A Different History of the Soviet Union: Lisa Giua Foa between Politics and History

This article presents the story of Lisa Giua Foa, a member of the Italian resistance and a leading gure of the Italian left who, for a period of fteen years around the 1970s, devoted herself to the study of history, especially of the Soviet Union. After thoroughly studying So- viet history, Lisa Giua Foa began a process of re-evaluation of the Soviet experience, which eventually ended with the condemnation not only of the USSR, but also of Marxist ideology. Assessing the meaning of Lisa Giua Foa’s intellectual evolution helps to understand why a part of the Italian left lost its a ection for the communist ideology as a whole, explaining the crisis of the Italian leftist parties in the following decades.