PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Aldo Agosti is Professor of Contemporary History at the University ofTurin in Italy. He is the author and editor of numerous books about the

the history of the Socialist and Communist movements.

Other titles in the Communist Lives series

Maurice Thorez

John Bulaitis

Ernst Thälmann

Norman LaPorte

Antonio Gramsci

Claudio Natoli

Imre Nagy

János Rainer

Georgi Dimitrov

Marietta Stankova

Tito

Geoff Swain

PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

A Biography

Aldo Agosti

Published in 2008 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

www.ibtauris.com

In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan,

a division of St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

This edition copyright © 2008 I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Original edition © 1996 UTET S.P.A., Torino

Paperback edition © 2003 UTET Diffusione s.r.l.,

The right of Aldo Agosti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the licensor in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book or any part thereof, may not be

reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publisher

Communist Lives: Volume 1

ISBN: 978 1 84511 726 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress catalog card: available

from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Series Foreword by Matthew Worley ix

Foreword by Donald Sassoon xi

Preface by Aldo Agosti xvii

1. Political and Cultural Development 001

2. A Revolutionary Party Facing Reaction 19

3. Moscow, Switzerland and Paris 41

4. The Night of Social Fascism 67

5. The Season of the Popular Front 85

6. Europe in the Storm 119

7. National Unity 151

8. Cold War and Retreat 189

9. Years of Détente and the Crisis of Centrism 223

10. The Last Years, The Last Question 265

Endnotes 297Index 331

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and the series editor wish to acknowledge the support provided for this

project by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. The Trust’s substantial

financial support made this translation possible. Thanks also to the Gramsci

Foundation and the University of Turin, both of which provided funding, and to

Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis for translating the manuscript. Throughout the project,

Nina Fishman has been extremely helpful and supportive, while the input and backing

of Donald Sassoon, Toby Abse, Gino Bedani, Enrico Sartor, Milena Nuti, Giuseppe

Vatalaro, Ilaria Favretto, Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Anne Showstack Sassoon and

Martin McGarry has similarly been invaluable.

SERIES FOREWORD

Communism has, traditionally, appeared to be something of a faceless creed. Its

emphasis on the collective over the individual, on discipline and unity, and on the

overwhelming importance of ‘the party’, has meant that only the most renowned (and

mainly Soviet) communist leaders have attracted interest from English-speaking

political historians and biographers. In particular, the party rank-and-file have tended

to be dismissed as mere cogs within the organisations of which they were part, either

denigrated as ‘slaves of Moscow’, or lost in the sweeping accounts of communist party

policy and strategy that have dominated the historiography to date. More recently,

however, historians have begun to delve beneath the uniform appearance of democratic

centralism, endeavouring to understand the motivations and objectives of those who

gave their lives to revolutionary struggle. The current series, therefore, has been

established to bolster and give expression to such interest. By producing biographical

accounts of communist leaders and members, it is hoped that a movement that helped

define the twentieth century will begin to be understood in a more nuanced way, and

that the millions who – at various times and in various ways – subscribed to such a

Utopian but ultimately flawed vision will be given both the personal and historical

depth that their communist lives deserve.

Matthew Worley

Series Editor – Communist Lives

FOREWORD

The art of political biography does not bloom in Italy the way it does in the Anglo-

Saxon world, where no self-respecting politician, including the second-rate, fails to

chance upon a biographer. Even the inevitable self-serving memoir finds a publisher.

Gerald Ford, the only US president never to have won a national election, scored on

both counts. Alec Douglas Home, British prime minister for just a year, has four

biographies and published several volumes of memoirs and letters. Neil Kinnock, who

led the Labour Party between 1983 and 1992 and lost two elections, has at least three

biographies.

Italians are more circumspect. Writing biographies is regarded as the prerogative of

journalists. Academics who experiment with the genre try hard to avoid the trivia they

disdain but readers love. Italians who want to know about Mussolini read British (or,

more recently, Australian) biographies and use Renzo De Felice’s barely readable multi-

volume biography of the Duce (in reality a history of fascism) to embellish their

bookshelves.

In 1973, Giorgio Bocca, a well-known journalist, produced the first comprehensive

biography of Palmiro Togliatti (who had died in 1964) using a wide range of

interviews and published sources. Bocca exhibited the endearing trait of acknowledging

the subject’s remarkable political intelligence and his leading role in the transformation

of the post-war Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a force for progress and

democracy, while expressing quite forcefully his unremitting antipathy towards

Togliatti. No other significant life appeared until 1996, when Aldo Agosti published

the first and, so far, the only authoritative, archive based, serious and balanced

biography of the communist leader. This, in an abridged and updated form, is the

volume you are about to read.

The paucity of works on the life of Palmiro Togliatti is all the more remarkable if

one considers that he was one of the towering political figures of twentieth-century

Italy, along with the Liberal statesman Giovanni Giolitti, Benito Mussolini, and the

Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi.

Unlike them, he was never prime minister. It is rare for someone who never won

an election, made a revolution, or staged a takeover to achieve such status. One of

Togliatti’s peculiarities was that he spent almost his entire lifetime in opposition, but

then occupied his last twenty years behaving as if he were in government. He thought

that one had to operate on a dual track; that it was necessary to combat the adversary,

yes, and with all means at one’s disposal; but, in the end, the objective was not to

oppose but to govern.

His favourite expression was fare politica. Literally, this means ‘make politics’, an

expression which – in English – has little meaning. For in Anglo-Saxon countries one

does not ‘make politics’; one is ‘in’ politics (whether to change things or to stop things

xii PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

from changing). But the broader political canvas remains unaltered as befits nations

blessed or cursed with uncommon political stability.

In Italy, ‘making politics’ implies changing the shape of the political, its rules, its

flavour. It is a dynamic concept; it underlines the unfinished nature of the Italian

polity, the relatively recent construction of its state, and the undetermined character of

its foundations. But there is also, I think, behind this expression, the weight of older

political traditions stretching back a few centuries, all the way to Machiavelli, whose

Principe was less concerned with the management of existing states than with the

creation of new ones. And in the creation of ‘the new’ Togliatti had two political

accomplishments to his credit.

The first was the invention of the partito nuovo, the post-war PCI with its one-and-

a-half-million members, its network of branches and federations, its affiliated cultural

and sporting associations, and its mass daily and weekly press. This was quite distinct

from the traditional Leninist sect, based on trusted and dedicated activists, waiting for

the moment of revolutionary rupture, ‘a small, closed association of propagandists of

the general ideas of communism and Marxism’. After opposing fascism for twenty

years, Togliatti believed the time had come to co-operate in the hard task of national

reconstruction. The partito nuovo he had in mind had to become ‘national’, Italian,

deeply rooted in society – an active participant in the country’s hopes and aspirations –

and not a distant observer of the woes of capitalism, exulting at every sign of its failings

in the hopeless expectation that things have to get much worse before they can get any

better.

National reconstruction was Togliatti’s second great political accomplishment. Its

centrepiece was the constitution of 1948, drafted in a new common political language

which embraced the main political families that had emerged or re-emerged out of the

destruction brought about by the war and the dictatorship: the liberal-secular, the

Catholic and, of course, the socialist-communist. This compromise, for it was a

compromise, was to be held together by the spirit of anti-fascism which had given a

sense of purpose to the Resistance. Such co-existence withstood even the most difficult

moments of the Cold War and lasted until the early 1990s when the post-war party

political system collapsed under the double impact of massive corruption scandals and

the end of communism.

Togliatti understood that a constitution had to enshrine the possibility of

coexistence between the contending parties. Bypassing the socialists he dealt directly

with the other great mass party of post-war Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian

Democrats), and produced the only constitution in Western Europe which bore the

decisive imprint of a communist party. The subversive had become a state builder.

The post-war settlement could have gone another way. The role played by Togliatti

and the PCI in the construction of the Italian republic and its constitutive charter

contrasts with that of the French Communist Party (PCF), the only other comparable

communist party in Western Europe. The PCF too pushed for a new republican

constitution, but failed to mobilise enough support behind it. It was defeated in a

referendum. A new amended constitution, grudgingly endorsed by the increasingly

isolated communists, was reluctantly approved by the electorate and lasted a decade or

FOREWORD xiii

so. The French communists never felt at home in the short-lived Fourth Republic (a

pathetic copy of the Third) and opposed – understandably so – the creation of the

Fifth, Gaullist, Republic. The PCF remained an antagonistic force until the day it

died. More nationalist than national, the PCF, like de Gaulle, had ‘a certain idea of

France’ though not the same as the General or indeed anyone else outside its own

ranks.

Yet, the beginnings of Togliatti’s career had not been auspicious. In his early days

he often wavered and showed indecision. When the First World War broke out and

Italy stayed out of it (joining the Anglo-French Alliance the following year, in spite of

great opposition in parliament), Togliatti’s position (and Gramsci’s) – as this

biography makes clear – was closer to Mussolini’s than to the leadership of the socialist

party. Absolute neutrality was not a position with which Togliatti felt comfortable.

Italy should not be left out of a momentous event which was about to reshape Europe.

He even thought it might not be a bad outcome if the principles of economic

liberalism championed by Great Britain were to triumph in Europe. His Marxism was

suis generis (as it would remain ever after). In 1917, unlike Gramsci, he seemed barely

aware of the importance of the Soviet Revolution. And, also unlike Gramsci, Togliatti

was cautious, pragmatic, aware of the lasting strength of institutions, less confident of

positive outcomes. He could not ‘make up his mind, as was always somewhat his

habit’, wrote Gramsci, a little disparagingly, in January 1924.

Togliatti, the prudent revolutionary, was disdainful of the maximalist rhetoric of

many socialists. Events confirmed him in this attitude. During the turmoil of the wave

of strikes of the so-called biennio rosso (the ‘two red years’ of 1919–20) Togliatti soon

realised how little his small group of activists could influence the Italian labour

movement. His great gift, essential for a politician, consisted in being able to learn

from mistakes.

In L’Ordine Nuovo, the journal he edited with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini

and Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti refined his skill as a sarcastic polemicist. But he was

not aware, any more than anyone else, of the real threat posed by fascism. Too busy

with the daily edition of the paper, he was not even present in Livorno in January 1921

when the new communist party was founded. Togliatti, like many others, fell at first

under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga, the sectarian leader of the new party. Soon he

realised that the advent of fascism meant that the Left had been defeated, and – what

was almost worse – that it had not realised the historic magnitude of this defeat. He

hesitated. The alternatives he faced seemed to be either to dedicate himself to cultural

pursuits – the cultivation of one’s garden, as Voltaire’s Candide would have it, or to

spend the rest of his life in politics. By May 1923 he had taken the plunge (something

he would occasionally regret) and threw himself into reorganising a party soon to be

banned and persecuted. This reluctant revolutionary faced a new, agonising choice:

whether to follow Bordiga’s line, thus breaking with the Comintern (Lenin had been

scathing about Bordiga, finding him guilty of ‘infantile’ communist extremism) or

accept the discipline required by Moscow. He chose Moscow. As he wrote to Gramsci,

on 1 May 1923, ‘entering into open battle with the Communist International, putting

ourselves outside of it, then finding ourselves without powerful material and moral

xiv PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

support, reduced to a tiny group held together by almost solely personal ties’ would

entail ‘losing all real and practical immediate influence on the development of the

political battle in Italy’.

In Moscow in 1926, he became head of the party after the effective establishment

of Mussolini’s dictatorship. He lived in exile returning again to Moscow from France

when the war broke out. By 1927 Gramsci was in prison. Angelo Tasca eventually

drifted away, gathering a remarkable archive while becoming a police informer.

Bordiga, expelled from the party in 1930, lived a quiet life under fascism. Togliatti was

now in charge. But in charge of what? The PCI was little more than an insignificant

little sect, barely able to organise against fascism. Its best activists were in exile or in

jail. The liberal and socialist oppositions to fascism were just as ineffectual, resorting to

futile gestures or keeping their head down, waiting for better times. Togliatti now

inhabited two worlds: the world of the international communist movement and that of

the Italian party.

Each of these worlds was in turn divided. The leaders of the Comintern, of which

Togliatti had risen to become one, were, in theory, in charge of a global communist

revolution. They received and read reports from China and India, from the Philippines

and from Brazil, from Berlin and from Madrid. They were aware of what was going

on, not just in Paris and London but also in Ulan Bator and Cairo. They discussed the

impact of strikes and wars, debated who should be in alliance with whom and why. At

the same time they lived in a surreal atmosphere, cooped up in the Hotel Lux in

Moscow, ‘its dusty corridors were still populated by rats’ and Soviet secret agents, and

were participants in the momentous sectarian clash taking place inside the vanguard

party which was supposed to lead the global revolution. This is where Togliatti met

Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin and Trotsky and, of course, Stalin. It was a

dangerous milieu but one which, until Stalin established his final control, was relatively

open to debate and disagreement – described by Agosti with uncommon poise and

balance. In fact the situation was all the more dangerous when the debate was open,

since one was less prudent and would pay the price later.

The other world, that of the PCI, was equally disjointed. Inside the country, bands

of clandestine activists, constantly suspicious of everyone and yet more in touch with

the life and feelings of ordinary people, carried on a brave, if largely ineffectual,

struggle. Outside the country, a band of exiles, under the prestigious mantle of an

international revolutionary movement, pretended to direct them. The conventional

anti-communist narrative, taking the same line as the official communist one, has

regarded the Comintern and its affiliated organisations as an amazingly efficient

monolith, endowed with a near perfect communication system, able to move its

various pawns, almost at will, on the great chessboard of revolutionary politics. The

reality, as Agosti deftly shows, was more complicated. The truth of the matter is that

the Comintern was an organisation in disarray. During its reign (1919–43) not a single

successful communist revolution occurred anywhere in the world, (with the possible

exception of the People’s Republic of Mongolia whose entry into the roster of

communist states in 1924 was due to the Red Army rather than the Comintern).

Indeed while the Comintern was laying down the line, trying to locate the

FOREWORD xv

contradictions within the ranks of the enemy, the ‘enemy’ was scoring repeated

successes. By the time the Second World War broke out, staunchly anti-communist

authoritarian governments of various hues were in power throughout eastern, central

and southern Europe, from Metaxas’s Greece to Antanas Smetona’s Lithuania, from

Franco’s Spain to King Carol’s Romania. The Comintern offered hope and faith in

these trying times. The prospects were dismal and the enemy powerful, but the future

belonged to the International – or so they felt.

Togliatti’s relationship with the Comintern was complex, but not unusual for

communists of the interwar years. He did not regard himself merely as a leader of the

PCI, loyal to Moscow, but as a leader of the international communist movement. He

could not see any contradiction between the two positions. In the 1920s one could

argue about whether Italian fascism was in crisis, whether it had succeeded in building

around itself a compact system of power, and whether the PCI could defeat fascism on

its own. These were not just debates between Moscow and the Italian party but within

(above all within) the party.

At least in the 1920s, Togliatti could and did express positions which went against

the prevailing mood in the Comintern, in particular by his insistence that fascism was

an exceptional form of capitalist rule against those who maintained that the differences

between fascism and the hated social democracy were insignificant. But he then

realised that he was in danger (he had been too close to Bukharin) and knuckled under.

He allowed his work in the Comintern to take second place to the business of

defending his position in the PCI. The enthralling fourth chapter of the biography

(‘The Night of Social Fascism’) maps out this most difficult period in Togliatti’s life.

His caution was such that it was Dimitrov who was instrumental in getting the

Comintern to adopt the new line of the popular front. Togliatti threw his weight

behind the new policy only when he was sure it had Stalin’s imprimatur. Even so he

remained distrustful of the French communists.

The new situation enabled him to produce one of the most interesting analyses of

fascism during the interwar years: the lectures on fascism to the cadres at the Moscow

party school – lectures (published in English in 1976) which urged activists to work

within fascist organisations and fare politica. When the Spanish Civil War broke out,

Togliatti, abandoning the caution of the previous year, explained that the struggle

(which had previously been between communism and all forms of ‘capitalist

dictatorship’, whether fascist or ‘bourgeois’ democratic ) was now today, everywhere in

the world, between fascism and democracy. The testing ground for this struggle was

Spain where Togliatti was sent, as chief Comintern adviser, or Stalin’s henchman as

some would have it. Those who propound for the henchman’s thesis would do well to

read chapter six (‘Europe in the Storm’) in which his criticism of the sectarianism of

the Spanish Communist Party is analysed and contextualised.

Other crucial and controversial moments of Togliatti’s career are examined by

Agosti without reticence: the reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact; the revitalisation of the

resistance against fascism; the role he played in the formation of a unity government

after Italy joined the Allies in 1943–44; the reconstruction of the Italian state; the

beginning of the Cold War; and, above all, Togliatti’s reception of Khrushchev’s de-

xvi PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Stalinisation speech in 1956 and his clear support for the Soviet intervention in

Hungary. Regardless of the differences he had with Stalin and his successors, he knew

and probably believed that there was no other choice open to a leader of a communist

party than complete subordination to the ‘vanguard state’. One can speculate whether

– had he broken with the USSR – he would have been able to carry his party with him,

but there is little doubt that this was not an option Togliatti ever seriously considered.

There was, inevitably, a kind of political schizophrenia. On the one hand there was

Togliatti’s genuine attempt to develop a distinctive ‘Italian Road to Socialism’ quite

different from that taken by Lenin and his successors. On the other there was the

realisation that – in a bipolar world and in the situation in which Italy found itself –

one had to choose one’s own camp. This, of course, meant that Togliatti’s analysis of

international relations during the Cold War, though often subtle, was debased by an

inability or unwillingness to do what he did so well in domestic politics: to see the

reasons of the enemy.

To see the reasons of Togliatti and situate his life in the context of his times is the

supreme achievement of this biography.

Donald Sassoon

London, 2008

PREFACE

This biography was first published in Italian in January 1996. Although it is

condensed, this revised and updated English version has retained the structure of the

first Italian edition. Some quotations have been omitted or abbreviated, mainly in the

last three chapters. The sections specific to the inner-workings of Italian politics have

been simplified. In addition, I have expanded the treatment of Togliatti’s role as a

leader of the international communist movement, as brought to light by documents

released from the Moscow archives after 1994 and from Dimitrov’s diary. I have also

considered some of the most significant historiography of the last decade, which has

informed the study of Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the party of

which he was the undisputed leader for 40 years. These revisions have resulted in the

substantial rewriting of certain sections and the bibliographical notes, which seek to

give an albeit brief account of the new research which emerged between 1996 and

2007.

Togliatti has left an uneven imprint on historiography. In Italy, his character has

attracted almost as much attention as Gramsci’s. Even more than the latter, obviously,

he has been identified with the history of the PCI, which – from at least the 1960s –

has become a particularly contentious topic for historical research no less than an

object of burning political passion. Togliatti’s place in the historiography of other

countries is less clear. An enormous amount of literature concerning the communist

movement was produced in the years of Cold War, especially by American historians

and political scientists. But in attempting to retrace Togliatti’s activities and political

thought in the years of the Communist International (Comintern), the English-

speaking reader would have found little to rely on until at least the mid-1970s.

Considerable attention had been paid, it is true, to his role alongside Gramsci in the

founding of the PCI1; but very little was known about his role in the Comintern. This

was only been touched on in the admirable books of E. H. Carr and Jane Degras. Both

are accurate in reconstructing the events; but neither enter deeply into the more subtle

details of the ideological and strategic issues confronting the Comintern.2

No selection of Togliatti’s works was published in English before 1976, when the

Lectures on Fascism were translated by Lawrence and Wishart. This included an

introduction by James Klugmann, which was both didactic and ‘militant’, without

catching the complexity of its subject. Three years later, Donald Sassoon edited and

introduced a rich selection of Togliatti’s writings. Of the twelve published texts, only

four could be considered directly political; the remainder had been selected, in the

editor’s words, ‘to trace the essential elements of the politics of transition which is at

the core of the strategy of Italian communism’.3 Within this perspective, Sassoon’s

introduction offered an excellent overall survey of Togliatti’s thought, especially after

1944.

xviii PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

It is only in the last two decades that Togliatti’s role in the Comintern has been

more closely scrutinised, both in works of synthesis about the international communist

movement and in studies specifically concerning the PCI.4 In contrast, the second

phase of Togliatti’s political career, coinciding with the final 20 years of his life, has

been more closely examined by English-language historians since the 1960s. This was

partly due to the blossoming of a rich school of studies in English-speaking universities

on Republican Italy, but also due to the great interest aroused in the PCI’s ‘peculiarity’

in the international communist system. As early as 1968, Donald Blackmer produced a

very serious analysis of the PCI’s role in the debate within international communism

after 1956.5 In 1981, Donald Sassoon wrote a lengthy and penetrating monograph on

the strategy of the Italian communists after 1944, which focused especially on

Togliatti’s role.6 In the 1990s, Paul Ginsborg and Patrick McCarthy published two of

the best histories of the Italian Republic, offering a stimulating, partly critical

interpretation of the role played by the PCI and its leader.7

After the political earthquake of 1992, which caused all the Italian political parties

acting on the political scene over the previous forty years to disappear or to radically

change their nature, the history of the PCI seemed, with few exceptions, to lose much

of its appeal for English-language historians.8 Italian scholars, on the contrary, have

never ceased to deal with the subject, following mainly two paths. On the one hand,

they explored the social and cultural history of the party, often at a local level. On the

other hand, stimulated by the opening of the Soviet archives, they concentrated on the

‘external bond’ (vincolo esterno) that loyalty to the Soviet Union exerted over the PCI as

the main key to unlock its part in the history of the Italian Republic. As a result, many

Italian historians changed their views on the scope of the PCI’s perceived ‘autonomy’.

