Misiano, Francesco

Born June 26, 1884, in Ardore, Calabria; died Aug. 16, 1936, in Moscow. Figure in the Italian and international workers’ movement.

Misiano joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1907. From 1908 to 1914, he served as secretary of the socialist federation and the railwaymen’s union in Naples. Drafted into the army in 1916, he refused to take part in an imperialist war. Misiano emigrated to Switzerland, where he became editor of the newspaper L’Avvenire del Lavoratore, the organ of the Italian Socialists in Switzerland.

In 1918, Misiano set out for Soviet Russia to carry on propaganda among the Italian units of the interventionist corps on the Murmansk front. During his stopover in Berlin, he took part in the January Uprising of 1919; after the defeat of the uprising he was sentenced by German authorities to ten years’ imprisonment. But through a protest campaign by Italian workers who had elected him to parliament and with help of German left-wing Social Democrats, Misiano was freed and returned to Italy.

As a left-wing maximalist, Misiano fought for the revolutionary rejuvenation of the Italian Socialist Party; in 1921 he was among the founders of the Communist Party and became a member of its Central Committee. He was reelected to parliament that same year, but under attack from the forces of extreme reaction, was deprived of his parliamentary mandate and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. By a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Misiano emigrated. In Germany and later in the USSR he became first a member of the Executive Committee of the Profintern (Red International Trade Union), and then a member of the Executive Committee of Mezhrabpom (Workers’ International Relief), representing this organization in the USSR.