or bureaucratic inertia, new migrants again concentrated in the same old locations, Ostia and Ladispoli. Parisi, who by then had risen to the rank of chief of police, reported that on 9 January 1989 about 7,000 foreign migrants were present in Ladispoli, 4,500 of them “Russian Jews” (ebrei russi). The town had 17,000 permanent residents at this point, so the newcomers comprised about 29 percent of its de facto population of 24,000—a share similar to that of 1979. Predictably, all the familiar issues associated with overcrowding came back as well.Footnote ¹¹¹

To resolve the crisis, Italian officials again raised the idea of geographic dispersal. In May 1988, a delegation led by Ladispoli’s mayor, Siro Bargiacchi, visited the Ministry of the Interior, asking that migrants be dispersed to other towns. The following winter, the problem only grew more acute, so on 9 January 1989 the mayor again wrote to the ministry, which again summoned the Joint and other relief agencies. Dispersal had to happen now, the Italians insisted.Footnote ¹¹² This time, probably because more migrants were expected, the pressure finally worked. Starting in 1989, agency caseworkers in Rome began telling newcomers not to go to Ladispoli but instead to seek housing in nearby towns. Although such instances had existed before, it was now that sizable communities of former Soviet citizens began to grow in Santa Marinella, Passo Oscuro, Anzio, Pomezia, Latina, and other localities around Rome. In February 1989, as many as 436 “Russians” were living in Aprilia, a city of about 50,000 in the nearby Province of Latina.Footnote ¹¹³

The overcrowding persisted, though. As emigration from the USSR rose, some of these new migrant concentrations also grew quite large. Santa Marinella, a town of 11,000, housed some 2,500 “Russians” in May 1989, while neighboring Ladispoli still housed no fewer than 4,252.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The total non-resident foreign population in Ladispoli remained about 7,000 in May, the same as in January. Mayor Bargiacchi asked the ministry for another appointment.Footnote ¹¹⁵

On top of that, new problems arose. Concerned about the implications of growing Soviet Jewish emigration for the U.S. budget, in August 1988 Attorney General Edwin Meese (b. 1931) introduced more stringent consular interviewing for ex-Soviet Jews, who now had to prove that they had been persecuted in the USSR on antisemitic grounds. Because much depended on the discretion of immigration officers, in the following months an increasingly high proportion of interviews at the consular section of the U.S. embassy in Rome—up to thirty-six percent in March 1989—ended in rejection.Footnote ¹¹⁶ After the first rejection, there was one chance for a make-up interview. A second rejection meant that one had to apply for immigration to another country or go to Israel. In a way, the rejected applicants of 1988–1989 found themselves in the position of their yordim predecessors from the 1970s. Desperate people kept applying and reapplying, knocking on various doors, while remaining stranded in Italy indefinitely.

That was what official Rome feared the most. The “Russians,” previously expected to leave quickly, now threatened to join thousands of other de facto refugees in Italy with uncertain prospects, becoming a chronic headache for the government. The numbers kept rising. By July 1989, Ladispoli with its 17,000 permanent residents accommodated as many as 16,000 ex-Soviets—about fifty percent of the town’s actual population. Among them were 4,400 interview rejects.Footnote ¹¹⁷

At this point, some Italian officials began calling for a complete end to the Soviet transit. One such voice belonged to Alessandro Voci (1928–2008), Prefect of Rome and future head of Italy’s civil intelligence agency, SISDE, who pondered a “political expediency to regulate the migration flow from the USSR to the USA differently, perhaps through a direct transit between the two countries.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ What especially alarmed Italian bureaucrats was that Soviet emigration was part of rapidly intensifying migratory processes associated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Although celebrated in the media, the collapse brought a fear to Western governments: the specter of a migration tsunami from Eastern Europe and the USSR. In January 1989, Parisi sent a “very urgent” dispatch to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The number of visas issued in a few days […] suggests a large-scale movement of Israelite Russians about to leave the USSR […]. The prospects for achieving emigration [from Italy], as already noted for refugees from Eastern Europe, mainly Polish, 6,000 of whom are still in Italy, are significantly weakened. Therefore, a further, massive immigration without a concrete corresponding rapid solution, risks assuming uncontrollable proportions, with grave implications […] for public order and security.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

In the end, things turned out far less “grave” and “uncontrollable” than Parisi and Voci had anticipated. Most Soviets and East Europeans did not leave their countries, and those who did were absorbed into Western societies without any public security disasters.Footnote ¹²⁰ But immigration was no longer just about Soviets and East Europeans. Global population shifts were on the rise. In Italy of the late 1980s, newcomers from the Soviet bloc increasingly coexisted with others of an ever-wider variety of origins. A 1989 assessment in and around Ladispoli identified migrants from twenty-seven countries, from Afghanistan to Zaire, of whom the “Russians” were only one group, albeit the largest.Footnote ¹²¹

For a long time, the Italian government did not know what to do with all these newcomers, but eventually Rome began to act. In 1990, the parliament passed the so-called Martelli Law, which enabled undocumented and illegal immigrants to regularize their status in Italy, opening a path to naturalization. The law also abolished the longstanding “geographic reservation” that had prevented non-Europeans from immigrating. By adopting this landmark legislation, Italy finally acknowledged the changing nature of its own society and worldwide migrations, opening a door into the twenty-first century.Footnote ¹²²

The door, however, opened just a few months too late for people from the Soviet Union. The year 1990, when the Martelli Law took effect, also marked the end of ex-Soviet transit through Italian territory. In October 1989, concerned about the financial burden of accepting a growing number of ex-Soviets, the U.S. government moved its visa processing from Rome to Moscow, while simultaneously tightening requirements for immigration from the USSR. Steps were also taken to clear the backlog of remaining consular cases. That, along with corresponding actions by other governments, led to the shutdown of the Vienna-Rome transit channel. Over the course of 1990, nearly all the remaining ex-Soviets left Italy and immigrated to other countries. The two-decade-long Italian operation came to an end.Footnote ¹²³

Any bureaucrat in Rome who gave a sigh of relief, however, was about to be disappointed. In the decades that followed, Italy would experience far larger waves of immigration from all over the world, which, in retrospect, made the passage of the ex-Soviets look relatively minor. An epoch was over. A more turbulent one was about to begin.