This issue had been presented – with some difficulty – as the pivot of previous Italian

communist historiography, and there were reasons in favour of such reappraisal.9 But

the ‘external bond’ thesis seems too reductive for understanding the complex events in

the PCI after 1944, and therefore indirectly for rereading the last 20 years of the life

and work of Togliatti.

In its second part, this book poses, starting from Togliatti’s biography, a series of

more general questions that are still pertinent for the history of the Italian Republic.

Was the PCI’s distinctive identity formed wholly by the ‘external bond’ of double

loyalty? How important was the other side of the ‘external bond’ to which the Italian

political system was subjected, namely its place inside the strategic arena of American

influence? And how much did internal matters count? Was the only reason that the

governing class isolated the PCI its affiliation to the communist international

movement? Or does this choice rather also reflect another historical characteristic of

the governing classes, namely a timid management of the resources of political

democracy? What impact did the presence of the Catholic Church in Italy have on this

choice, at least until the papacy of Pope Pius XII, and even afterwards? These are all

questions that must become a part of a general rethinking of the history of the Italian

Republic; otherwise there is a risk that historians will use the PCI as a convenient

scapegoat for all its distortions.

Nobody could question the importance of the relationship between the PCI and

the Soviet Union, nor its persistence long after Togliatti’s death. Nevertheless, this

PREFACE xix

‘iron bond’ – as he himself called it – does not explain the long survival in Italy of such

a strong communist party. Roberto Gualtieri has given a very thought-provoking, and

partly convincing, explanation of this fact: he has argued that ‘the PCI was far more fit

than the Italian socialists and social democrats to underpin the “negative integration”

of the world of labour in the new democratic State, unifying and regulating most of the

various forces and subcultures that constituted the variegated and turbulent world of

the Italian left into a robust national (and international) backbone’.10 In other words,

perhaps only a mass communist party was able to absorb the shock of an

extraordinarily rapid modernisation process with its extremely high social costs. As

intriguing as this explanation may be, it does not entirely resolve the question. It

underestimates both the contribution of the PCI to the defence of the constitutional

legality of Republican Italy and the growth of a pervasive democratic culture. This

aspect has often been better perceived by external observers of Italian affairs than by

Italian historians.11 Of course some – often serious – incongruities and delays may

come to the fore in this field. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the PCI is a force

which has long persisted in Italian society. Its significance can be traced by observing

its ability to teach its militants the principles of democracy, which has resulted in great

civil growth, transforming, as I state in the conclusion to this book, millions of

‘subjects’ or ‘rebels’ into ‘citizens’.

This is Togliatti’s most important legacy. It is a legacy that has generated an

extraordinary paradox, allowing Italian communists to renew their organisational forms

and open up their ideology to changes. Togliatti’s achievement was to preserve the

Italian communist party from the ghettoisation which afflicted its ‘brother parties’. It

status as a mass party also made it so strong and dangerous – in the bipolar logic of

international relations – that it was denied access to national government.

The realisation of this English edition was made possible by a team of friends and

colleagues, to whom I would like to express my profound gratitude: first, Matthew

Worley, who with great passion has followed each step of my work; also Donald

Sassoon and Nina Fishman, who proposed an English translation of this book and who

worked to find the necessary resources; Gino Bedani, who has read some chapters and

given precious advice. Special thanks also to Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis, who

translated this book with particular skill. And just because I have been given the

occasion of fully appreciating the art of translation, I would like to dedicate this

edition to the memory of my mother, Maria Luisa Castellani, an Italian translator of

Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James and many other English-language

classics.

Aldo Agosti

Turin, 2008

1

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa on 26 March 1893 in an old house on Via

Albergo dei Poveri to Antonio and Teresa Viale. He was the third of four siblings:

Eugenio Giuseppe (born 1890), Maria Cristina (1892) and Enrico (1900). With

characteristic historical and philological precision, the future secretary of the Italian

Communist Party (PCI) appears to have undertaken research into his own family

history. He wrote in a letter to Carlo Trabucco in 1962:

According to the registers of Castellania di Lanzo – a Toglià (the name will then become

Togliat, Togliatto, Togliatti) Pietro bought fields and woodland from a Giovanni de Toglià to

the value of 100 Viennese monies. The sale is registered in an account of N. Agnone of

Challand and dates from 1347–48. […] As you can see, I’m not short of titles of nobility, and

of the true kind. Free peasants since the 1300s!1

Free indeed, but poor. Palmiro’s father was born in 1852 in Coassolo, a village of

around 4,500 souls, 30-or-so kilometres from Turin. His parents owned little more

than a hectare of grazing land and some fruit trees. Antonio had six brothers and

sisters, and the land was not enough for all of them: one, Martino, emigrated to the

United States, while Caterina became a nun.

Initially, Antonio also appeared destined for an ecclesiastic career; but, on the eve

of his entrance into the seminary, the young man, not feeling the vocation of

priesthood, left his birthplace to seek his fortune in Turin where he succeeded in taking

the diploma to become a primary school teacher. Having taught for a while in private

schools, he worked as a tutor in the Turinese Convitto Nazionale. In the meantime, he

had met Teresa Viale – in a school where they both taught – and married her.

The social class of Togliatti’s mother must have been quite modest. She was

adopted at the age of six by a well-to-do Turinese family. It seems that a brother, a

worker in a bakery, died young from tuberculosis (and Togliatti would not fail to note

this modest proletarian ancestry in the autobiographical file compiled in 1932 for the

personnel office of the Communist International). Teresa Viale’s adoptive family had

her undertake teacher training.2

Teresa Viale was an energetic woman, ready to sacrifice herself to ensure a

satisfactory social position for her children. Her tenacity was rewarded, if it is true that

all four of them received a degree. She was gifted with an artistic temperament and was

highly cultured. Very religious, she imparted to her children a rigorous Catholic

education. ‘Nevertheless’ – Togliatti recalled – ‘the family atmosphere I lived in was

2 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

not bigoted even though it was very religious. I would go to church every Sunday out

of habit, but did not feel the question of religion with much intensity.’3

Togliatti’s family, then, exhibited some of the traits possessed by a typical

Piedmontese petit-bourgeois family at the end of the century, characterised by

attachment to religious values and to the royal dynasty that constituted the backbone

of Piedmontese bureaucracy; but there was in both mother and father a certain refusal

to submit to a pre-established destiny.4 Antonio’s salary as a state employee was barely

sufficient to cover the upkeep of his wife (who stopped teaching as soon as she

married) and his children. Having moved from the post of tutor to that of

administrator, Antonio was forced by his profession to transfer frequently from one

city to another. From Turin, the Togliattis moved to Genoa, where the third child was

born, then briefly to Novara, where Palmiro began primary school, and then back to

Turin. Yet another transfer order took the whole family to Sondrio, where Palmiro

enrolled in the Ginnasio G. Piazzi in the same class as his sister Maria Cristina.

FROM SONDRIO TO SASSARI: AN ADOLESCENCE IN ‘DIGNIFIED POVERTY’

Sondrio at the beginning of the century was a quiet town with a relatively prosperous

economy based on wine, textiles and livestock. Political life was quite lively, although

largely restricted to the local dimension. The Radical Party was prominent, looking

towards the figures of the pedagogue Luigi Credaro and the ex-Garibaldian Giuseppe

Marcora.5 It seems Antonio Togliatti was a regular reader of the radical paper La

Valtellina that often distinguished itself with lively anti-clerical polemics. It is not

unlikely that during this period Togliatti’s father was at least tending towards radical

and socialist sympathies, which would explain the ‘small bundle of socialist leaflets’

Palmiro happened to find in a wardrobe at home.

Reading this ‘prohibited’ material made a considerable impression on the boy, who

must have been between 12 and 14 at the time, perhaps because an interest in the

‘social question’ had already been excited by two distinguished teachers. One was

Baldo Peroni, a scholar of Italian Jacobins and a historian of education; the other (in

fact more influential, if we are to believe that Palmiro wrote him on finishing the

lyceum to ask for advice on his future) was Mosé Niccolini, a socialist from the

Trentino.

Togliatti excelled in his studies from the outset: after all, a very high mean score

was a condition of exemption from fees. As a model student, he disseminated his

knowledge generously, letting his classmates copy Greek and Latin translations. A taste

for mockery in the face of authority emerged alongside this spirit of solidarity

according to the memory of his sister, as when ‘he carefully rolled up the exam exercise

in a fountain pen, asking the teacher himself to pass it on to the recipient’.6

The boy does not appear to have made particularly significant friendships: his life

flowed serenely in the circle of family affections and in the furrow of habits that would

re-emerge in future years whenever circumstances allowed. Palmiro and his siblings had

a marked sense of nature: an allotment behind the Sondrio house allowed them to rear

all kinds of small animals and to cultivate flowers. A passion for botany would never

leave Togliatti, just as he never lost his passion for walks, in particular for mountain

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 3

excursions. On days off work, the father led the children on extremely long trips. It

was, surely, such experience which tied Togliatti so intensely to the mountains, and led

him once he returned to Italy after 18 years in exile to retreat there every time a pause

in his political work permitted. It was, moreover, a connection loaded in memory but,

perhaps, already nourished by adolescent readings on the meaning of a metaphor of

typically romantic origins. On 9 August 1946, he wrote in a letter to Nilde Iotti:

I saw again the fresh, large Alps and again I felt their call to freedom, to solitude. One day I

will tell of what the Alps meant to me when I ran them as a boy, alone with my pride, alone

with my dreams. Perhaps they are what taught me to desire, and to live alone in myself, and to

despise what is easy, and to rebel, and to go forward when there is no longer a road, but only

the body that grips the rock and fingers that search for purchase and the knee that trembles

but does not give.7

It was in Sondrio that Togliatti first tackled involved readings and got into the

habit of dedicating much of his free time to them outside his studies. He would later

tell his biographers that he had been impressed by Voltaire, and even more by

Francesco De Sanctis, whose work ‘was a revelation, perhaps not so much for the

aesthetic analyses as for the profound new vision of history and of the cultural

upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.8 His interests concentrated

mainly on history. He remembered in 1961:

What struck me in the history of the Risorgimento was above all the universal popular element:

universal in the sense of a particular vision of the world, even though the Risorgimento

movement was without doubt national. The poet I felt most was Carducci, for the universal

concept of the Risorgimento and for the re-evaluation that he made of the French Revolution.9

In May 1908, Antonio Togliatti was transferred to Sassari in Sardinia.10 Palmiro

and Maria Cristina enrolled in class 1B of the Lyceum Azuni. The political climate of

the city, provincial but lively, was characterised by the clash between clericals and anti-

clericals, and by a vivid anti-Giolittism amongst a section of the intellectual

bourgeoisie. It appears the Togliattis took no direct participation in local political life,

although Palmiro later remembered witnessing with his father a protest demonstration

against the assassination of Francisco Ferrer in October 1909.

As a teenager, Togliatti’s efforts were poured totally into study, always with

excellent results. Confirming a striking predilection for the humanities, in his second

year, as was then possible, Togliatti opted for ‘Greek culture’ rather than for

mathematics. In truth, the Lyceum Azuni, which Togliatti himself described as ‘rather

shoddy’, was – as remembered by fellow student Nunzio Cossu – a school where there

was no space for ‘the questions of the day that agitated culture and science […] all the

work was undertaken in quite a gloomy and stuffy atmosphere, lacking in light and sun

[… ] life was rather miserable and sterile’.11

Not even in Sassari did the young Palmiro appear to forge particularly firm or

long-lasting friendships. Some of the schoolmates to whom he was closest sided with

the democratic-republican camp and, like Mario Berlinguer, father of the future

4 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

secretary of the PCI, also took a stance against the war in Libya. Togliatti shared their

anti-Giolittian attitude, but shunned any active display of political engagement. He

had only recently begun his last year at the lyceum when a terrible tragedy befell his

family. Antonio Togliatti became ill with a throat tumour: he was taken to hospital in

Turin and died aged 59 on 21 January 1911. The family’s economic condition,

deprived of its sole income, became very precarious and a question hung over the

continuation of the adolescents’ schooling. Teresa Viale obtained the sum of 400 lire

from the Sassari Convitto in recognition of ‘the extraordinary administrative services’

rendered over the three previous years together with her husband. Palmiro and Maria

Cristina added to the income of the family by giving private lessons. Both brilliantly

obtained the lyceum certificate. Thanks to the extremely high marks achieved, they

took part in the annual competition held by the Collegio Carlo Alberto reserved for

young people born in the old provinces of the Kingdom of Sardinia. In October 1911,

joining their mother in Turin, they succeeded: the boy even came second, his sister

eleventh, while the ninth place on the pass list for the same group of law and literature

students featured a young man from the lyceum in Cagliari, Antonio Gramsci. The

winners were guaranteed a monthly cheque of 70 lire for ten months a year until

graduation, on condition that they did not fall behind with their exams and their

marks did not fall below a certain average.

UNIVERSITY STUDIES

Palmiro Togliatti enrolled in the law faculty, the most heavily subscribed in Turin

University. A law degree offered the possibility of a qualified and relatively well-paid

job, especially in the public sector. Indeed, such reasoning induced Togliatti to

renounce the philological and literary studies for which he felt he had more talent.

When the 18 year-old student arrived in Turin in the summer of 1911, Italy was

on the verge of an event destined to stand as a watershed in its national history: the war

in Libya. The Giolittian experiment, characterised by the union of the liberal

government with the left in the name of social progress and resolution of class conflict,

showed clear signs of wear and tear. In Turin, the industrial capital of the kingdom,

amidst celebrations commemorating 50 years of unification, social radicalisation

presented itself more acutely than elsewhere. For Togliatti, the leap from the sleepy

provincial atmosphere he had experienced earlier in the century could not have been

more clear-cut. The demonstrations for and against the war were intensifying and the

protagonists on the two opposing sides were most often workers and students, with the

latter representing ‘the current of bourgeois opinion that will bring the atmosphere of

rising nationalism to the streets and squares with greater impetuosity and physical

presence’.12 It is true that there was a small but militant group of socialist students13,

but the university environment was generally dominated by an atmosphere of fervent

nationalism.

In truth, Togliatti did not seem to have been infected. During the first years of

university, the generically anti-Giolittian position he had matured in Sardinia found a

reference point in La Voce magazine that he subscribed to and whose criticism of the

war he agreed with. But these were political trends that were still ill-defined, certainly

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 5

not such as to induce the young man to participate in political battles in the first

person; also, to meet his own material needs and those of his family, much of his free

time went towards those private lessons, largely on Italian composition, for which ‘he

received a small sum and a vermouth, and wrote off the cuff in an hour a lyceum

student’s essay’.14

Togliatti was an extraordinarily diligent university student: he followed all the

obligatory courses and frequented numerous others outside his faculty; he kept himself

abreast of the study programmes needed to obtain renewal of the Carlo Alberto

scholarship, and also to attain a series of study awards for deserving students.

The cultural atmosphere that was breathed in Turin during the years of Gramsci

and Togliatti’s ‘university apprenticeship’ has been the subject of deep and exhaustive

studies.15 The cult of science and of severe philological discipline linked to positivism

began to be questioned by spiritualistic currents and, especially, by neo-idealism; but

the level of teaching, which remained extremely high, was not impaired. Togliatti

would have been influenced by it, and he later noted that Gramsci was too: ‘the

precision in thought, the taste for exactness of information, disdain, even moral

repugnance […] for improvisation and superficiality’.16

Palmiro’s university career would know no défaillances: he would pass though all

the faculty exams with marks never lower than 30/30, even though he was not

passionate about studying jurisprudence. Between 1912 and 1914, the young man met

the teachers destined to have most influence on his development. Among them was

Francesco Ruffini, lecturer in ecclesiastical law who in his course illustrated a

conception of the relation between church and state that Togliatti would refer to

explicitly as the basis for his position in the Constituent Assembly of 1946–47. Above

all, he met Luigi Einaudi, holder of the chair of fiscal policy. The intellectual influence

that the youth was subject to in greatest measure was certainly Einaudi’s liberalism, as

testified by his writings of 1917–18 and his degree thesis, discussed in November

1915, which was apparently based on the theme ‘The Customs Regime of the

Colonies’. Unfortunately, this thesis, which obtained maximum marks cum laude, has

been lost.17

Togliatti’s attendance at three complementary courses in his last two years at

university (forensic medicine, scientific policing, and the extra-curricular ‘madness and

its crimes’), along with his at least occasional attendance of clinical psychiatry courses,

demonstrate how the influence of positivism continued to be well represented.

However, anxious to widen his knowledge and broaden his horizons, he also followed

courses in the arts faculty. Those of the Germanist Arturo Farinelli, who held lessons in

1912 on the Romantic German poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel, made a profound

impression on him.18 Of the ethical content of Romantic German thought, he would

later recall having found inspiration also in the Dantesque lessons of Umberto Cosmo,

‘[in which] Hegel’s dialectic in its idealistic form was already making a comeback’.19

From all this came a growing interest in idealist philosophy, which led Togliatti to

translate of his own accord 150 pages of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit from

German. It is certain that the scope of Togliatti’s reading continued to expand beyond

the subjects he studied, into areas which conflicted with the positivism and philological

6 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

erudition prevailing within the university. The idealism of Croce almost inevitably

came to represent the catalyst to this reaction. Revisiting a posteriori his adherence to its

inspiring motives, Togliatti would always be concerned to present it as an

indispensable stage for the recovery of a non-spurious Marxism freed from the

encrustations of positivism. He also sought to keep his distance from those

degenerations of Idealism that resulted in an ‘exasperated anarchic and aestheticising

individualism, in nationalism, in the cult of the person superior not just to the social

being but even to the common human being, in the exaltation of will for will’s sake,

[and] in the preaching of violence for violence’s sake, all covered by a brilliant aesthetic

and philosophical veneer’.20 In reality, the process must have been less clear cut, and

the charm of the spiritualistic currents greater than Togliatti was later prepared to

acknowledge, even though never sufficient to produce full identification with the most

frequent of their political expressions, nationalism. Two things probably acted as an

antidote to this temptation: on the one hand, reading Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la

Quinzaine, through which Togliatti discovered the Romantic universalism of Romain

Rolland, the French writer destined to leave a strong impression on the Ordine Nuovo

group (see below); and, on the other, familiarity with Salvemini’s L’Unità, with its

attention to social and economic problems and its intransigent anti-protectionist and

‘meridionalista’ (pro-South) battle.

It is not documented what were, in this process of cultural development, the

fundamental stages of Togliatti’s approach to Marxism, except for the rationalisation

he himself undertook with hindsight. The decisive step was supposed to have been the

discovery of Antonio Labriola: ‘his texts explaining and delving deeper into Marxism

[…] were read, re-read, studied, commented’.21 It is an affirmation that needs to be

‘calibrated’ in the light of the politico-cultural operation that Togliatti himself

conducted after his return to Italy in 1944, aiming to reconstruct a particular

genealogical tree of Italian Marxism. It is more likely that Togliatti’s adherence to

Marxism matured along a less linear path, interwoven with multiple intricate

components. In any case, two factors appeared decisive in its determination: the first

was the beginning of the friendship with Gramsci; the second was the encounter with

the Turinese workers’ movement.

