Me and my friend had a conversation about Russia and noticed there seems to be a weird connection between Italy and Soviet Union. This started with us listening to old Italian disco, some of which seems to have a lyrics about the Soviets.
Then I started to read Doctor Zhivago and learned that it was first published by an Italian company and in Italian since it would have been cencored in the Soviet Union.
Later, my friend told me about his exprience as an exchange student in St. Petersburg. He told me a signifigant part of his fellow exchange students were Italian.
This all got me thinking. Is this all just coincidence or is there an historian reason for all this? Is there a weird connection between Italy and Soviet Union / Russia and if there is, why and how did it came about?
While I cannot speak to the specific instances you mentioned, there very much is a historic precedent linking the USSR and Italy.
The Italian Communist Party (the Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) spent nearly fifty years as the principal political opposition to the long-ruling and hegemonic Christian Democracy Party (Democrazia Cristiana, or DC). While the the size and influence of the explicitly pro-Soviet faction within the PCI would ebb and flow through the years and decades, Communist Party-affiliated or sympathizing foundations, youth groups, and even governmental institutions (mostly at the City and Province level) organized a multitude of events and cultural exchanges which could and did feature visiting participants from the Eastern Bloc, and those adhering or involved with these organizations were in turn often invited to analogous events in and around the Soviet Union.
Even those Communist Party members who were critical of the USSR were habitually invited to attend events in the Eastern Bloc. Most notably Enrico Berlinguer, who headed the party from 1972 until his death in 1984 and made a point to move the party platform to an explicitly Atlanticist position, circulated fairly freely in Eastern Europe for much of his tenure as General Secretary (although there is suspicion that a car accident Berlinguer survived while visiting Bulgaria was in fact a failed attempt on his life sanctioned by the KGB).
Other parties also maintained some links to the USSR, albeit mostly in association with the Communist Party. The Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, or PSI) spent the first thirty years of it's post-Second World War existence struggling to differentiate itself from the Communist Party and its members often flanked Communists in their social and cultural ties to the Eastern Bloc (that is, until the Socialist Party developed an autonomous and admittedly electorally successful platform in the late 1970s which was highly critical of the USSR). Similar was the Italian Social Democracy Party (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano, or PSDI) which formally represented the "Reformist" faction (thus pro-electoral and anti-direct action) split from the PSI, but nonetheless flanked the PSI and PCI in governing coalitions at the local level, and whose members participated in many of the cultural and social associations which were PCI-affiliated or otherwise communist-leaning.
The cultural influence and social narrative around the Italian Communist Party, of which its complicated relationship with the USSR was a component, definetely had a tangible effects Italian culture. While the PCI was a largely working-class movement, it also had broad cross sectional appeal: very many public sector employees (even those in high-earning specialized or managerial roles), some urban professionals, university professors, and artists could be found within its membership. Thus Italians from all walks of life might have had the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union, or in any case interact with its cultural exports, through any of a variety of party-affiliated activities. Some Italians might certainly have been enamored by the idea of a country attempting to achieve a dictatorship of the proletariat. Others might have been attracted by the mystique of a government that terrified the ruling political establishment (the DC was staunchly anticommunist and anti-USSR). Others still were simply Communist party rank-and-file or sympathizers who just happened to learn a lot about Russian and Eastern European culture because it was widely featured in PCI-affiliated social clubs and associations.
I wrote this answer two months ago offering a brief summary of the power and influence of the Italian Communist Party touching on its links to the Soviet Union, which also links to a couple of other older answers that might interest you as well.
Thanks for the answers and link to the other answers, as well. I am now going to deep dive into the history of Italian left wing politics.