Red Brigades

aka Brigate Rosse

The Red Brigades were a Marxist terrorist group active in Italy throughout the 1970s.

Since World War II, in which Communist-led resistance fighters contributed decisively to the Allied victory in Italy, the Italian Communist Party has been a potent force in that country's politics. By the late 1960s, the party was more interested in attaining parliamentary power than in fomenting revolution, and when student protests swept across Italy, the party did little to aid the protesters. The Red Brigades were founded in Milan in 1969 by former students and factory workers who had abandoned the official Italian Communist Party. The brigadiers claimed to follow pure Marxist-Leninist doctrine, in which a small group of revolutionaries is supposed to inspire massive worker uprisings through attacks on the political structure.

The Red Brigades began by distributing pamphlets and releasing statements that attacked the government and Italian ...