GRAMSCI, SALVEMINI, MUSSOLINI

Togliatti met Gramsci briefly for the first time towards the end of October 1911 on

the day of the competition for the Carlo Alberto bursary; he subsequently met him

again in the lecture theatres of the faculties of law and literature. If not real friendship,

a habitual dialogue grew between them, rooted in their common provenance and direct

knowledge of Sardinia, as well as in their similar condition of economic difficulty

bordering on extreme poverty, unusual among university students of the time.

Without doubt, Gramsci was the more mature of the two, and the more politically

oriented, for he frequented a young socialist group, having made friends with one of its

most active representatives, Angelo Tasca. Togliatti shared this experience, albeit in a

milder and more casual way, although his encountering workers marching through the

crowded streets of the city in 1912–13 (years of intense union battles in Turin) made a

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 7

strong impression on him. According to Togliatti himself, he became a card-carrying

member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1914. Such a claim has been questioned

by Andrea Viglongo, who was the active director of the young socialist branch,22 but is

probably true: both because Togliatti reaffirmed it in significant documents such as a

Communist International (Comintern) questionnaire, and because it would have been

less difficult for him to justify his ‘interventionist’ position towards the war – discussed

below – had he not had any formal tie with the PSI. However, his adherence did not

translate into active militant engagement.

What was the nature of Togliatti’s socialism at this time? To answer this, two

points of reference may be discerned: Gaetano Salvemini and Benito Mussolini.

Togliatti read Salvemini’s articles in La Voce and L’Unità and shared his anti-

protectionist position: it is, therefore, not unlikely that he might have been, with

Gramsci, Tasca and Ottavio Pastore, among those young socialists who in 1914

supported the southern historian’s candidature to the supplementary elections for a

vacant Turin constituency. With regard to Mussolini, ‘the “Mussolinismo” of young

socialists in the period 1912–14 […] was in reality something more and of greater

importance in their ideological and political formation […] than would appear from

the testimonies of the young protagonists of the time’,23 and this holds undoubtedly for

Togliatti, who later recognised that in 1914 the editor of Avanti! had made a great

impression on him ‘for his will, for his energy’. What is certain is that Mussolini

personified the mixture of heterogeneous elements (from Bergsonian spiritualism to

Sorelian ‘leftist’ revisionism to voluntaristic activism) that characterised the

development of a generation of young socialists.

And there was a more than ephemeral trace of Mussolini’s influence in the attitude

that Gramsci and Togliatti took towards the war. On 31 October 1914, Gramsci wrote

an article in Il Grido del Popolo, a publication of the Turinese socialist branch, in which

he criticised ‘the comfortable position of absolute neutrality’, fearing that it might

induce socialists to ‘an overly naïve contemplation and Buddhist renunciation of our

rights’. According to Togliatti, Gramsci submitted the article to him before its

publication, and he approved it without reservations. In fact, after the end of the war,

Il Grido del Popolo would conduct a resentful campaign against the men who had sided

with intervention or even just hesitated about it. In this, ‘Doctor Togliatti’ would be

one of its main targets. Of course, it was not an interventionism inspired by myths of

nationalism, nor did it blindly follow that of Mussolini: rather, it was quite close to the

democratic interventionism of Salvemini, based on a confidence that a British victory

would be followed by ‘a triumph of commercial freedom in the whole of Europe’.

Indeed, such a liberalist theme of Togliatti’s philo-interventionism would receive full

confirmation in his first articles in Il Grido del Popolo in autumn 1917, and more still

from an article that appeared in L’Ordine Nuovo on 9 August 1919, where Togliatti

went back over the fortunes of Wilsonism:

It really seemed that […] the liberal idea was then about to come out of the realm of dreams,

the world of utopias, to become embodied in a world political system! The world would have

thereby become all one great democratic republic; the international would have become a

8 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

reality, with a white flag, with principles of liberalism, and a programme of peace in

perpetuity.24

Declared unfit for military service (apparently due to the severe myopia he suffered

from) immediately after having received his degree in November 1915, Togliatti

enrolled as a volunteer in the Red Cross and saw service in various territorial hospitals,

first in Turin and later in a field hospital in the Isonzo valley. During 1917, however,

following revision of the enrolment criteria imposed by the need to recruit new

soldiers, Togliatti was declared fit. Once attendance on courses for obtaining the

degree of complementary officials became obligatory for pupils with the necessary

educational qualifications, he was admitted to the Officers’ School of Caserta in

February 1918, where he followed a five-month course. Here he told of listening to the

‘military morale’ lessons that young infantry lieutenant Luigi Russo, future illustrious

historian of Italian literature, held for aspiring officers. According to him, however, he

was more passionate about the ‘visits made carefully and alone, during half-days off, to

the locations of the battle of Volturno […], with the help of history books and

Garibaldine memories’.

Before the end of the course, Togliatti was recognised as ‘physically unfit’,

apparently because of a bout of pleurisy that forced him into protracted confinement

in various military hospitals. It is not known whether during his military service he

remained in contact with his Turinese friends, and with Gramsci in particular; but his

brief leaves, which allowed Togliatti to sit exams in literature and philosophy, may well

have provided occasional opportunities for encounters. For this faculty was the one

Togliatti had enrolled in as soon as he had received his law degree, gaining admission

to the third year, and it was a choice that suggests a need to integrate his own juridical

formation by obeying the inclinations he had matured in previous years. Between April

1917 and July 1919, Togliatti passed eight exams, four of them in philosophy, with

top marks. His university career would stop, however, at the threshold of a second

degree because, in the summer of 1919, he decided to embark on the road of political

engagement. A first signal of this direction was his participation in a special issue of Il

Grido del Popolo in October 1917, edited by Gramsci and entirely devoted to the

problem of free trade, where Togliatti published in his own name an article entitled

‘Lotta economica e guerra’ [‘Economic Battle and War’]. Together with a second essay

published two weeks later,25 it bore witness to a phase of critical re-evaluation of the

unconditional liberalist faith of the previous years. The profound influence of the

democratic ‘meridionalismo’ of Nitti, Fortunato and Salvemini could be perceived in

both articles, and they attempted to analyse the social-political forces capable of

cancelling the gap between the ‘Two Italys’, proposing a more radical sense of

liberalism ‘which is not a battle for a few reforms to be obtained with parliamentary

repairs, but is a social battle that assails the whole structure of the nation’.

L’ORDINE NUOVO AND THE ‘BATTLE OF IDEAS’

Having been discharged from the army in November 1919, Togliatti returned

permanently to Turin, where he lived with his mother and siblings in modest quarters

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 9

in council housing at ‘Borgo Rossini’. He was nearly 26 and had behind him a solid

cultural education; he had reached maturity having been sheltered from the profound

disorders that marked Italian and European history. His return to civilian life,

however, seemed to coincide with what quickly became total immersion in the acute

political and social tensions that animated the industrial capital of the kingdom.

Togliatti’s attendance at socialist meetings now became assiduous. He was also

regularly present in the head office of the Piedmontese edition of Avanti!, first

published in December 1918 and for which Togliatti worked as a temporary clerk.

Alfonso Leonetti, a young socialist from Puglia who at the time was a reporter on the

paper, remembered his first encounter with him:

He wore a modest bourgeois suit, dark, a ‘pan’ hat and very thick glasses. He wanted to have a

familiar air, but one sensed he was a bit awkward on those premises. At the end of the

conversation, Gramsci accompanied him to the door to say goodbye, then coming towards me

said: ‘He’s Togliatti, a very well-prepared friend.’26

At least for the time being, his interventionist past did not seem to be an obstacle

to his reintroduction into the Turinese socialist branch. One of the first problems that

those socialists were posing themselves was the task of proselytising in the university,

where ‘socialist students, militant or sympathisers, could be counted on the fingers of

one hand’,27 and Togliatti’s engagement was addressed in just that direction. It is

certain in any case that he had by now developed an idea of direct engagement that

involved a new conception of the duties of an intellectual and his relationship to social

and political reality.

It is not surprising, then, that Togliatti was, with Gramsci, Tasca and Terracini, to

the fore in promoting the idea of a magazine that, as Mario Montagnana (a young

worker who became a frequent contributor) wrote a few months later, ‘must be for

young socialists what up until recently La Voce was for the most intelligent part of the

bourgeoisie […]; that is, it must be the fulcrum around which all the intelligences and

the wills to understand take place and develop’.28 Thus was born L’Ordine Nuovo, the

first number of which came out on 1 May 1919. Tasca, exploiting his contacts in the

organisation of the party and the network of trade union and cooperative associations,

had found the necessary financial resources for print and distribution, as well as a head

office in the same building as the editorial office of the Piedmontese Avanti!29

Little more than a year later, Gramsci – having mainly let the responsibility fall on

Tasca – gave a very critical and perhaps overly severe verdict on the first issues of the

magazine: ‘No central idea, no intimate organisation of the literary material published

[…] a review of abstract culture, with a tendency to publish hair-raising short stories

and well-intentioned xylographies […] a product of mediocre intellectualism which on

all fours searched for an ideal basis and a route to action.’30 According to a later

testimony of Terracini, Togliatti also seemed from early on to nurture some concerns

about the line taken by the magazine, and wanted to make it ‘an instrument of action,

therefore a light on reality, an elaborator of experiences, a generator of creative force’,

directed above all at factory workers.31 Nevertheless, the articles that he published in

10 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the first six issues were for the most part book reviews, in line with the primitive set-up

of a ‘socialist cultural review’ which was characteristic of the magazine. It was these

articles, however, collected in the survey La battaglia delle idee (‘The Battle of Ideas’) –

a name that would remain dear to Togliatti and would appear again 25 years later in

La Rinascita – that constituted the principal trace of the ‘rendering of accounts’

achieved by his own intellectual formation with the authors and teachers that had

nourished his youthful readings.

The double yardstick by which the validity of that cultural baggage was measured

was given by the war and the Russian Revolution. The war demonstrated for Togliatti

the inability of the capitalist world to renew itself and overcome its contradictions. The

Bolshevik Revolution – from the beginning of which he had been keen to underline

the originality of a movement that ‘has a practice and ideology all of its own, that

cannot be those of any preceding bourgeois movement’32 – appeared only fleetingly in

these first writings of Togliatti. He evidently had a still incomplete and imprecise

image of it: but the awareness of the acceleration that it imposed on history can be

sensed behind his every argument.

The heads of Italian Idealism, Croce and Gentile, whom Togliatti recognised

respectively as ‘the major educator of our generation in Italy’ and ‘the most illustrious

and listened to of the Italian philosophical school’, appeared incapable of

understanding the significance of war and revolution as both expression and cause of

an epochal caesura. Beyond the differences in tone – that denoted on the one hand a

greater familiarity with the work of Croce and on the other a more direct interest for

the themes discussed by Gentile – Togliatti’s reservations in relation to the two Idealist

philosophers were, as he himself specified, ‘the reservations of a revolutionary’. As such,

he assailed the inadequacy of their thought to capture the importance of the

revolutionary antithesis as a crucial moment of historical development and, above all,

their concept of the state, in which he saw an implicitly conservative idea of a subject

superior to every law and without ‘concrete support of the moral wills of individuals’.33

Far harsher and more dismissive, however, was his polemic against a number of

individuals who had a more prominent role in political culture before the war and in

his own development. His attitude towards the vociani (followers of La Voce) of the

first generation was pitiless: Prezzolini, for instance, was now dismissed as a preacher of

‘school teacher’s morality, pre-destined to sterility’.34 While there still remained a

sentiment of respect towards Sorel – if only for his capacity to comprehend the

revolutionary greatness of the Bolshevik Revolution – harsh indeed was the slating

criticism of the Italian followers of revolutionary syndicalism, portrayed as ‘nits’ on the

bodies of those giants of thought, such as Sorel and Bergson, whom they claimed to be

their inspiration.

Even the extremely young Gobetti of Energie Nove (‘New Energies’) did not escape

Togliatti’s caustic criticism; with respect to him, the sarcasm assumed ferocious tones:

[Here] the whole universe is judged while remaining suspended half in the sky in a nebulous

vocabulary that is supposed to give an illusion of depth […] Blessed be positivism, which sent

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 11

its neophytes around mad-houses to measure the skulls of delinquents, and didn’t make of

each ‘youth of understanding’ a preacher of the moral renewal of the world.35

One must recognise that Gobetti, who replied in a measured but curt way to the

criticism and earned himself a further ugly response from Gramsci, showed evidence of

notable fair play when, three years later, he judged the ‘brilliant cultural reports of

Togliatti’ as ‘the only lively things’ in the first series of L’Ordine Nuovo.36 In any case,

behind the harsh tone of the Ordine Nuovo editors there seemed to be a vexed attitude

towards the intellectual who wanted to rise to teacher of moral life and politics, a role

which they viewed as an aristocratic anachronism isolated from collective action

organised by the masses. Such attitude was, particularly in Togliatti’s mind, the

expression of an almost iconoclastic anxiety to make a blank slate of a past of

uncertainties, of illusions and inaction which was his own.

But, alongside this corrosive pars destruens, a pars construens also began to take

shape, with an ever more precise outline. In one of the most mature of Togliatti’s

writings of this period, he saw in the crisis of the unitary state the re-emergence of ‘the

original sin of home-grown liberalism, that of having been the movement of an

intellectual aristocracy and not the insurrection and reorganisation of strong social

energies’: class war had been, for a good part of the people, ‘the only school of liberty’,

and thus ‘socialism can become the true liberator of the whole of our country, making

us accustomed to considering freedom as a conquest, political institutions as an

incarnation of wills organised and coordinated to a common end.’37

WORKERS’ COUNCILS AND THE PARTY

When Togliatti wrote these words, in September 1919, L’Ordine Nuovo had already

profoundly transformed its nature. From the seventh issue, in June, after what Gramsci

would recall as an ‘editorial coup d’etat’ enacted with the full participation of Togliatti

and Terracini, it began to lose its initial character of ‘socialist cultural review’ to

become the platform on which the theme of factory councils, seen as possible

equivalents in Italy of Russian soviets, was developed with most coherence. Gramsci

planted the seed from which the new organisms could develop in the factory internal

commissions, which had to be revolutionised on the basis of two guiding principles:

the right of all workers, including those not organised in the union, to elect members,

and the organisation of the workers’ representation by workplace rather than by

trade.38

Togliatti did not arrive unprepared for the direction in which his friend wanted to

take the magazine. The translations that he had previously carried out for the Turinese

socialist press, thanks to an excellent knowledge of foreign languages, had enabled

Togliatti to familiarise himself with the new institutions of workers’ democracy – the

shop stewards’ movement in Britain, the Arbeiterräte in Austria, the Revolutionäre

Obleute in Germany – then reinvigorating the workers’ movement. It is likely that his

knowledge of the few writings of Lenin that circulated in Italian and French dates from

these months. It is not surprising, then, that he not only followed without reservation

the new policy of the magazine, but was also among its promoters. In collaboration

12 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

with Gramsci, he wrote the first editorial of L’Ordine Nuovo, ‘Democrazia Operaia’

(‘Worker Democracy’), addressing the topic of councils and, from here on, he

dedicated much of his writing to the theme of factory councils and their function. He

was concerned with defending their essence as a functional instrument in the

construction of a proletarian state in Italy: from his first article he upheld the thesis

that the factory council, based on the premise of a ‘spontaneous organisation of the

self-governing masses’, must prepare itself to become the ‘supreme regulator of work in

practice and by rights the organiser of the whole regime of production and exchange’,

until it constituted effectively ‘the new State, the State of labour’.39

On these grounds, Togliatti decisively rejected the attacks on the council

experiment coming simultaneously from left and right: from the leaders of the

powerful Federation of Engineering Workers (FIOM), who saw in it the spectre of

anarcho-syndicalism and feared that conceding the vote to non-members drained the

power of union organisation, but also from those exponents on the left of the PSI, like

Serrati and Bordiga, who accused the followers of L’Ordine Nuovo of believing that ‘the

proletariat can emancipate itself by gaining ground in economic relations while

capitalism along with the state still holds political power’ – as Bordiga affirmed in

Soviet on 4 January 1920.

In the meantime, the campaign launched by L’Ordine Nuovo achieved wide

success: the council movement was rapidly extended, so much so that towards the end

of the year it affected around 30 plants and more than 50,000 workers. On 1

November 1919, an assembly of the Turinese branch of the FIOM approved with a

large majority the principle of the constitution of factory councils based on the election

of workshop ‘commissars’ chosen by each ‘work team’.40

Togliatti participated intensely in the development of the movement: hardly a day

went by when he was not engaged in debates, conferences and meetings to explain and

popularise the function of the councils.41 Having been hired as a member of the

editorial staff of the Piedmontese Avanti!, it can be said that his career as a ‘professional

revolutionary’ began here.

The first months of 1920 saw him engaged in the internal battle of the socialist

party for the election of a new executive committee: together with Gramsci and almost

all the working class core-followers of L’Ordine Nuovo, but not with Tasca and

Terracini, he sided with the ‘communist-abstentionist’ faction in opposition to the

‘maximalist-electionist’ one. In reality, the denominations that reflected the complex

national geography of the socialist factions did not have a defined and stable organising

equivalent in Turin: the problem of participation (or lack of it) in elections was not felt

as fundamental or decisive. Rather, the reasons for opposing the maximalist current

stemmed from concern that it had not provided an effective critique of the reformist

influence in the national Direzione42, which was deemed incapable ‘of giving a firm and

precise direction to class war’.43

The communist-abstentionist list won the majority of the branch: Togliatti

obtained 239 votes and got onto the executive, of which a worker, Giovanni Boero,

was secretary. From this point, the Ordine Nuovo group began to come out of its

narrowly Turinese focus, concentrating more on how to reconcile the renovating

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 13

function of the new institutions with transforming the PSI into a revolutionary party.

Togliatti, too, shifted the emphasis of his argument in this direction, for the first time

engaging in internal party battles at the national level. Between February and March,

he wrote a detailed critique of the constitution of the soviets presented by Nicola

Bombacci, one of the leaders of the maximalist current, which he admonished for

being too abstract.44

The lockout decreed by Turinese industrialists following a engineering strike in

protest against working hours marked the beginning of a bitter struggle that continued

for a month, including a ten-day general strike. At stake, as clearly perceived on both

sides, was the very legitimacy of factory councils and, consequently, the workers’

control of production. The almost total isolation of the Turinese workers due to the

lack of support on a national scale was proof that the leading organs of the PSI and the

Italian Confederation of Labour (CGIL) were not willing to back any initiative that

could lead to a revolutionary outcome that they judged premature or inopportune. For

the Ordine Nuovo group, it was a decisive turning point: ‘the illusion that a

regeneration of the party could be born spontaneously given the existence of an

organised mass movement on the production site’ was no longer plausible.45 In April,

Gramsci prepared – and the Turinese branch approved – a document that a few

months later would be judged by Lenin to be the PSI ‘fully responding to the

fundamental principles of the Third International’. It contained an extremely harsh

criticism of the politics of the PSI leadership, and it enjoined its transformation from a

‘mere parliamentary party that keeps itself immobile within the narrow-minded limits

of bourgeois democracy’ into a ‘homogeneous, cohesive [party] with its own doctrine,

own tactics, a rigid and implacable discipline’, from which ‘revolutionary non-

communists’ must be excluded. The Turinese branch expressed a very clear-cut verdict

on the situation: ‘the current phase of class war in Italy is the phase that precedes either

the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat […]; or a

dreadful reaction on the part of the property-owning class and the governing caste.’46

Togliatti seemed to agree completely with this analysis. In an article entitled

Guerra di classe (‘Class War’), he explained more concisely – but no less dramatically –

the alternative indicated by Gramsci: ‘either all power is won, or all is lost in the

battle.’47 Hence the urgency to forge a new type of party and the requirement to win

over the decisive levers of the organisational structure of the PSI. On this ground,

however, a quite clear-cut differentiation within the Ordine Nuovo group became

manifest at the beginning of the summer.

The first and most serious disagreement divided Gramsci from Tasca, who at the

end of May presented to the Turinese congress of the Camera del Lavoro48 a report

aimed at bringing the council movement back under the guardianship and direction of

the union. Despite what Tasca stated subsequently, it seems unlikely that Togliatti had

been informed of this and that he made ‘no objection’. In these weeks, he still appeared

to be counting on a re-launch of the councils, underlining their adverse function with

respect to ‘union bureaucracy’. His differences with Gramsci came to the surface later

when, in July 1920, Giovanni Boero resigned as secretary of the socialist branch and

14 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the different positions of the Ordine Nuovo followers revealed a deeper disagreement

on the very conception of the party.

