Renato Crotti: Riflessioni per Riflettere

"LIFE" International ( Agosto 8, 1966 - Vol. 41 N° 3)

For some, their free bus tour
of the communist paradise was

A TALE OF PARADISE LOST

By sending busloads of Italians to Russia, the textile millionaire at right has won fame abroad and ineffective persecution at home. Renato Crotti was born in 1921 to a shopkeeping family in Carpi (a small town 35 miles north of Bologna), studied business economics and left the Italian army after the fall of Fascism in 1943 for the heavily Communist Bologna area where he hid because he disliked war, fascism and Communism, and "I was not capable of shutting up about how I felt". After the war he launched a wool-marketing career with $500 and a motorcycle which, he says, was both his transportation and "a symbol of how fast I had to make my capital turn over." Dyed wool sold faster than plain, so he started a Carpi dyeworks; the next step, to a man as abreast of his times as Crotti, was obvious-sweaters. Soon he had five textile factories and 1,200 workers, 700 of them in the big plant he calls "the heart and lungs of Carpi." With encouragement (and some loans) from Crotti, other businesses have come and Carpi now produces half of Italy’s sweaters , according to Crotti, and provides $55 million worth of Italy’s annual exports. Is Crotti, the engineer of this prosperity, the man who won’t fire anybody (he lays off excess workers at part-pay), the launcher of supermarkets and low-cost public housing, honored by all? No. Crotti belongs to no political party but still has not learned to shut up, and the city government of Carpi, which voted 56% Communist in the last elections, has reacted to his anti-Communism with legal harassment and a municipal tax bill of $256,000 which, if he paid it, would make him Italy’s third-highest such taxpayer. To escape it he moved his family to Modena and now spends a little over half of each year outside Carpi. "They tried everything," Crotti says, "but I am still here."

Foto

Crotti leaves the editing of his two magazines to a five-man staff but likes to look at the final proofs as he does here with an editor, Nello Chetoni. "The Communists have tried to pubblish their own magazines," he says, "but they have always failed…My dream is to have two newspapers-one conservative and the other labor."

Crotti’s troubles with Carpi Communists started in 1959 when he and his wife made a trip to southern Russia. When even his anti-Communist friends doubted his tales of low Soviet livin standards he went again in 1961 for 25 days and on his return founded two money-losing monthly picture magazines, Tuttomodena and Tuttocarpi, "for the defense of liberty" and the dissemination of his ideas about Russia. Then he paid for a bus trip to Russia for 10 local workers of various parties, including Communists, stipulating only that the travelers tape-record their impressions. Crotti turned the experiences of two of them, Communist Agostino Saltini and Communist-sympathizer Alberto Sassi, into a book which has sold 36,000 copies and annoyed Italian Communists with its assertions that Russians earn less than Italians, pay more for inferior food, clothing and housing and can’t even strike.

Said Sassi crisply on page 130, when asked if he would care to eat in the dismal dining room of a Moscow electricity-generating plant, "I wouldn’t dream of it." Crotti, delighted, organized a second trip for 30 people including five women and a Communist Carpi city councilor, Dr. Eldo Rossi, who gave up his post and left the party on his return. All parties except the Communists held meetings in Carpi to discuss the second trip. "The Communists," says Crotti, "never talked again about those [Iron Curtain ] countries. This is the great success of the trips. They began to say, ‘We are in Italy and it must be an Italian Communism.’ "With help from some other businessmen, Crotti in 1964 sent on a third trip 140 more Italians, including reporters from major Italian newspapers. The Communists refused to send anybody and attacked Crotti for daring to invite the Communist daily L’Unità to assign a reporter. The third trip reaped more publicity and Crotti immediately asked Intourist, the Soviet government tourist agency, for its vital permission to organize a fourth tour but has received no answer except a blast from the Moscow newspaper Trud. Undismayed, Crotti dreams of future possibilities. "A private businessman who can move freely in a Communist country," he says, "could go without any means and in a little time build up any kind of industry, pay workers better, build better factories and, after having paid all taxes, could still become a mllionarie in a very short time."

Many lost not only their faith but their friends

In Giovanni Guareschi’s Comrade Don Camilo, the famous fictional Italian priest goes to Russia disguised as a member of an Italian workers’ delegation and by exposing the failings of Communism converts the whole group, except for his friendly enemy Peppone, to anti –Communism and happiness. But real life is seldom so simple and many of those who renounced Communism after taking a Crotti tour suffered deeply. "I believed in a perfect system. This experience was a very bitter one for me," said the former secretary of a Communist factory committee who lost old friends because he told what he had seen. "Some of the other workers said we were Fascisti and were paid to speak like this, " said a non-Communist lathe operator. "But I said, ‘Where is all this liberty? We had to have special permission to stay outside the hotel until one o’clock.’ "Though happy to have revealed some truth about life in Russia, Crotti is keenly aware of the corrosive effects of this knowledge on some visitors. "Rossi," Crotti says earnestly, "was like an unfrocked priest. The Communists demonstrated against him. I could not talk to him for a year because people would have thought I paid him. I told him to join a party like Sassi did but he couldn’t. He’s like a priest who has taken off the cassock and feels lost because Communism is a religion."

‘IT WAS DIFFERENT’

Crotti keeps in touch with many of those he sent to Russia, helps them when he can. At left, he visits Dr. Eldo Rossi, director of a government agricultural school, who left the party and gave up his post as a city councilor after one trip to Russia. "I went to see the organization and tenor of life in Russia," says Rossi, "especially the agricultural organization. I had an idea of what it would be like from what I had read in magazines. But it was different from what I had imagined. I did not find an organization of work and there was lack of objectivity. I was 10 years in the party. I am glad I made the trip and I would still make the trip if I had to do it all over again. In fact I would return to Russia another time. For now, I am a nonparty man, not nonpolitical. Social problems are still the same but I would chage the methods of solution. I still believe good things can exist in Communism depending on the methods used to gain them."

‘I LOST SOME FRIENDS’

Alberto Sassi, now 27, began working for Crotti (to whom he is saying goodby at right) at 19, left recently to work for a Carpi labor union. "I expected to find a great sociological and human realization of my dreams, " says Sassi. "There wasn’t anything of this. In Warsaw there were drunken people all over and in one nightclub we were not permitted to enter because they said we were not properly dressed. Classes exist. The high officials go around in cars with shades drawn so people won’t know who they are. And when I came back and talked about these things, my party friends said I was paid to say those things and I lost some friends. But I waited for the second group to come back from Russia and I said to them, ‘Is it true what I told you?’ They all said that it was, and now I am no longer afraid to speak. I am now a Socialist. I have not changed my idea of Socialism, but I have changed the form and substance of my idea."

Crotti stands by a knitting machine in Carpi plant. "Wherever there is a good machine, I buy it," he says. "I have one that can knit my wife’s picture. I just put the picture on steel film and the machine does the rest."

In the Modena apartment
where he lives
to avoid Carpi taxes,
Crotti relaxes with his
familyu as younger son,
Davide, shows how his
teacher plays baseball.

He wins all the time", says Crotti of the employe with whom he regularly plays tennis at his Carpi villa. "I think I am going to have to fire him".

A versatile warehouseman in Crotti’s Carpi plant shaves Crotti daily between phone calls. The diagram on the wall shows every step in teh processing of wool from spinning through knitting exactly as it is done in theis factory. Just below the diagram is a photograph of Crotti’s three children.