Gramsci, who had collected around himself a small ‘group of communist

education’, declared himself out of the contest, concentrating on the task of education

in the factories and re-launching – as he himself said – the ‘integral thesis of the

councils’. Togliatti and Terracini instead held the conquest of the branch to be

extremely important. Their objective was the ‘purging of the party’, even if they

rejected an ‘immediate division’, which would allow the reformists to drag away an

important part of the proletarian base of the party. Rather, it amounted to establishing

rigid discipline, excluding ‘unreliable elements’ from any office, preparing armaments

of the proletariat ‘with organic military criteria’, promoting the formation of councils

and ‘communist groups’ in factories and unions, whilst also maintaining close

connections with other sections at a national level in order to arrive at a future congress

in strong positions. It was necessary to participate in the then imminent administrative

elections as well: ‘for a political affirmation, to snatch another position from the

bourgeoisie, to lay the foundations for the essential organisms of future society,

connecting with each other districts, unions, cooperatives of production and

consumption’.49

This position obtained a wide majority, and Togliatti was nominated secretary of

the executive committee. However, the emerging divergence was no small matter: so

much so, that Gramsci even talked of ‘a revenge of union bureaucracy and of the

opportunist elements of the socialist section’, and again in 1924 he would criticise

Togliatti and Terracini for having ‘caught up with Tasca’. For his part, Togliatti

recalled the episode in the Turinese commemoration of Gramsci in 1949, hinting at ‘a

few moments, I don’t want to say of demoralisation, but uncertainty’ of his friend,

‘when perhaps he was assailed by doubt whether the road of battle was the one to take

immediately, or whether wide educational work might not be needed first’.50 The

episode highlighted, as Ragionieri revealed, different personality traits in Gramsci and

Togliatti, the first capable of ‘penetrating within the general awareness of a universal

historical situation even the internal discussion of a party section, and in the end so

profoundly trusting of the creative revolutionary forces of history’, the second more

cautious and pragmatic, ‘more inclined to recognise the importance of historically

established and realised institutions’.51

The disagreement, of which no trace appeared in the pages of L’Ordine Nuovo

(whereas the polemic with Tasca was open and he ceased to collaborate on the

magazine), was destined however to be overtaken by events.

FROM THE OCCUPATION OF FACTORIES TO THE LIVORNO SCHISM

The resistance from the engineering industrialists to the demands for improvements in

wages and conditions presented by FIOM led the union, in mid-August 1920, to

choose obstructionism, consisting in suspension of piecework and in meticulous

observance of all safety regulations. The contractors responded with a lockout, and the

workers in turn spontaneously occupied the factories at the beginning of September

1920.52

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 15

In Turin, the workers’ councils organised and directed the occupation of all the

factories in the city, preparing armed guards and also managing to continue production

activity: the tenacious propaganda started by L’Ordine Nuovo little more than a year

before had borne fruit. The editors of the magazine threw themselves into the

movement heart and soul, holding rallies in the occupied factories, participating in the

workers’ assemblies, making efforts to guarantee internal discipline and armed defence.

In the heat of battle, the differences that had emerged the previous July–August were

forgotten: Tasca, the Gramscian group of ‘communist education’, the ‘electionists’ and

the ‘abstentionists’ were all united in this gigantic effort.

As secretary of the socialist branch, Togliatti found himself in the front line. He

had a strong conviction that he was facing a revolutionary situation unlikely to be

repeated. A year later, in a profoundly changed context marked by defeat, he would

write that in September 1920 ‘the proletarian dictatorship appeared realisable as its

fundamental historical premise had been achieved: the predominance of the industrial

and revolutionary proletariat in the life of the country, and the transmission of its

ideology of victory to all categories of workers.’53 In line with this conviction, his intent

was to overcome the original trade union nature of the movement and have it assume

the character of a struggle for power. At a meeting of the governing bodies of the CGIL

and the PSI held in Milan on 9 September, he declared that the Turinese branch ‘has

drawn the battle on political ground’ and that a ‘national action’ should also ‘be

centred on a movement of political character, [while] union and parliamentary action

must only serve as a smokescreen’. Although sceptical about the possibility of success

should the workers attack first, Togliatti declared ‘insurrectional action [to be] better,

as long as the Direzione, which has the means to judge, warns us in this sense’.54

Demanding from the top of the PSI the choice of which direction to take, without

expressing his own opinion on whether the conditions existed to attempt a seizure of

power, Togliatti’s conclusion exposed the dramatic isolation in which the Ordine

Nuovo group had developed its project, and the excess of trust that it placed in the

creative spontaneity of the council movement as an element in and of itself capable of

resolving the political contradictions of the PSI.

At this point, the decision of the CGIL to look for a trade union resolution to the

dispute in compliance with the PSI Direzione was already clear. Equally clear to

Togliatti was his own impotence with regard to influencing the orientation of the

Italian workers’ movement. On 19 September, the Confindustria (employers’

federation) and the FIOM, with government mediation, negotiated an agreement for

the conclusion of the dispute; a week later, the workers began to leave the occupied

factories.

The outcome of the battle was not immediately perceived as negative, even by the

Turinese: the engineering workers obtained notable wage increases, and the Giolitti

government instituted a joint committee to formulate a bill on the workers’ control of

industries. Togliatti himself seemed worried, not so much about the consequences of

what for him did not yet appear to be a defeat, as about the dangers for preserving class

autonomy in such an agreement. The fundamental lesson drawn from the conduct of

the engineers was very clear, however: the awareness of the vacuity of every effort

16 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

aimed at ‘renovating’ the PSI. The need for division, too, was affirmed by the Ordine

Nuovo followers without any hesitation. Already on 18 September a communiqué from

the Turinese branch, almost certainly drafted by Togliatti, affirmed that ‘the

conviction that the destiny of the socialist revolution depends above all on the

existence of a party that is truly a communist party has been confirmed’.55

All the action and all writings of Togliatti in the last months of 1920 were now

dominated by this objective. However, there was some oscillation in his position on the

modal and timescale for the constitution of the new party. While the occupation of the

factories lasted, and for a few weeks longer, Togliatti suggested he was aiming at a

communist party capable of bringing with it a large majority of the organised

proletariat in the PSI. Therefore, he firmly rejected every ambition to provoke the split

as ‘damaging, disastrous to the fate of our movement’ and fully engaged the energies of

his branch in the battle for the PSI administrative elections, expected on 7

November.56 In this case, even though he made efforts to exclude the ‘mandarins’ of

trade union and cooperative reformism from the list, he still called upon the forces of

the Turinese proletariat to gather around the banner of the old PSI, in order to leave

an important power lever such as the city administration as a legacy for the gestating

communist party. The result of the elections was, however, unfavourable to the

socialists. By very few votes, and with strong suspicions of fraud, the conservative

block, formed by liberals and ‘populars’ (Catholics), prevailed. Togliatti, in turn,

missed election to the town council by only a few votes.

The elections were the last important event before the decisive national congress of

the PSI. In the Turinese pre-congressional debate, the full complement of the executive

immediately sided in favour of the communist fraction that would be officially

constituted at the Imola convention. Togliatti, in the opening address, echoed the

motion presented by Gramsci in April ‘that comrade Lenin and the Executive of the

International have [since] made their own’; a fact, he underlined, that counted to

refute the accusation ‘made of Italian communists of being blind executors of Russian

orders, and of the blame apportioned to Russian communists of judging things about

Italy without knowing them’.57 The communist fraction prevailed with a large

majority; shortly afterwards, Togliatti resigned as secretary and took over as editor-in-

chief of L’Ordine Nuovo, which from 1 January 1921 became the daily paper of the

communist fraction.

After the Imola convention, Togliatti – like Gramsci – appeared to accentuate the

‘anti-centrist’ polemic rather than underline the necessity of a majority split. He traced

a ruthless analysis of the components of Italian socialism: that the vain ambitions of

government held by the reformists were destined to be frustrated due to the absence of

a social base capable of sustaining them, while Serrati’s fraction ‘paralysed’ the

proletariat with the equivocation of having as its ‘sole programme’ the maintenance of

a fictitious unity, which jeopardised every possibility of ‘accelerating revolutionary

development’.58 This constant concern about programmatic clarity, ideological

cohesion and internal discipline developed into exaltation of an openly Jacobin

conception of the party as:

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 17

[A] minority that is furnished with greater conscience and more precise historical perception.

To this minority is entrusted the future of the whole class which it has to save from every

danger, internal and external. It is thus the natural guide of the historic movement through

which the proletariat is brought to conquer power; it understands the class in its different

stages, evaluates every fact on a par with the end it is aware of, exercises at the same time a

function of criticism, of clarification and framework for action.59

The conception of the party as a direct expression of the masses’ revolutionary

organisation inspired by the experience of the workers’ councils was now relegated by

Togliatti to the background.

2

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION

BEYOND THE TURINESE DIMENSION: THE DISCOVERY OF FASCISM

Togliatti was not present in Livorno on 21 January 1921, when the division of the PSI

was officially confirmed and the birth of the Communist Party of Italy, section of the

Communist International, was registered. He had stayed in Turin to edit L’Ordine

Nuovo. After all, the role of the Turinese group in the new party – solidly directed by

the Bordiga fraction, the only one with a semblance of national organisational

substance – initially appeared to be of secondary importance to maintaining contact

with the workers.

Togliatti wrote a far from triumphalist comment on the split in L’Ordine Nuovo.1

He was too realistic to deny that the conditions in which the new party would be

operating were far more difficult than had been foreseen when the decision to break

away had been taken. In the first months of 1921, the Italian situation had undergone

a radical change which overturned the relationship between the classes existent during

the ‘red years’ of 1919–20. The PCI had been formed on the hypothesis that Italian

society would succumb to a revolutionary crisis. It had to establish itself amidst a

disturbed social fabric, whilst also defending its fledgling organisation from the double

threat of a managerial counter offensive and fascist violence.

And yet, the exit from the PSI was certainly felt by Togliatti as a liberation.

Gramsci’s statement, made a few weeks later, that thanks to the split the communists

‘saved themselves […] from a tomb, […] released from the embrace of a cadaver’,2

reflected Togliatti’s most deep convictions too. There was in him an almost

exasperated will to sever ties with the past of Italian socialism. Nothing better expressed

this mood than a curious article written just four days after Livorno, provocatively

titled ‘In Praise of the Cynic’, that set to counterpose in deliberately paradoxical tones

the considerations of the mind to those of the heart, ‘this cumbersome and tiresome

muscle, so dear to the poets of the past, to the politicians of today, and to women of all

ages’.3 But fierce sarcasm did not succeed in hiding entirely the sense of loss that

originated from the trauma of a painful fracture; it rather strengthened the impression

that in the cold rationality that Togliatti applied to rule his own political action there

was a strong dose of self-denial.

The activity of political journalist was Togliatti’s principal occupation until the end

of 1922. He was, as we have seen, editor-in-chief of L’Ordine Nuovo. A whole series of

organisational duties occupied part of the day and the whole night in the Turinese

office of the paper. This office was by then fortified – as recalled by Benedetto Croce

on a page of his diary from 1944 – ‘with Friesian horses and other similar military

preparations’ to safeguard it from possible attacks from the fascist squads. In addition

20 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

to his editorial work, Togliatti wrote increasingly and with continuity on topics of a

national character.

In Turin, the local fascist group – which had links to another group of extreme

nationalists – did not constitute a spearhead of Mussolini’s movement. For a long

time, the Turinese fascists were unable to find a way of reaching the local bourgeoisie,

who were still sensitive to Giolittian politics. The direct observations of the most

virulent forms of fascist violence made by Togliatti during 1921, particularly in

Tuscany, therefore represented an important broadening of his own horizons. It is

worth recalling in particular his comments on the events in Florence, where in

February 1921 the fascist squads attempted a sortie, culminating in an attack on the

proletarian areas of the city and the assassination of the communist railway worker

Spartaco Lavagnini, secretary of the Camera del Lavoro. This, in turn, precipitated a

tough popular response. Togliatti considered the unfolding events paradigmatic of the

very nature of fascism and its relationship with the ruling classes. The withdrawal on

the part of the ‘private bourgeois forces – fascists, ex-officials, students’ in the face of

the worker counter-offensive and the re-establishment of ‘order’ by the Royal Guard

and the ‘carabinieri’ symbolised ‘the moment of class war when, as conflict spreads and

social laceration deepens, the State intervenes and takes the place of the forces that have

operated up until now, at least apparently, on their own’.4

Togliatti appeared entirely in accord with both Bordiga’s and Gramsci’s analysis,

though with different nuance. Having denied all originality and autonomy to the

fascist movement, which they considered a manoeuvrable instrument at the command

of the bourgeoisie, the communists saw in the actions of the fascist squads the means to

a solid counter-revolutionary coalition, from democrats to populars, from socialists to

fascists, in the footsteps already followed by other countries, such as Germany. The

possible variants and the tensions internal to this design, like those between the two

liberal leaders Nitti and Giolitti, were considered a secondary aspect of the problem.

The reading of the ministerial crises in which the death throes of the liberal state were

consumed was all inspired by this schema.5

Certainly, while Bordiga looked at the succession of blows fascism landed on the

scaffolding of the liberal state with a certain detachment not alien from satisfaction,

Togliatti appeared to feel a sense of almost rabid impotence for what, beyond

declamations, he believed was a dramatic defeat of the proletariat. Every hint of

resistance, every symptom of recovery was saluted with enthusiasm: ‘the proletariat

must never provide examples of cowardice,’ he writes after the events of Florence in

March 1921, ‘[…] better, one hundred times better, to leave fifty dead on the

pavement of a city than to tolerate without reaction violence and offence’.6 But when it

was a matter of indicating a route to overcome impotence, he appeared almost always a

prisoner of the rigid sectarian and class prejudices of the PCI Direzione: ‘the proletariat

must know that suppression of legality is a fact closely linked with the sharpening of

class differences, and must not seek to end this state of affairs prematurely, but to

aggravate it to make class conflict ever more acute, open, evident’.7

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 21

THE CHARM OF BORDIGA

Without doubt, this position was accentuated when Togliatti, towards the end of the

summer of 1921, moved to Rome to become editor-in-chief of Il Comunista, the daily

newspaper of the PCI published from 11 October. Later, he would advance the

hypothesis that the decision to call him to the capital was due to Bordiga’s intention of

breaking up the Ordine Nuovo group. This is not really credible; in autumn 1921, no

covert dissent with regard to national Direzione positions was evident amongst the

Turinese. It is likely that distancing himself from the city where he spent his youth and

developed culturally and politically affected Togliatti; that he reacted against his

enforced transplant to Rome, ‘the city of traffickers and bureaucrats, the city of the

heroic and generous populace and the vile and parasitic bourgeoisie’, is certain. So

different from Turin, he learnt only to love Rome with time.8 Nor can it have been

easy for his temperament of ‘cold person, controlled and reserved so as to appear

apathetic, […] closed within himself, little inclined to formulate conversations’ – thus

Giovanni Giardina, the manager of Il Comunista, remembered him9 – to adapt to a

new common working practice with comrades who were for the most part unknown,

or to create for himself a circle of friends. Nevertheless, in Rome Togliatti came more

directly under the political influence (and probably also the charm) of Bordiga, with

whom he had almost daily meetings. The harmony of their judgements on the Italian

situation seemed to deepen as the crisis in the country increased.

In the meantime, the communist polemic against the socialists intensified

following the parliamentary elections of May 1921, whereat 123 PSI deputies were

returned compared to just 15 from the PCI – a proportion that did not reflect the less

imbalanced relationship between the two parties sanctioned by the Livorno division.

Later, on 29 July 1922, when the king consulted Turati as to the solution to the new

governmental crisis, Togliatti wrote: ‘Turati went to the king: the Italian socialist

movement is undone. It is one less corpse to drag along for the future, one less

encumbrance for the day of the supreme trial.’10

If anything, the specificity of Togliatti’s position on the PSI lay in a depth of

historical analysis rarely found in the writings of other Italian communist leaders,

except for Gramsci. So, for example, in an article of June 1921 on socialist policy in

the countryside, he questioned the reasons for the sudden crisis in the peasant leagues

in the Po Valley, and located it in the lack of connection between their actions and the

wider prospect of the ‘conquest of the state’. Thus, ‘the violence, limited,

circumscribed within the limits of trade union action, rather than being an instrument

of revolution, took on the aspect of arrogance and arbitrariness.’ Nevertheless, this

judgement did not stop him from recognising in an interview held on 8 June 1922

with the leader of the cooperatives, Giuseppe Massarenti, ‘the real, enormous, perhaps

never yet equalled importance that the propaganda and organisational action of the

agricultural masses had in the history of the awakening of the Italian masses’.11

Togliatti also followed the evolution of the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) with

perhaps greater attention than he devoted to the PSI between the summer of 1921 and

the spring of 1922. In so doing, he tried to trace the background tendencies of the

22 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Catholic world from everyday political reporting. His starting point was to evaluate the

lay character assumed by this political force. This, in turn, was set against a

background of the secularisation of Catholic parties in the wider European context,

which made them a dam against the revolution.12 In Italy, the party of Don Sturzo

appeared, since the summer of 1921, to be the only party to pose without reticence

‘the problem of taking advantage of the depression of the masses in order to constitute

a solid base for a government party’.13 However, whilst identifying the PPI as the most

advanced and coherent form of bourgeois political expression, Togliatti also recognised

at the beginning of 1922 ‘the first signs of a greater awareness of the ecclesiastical-

religious dimension of the Catholic problem’.14 Commenting on an official agreement

between the Soviet Union and the Vatican, he held that for Italy the deep roots of

Catholicism were such that ‘a mass […] could even be in the sights of communists’.

Thus, the party could combine the struggle for economic and political liberation,

complete with its objective ‘anti-religious meaning’, with the conservation of ‘that

which is called “faith”, that is a rudimentary transcendental conception of the world

and of life’.15

This capacity for articulated analysis was not, however, reflected in an adequate

evaluation of the extremely serious political crisis which in the summer of 1922 opened

the way to power for fascism. Faced with the crisis of the Facta government, which

officially began on 20 July, Togliatti adopted a detached and scornful position. After

the substantial failure of the ‘legalitarian strike’ of 1 August, the comments of the PCI

press – almost all attributed to Togliatti – were preoccupied with reacting to the feeling

of distrust in the masses and, above all, developing the propagandistic motif of social

democratic betrayal.16

Immediately after the strike, at the request of the local communist federation,

Togliatti was invited to Turin ‘to assume on the mandate of the E[xecutive]

C[ommittee] the direction of the whole […] party movement in the eventuality of a

worsening of the situation’. We do not know precisely how and by overcoming what

resistance Togliatti fulfilled the mandate he had received. Certainly, the report that he

gave on 8 August to the Turinese section appears entirely in tune with the positions of

the leading Bordighian group. He insisted on the fact that ‘the process of disintegration

of the Italian government as a whole is taking place inexorably’. He reaffirmed the

thesis of convergence of ‘mass parties (socialists, populars, fascists)’ in an attempt to

pre-empt the ‘proletarian recovery’ and to ‘stop it channelling towards its natural

outlet’, that is the transformation of ‘civil battles […] into true class war organised

according to a single plan’. To reach this end – he continued – it was necessary to

‘clarify the misunderstanding of the Italian socialist party’.17

THE SOCIALIST SPLIT AND THE MARCH ON ROME

Togliatti, then, did not notice that the failure of the general strike had disarmed the

entire workers’ movement, and that the communists ‘far from being able to turn the

defeat in their favour, were destined to be the first victims of the success of reactionary

forces and of the disintegration of the proletarian front’.18 Nevertheless, when the

division of the PSI occurred, and congress decreed the expulsion of reformists,

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 23

Togliatti’s position registered a sudden change of direction.19 His statement of 5

October 1922 had a strikingly different tone from the past: in Serrati’s final speech he

picked up on not only ‘the recognition of many errors and many aberrations’, but also

‘a promise for the future’.20 It was a position that, in effect, took into consideration

pressure from the Comintern in favour of a speedy fusion of the residual revolutionary

forces in Italy. This was clearly different from the position of Bordiga, who expressed

maximum indifference to the split. Albeit very cautiously, Togliatti confirmed his

position in the discussion of the leading organs of the party: in the Central Committee

(CC) session of 12 October he showed a willingness to confront the problem of fusion,

so long as it followed a lengthy period of common action that put to the test the

‘maximalist elements’. His declared concern was to avoid retreating into a position of

absolute intransigence, which would offer the Comintern the pretext to deprive the

leading group of authority and consign the reins of the party to the ‘right’ (Tasca and

Graziadei), who were ready to accept the line of the united front.21 In fact, it was the

first sign of difference within the PCI’s majority and, on close inspection, the first

political act of national importance undertaken by Togliatti.

Undoubtedly, in October 1922, he had already become one of the most

authoritative leaders of the PCI. Having been elected onto the CC by the second

congress, held in Rome in March 1922, the role of journalist had become too narrow,

and the intention on the part of the party executive to use his abilities in tasks of more

direct political responsibility had been raised already with his mission to Turin in

August. The decision to entrust him with a ‘Report on Fascism’ in October, to be

presented to the fourth congress of the Comintern, was further significant recognition.

The document – which did not arrive in Moscow in time to be used in discussion

– was notable for its remarkable breadth. First of all, it underlined the specifically

Italian character of the fascist movement, and therefore recalled the structural problems

of the process of national unification of the peninsula, the heterogeneous composition

of a bourgeoisie that had never lived up to its role of ruling class, the repercussions of

this on the workers’ and peasant movement, and the permanent limits of its

‘subversionism’. Secondly, the evaluation of the role played by the middle classes in the

formation of a mass base for fascism was much more developed than Bordiga’s

schematic analysis, even though it was still far from attributing to the petit bourgeoisie

the revolutionary potential that the Comintern leader, Karl Radek, saw in it.

Despite such originality, Togliatti gave the same dismissive judgement to the

March on Rome and the accession of the fascists to government as the majority of the

leading group of the PCI. He displayed the opinion that the events of 28–30 October

‘have not profoundly modified the internal Italian situation’, and that ‘the fascist

government, which is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, will have no interest in

freeing itself of any of the traditional democratic prejudices’.22

And yet, when he wrote these words, Togliatti had just lived through the violence

of fascist squads in all its drama. He had been, as he would tell his biographers 30 years

later, ‘for the first time placed, by the enemy, face to face with death’. For on 29

October, the head office of Il Comunista was invaded and seriously damaged by the

blackshirts. According to his story, Togliatti, having been recognised, managed to

24 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

escape the firing squad because he had been left in the charge of a single squadron

member, an army officer who, perhaps astonished by his sang froid, allowed him to slip

out of an unguarded exit at the printers.23 Bordiga would pay tribute to his ‘truly

heroic attitude’ a few days later from the platform of the fourth congress of the

Comintern, generating applause from the assembly.24

A ‘TEMPEST OF DOUBT’?

After this episode, with the illegal publication Il Comunista all but impossible, the

party again sent Togliatti to Turin. His task was to ensure the survival of L’Ordine

Nuovo. Its head office, however, was first cleared out by the police, and then destroyed

by fascists. Only a few zinc printed issues of the paper could be produced, distributed

directly to the factories.

For some weeks, Togliatti worked tirelessly in Turin (sometimes underground and

sometimes openly) to re-establish interrupted contacts and to disseminate the presence

of the party. On 7 November, in a working-class area of the city, he even arranged to

celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a rally protected by

‘communist defence squads’.25 The knowledge of belonging to a world movement, and

the strength of connection with the country where the working class had seized power,

began to constitute for Togliatti one of the decisive factors in the will to resist fascism,

as testified by an article that appeared on 9 December in the Trieste Il Lavoratore, the

only communist newspaper that continued publication:

The biggest country in Europe is governed by workers and peasants […] Around the Soviet

Republic are gathered all the oppressed peoples that threaten the heart of English Imperialism.

On the other hand revolutionary ferments mature throughout Central Europe. What then is

the equilibrium that the bourgeoisie has reached? Where is the defeat of the revolution?26

In reality, the ‘defeat of the revolution’ weighed heavily on the Turinese proletariat,

with all its tragic consequences. Fascism wrote one of the most atrocious pages of its

history in the Piedmontese city, that of the massacre of 18–20 December. At least

eleven people were confirmed dead, while the majority of the active cadres of the PCI

were forced to leave the city or go into hiding.27 The December massacre was then

followed in February 1923 by a wave of arrests unleashed against the communist

leaders at the national level.

What of Togliatti? Apparently, and inexplicably, his contact with the party was

interrupted for at least a month. On 7 April, Umberto Terracini wrote to his Turin

address, tersely recalling him to his duties:

Dear Palmiro, we will talk at length as soon as we have the pleasure of seeing you again. I will

not hide from you, however, our surprise at your behaviour in these most serious of times for

the party […]. Your splendid isolation, that has stretched now over two weeks […] is

damaging to the party and to our movement. We pray you on receipt of this communication

to leave whatever is currently keeping you that you hold to be more important and worthy of

attention than the party and come immediately to speak with us.

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 25

Togliatti answered, but in terms that left his interlocutor understandably

dumbfounded:

Dearest, a note from you dated 7 April has reached me. I had already sent to warn you that I

was and am curing a tiresome relapse of pleurisy, which is appreciated neither by me nor my

affairs. You talk to me of a worsening of conditions of the party and that pains and surprises

me. Just think, I have spent quite a few days without even reading the papers.

Terracini’s answer, dated 13 April, did not hide his growing irritation, nor did it

neglect sarcasm. It concluded, however, with a heartfelt appeal to Togliatti: ‘Your place

is on the Executive, and it is all the more necessary that you should fill it as much as it

is likely that the methodical police raids on us will continue.’ A few more days passed

and Togliatti, who in the meantime had made known that he now felt ‘reasonably’

well, returned to his post.28

Some shadows of uncertainty remain. In the few mentions that he made of it,

Togliatti kept to the version of illness; but this is apparently contradicted by the

testimony that his sister Maria Cristina gave to Giorgio Bocca:

After the massacre, Palmiro returned to our house […] and he practically retired from

political life […] He was not ill, he read and wrote until late at night, he received with much

caution comrades Santhià and Robotti. They would enter on tiptoe, and stayed for a short

time, but he would not talk to us about it. Mother every so often would say to me, as if in

thanks: ‘Palmi has returned to the roost.’

It seems then that Togliatti – whatever his state of health – was going through a

personal crisis in these months, something similar to the famous ‘storm of doubt’

reminiscent of Mazzini. What were the reasons for it? The understandably reticent

explanations of his comrades at the time hinted at different factors: irritation towards

Bordiga’s position (not such as to translate into open dissent over the party line,

however), and uncertainty about his own private future (during these months,

Togliatti’s relationship with his long-term fiancé, Elda Banchetti, was disrupted. Her

family apparently posed him the classic dilemma of choosing between political

engagement and the commencement of an ordered family and working life).29 Only

Andrea Viglongo, ex-journalist from L’Ordine Nuovo and recently expelled from the

PCI, alluded openly in July 1923 to ‘he who must still explain certain lacunae of his

activity as revolutionary leader, which coincide with the most difficult moments

encountered by the communist party’. Togliatti reacted icily, writing to Terracini in

these terms:

I personally couldn’t give a damn. Since I entered the party, I have as a principle not to hold

in any regard the opinions that people have of me. Only I know whether I am a scoundrel or

not, and in the judgement of others I never find reason for either satisfaction or displeasure.30

It seems certain, however, that between the end of 1922 and the first few months

of 1923 Togliatti reflected deeply on the choice before him. It was neither an easy

26 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

choice nor a painless one; nor was it made all at once. On 8 March 1923, just before

his contacts with the party were interrupted, an article of his appeared that hinted at

something of his path. Its title was ‘In Praise of Fascism’ and, like ‘In Praise of the

Cynic’ written little more than a year before, it relied on sarcasm and paradox to mask

a moment of serious personal upheaval. Among the reasons that – according to him –

made it tempting to write ‘in praise’ of fascism, before giving way to disdain and

contempt, there was one that resonated:

Better still if revolutionaries had learnt that theirs is a mission and not a job; a mission that

requires self-sacrifice and in which the bitterest of fruits are harvested: deprivations of liberty

and a wretched life and exile and tenacious resistance in the middle of desperate events. And

better still if all this had been done consistently and persistently, with bitterness it’s true, but

with seriousness.31

‘WOE BETIDE THE TIRED IN A MOVEMENT SUCH AS OURS’

At the beginning of May 1923, Togliatti returned to party work, having been co-opted

on to the Executive Committee (EC) as a full member on 5 March. He dedicated

himself to the job of reorganising the party with total determination, evidently keen to

bury the anxieties that had tormented him over the previous weeks. Camilla Ravera

remembers:

At work Togliatti was tireless. Precise, patient, rigorous in examining problems and possible

solutions, and then considered in his decisions, in assuming tasks and engagements. In

checking the carrying out of assigned tasks he was tenacious, demanding, severe. And he

always bore in mind the practical reality within which men operated; their way of being, of

thinking, of feeling: different in each one, he said, and to be considered with attention and

serene detachment.32

This portrait, beyond its ‘edifying’ tints, seems to correspond well with a ‘style of

work’ that became one of the distinctive traits of Togliatti’s persona, and that gradually

imposed its authority on his comrades, making secondary those aspects of insecurity

that had not been erased from his personality. The hold of the party, the tenacity and

the spirit of sacrifice of its militants, were for Togliatti ‘reasons to believe’ in the final

victory and guarantee of its realisation. In August 1923, criticising a manifesto of the

Turinese communist trade union committee wherein he sensed signs ‘of a tiredness, a

mistrust and a lack of enthusiasm and complete faith in what is said’, he offered a

revelatory comment: ‘It is perhaps a matter of tiredness and personal temperament.

Well, woe betide the tired in a movement such as ours.’33

Togliatti’s attitude towards fusion with the PSI, or at least with a part of it, which

the Comintern continued to enjoin as the primary task of the Italian party, must be

understood in the light of this moral view. For Togliatti, the revival of the Italian

workers’ movement could not occur other than outside and against the whole socialist

tradition, which was ‘encumbered with [a] body without [a] soul that can live no more

and [yet] is incapable of disappearing’.34 The priority for the communist party was to

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 27

select a leading cadre able to arrive prepared for a new revolutionary situation that it

had contributed to bringing to maturation.

Togliatti’s lack of preconceptions about the regrouping of the Italian bourgeoisie

after Mussolini’s March on Rome was evident in the almost weekly reports that he sent

to the Comintern from the beginning of May to September 1923. In these, an

evaluation of fascism emerged that related its character to the historic divisions within

bourgeois hegemony in Italy, underlining the ‘inexorable developments’ that forced it

‘to eliminate steadily all the residue of the past regime and shut itself into an

intransigence that will make its dictatorship ever more bitter and tyrannical’. So much

so, that – and here his disagreement with Bordiga was clear – ‘it cannot be understood

how the legend of a certain affinity between fascism and labourism could have found

so much currency’, from the moment that ‘an armed fraction could not transform itself

into a rough copy of reformism without totally renouncing its power, that is to say

without condemning itself to disappearing’.35 On the whole, the understanding of

fascism as no longer just a mass movement capable of interpreting at least momentarily

the moods and aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie, but as a force of government, took

hold in Togliatti.

Symptomatic was the attention with which he followed the process of electoral

reform, well known as the ‘legge Acerbo’. This was approved in parliament in the

summer of 1923, with the only votes against being those of the two socialist parties

and the PCI (and with part of the PPI abstaining). The substantial abolition of the

proportional system and the conspicuous prize of seats it predicted for the majority list

represented for Togliatti the formal crowning of the objective pursued by Mussolini

since the March on Rome, that is the unification of the forces of the bourgeoisie

around a single party. In his report to the Comintern of 10 September, Togliatti

summarised the measures which cemented support for Mussolini’s government

amongst the ruling forces of the Italian economy. These included the abolition of

inheritance tax, the institution of new customs tariffs and the ceding to private

industry the state telephone and telegraph companies. He also recognised the

‘restoration of all capitalist privileges to the detriment of not only the working classes

but also of the middle classes’. Even so, he had little faith in the anti-fascist credentials

of the latter.36

The reasons for this scepticism were founded in a frank analysis of the opposition

forces, which in the debate on electoral reform law had demonstrated their

inconsistency. The fact that ‘the foundations to begin a bourgeois anti-fascist

movement with revolutionary character are absent’ in the end induced him to

concentrate entirely on the task of reinforcing the organisation of the PCI.37

So Togliatti clearly distanced himself from the hypothesis of political ‘blocades for

the defence of liberty’ considered with interest by Avanti! The call for the ‘united front’

that he offered the socialists on 14 May in the name of the PCI was clearly

instrumental: ‘we conceive of […] the tactic of blocades and of the single front – he

declares – as a means precisely to continue to wage on new ground the battle against

the traitors of the proletariat’.38

28 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

‘HALF-WAY’ BETWEEN BORDIGA AND GRAMSCI

It is likely that Togliatti’s statement was directed against the Comintern’s line of united

action between the PCI and PSI. Nevertheless, he began to realise what risks would be

involved in, as he wrote to Gramsci on 1 May 1923, ‘entering into open battle with the

Communist International, putting ourselves outside of it, finding ourselves without

powerful material and moral support, reduced to a tiny group held together by almost

solely personal ties, […] losing all real and practical immediate influence on the

development of political struggle in Italy’. He hesitated, therefore, to accept the

proposal that Bordiga made from prison: that is, of drafting, as a ‘political group that

up to now directed the PCI’, a manifesto where all the disagreements with the

Comintern were made explicit. The disciplinary ties to the Comintern were important

to him, but ‘not to the point that it stops us developing the programme that was the

reason for the birth of the communist party in Italy’. The only way out, it appeared to

Togliatti, was to find ‘an agreement [with the Comintern] that allows our political

group substantially to continue on the road it has taken up to now’.39

Gramsci was apparently more determined than Togliatti to pay the price that

taking a line distinct from Bordiga might entail. However, he shared Togliatti’s

concern about handing the party into the hands of the ‘right’ opposition of Tasca and

Graziadei. This outcome appeared more likely after the Third Enlarged Plenum of the

ECCI (held on 12–23 June 1923), which imposed two exponents of the minority,

Tasca and Vota, on the new party executive. In addition, Fortichiari, Scoccimarro and

Togliatti were selected to represent the old majority.

Bordiga, from prison, immediately made known his opposition. If the PCI altered

its position in line with the Comintern, then it was the right, and only the right, which

would gain the leadership of the party. He recommended that members of the majority

appointed to the EC not accept: ‘don’t make the most foolish mistake of your lives.’

Togliatti did, in fact, appear inclined to refuse the appointment, and not even

Gramsci’s impassioned appeal (‘I confess to you that it is absolutely incomprehensible

to me that revolutionaries […] convinced of their programme should now abandon

their place, which today, given the general situation, is a barricade to be defended and

not only from the opposing enemies’40) moved him initially. He nurtured strong

reservations above all towards Tasca, whom he criticised for ‘petit-bourgeois pseudo-

idealism’ and ‘all-embracing political confusionism’, and retained a faith in the

possibility of re-establishing Bordiga in a leading role.41 During the whole summer,

thanks to the complicity of a prison guard, Bordiga and Togliatti entered into a close

coded correspondence.42 During this, he showed himself willing to underwrite the

manifesto in which Bordiga intended to make public the party’s disagreement with the

Comintern, concerned only to smooth out the most bitter points.

It is thus clear that, while developing a much more detailed analysis than Bordiga’s

of the Italian political situation and of fascism in particular, Togliatti continued to be

worried about losing the inheritance of Livorno and protecting the continuity and

compactness of the left PCI group that managed it. In the meantime, the work of

reorganising the party was interrupted by the arrest of all EC members present in Italy

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 29

(along with other important leaders) on 21 September 1923. Togliatti, too, was

denounced for plotting against state security and imprisoned in San Vittore, thereby

learning for the first time the harshness of prison existence.43 The profile drawn of him

on this occasion by a police informer underlined his central role in party life:

Palmiro Togliatti. I had the opportunity to observe him repeatedly and to single him out for

all the care and attention called for by the situation. He is the despot of the Communist Party

of Italy. Sole and absolute member of the Executive Committee after the arrest of Bordiga,

Grieco and the fleeing of Misiano and Fortichiari. Everything was in his hands. Monies,

orders, codebooks, etc. I reported his presence repeatedly but he always managed to escape.

And only the small Milan meeting offered the means to take him out of circulation. Of the

current prisoners he is the most shrewd and most fierce. I have known him well for many

years and I can affirm and render him the notoriety of being the most cunning of the Italian

communists […] With the sensational arrest of Togliatti the movement to reorganise the

communist rank-and-file has irremediably halted.44

Togliatti spent three months in San Vittore, during which he nevertheless managed

to keep up to date with the political situation through reading newspapers. He also

maintained ties with the party. Cleared in a preliminary hearing on 20 December 1923

of the charge of conspiracy against the state, he was released. Having had sight of the

document which Bordiga had drafted to inform the PCI about the disagreement with

the Comintern, he then wrote to Gramsci on 29 December. In the meantime, Gramsci

had moved from Moscow to Vienna with the objective of following the PCI more

closely and retaining links with other European parties. Togliatti’s move away from the

positions of the previous months now became more clear-cut: the sheltering behind the

communist ‘tradition’, the ‘titles of nobility’ of the party, were replaced by an

awareness of the need to measure up to ‘present conditions and necessities’.45

Nevertheless, it seemed to Togliatti that the document could have a positive function,

and therefore he was inclined to sign it. It was impossible, he said, ‘to not present to

the party something that is, if not an explanation of the differences of these years, at

least […] a place to stop and look around and move’.

Gramsci reacted against Togliatti’s wavering and hesitation with a certain

bitterness. ‘Togliatti cannot make up his mind, as was always somewhat his habit,’ he

wrote to Leonetti on 28 January 1924. ‘Amedeo’s “vigorous” personality has hit him

strongly and holds him mid-point in an indecision that seeks justifications in purely

juridical quibbles.’ Almost a month passed before Togliatti’s indecision was overcome.

Even when, with the Chamber dissolved on 25 January 1924 and parliamentary

elections called for 6 April, Togliatti found himself acting as ‘majority secretary’ of the

PCI and invested with the responsibility for making important choices, he moved with

caution. While he surely had a frontline role in the PCI’s decision to participate in the

elections ‘to exploit every possibility of legal action’, he appeared hesitant about the

initiative pushed by Tasca and Humbert-Droz (the Comintern representative) of

inviting the two other socialist parties to ‘adhere to an agreement for the presentation

of a common list of proletarian unity and for an action in which electoral battles must

not represent other than the initial moment’.46 In the report that he sent to the

30 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Comintern on 19 January, he moved away from ‘every opposition to fascism that rests

on the ground of demands of constitutional freedoms’, and sought to specify the

different aims with which the proposal of the blocade must be addressed to the two

socialist parties, the PSU and the PSI.47 The refusal of the first he took for granted –

and this was, in fact, duly communicated in a terse letter from Matteotti on 25

January. But such a proposal was, in his opinion, an opportunity ‘to develop a vast

polemical campaign’ against the reformists. Similarly, the likely refusal of the PSI was

seen as a chance to place, as Spriano put it, ‘a tombstone on the fusion’,48 forcing the

left of the so-called ‘terzini’49 to come out into the open in favour of an electoral

alliance with the communists and thus lay down the promise of their rapid

incorporation within the PCI.

In practice, things went as he predicted. The PSI declined the invitation to

participate in the blocade, while the terzini adhered to the ‘Alliance for Proletarian

Unity’, which presented itself to the electorate as a manifesto drafted by Togliatti, in

which it was affirmed that the fascist dictatorship could be brought down only by the

working and peasant class.50 According to the testimony of Humbert-Droz, Togliatti

maintained a good dose of indifference towards the new partners. At the same time, he

made every effort to prevent Bordiga’s refusal to present himself as a candidate, for fear

it would give rise to disciplinary measures from the Comintern.51

Bordiga’s refusal, incidentally, must have definitively convinced him that it was no

longer possible to recompose the unity of the majority around the person who had

been its undisputed and most prestigious leader. On 23 February he wrote Gramsci a

long letter in which he announced that the manifesto drafted by Bordiga would not be

published, and that instead it had been decided ‘to begin a discussion on the problems

and the general direction of the party, in which every person will be free to assume, at

the outset or during the course of debate, the attitude he wants’. Behind this new

direction was his reflections on the ‘political work’ undertaken during the election

campaign.52

THE COMO CONFERENCE

The outcome of the elections of 6 April was partly unexpected. The fascist ‘large list’

did obtain wide success, amply sufficient to guarantee the majority expected by the

Acerbo legislation. But despite the campaign of violence waged against adversaries, it

gathered fewer votes in the North than the opposition lists. The Alliance for

Proletarian Unity elected 19 deputies, just five fewer than the reformists, and two less

than the maximalists. Togliatti could thus affirm, on 12 April, in the new party daily

L’Unità, that ‘the elections have proved that fascism is an army that sets up camp in

enemy territory, and that it can snatch no other consensus from the majority of the

Italian population than that given to the strongest violence’, and even predicted a few

days later that ‘the Italian masses tend to place themselves on the ground of active

resistance’.53 He was worried, however, in this favourable situation by ‘the tendency

that still prevails in many of our comrades to willingly and artificially restrict the cadres

of our political organisation’.54 Keeping a clear distance from the Bordighian

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 31

conception, he anticipated that ‘the idea take flesh and blood in an organisation of

work and battle’ and that ‘the “faithful” would cede the place to the “militant”’.55

To translate this aspiration in practical terms, it was necessary to continue

renovating the party, constituting a ‘centre’ group that benefited from the full trust of

the Comintern. At the beginning of May, a consultative conference of the party was

convened: a kind of CC extended to the federation secretaries and to those responsible

for the inter-regional committees, which took place under cover near Como with the

participation of 67 militants.56 For the newly-constituted ‘centre’ group, it was the

occasion to present its platform to the party and win over the majority of cadres to it.

Both the theses of the ‘left’, drafted by Bordiga, and those of the ‘right’, the work of

Tasca, insisted above all on a punctilious analysis of the past, reaffirming the

righteousness of their respective positions. The document of the majority, set out by

Togliatti,57 instead placed the accent above all on future prospects. And the emphasis

which it gave to the analysis of the politics of the Comintern reflected the decision to

locate itself ‘on the basis of the International’, not for discipline but, as Togliatti would

say in debate with Bordiga, ‘for conviction and with eyes open’.

Certainly, this choice was facilitated by a turn to the left within the Comintern

after the defeat suffered by the German Communist Party (KPD) in October 1923,

which in some way legitimised a posteriori the resistance of the PCI to the politics of

the united front and thus meeting Togliatti’s preference for ‘continuity’. He also

included in the ‘centre’ theses some concession to Bordiga’s fear of ‘an opportunistic

and social democratic degeneration of communist political thought’. More thoroughly

articulated than in the theses of the ‘left’, however, was the analysis of the Italian

situation, particularly those distinctions that made the unification of the forces of the

bourgeoisie around fascism more important than had been anticipated. On this point,

Togliatti’s introductory report contained at least one significant idea. He stated:

We recognise that in Italy no bourgeois forces exist which are disposed to fight armed against

fascism […] but that does not exempt us from having to examine what is the physiognomy

and the current structure of all groupings of bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and semi-proletarian

forces. [Our] action will have to seek to take advantage of all these groups and all their

attitudes to open the road to the revival of the workers’ movement.58

The course of the discussion revealed, as Spriano noted, ‘a state of mind and a

reaction largely indicative of the mood of the rank-and-file: irritation at the birth of

fractions in the party, surprise at the internal dissent which previously had been almost

entirely ignored, hostility towards the “right”, and scepticism towards the ambivalent

attitudes of the “centre”’.59 This was confirmed in the final vote, in which a good 41

delegates out of 67 supported the theses of the ‘left’, while 9 pronounced themselves

for the ‘right’ and only 8 for the ‘centre’. And it was, perhaps, this very full discussion

and disappointing vote that convinced Togliatti to venture further into the open. In

his concluding intervention he decisively attacked ‘the senseless verbalism that pushes

many, even if they are in agreement with the things that we say, to side against us

because they believe that the duty of a good militant communist is that of being always

32 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

to the “left”’. But it was, above all, his renunciation of the document that perhaps

epitomised the Bordighian conception of the party, the so-called Rome theses of the

first party congress, that left no margin for misunderstanding. He affirmed:

Today we no longer approve the Rome theses. We voted for them in 1922 almost as a

theoretical formulation of the state of need in which the party then found itself. We think that

their original spirit leads to conceive party development as independent from the development

of real situations […]The party cannot be conceived, for us, without the working masses, but

as a part of them.60

This conception of the party, entirely in tune with the one Gramsci had been

elaborating, encapsulated Togliatti’s contribution to the first great ‘turning point’ in

the history of the PCI.

DEBUT IN THE INTERNATIONAL

At the Como conference, Togliatti was nominated as a member of the Italian

delegation to the fifth congress of the Comintern, convened in Moscow on 17 June

1924. He reached the Soviet capital on the eve of the congress. This was his first

journey to the homeland of the revolution, where he would spend in all nearly ten

years of his life. Although no documents remain to give us his ‘on the spot’ impressions

of Moscow in 1924, there is no reason to doubt that he, like most communists, viewed

it as the construction of a new society and the outpost of the world revolution.

Nevertheless, the circumstances in which the fifth congress opened were

problematic. The international position of the Soviet republic had been consolidated,

with diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and, not without embarrassment for

the PCI, Mussolini’s Italy; France was poised to follow suit. But the Bolshevik party

was missing Lenin’s guidance, as the cracks in the party leadership widened with the

battle between the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin against Trotsky continuing

to simmer beneath the surface. Prior to his attendance at the congress, Togliatti knew

little of the debate within the Comintern, and was even less aware of Russian matters.61

This is confirmed by a curious detail: on 15 January 1924, he sent to Mario

Montagnana, who remained in gaol, a postcard that reproduced a photo of Trotsky

and stated: ‘Always hope. He will save you.’62 It was apparently a display of his usual

ironic tone, but also a testimony to the common-sense vision that Togliatti had of the

harsh conflict within the Russian party.

His participation in the congress showed, for a ‘novice’, his ability to make

autonomous judgements and a readiness to recognise the underlying facts of the

congress agenda. It is notable that he had the courage to pronounce himself against the

majority decisions of the Comintern when, at the ECCI meeting on 13 July, he was

alone with Bordiga in voting against the expulsion of Boris Souvarine from the French

Communist Party (PCF). Souvarine had published on his own initiative Trotsky’s

leaflet The New Course. The Italians’ decisions demonstrated more than political

solidarity with the expelled; their move expressed perhaps a residue of resistance to the

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 33

over-heavy interference of the Comintern on its sections, of which the PCI had

repeated experience.63

‘Ercoli’ (the pseudonym which Togliatti adopted and by which he became famous

in the Comintern)64 intervened in the plenary debate on 23 June. His position,

although declared cautiously, was along the same path that he had followed over the

past few months. Commenting on the general report of Zinoviev that reaffirmed the

objectively revolutionary character of the world situation and denied the social

democratic thesis on the stabilisation of capitalism, he suggested that the fifth congress

would commit an error ‘if it stopped at an equivocal formulation of “left”, “uncritical”,

“superficial”’. Rejecting the thesis of ‘synonymy’ between a workers’ government and

the dictatorship of the proletariat affirmed by Zinoviev in his report, and which on the

eve of the Como conference he too shared, Togliatti stated that ‘it is not a question of

a problem of words’, rather ‘of different historical and political conditions, of different

power relations between the working class and the bourgeois class, that force us to

follow different lines’.65

In arguing for this thesis, he recalled the speech made by Radek, the principal

supporter of a ‘rightist’ interpretation of the ‘workers’ government’ slogan. This was

underlined in the letters that he wrote from Moscow to the PCI executive in Italy, in

which he praised the speeches of the KPD leaders Brandler and Thalheimer, who were

viewed as being responsible for the failed revolution of October 1923. But Togliatti

also declared himself convinced that the KPD’s error was precisely to have ignored

those things ‘which are the tasks that fall to the communist party in the development

of revolutionary situations, such as the autonomous organisation of the vanguard of the

proletariat’.66

The ‘Italian question’ absorbed most of Ercoli’s time during the fifth congress. At

the beginning, an ad hoc Italian commission67 had to resolve the perennial problem of

relations with the PSI. But it was precisely Togliatti who moved the focus away from

previous political faultlines and onto the current political situation in Italy, which was

evolving rapidly following the assassination of Matteotti.68 The picture Togliatti

presented reflected and modified the assessment of fascism as a ‘united front’ of Italy’s

dominant classes that had punctuated his reports to the International in 1923. The

definition of fascism that he gave, as the ‘armed dictatorship of a fraction of the

bourgeoisie’, clearly implied an effort to ‘isolate this enemy, provoke the detachment

from it of all its temporary allies, making of them for a transitory period – perhaps for

a single moment, but with some political result – allies of the working class […]’.

It was significant that Bordiga reacted energetically, insisting that Ercoli

‘emphasises too much the differences that exist between fascism and the various

bourgeois groups’. Bordiga also accused Togliatti of avoiding ‘the dilemma: fascism or

communism, fascist bourgeois dictatorship or communist dictatorship of the

proletariat’. Indeed, the distance that by now separated the analysis of the ‘left’ from

that of the ‘centre’ no longer allowed for collaboration within the leading organs of the

party. The Comintern could not but take note. On 2 July, Zinoviev and Manuilsky

convinced the Italian delegation to adopt their proposal that the leadership of the PCI

be entrusted to the ‘centre’ group, and that Bordiga transfer to Moscow to become

34 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

vice-president of the Comintern. Bordiga’s refusal threatened to create a new crisis

about which Togliatti, as his letters to comrades in Italy demonstrated, revealed himself

to be extremely worried. Something of the party’s ‘exclusivism’ evidently still survived.

For this reason, Togliatti appeared reluctant to accept the route proposed by Gramsci,

obstinately opposing the inclusion of the ‘terzini’ on the future EC and the nomination

of Serrati to joint editorship of L’Unità. In the end, thanks to the patient mediation of

Humbert-Droz, the differences were smoothed over: the programme of action of the

PCI approved by the Italian Commission found the ‘centre’, the ‘right’ and the ‘terzini’

in agreement, and ended up largely reflecting the orientation given by Togliatti in the

discussion. From his first testing in the arena of the Comintern congresses, Ercoli

emerged with an authoritativeness that was reflected in his nomination to the ECCI.

THE AVENTINO AND ‘ANTI-PARLIAMENT’

The Italian delegation returned home from Moscow in the second half of July, at

which point the most acute phase of the political crisis that followed Matteotti’s

murder can be said to have finished. Writing to Scoccimarro and Gramsci from the

Soviet capital on 7 July, Togliatti approved ‘the line followed up until now’: that is,

both the withdrawal of communists from parliament alongside other anti-fascist

parliamentary groups,69 and their subsequent detachment from the committee of

oppositions following its refusal to call the workers out on a general strike. Since then

his attention had shifted towards the need to ‘establish an organic bond between the

party and the masses already set in motion by the Matteotti affair’, through the

constitution of action committees ‘naturally composed initially of our own elements,

but with the aim of gathering around them the mass of workers, both those supporting

other proletarian parties and those without party’.70

Immediately after his return to Italy, Togliatti – now responsible for the agit-prop

section of the party – was concerned to draw a clear boundary between the proletarian

and the bourgeois opposition, restoring to the former the full capacity of political

initiative. Thus, ‘on one side the bourgeois, on the other the proletarian’, he

summarised on 1 August, in a polemic against the PSI’s proposal to create a united, all-

in political committee of opposition.71 For Gramsci, who insisted on the ‘wave of

democracy that is characteristic of the current phase of the Italian social crisis’, but who

did not think that a ‘victorious battle for power’ should be the order of the day for the

working class, it was essential not to prejudice through a compromise with bourgeois

opposition ‘the preparatory work for the following phase’. It was necessary instead,

continuing in the Ordine Nuovo tradition, to galvanise a mass movement capable of

acting for the ‘fundamental transformation of the democratic state’. The workers’ and

peasants’ committees, which would be formed throughout the country, would be its

instrument.72

Such a line provoked open reservations from the Comintern, which in September

sent a letter to the PCI criticising the isolation in which the party was placing itself.73

Togliatti, whose reports to the ECCI ensured that he was the PCI leader with the

closest links to Russia, found himself in the frontline, defending the party from the

increasingly insistent accusations directed against it. But, on the whole, he appeared

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 35

less sensitive than Gramsci to the Ordine Nuovo suggestions and more attentive to the

organisational role of the party.74 Togliatti also showed himself to be rather more

sceptical than Gramsci about the significance that any middle-class detachment from

fascism might have on the situation. Similarly, he appeared more convinced than

Gramsci that the phase of democratic ‘awakening’ opened by the Matteotti murder was

destined to result in a compromise between fascism and the Aventinian opposition

parties. He was, nevertheless, firmly persuaded that this tendency was favourable to the

PCI, because it contributed to the growing distrust shown toward the other opposition

parties ‘in proletarian circles and also in some layers of the proletarianised middle class

and among the peasants’.

The possibility of a compromise between fascism and other opposition parties

induced the communists to ask themselves whether it might not be the thing to do to

wrong-foot their adversaries by reassuming their place in parliament. Before reaching

such a momentous decision, however, the CC of 15 October decided to propose a

continuation of the boycott to the opposition parties, on condition that this should

translate into a constitution of a real ‘anti-parliament’, to which the communists would

adhere, with the intention of proposing their programmatic platform that provided for

the disarming of the blackshirts, the arming of the proletariat, and the constitution of

‘a worker and peasant government’.75 In truth, the proposal – as Humbert-Droz

explained in his reports to Moscow – was put forward in the conviction that it would

not be accepted and that after the refusal of the opposition parties ‘we will be able to

re-enter parliament more easily and unmask their failure and their weakness’.76 As

emerged from his report to the Comintern of 28 October,77 Togliatti was firmly

committed to this line, which was eventually accepted by Moscow. But the whole

episode left a bitter taste in the mouths of the PCI leadership, primarily due to the way

in which the International repeatedly intervened in the politics of the party. Togliatti,

in a speech to the CC on 26 November, made his own protest:

We deny […] that the function of the [ECCI] Presidium with regard to the national centres is

to conduct itself as it has done in our case, by issuing a simple order not preceded by

discussion, nor followed by explanations exploring its ramifications.78

Neither the reopening of the Chamber and the resumption of parliamentary

debate, nor the continuation of the Aventinian secession, which still assumed the

significance of a moral testimony against the regime, shook the government. The king

and his advisers rejected all approaches from the opposition parties within and outside

parliament, and refused to restore constitutional legality. The idea that the situation

might precipitate a coup d’état, which would further restrict statutory freedoms, was

repeatedly canvassed in Togliatti’s writing. In the article that he published in L’Unità

on 1 January 1925, while accepting the general thesis of the Comintern of a

transitional phase of capitalism in the name of ‘democratic pacifism’, he underlined

that in Italy the capitalist reaction had assumed such an extreme form as to become a

danger to the stability of the old style of government: ‘It is the infernal force evoked by

36 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the sorcerer that does not want to return to the abyss, that does not want to “serve” but

to dominate.’79

Togliatti’s metaphor apparently includes an evaluation of fascism as a political

force autonomous from the tutelage of that ‘fraction of the bourgeoisie’ of which it

formed the armed wing. However, the act of strength performed by Mussolini with his

speech of 3 January 1925,80 and the multiplication of repressive measures against the

opposition forces which immediately followed it, were interpreted by Togliatti, as by

the whole of the PCI leadership, in an entirely different way. On 5 January, he wrote

to Moscow that ‘the tendency of the situation’ remained that of a compromise between

fascism and opposition parties. This was favourable to the PCI ‘because the relevance

of the revolutionary solution and the insurrectional thesis are obvious to a far larger

number of Italians than previously’.81

THE BOLSHEVISATION OF THE PCI

This optimistic prognosis was reinforced by the recruitment of new PCI members,

which was in turn due to Togliatti’s capacity to aggregate the scattered forces of the

workers’ and peasants’ opposition to fascism, and to encroach upon socialist party

terrain. This centripetal tendency was facilitated by the profound organisational

transformation that the Gramscian group was making in its application of the

Comintern’s directives on the ‘Bolshevisation’ of communist parties and their

restructuring on the basis of factory cells. In his responsibility for the ‘government of

the party’, Togliatti was one of the principal architects and amongst the most

committed to this transformation. He realised, however, that given the social and

economic structure of the country, the new organisational model would be unable to

entirely replace the existing one based on territorial sections. Even so, he ascribed the

difficulties and delays in its application principally to the survival of a Bordighian

mentality within the party.82

The PCI’s full adherence to Bolshevisation as an organisational formula was

accompanied by Togliatti’s acceptance of ideological Bolshevisation which, having

been commenced in the Soviet party with the renewal of the polemic against Trotsky

following the publication of his Lessons of October, would extend to the whole

international communist movement by the fifth plenum. In March 1925, Togliatti

published an article that, taking the discussion in the Soviet party as its starting point,

aimed to deny the legitimacy of factional political conflicts in the name of a dialectical

conception of Marxism capable of resolving contradictory positions ‘in a unity that is

their premise and their outcome’.83 Apparently detached from the more immediate

aspects of the controversy dividing the Russian party, and indeed disposed to agree

with part of Trotsky’s argument, this piece represented Togliatti’s principal

contribution to the Bordighism-Trotskyism equation that was becoming common

currency in the Italian party (even though Bordiga was never mentioned).

Togliatti did not, however, participate in the PCI discussion on Bolshevisation,

which opened with Gramsci’s report to the CC on 12 May 1925, for on 2 April he was

arrested in Rome and accused of ‘direct association to commit crimes against the

powers of the State’. The police had looked for him in vain on 1 March in Turin,

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 37

where he formally resided, suggesting that they were ignorant of the role in the party of

this ‘dangerous communist’. The arrest was precipitated by the imprudence of ‘an

extremely well-known communist deputy’ who, ‘having bumped into Togliatti in via

Campo Marzio, had not managed to refrain from stopping him, greeting him and

starting a conversation’. During the preliminary hearing, Togliatti observed the rules of

the good communist, denying everything except for his personal particulars and his

membership of the party.

Imprisoned in the Regina Coeli, it is likely that he managed again to find a channel

to keep in touch with the party regularly. Awaiting sentence, he remained in prison for

four months; but before the trial an amnesty was decreed that allowed him to be

released on 29 July.84 A new arrest warrant was issued against him in September, but in

the meantime he had managed to disappear from police view and return to Rome

where he led a wholly clandestine existence.

These were, he would recall, ‘the only months of withdrawn life’ of that period,

and probably, one might add, the only ones with a semblance of ‘normal’ family life.

For Togliatti married Rita Montagnana in Turin on 27 April 1924. Rita, two years

younger than Palmiro, was the third-born of a Jewish working-class family. First she

was a seamstress, then an office worker, living her first political experiences as secretary

of the Borgo San Paolo socialist group ‘La difesa’, and she had met Togliatti during the

time he worked on L’Ordine Nuovo. She had shared with him other experiences of

party life, first in Rome when he was editor of Il Comunista and she was responsible for

the women’s bi-monthly Compagna, and then between Milan and Angera, at the centre

of the illegal apparatus of the PCI. The marriage was, then, the consummation of a

bond which had matured over time, reinforced by political passion and by the sense of

belonging to an organ whose aims transcended individual destinies. It was a bond

between two strong personalities, the ‘private’ aspects of which husband and wife never

let transpire the smallest indiscretion. From the wedding a son, Aldo, was born during

Togliatti’s detention, whom the father saw for the first time when, leaving prison, he

audaciously reached Rome.85

THE LYONS CONGRESS

Togliatti’s return to political activity occurred whilst the third congress of the party was

taking place. The pre-congress discussion had been dominated by the clash between

the leading group ‘consecrated’ by the Comintern’s fifth congress and the ‘extreme left’

of Bordiga. The intense internecine conflict was accompanied by the expectation that

the party would need to move quickly to a comprehensively underground organisation.

An accusation of ‘factionism’ was levelled at the left, justified by the formation on the

part of some of its exponents of an ‘entente committee’ which was dissolved only

following an ultimatum from the Comintern. Those leading the charge favoured the

concentration of the party around the majority of the rank-and-file, a party which,

faced with the raging of reaction, was particularly jealous of its unity and felt, in its ties

with the Comintern, an extremely strong identity that they sensed was put into

question by the Bordighians. The ‘central’ – as the executive was commonly called –

did not hesitate to appeal to a series of administrative measures against the Bordighian

38 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

groups, some of which were dissolved. The attainment of iron discipline was indicated

as a fundamental objective of Bolshevisation.86

The provincial congresses were held in total secrecy: in taverns, farmsteads,

sometimes in the woods or open countryside. Togliatti was present in person at those

of Turin, Novara, Biella, Alessandria and Genoa, and drafted detailed reports of each.

He also participated in the debate with the left in the party press, in a series of public

discussions with Bordiga, from whose political and intellectual influence he seemed to

have entirely emancipated himself. He attacked Bordiga again for the accusations of

Hegelianism and voluntarism he had levelled against the Ordine Nuovo group. Not

only did Togliatti proudly claim as entirely legitimate the ‘guiding path’ that led the

youth of the Turinese magazine to reach Marxism (‘the route followed by Karl Marx,

that is starting from German Idealist philosophy, from Hegel’), but he relied on the

proposition that ‘a voluntary element which affects the historical process in general and

the revolutionary process in particular’ ensured that it was a requirement of the

proletarian party to intervene in an active way, modifying it, on ‘the basis of those

forces in movement’.87

In fact, neither Togliatti nor Gramsci were applying this method to the Italian

political situation. They were far from reconsidering the role of political forces that,

even though the Aventinian experience had failed, still remained hostile to fascism in

various ways. Hence the under-estimation, indeed the denial of the problem of

democracy that was instead, as Spriano observed, ‘the very peculiarity of the battle to

which Italian communists were called and which eluded them’.88

The mobilisation with which the PCI tried to oppose the advance of fascism

focused increasingly on the strenuous defence of trade union organisation. The

agreement of Palazzo Vidoni between the Confindustria and the fascist corporations

had on 20 October 1925 given the exclusive right of negotiation to the fascist unions

and suppressed factory representation. The problem of how to save the democratic

unions and to enable factory cells and workers’ councils to function became the main

pre-occupation of the communist leadership. Togliatti drafted the ‘theses on the union

question’ presented to the Lyons congress, and he had worked on them assiduously.

The line he presented recognised the necessity of defending the CGIL against

disruption, safeguarding it as a point of coalition for all union activists prepared to

fight against fascism and defend workers’ rights. Thus, every tendency towards a

division of class union organisations was rejected.89

The union theses were the only contribution attributed to Togliatti in the platform

presented by the majority to the third congress. His hand was, however, clearly

recognisable in the fourth of the five theses put forward for the approval of the

delegates, entitled ‘The Italian Situation and the Bolshevisation of the PCI’, the most

significant document before congress.90 Throughout, the document reflected the

coordinates of both Togliatti’s and Gramsci’s intellectual thought. Most notably, the

breadth of reference to Italy’s post-unification history was a crucial innovation, as was

the analysis of the economic situation and the current social and political forces, and

the characterisation of Italian capitalism as weak and laden with imbalances but

nonetheless representing ‘the predominant element in Italian society and the force that

A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION 39

prevails in determining its development’. Equally, it was evident in its judgement of

the forces of anti-fascist opposition, seen as so many more links in a chain of

reactionary forces that contended with the proletariat for hegemony over the

intermediate layers of society and above all the peasants, who to varying degrees

collaborated with fascism ‘in hindering the re-organisation of the working class’.

Finally, and especially, in the evaluation of fascism as an ‘instrument of an industrial

and agricultural oligarchy to concentrate in the hands of capitalism the control of all

the wealth of the country’, capable ‘of realising an organic unity of all the forces of the

bourgeoisie in a single political organ, under the control of a single centre that should

lead together party, government and state’.91

It is not easy to reconstruct Togliatti’s contribution to the congress discussions,

which took place secretly in Lyons with the logistical support of the PCF and lasted a

week. It is clear, however, that his leading position in the party was confirmed by the

end of the congress. He was re-elected as a member of the CC, of the executive (which

had begun to be called the Political Bureau (PB), and of the secretariat, and he was also

recognised as the most appropriate person to represent the PCI at the ECCI in

Moscow.

This decision was confirmed a few days later, in a meeting that took place in Milan

between Gramsci, Scoccimarro and Togliatti. Many years later, Togliatti recalled that

he had only agreed this arrangement reluctantly as ‘a means to assure a reserve to the

direction of the party’.92 This is not unlikely, given that within the leading group of the

PCI Togliatti was, at the beginning of 1926, in a political and organisational capacity,

second only to Gramsci. On the other hand, the decision to send him to Moscow may

simply have been due to the principle of rotation amongst the most important leaders.

In the role of representative of the party to the ECCI, Togliatti was fourth, after

Gramsci, Terracini and Scoccimarro. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s appointment reflected

the deepening relationship of trust with Moscow, the result of his having been the

almost continuous Comintern ‘correspondent’ for the PCI since spring 1923.

3

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS

A DEFINING CAESURA

Togliatti left Italy, illegally, on 10 February 1926; he would not return for another 18

years, during which time he incurred many painful personal and political wounds.1 He

arrived in Moscow on 14 February. His wife Rita and their few-months-old son were

with him. They moved into the Lux Hotel, residence of most of the foreign Comintern

personnel. During the summer months Togliatti and his family shared a dacha with

the Humbert-Droz family in the forest a few kilometres from Moscow.2

In 1926, there was an atmosphere of tense expectancy, in the Soviet Union. The

New Economic Policy (NEP) was enjoying its golden period. Even amongst its many

‘contradictions’, there were signs of an embryonic social pluralism, while the severe

lack of material comforts was compensated by an atmosphere open to relatively free

debate within the artistic and intellectual arenas.

The political scene was active. The crisis that had been latent within the troika at

the head of the Russian party for the last two years reached its peak. At the fourteenth

congress, in December 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev warned about the risks of making

excessive concessions to the peasants and insisted that NEP was a necessary but only

temporary diversion from the revolutionary path. Against Stalin and Bukharin, they

argued that ‘the definitive triumph’ of socialism was impossible in a single country,

especially a country as economically backward and isolated from the international

scene as Russia. Although they were defeated, both majority and opposition were

agreed in wanting to avoid an internal struggle within the Russian party which could

directly affect the Comintern.3

The sixth plenum of the ECCI opened on 17 February in this climate of

uncertainty. Togliatti headed a large Italian delegation, which also included Bordiga.

In his opening speech Zinoviev, who was still president of the Comintern, predicted

that the stabilisation of capitalism would soon be undermined, leading to a quick

escalation of the ‘revolutionary conflicts’ and the victory of the proletarian revolution

‘within four or five years’. In the discussion that followed, Bordiga delivered the most

notable speech and, perhaps, the last speech of open disagreement that would be heard

at an official meeting of the Comintern. He reiterated his criticism of the united front

tactic; he maintained that the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks could not be

applied directly to western Europe; he attacked the party structure of factory cells

deeming it to be insufficient to guarantee an effective political discussion and he was

especially harsh against the internal organisation of the Comintern and its branches

where ‘the application of the penal code has become the rule’. Bordiga concluded by

confronting directly the issue of the Russian party’s role within the International,

42 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

comparing the structure of the latter ‘to a pyramid standing on its tip’. In clear

opposition to the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, Bordiga closed his speech with

an impassioned declaration of the interdependence between the Russian and European

revolutions.4

In the plenary session of 25 February, Togliatti felt that his address needed, firstly,

to counteract the strong impression made on the assembly by Bordiga’s speech. He

therefore attacked him on what he knew was his weakest ground:

You have all heard Comrade Bordiga and you probably sympathise with him. Comrade

Bordiga’s speech appeared to originate from the true and revolutionary strength of a leader

[…] We, comrades, do not believe Bordiga to be a great revolutionary leader […] If we had

followed the political path that Comrade Bordiga advised us to pursue in the last two years we

would have destroyed the Communist Party.

Aware that the credibility of the new PCI executive also depended on its ability to

influence the general political line of the Comintern, Togliatti considered with

scepticism the hypothesis of an immediate recovery of the revolutionary process. But

he spoke confidently of a ‘crisis’ of the communist movement at international level, a

crisis that ‘would be likely to last a few years still’. He appeared to have no doubt that

‘the expertise of the Russian Communist Party’ would be ‘the guiding force’ out of the

crisis.5

Unlike the speech he had delivered a few months before at the fifth PCI congress,

this address conformed to the official ‘Marxist–Leninist’ discourse taking hold across

the Comintern. But, compared to Lyons, he also sounded more assured and

authoritative. Togliatti evidently viewed his arrival in Moscow and attendance at the

congress as an important stage in his ascent inside the international communist

movement.

IN THE COMINTERN WITH BUKHARIN

When Togliatti began his work on the ECCI, the latter was undergoing, on Bukharin’s

initiative, a cautious (if short-lived) process of decentralisation. The young Italian

leader apparently proved he had the qualities needed to be part of a leadership whose

aim was to direct the International in a more collective and structured way. He showed

that he could analyse problems from different perspectives, that he was level-headed,

and that he had the pragmatic political reflexes needed to adapt to a changing

situation.

In addition to his appointments as member of the ECCI and the presidium,

Togliatti was also called to join the central secretariat and the organisation bureau. Not

only did he take part in the frequent meetings of these bodies, he also participated in

the agit-prop section, followed the affairs of the Italian party, and presided over the

ECCI’s trade union commission. What he gained from these activities strengthened his

belief that the communist challenge to social democracy must be played out in the

context of the influence exercised inside trade union organisations. This is confirmed,

firstly, by his failure to join in the strong criticisms directed against the Communist

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 43

Party of Great Britain (CPGB) following the British General Strike of May 1926. The

CPGB’s concern at ‘not turning away from the masses’ reflected his own views.6

Secondly, and more explicitly, he firmly opposed the dissolution of the Anglo-Russian

Joint Advisory Council established between the British Trades Unions Congress and

the Russian trade unions, which had become the target of fierce criticism by Zinoviev

and Kamenev, as well as Trotsky.

At this point, a difference of opinions emerged between Togliatti and his Italian

comrades on the issue of trade union politics.7 Essentially, Togliatti – clearly influenced

by the opinion of other Comintern leaders – had his doubts about the PCI line which

ascribed to the factory councils, viewed as united rank-and-file organisations, an

increasingly important role. He also opposed Lozovsky, the president of the Red

International of Labour Unions (RILU; Profintern), who was arguing in favour of

forming a new revolutionary trade union movement in opposition to the CGIL. For

Togliatti, the situation in Italy, where the working class was disorganised and in

disarray, made this an unrealistic proposition. Thus, defending the CGIL remained

valid, bearing in mind that the communist minority aimed to take over its leadership.8

The question of Bordiga, together with the problem of the trade unions, was at the

core of the relationship between the Comintern and the PCI throughout much of

1926. With his speech at the sixth plenum, Bordiga had unintentionally become the

focus of the left opposition within the Comintern, which had previously been disparate

and divided. As representative of the PCI in Moscow, Togliatti had to execute a

difficult balancing act in the campaign against the ex-secretary of the PCI. On the one

hand, he was asked to discredit Bordiga as a leader of international stature.

Consequently, he shifted the debate with the Neapolitan leader from the purely

political level to one based on the theoretical criticism of ‘Bordighism’, defining the

latter as an independent ideological system inherently alien to the Marxist dialectic.

One could detect in this the influence of the rigid, schematic interpretation of

Leninism gaining ground inside the Comintern and the Russian party, which

manifested itself in the artificial standardisation of ‘anti-bolshevist deviations’.9 On the

other hand, Ercoli still had the problem of dealing with Bordiga at a ‘political’ level.

Whilst declaring he was against the disciplinary sanctions called for by one PCI

faction, and keen to avoid ‘the most dangerous of scenarios: a faction with its core

outside the party and its roots left behind in the party’,10 Togliatti opposed the

proposal to send Bordiga to Moscow and employ him in the Comintern central

apparatus.

However, the proposal had been warmly supported by the Italian party and,

apparently, by Bordiga himself.11 Togliatti therefore found himself in the awkward

position of having to support the PCI secretariat’s request to send Bordiga to Moscow,

which Gramsci viewed as a way of bringing Bordiga back to the fold. But he was also

compelled to respond to the countervailing pressures coming from the majority of the

Russian party, voiced with brutal frankness by Manuilsky, who reminded him that ‘the

ECCI is not a refuge for political invalids’. Resolution came at the beginning of July,

with the arrival of a peremptory telegram to the PCI secretariat from the Comintern

44 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

instructing them to postpone Bordiga’s departure. The secretariat expressed its

disagreement to no avail.

Togliatti’s role in the affair shows that his evaluation of the PCI was influenced by

the ongoing conflicts within the Russian party and the interests of its majority.12 He

also recognised that the debate inside the Russian party had to be replicated in the

Comintern’s affiliates. The alliance between the opposition, represented by Zinoviev

and Kamenev on the one hand, and Trotsky on the other, which was identified by the

Soviet CC in July 1926, convinced him that the PCI had to enter the fray immediately

and without dithering. On 28 June, he wrote to the Italian comrades that ‘taking a

standpoint on the issues that are debated internationally’ would increase the status and

authority of the party.13 In mid-July, at the CC of the Russian party, he put aside all

hesitations and delivered a speech that contrasted the thesis of the opposition on the

potential of the international communist movement with an analysis that left little

room for optimism about the prospects for worldwide communist revolution. Togliatti

was aware of the profound fissure that was continuing to widen in the old Bolshevik

leadership and of the repercussions this could have at international level. However, he

was sufficiently confident to take and express a very clear position on the contentious

issues.14

GRAMSCI’S ‘ILL-TIMED’ LETTER

The escalation of the fight inside the Russian party caused growing concern in the PCI,

which was exacerbated by the aggressive campaign in the Italian press about the

‘degeneration’ of the Russian revolution. The impact of such a campaign, the PCI

leadership believed, was very damaging to the militants’ morale. Consequently, the

Italian PB sent a letter to the Russian CC, written by Gramsci. He wrote that

witnessing the harsh battle taking place the Italian communists felt an ‘overwhelming

anguish’ and thought it was their duty to intervene somehow in order to prevent a

split. The unity of the ‘Leninist nucleus’, which had guided the Bolshevik revolution,

was the foundation of the Russian party’s hegemony in the international communist

movement. If this unity shattered, severe consequences would follow.

The letter did not refrain from pronouncing on the issues which divided the

Russian party and expressed support to the political line of the majority. However, it

concluded with the hope that not only a split could be avoided, but also that the

majority ‘would not inflict a humiliating victory’. In a short accompanying note

Gramsci gave Togliatti permission to ‘revise the text, as far as detail and form’

according to the preference of ‘those with more responsibility’ among the leaders of the

Russian majority, whom, he stressed, the PCI wanted ‘to help’. But he also insisted

that the ‘essential terms [of the letter] must be kept intact’.15

By the time the letter arrived in Moscow on 16 October, the situation had evolved.

The opposition had signed a document that was more or less an act of unconditional

surrender, committing its members to completely abandon factions within the party. A

truce was in sight and Togliatti, Bukharin, Manuilsky, Humbert-Droz and Kuusinen

agreed not to deliver the letter to the Russian CC.

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 45

First, in a telegram on 16 October and then at more length in a letter two days

later, Togliatti explained the reasons for this decision to the Italian PB. He reported on

the emerging situation and declared that delivering the letter to the CC would have

been ‘extremely ill-timed’: ‘in the hands of the opposition it would have become a

weapon against the CC’. The Italian PB accepted this view, as the letter from Camilla

Ravera to Togliatti on 26 October made clear. Their readiness to acquiesce in

Togliatti’s actions is clear, and provides evidence against the myth that Togliatti

betrayed the PCI’s mandate.

Yet, there was serious political discord inside the Italian party, and Ercoli himself

was apparently aware of it, so much so that on 18 October he felt compelled to

accompany his letter to the PB with a personal note to Gramsci, whom he believed to

be the author of the document. The tone was vibrant, sometimes terse, and it

definitively echoed the negative reaction that the Italians’ view had had on the Russians

leaders who had been informed of it. But it also expressed a personal evaluation,

reached after protracted self-searching:

It isn’t so much the unity of the leadership (that in any case has never been complete) that has

made the Russian party the organiser and the thrust of the revolutionary movement

worldwide after the war, but more the fact that the Russian party led the working class in

taking and then consolidating state power. Does the present line of conduct make it guilty or

not guilty of fulfilling its historical duty? This is how the position of the Russian party within

the international working-class movement should be questioned if we don’t want to end up

using the arguments of the opposition.

Gramsci replied on 26 October reaffirming point by point his own position. He

believed that there was ‘a duty to appeal and appeal vigorously to the political

conscience of the Russian comrades, to make them aware of the dangers and

weaknesses that their actions are going to cause’; ‘we would be pitiable and

irresponsible revolutionaries if we merely let events take their course with the caveat,

given in advance, that they were necessary.’

Gramsci’s answer was bitter and resentful in tone. ‘This reasoning of yours […] I

find pathetic, your analysis is vitiated by bureaucratism.’ He concluded with a reproach

betraying sadness for such a serious disagreement with his closest political collaborator

and friend:

I am very sorry that you first didn’t understand our letter, and then, on the basis of my

personal note, didn’t reconsider your misunderstanding; our letter was entirely an indictment

against the opposing stances, presented in non-demagogic terms, and thus sincere as well as

serious.

Besides issues of methods, the correspondence of 1926 may have revealed a

divergence of opinion emerging between Gramsci and Togliatti on the evaluation of

the international situation. Gramsci thought that, although capitalism had regained

control over the forces of production and the global market, the world revolution was

still as likely as previously, it had changed qualitatively. The focal point of

46 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

revolutionary action had moved to a national arena and was dependent on the

individual Bolshevised communist parties. This argument enabled him to put into

perspective the significance of the ‘relative stabilisation’ of capitalism. By contrast,

Togliatti argued that there had been a historical defeat of the working class and, in real

terms, that meant a postponing of the world revolution. The only goal around which

communist parties could realistically converge was the ‘building of socialism in one

country’, i.e. the defence of the Soviet Union.16

There is no doubt, however, that the letter of October 1926 left a mark on the two

men’s relationship. The indelible divergence of opinions was ‘dramatically crystallised

by Gramsci’s arrest and the impossibility of continuing the discussion’.17 Because of

this tragic coincidence, some historians have seen the divergence of opinion as the

paradigmatic expression of two opposing views on internationalism, or even an

opposition between political ends and political means. Such a characterisation is not

helpful in understanding the substance of the issue. Nevertheless, the differences that

emerged between Gramsci and Togliatti had touched on crucial issues, and these might

not have been settled in an atmosphere of sedate, reflective discussion, had that been

possible.

Gramsci saw very clearly the serious consequences which followed from the break

up of the old Bolshevik leadership and the dangers constituted by the new internal

party regime which was taking hold in the Soviet Union. In this respect, contrary to

Togliatti, he was aware of the qualitative shift that the autumn events of 1926

represented, and how they compared to previous tense moments in the struggle of the

Russian party.

Togliatti concentrated his efforts on bringing their divergence back to its political

kernel, that is the relationship between factory workers and peasants. His analysis was

an indication of the ‘iron’ logic that was increasingly gripping the communist

movement.18 If the ultimate success of world revolution was determined by the making

of socialism in Russia, and if the needs of the latter were represented and expressed in

the choices made by the Soviet party and its majority, then to ally with the opposing

factions or simply not to contest them vigorously would have been to fall short of one’s

duty as a communist.

With hindsight we might observe that Gramsci grasped better than Togliatti the

inherent risks of that logic; that Togliatti, totally aligned to Bukharin’s position –

whose main concern during this phase, in accord (even in method) with Stalin, was to

defeat the left – made a fatal error in judgement. Together with Bukharin, Togliatti

found himself in the difficult position of having to oppose a system which he had

helped establish. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s assessment of the balance of power was in its

pessimism more realistic. One wonders whether the disclosure of the letter would not

have reopened the dispute between the Comintern and the PCI just when the latter

was confronting its toughest hour.

Gramsci’s reference to the responsibility of the Russian leadership as the vanguard

of the communist movement represented both a high moral expression and a

prophecy. However, it would be unrealistic to think that it could have influenced the

ongoing struggle and given it a different and less dramatic course. It was for good

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 47

reason that the leadership of the PCI, which had endorsed Gramsci’s letter during a

clandestine meeting that took place simultaneously with the enactment of Mussolini’s

‘special laws’ (and which the party secretary could not attend because of police

surveillance)19, was also united in pushing into the background the issues of ‘method’

and in affirming its full support for Stalin and Bukharin.20

A FIRST ESSAY ON ‘DIFFERENTIATED ANALYSIS’

In his speech on Stalin’s report to the seventh plenum of the ECCI on 10 December

1926, Togliatti seemed to echo some of the statements that Gramsci had made in his

letter (more specifically, the comments on the opposition’s social democratic and

syndicalist tendencies, understood in terms of working-class corporatism). The speech,

however, did not attempt to call the collective Russian leadership to account, nor did it

express any concern over the ‘strong passions’ roused by the Russian issues, an essential

aspect of Gramsci’s argument. On the contrary, Togliatti’s speech was dominated by

those strong passions, especially in the concluding invective against Zinoviev.21 In

discussing Bukharin’s report on 27 November, he praised his frank acknowledgement

of capitalist stabilisation and did not share the reservations of other delegates, such as

Thälmann and Lominadze, who were closer to Stalin.22 The speech designated

Togliatti as one of the key men in Bukharin’s ‘team’, which for a period had assumed

the management of the Comintern. Significantly, Togliatti was called to present a

short report on the reorganisation of the managing bodies of the Comintern, which

reflected Bukharin’s more articulate vision of the international revolutionary process.23

These proposals for organisation ended up – in the main – as paper exercises. Their

strength was diminished by a secretariat that, in addition to Bukharin, also included

Manuilsky and Molotov. These appointments ensured that Stalin was able to exercise

as much influence as Bukharin on the Comintern apparat.

Togliatti also spoke on the issue of fascism at the seventh plenum. He had during

the year made a considerable effort to keep up with and analyse the phenomenon.

After his arrival in Moscow, Togliatti tried to integrate the findings of his previous

research, which had only Italy as a point of reference, within a more general debate

taking place in the Comintern on the shape of capitalist stabilisation. In an article

published in May 1926, in which he tried to avoid discussing the phenomenon as

exceptional or typically Italian, Togliatti nevertheless criticised ‘the habit of employing

the term “fascism” in such broad terms that it encompassed the most diverse forms of

reactionary movements of the bourgeoisie’. He also insisted on the need to identify the

peculiarities which differentiated individual movements close to fascism.24

Because he thought that a ‘differentiated analysis’ was crucial, Togliatti had no

inclination to agree with the tendency that put fascism and social democracy on the

same level – on the mere basis that both provided mass support for capitalist

restoration. This tendency had emerged at the fifth congress of the Comintern, with a

resounding echo in the KPD. In the report to the plenum on 12 November, Ercoli

attributed the specific character of Italian fascism to the unresolved contradiction

between mass support, rooted largely in a strata of the middle classes, and a policy of

economic stabilisation controlled by the interests of the higher bourgeoisie. He

48 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

identified the ‘ongoing escalation of terror’ against anti-fascists on the one hand, and

‘the expansionist–imperialist campaign’ on the other, as the ground where the

contradiction between these two components was, at least temporarily, resolved.25

The dangers represented by fascism at the international level became one of the

leitmotifs of Togliatti’s analysis; he discussed it at length at the beginning of 1927 in

an article ‘Fascist Italy: Breeding Ground of War’.26 However, during the weeks in

which the seventh plenum took place, he focused mainly on the ‘escalation of terror’

aspect. In a speech commenting on Bukharin’s report to the plenum, he maintained

that the escalation of terror was caused by the radicalisation taking place among the

workers and peasants, and the significant results achieved by the PCI in organising

their resistance. The reason for this positive diagnosis was clearly to give the party a

vote of confidence, to equip it with the essential means to withstand the test of

systematic persecution and totally clandestine existence.

HOVERING BETWEEN COMINTERN AND PCI

In fact, the Italian communists reacted to the ‘special laws’ of 25 November 1926 and

the disabling of their leading cadres with a kind of arrogant activism, determined to

prove that the party was more than ever alive and in rude health. It was a reaction full

of pride, but it also ignored the extent to which clandestine operation differed from

functioning semi-illegally, and underestimated the state’s growing repression.

Togliatti was affected by this show of pride. The previous November he had told

his comrades that he was prepared to go back to Italy and be of use to the party.27 But

on 1 January 1927, Camilla Ravera who was carrying out, practically on her own, the

clandestine reorganisation, wrote to the comrades in Russia that it was best for ‘Ercoli

to stay put’, since he could follow the work of the party from Moscow. She also added,

‘he will be useful to the core workings of the Comintern, which will also be extremely

useful for us.’28

Meanwhile, throughout January, a series of meetings took place in Moscow to

evaluate the political and organisational future of the PCI under the changed

circumstances. The Italian communists, supported by Humbert-Droz, were in favour

of keeping the gravitational centre of the party inside Italy. Russian comrades warned

them of the danger of ‘burning out’ immediately all available energies in what looked

like being a long-term struggle. The Russian comrades also proposed the establishment

of an ‘exiled leadership’, which would be in charge of providing the party with general

political direction, a link to the ECCI, and ‘ideological education’.

Their proposal was formalised in a document approved by the ECCI presidium on

28 January, along with a political motion discussed below. The exiled leadership

subsequently established its base in Paris. In March, the review Lo Stato Operaio started

publication. In Italy, a secretariat office remained, managed by a member of the PB

(Ravera), along with three departments: agit-prop, trade unionism, and the ‘sporty’ one

– i.e. those working in the army.29

The ECCI motion had been approved by the PCI in Italy at the beginning of

February, when Gramsci was transferred from the confinement in Ustica to San

Vittore’s gaol in Milan. Plans to organise his escape had to be set aside in order to

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 49

address the problem of the political leadership of the party. Ravera wrote to the ECCI

asking for Ercoli to be recalled from Moscow and put in charge of the exiled leadership

in Paris.30 The request was granted, with the proviso that Togliatti’s commitment to

the Italian party would not go any further than the next ECCI plenum. Thus, Ercoli

was in the position of being a Comintern leader who had been ‘lent’ to the Italian

party and, as we shall see, his future posting would be unresolved until the middle of

1929.

From this point, Togliatti framed his depiction of the Italian situation and the

PCI’s tasks in the fight against fascism within a comprehensive analysis of the

revolutionary struggle on a global scale. This approach had much in common with

Bukharin, whose report to the seventh plenum identified three principal driving forces

of the international situation: the struggle of the European proletariat against capitalist

stabilisation; the struggle of colonial peoples against imperialist exploitation; and the

struggle of the Russian proletariat to build socialism. The latter was ‘the most

important sector in which we are now struggling to destroy capitalism’, Togliatti said.

This did not mean, however, ‘that we should not keep up at all costs the struggle in the

other sectors of the world revolution’.31

The Comintern’s eighth plenum, which took place in Moscow between 18 and 30

May 1927, considered the problems of all three ‘sectors’ simultaneously. The central

issue, which in some way affected all of them, was the impending danger of a war of

aggression against Soviet Russia, which had in recent months become a major

preoccupation of the Russian leadership. During the proceedings, it became known

that Great Britain had severed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The

obsessive fear of war escalated, nurtured also by the majority to create a climate of

‘sacred union’ which would make easier the task of defeating the opposition (which

had resumed its attacks on Stalin and Bukharin’s domestic and international politics).

In the ECCI debate that followed the theses presented by Otto Kuusinen and Tom

Bell, Togliatti proposed that the Comintern adopt as a central slogan ‘the struggle for

peace’, which he considered best suited to make ‘a direct connection between the

politics of the workers’ state and the undercurrents of feelings in the masses who are

against the war and want to stop it’.32 His position was embodied in an amendment to

the theses, but was rejected. The main slogan became the defence of the Russian and

Chinese revolutions. At a later date, Togliatti told the PB of the PCI that his proposal

had had the direct support of Bukharin,33 although the records of the committee

proceedings show that he was totally isolated and that Bukharin had intervened to have

the amendment rejected.34

Nevertheless, if Togliatti was correct and the ‘struggle for peace’ was the most

effective means that the European communist movement had to defend Soviet Russia,

then this meant mobilising disparate sectors of the masses and public opinion which

were not themselves inclined to revolution. It meant making contact with other

political forces and, in line with a broad interpretation of the politics of united front,

with social democracy. This strategic perspective, which had initially been Bukharin’s,

was discredited for many in the Comintern by the outcome of the British General

Strike (1926). In response, Bukharin himself made partial amendments to his line,

50 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

thereby facilitating a shift to the left within some sections of the Comintern,

particularly the PCF.

The Swiss communist Jules Humbert-Droz played an important part in the fierce

criticisms that were directed in 1927 at the PCF, whose electoral tactics had included a

coalition with other parties of the left. Humbert-Droz had maintained a close political

and personal relationship with Togliatti, who was also very critical of the French party.

He was particularly concerned that the party, even when confronted with the repressive

measures, including the imprisonment of high-profile leaders, was ‘falling with its eyes

closed into the trap of respecting the law’.35

However, the harsh criticisms directed towards the PCF were more a manifestation

of the – by now customary – negative evaluation of the party’s modus operandi than

any sign of a substantial change in Togliatti’s outlook. Throughout 1927 and

thereafter, all observers agreed that Togliatti appeared reluctant to conform to the left

trend that was gaining ground in the Comintern. He might occasionally have approved

of it, for instance in the French case, but he regularly tried to soften and limit the

practical impact of the left position.36

In addition to the issue of the ‘war danger’, debate at the eighth plenum was also

concentrated on the development of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Following

the great hopes of 1925–26, defeat was now a real prospect. Indeed, on 12 April,

Chiang Kai-shek unleashed in Shanghai a bloody repression of the trade unions and

the communist party, killing thousands of people. As a result, the Comintern’s Chinese

political strategy – based on the alliance with the Kuomintang – was increasingly

questioned. Trotsky and Zinoviev, who had formed a united opposition, were deeply

critical of it.

Presented with the new situation, the majority – headed by Stalin and Bukharin –

reasserted the need of an alliance with the left inside the Kuomintang and involvement

with the Wuhan government. The establishment of soviets was excluded, as they

would have created a situation of dual power and therefore compromised the

completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, so playing into the hands of

Chiang Kai-shek and foreign imperialism. Intervening in the debate, Togliatti stressed

the important role of the agrarian revolutionary movement and its ‘plebeian’ ways.

Their objective had to be the seizure and distribution of the land, and the destruction

of the bureaucratic machine exercised feudal power in the countryside. Togliatti

believed that the Wuhan government still had a role to play if the communists could

develop the mass movement ‘as widely as possible’.

Clearly reluctant to reject a political line which the opposition had been attacking

for over a year, he underestimated the close links that existed between the left of the

Kuomintang and the system of class power in force in the countryside. He did not fully

realise that it was impossible to safeguard the interests of Wuhan’s ‘revolutionary

bourgeoisie’ whilst at the same time developing a mass movement that would challenge

the very basis of its social power.37

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 51

THE LAST REMAINING QUALMS AGAINST THE OPPOSITION

Togliatti conducted his critique of the opposition in relation to the need to mould

Comintern tactics to the specifics of the Chinese revolution: that is, on a political level.

However, since the beginning of the eighth plenum it had been evident that the

majority of the Russian party was employing other non-political means to stop the

minority from taking part in the debate. A resolution of the eighth plenum had

forbidden Zinoviev from being active in the Comintern: two policemen actually

stopped him from entering the meeting room, whilst Trotsky was continuously

interrupted and ultimately forbidden to speak by the chairman.

That the atmosphere was poisoned is evident from the testimony of Ignazio Silone,

who had arrived in Moscow with Togliatti to represent the party’s ‘internal

leadership’.38 Even before the plenum began, and during a meeting of the more

important Comintern and party leaders, Stalin had tried to compel the affiliated parties

to agree on a resolution condemning a document by Trotsky on the question of

Chinese policy. Stalin recommended his expulsion from the ECCI. Moreover, the

delegates could not read Trotsky’s contribution, having been told that it contained

confidential intelligence on the politics of the Soviet state in China. Togliatti was

against Stalin’s proposed resolution, and did not give in to the pressure to support it

exercised covertly by several Comintern representatives. He managed to convince other

delegations, including the Belgian and the French, to reject the motion. Stalin was too

experienced a politician not to realise that a non-unanimous vote would have been

counterproductive; he therefore withdrew the resolution.39

At later plenum discussions, however, Togliatti’s initial show of independence

disappeared. In the meetings of 18–30 May, he declared he was against the

participation of Zinoviev in the plenum. He entered into a harsh polemic with Trotsky

on the issue and even presented a resolution ordering Trotsky and Vujovic, as surviving

members of the opposition within the ECCI, to either stop participating in the

opposition faction or face expulsion.40

Togliatti stated that ‘there are times when there is the need to go past the rules of

the party in the interests of revolutionary work.’41 Nevertheless, he then wrote to

Bukharin and Piatnitsky that it would have been appropriate to have ‘preliminary

contact between the Russian delegation and those from other countries (or at least

present the issue to the CI secretariat)’ and that it had been ‘a mistake to set the issue

[of Zinoviev’s expulsion] on a purely “procedural” level supported by argument of

questionable value’.42 But it would be mistaken to read into this letter a belated

acknowledgement of the warning which Gramsci had issued a few months before,

when he urged the Russian majority ‘not to inflict a humiliating victory’.

Togliatti gave the reasons behind his conduct to the Italian PB a few months later:

the disciplinary measures against Trotsky were inappropriate because for the masses he

was still ‘one of the leaders of the October Revolution and the organiser of the Red

Army’. Moreover, it was not very helpful to give to the sections of the Comintern the

impression ‘that every lively discussion would end in disciplinary organisational

measures’.43 These were important scruples but they did not withstand the events that

52 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

followed. Faced with the exclusion of Trotsky and Zinoviev, first from the Russian CC

and then from the party, Togliatti reasserted the criteria that had shaped his answer to

Gramsci thirteen months before. When the choice was ‘between some men and a

political line they should have adhered to, because that line would determine the

success of the proletarian revolution’, then all doubts should be cast aside. According to

Togliatti, the crux of the matter was ‘socialism in one country’, a conception of the

revolutionary process to which he was now completely won over.44 Nevertheless, his

gradual alignment with the ‘left’ tendencies prevailing in the Comintern – which were

confirmed in the proceedings of the ninth plenum (9–25 February 1928) – did not

take place without resistance on his part. For instance, he still disagreed with the

politics of widespread splitting of the social democratic trade unions and the setting up

of ‘independent’ organisations under the control of the communists.45

As a reflection of his status as primarily a PCI leader, Togliatti submitted an

important report to the Italian commission at the ninth ECCI plenum in early 1928.

In fact, his position was far from clear.46 After the eighth plenum, in May 1927,

Camilla Ravera had asked the Comintern to allow Ercoli to return to his party, as

authorised a few months earlier. In August 1927, however, the ECCI decided that

Togliatti should take on the direction of the Western European Bureau (WEB) based

in Berlin, thus delaying his return to PCI work for a few months.

After the ninth plenum, the decision as to Togliatti’s future could not be

postponed any longer. On 15 March 1928, therefore, the WEB demanded the

fulfilment of the ECCI decision to send Togliatti to Berlin. They told the PCI

Direzione that without comrade Ercoli’s experience, political foresight and influence,

the bureau could not work.47 But despite the fact that Togliatti had initially consented

to go, he was now resolutely against it, realising that it would mean ‘a total and

permanent uprooting’ from his work with the PCI. He justified his opposition mainly

as a procedural issue in a letter of 17 March to Humbert-Droz. Between the lines,

however, one can detect a personal act of rebellion:

It is not possible to think of the party’s leaderships as if they were dummies and tear away

their arms or legs at will without thinking of the consequences […] It is a serious mistake to

think of the development of those responsible for the workers’ and communist movement

only in terms of their use to the apparat. But I feel this is what is happening in my case. No

attention has been paid to the need of employing me where I can be most useful, of making

me work to solve problems that I understand, feel, and for which I would work with all

necessary efforts and passion. I am thought of as a pawn that can be moved to any place and

in any direction.48

In the end, thanks also to the solidarity of the PCI leadership group that opposed

his departure and the vital support of Humbert-Droz, Togliatti won. The political

secretary acknowledge that the PCI could not do without him and his role in the WEB

was refashioned in more flexible terms so that his tenure in Berlin was not indefinite.

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 53

LEADING THE PCI: THE DISAGREEMENT WITH THE ‘YOUTHS’

In March 1928, Togliatti justified his refusal to take on a full-time commitment

within the WEB in political terms: all available energies needed to be geared towards

the leadership of the Italian party in order to prepare for an objective reality that might

evolve positively if organisational weaknesses could be overcome. Togliatti’s appraisal

of the opportunities available to the Italian communist movement in the wake of the

special laws had already come to the fore with sufficient clarity in the meetings held in

the Comintern in January 1927. In substance, the Comintern’s and Togliatti’s political

orientation with regard to Italy did not change until at least the end of 1928.

It is best to start from the resolution ‘On the political and economic situation in

Italy and on the duties of the PCI’, approved on 28 January 1927 by the ECCI

presidium. The document made two main claims: on the one hand it stated that ‘the

fascist regime will only disappear under the blows of a popular revolution of the

workers and the peasants, with the alliance of some strata of the middle classes.’ On the

other hand, it said that ‘the development of the people’s revolution into a proletarian

revolution is not predestined and automatic.’ All would instead depend ‘on the trust

that it [PCI] could gain as leader of the revolutionary, anti-fascist activity’.49

The implication that the Italian revolution would not be tout court a proletarian

revolution, but could have two stages, was animatedly challenged by some leaders of

the International such as Manuilsky and Lozovsky, as well as by Longo, the

representative of the Italian Federation of Communist Youth (FGCI). Togliatti,

however, supported by Humbert-Droz, maintained that it was not possible to ‘give our

party a rigid outlook at a time when the masses are passive’.50 Nearly a year and a half

later, in a speech to the CC in June 1928, Togliatti reaffirmed his position.51

Between January 1927 and June 1928, a lengthy controversy developed within the

PCI. The main protagonists were, on the one side, Togliatti and his close collaborators

in the new leadership, Tasca and Grieco. On the other side were Longo and the leaders

of the FGCI, notably Secchia and D’Onofrio.52 The ‘youths’ deemed the concept of a

‘people’s revolution’ dubious, and any immediate short-term demands to be

unrealistic: the class identity of the revolution and the socialist outcome of ‘worker and

peasant rule’ (a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat) had to be made

explicit.

Togliatti conceded that in Italy there was no space for ‘a second bourgeois-

democratic revolution’, and that a proletarian anti-capitalist revolution was on the

agenda. He agreed that it was impossible to ‘make two different things of fascism and

capitalism’. He maintained that Italian capitalism could not restore democracy and

freedom, because that ‘would inevitably be the prelude of a new mass insurrection,

more widespread and more determined than the post-war one’.53 He did, however,

challenge the youth’s assertion that the PCI had already built up a bloc of

revolutionary forces sufficient to defeat fascism. Though ‘middle-ground’ political

forces – democratic and social democratic – had disappeared in Italy, that did not

mean that social classes, currents of public opinion and the aspirations they embodied

no longer existed. On the contrary, reactionary political pressure intensified ‘the

54 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

illusions and hopes of democracy’ in these social classes, particularly as one of the

characteristics of fascism was, contrary to other European reactionary movements, that

it excluded not only a compromise with social democracy, but actively persecuted it. As

Togliatti would later point out in June 1928, ‘Matteotti, the greatest anti-fascist martyr

in the people’s perception, was not a communist’.54 The communist party, therefore,

had to implement a political strategy to gain hegemony for the proletariat in the

struggle against fascism, which could not be taken for granted. The PCI had to point

to short-term political objectives which were ‘democratic’, and reclaim some of the

freedoms which fascism had suppressed, for instance the freedom to elect local

councillors (or the right of workers to appoint those bodies that represented them).

For most of 1927, these ideological differences, though serious, were still

contained. More pressing was the problem of party reorganisation, which dominated

the debates of the party leadership. In the second half of February 1927, the exiled

leadership was set up in Paris with Togliatti in charge. He was also a leading

contributor to Lo Stato Operaio, the ideological review of the party, collaborating

regularly in editorial work and contributing several articles in every issue. The

publication, which became invaluable in the training and education of clandestine

party cadres, not only provided information on the debates in the Comintern and the

Russian party, but also furnished comprehensive analysis of the Italian economic and

social reality, which made it unique among the Italian anti-fascist press abroad.

Meanwhile, the internal leadership of the party was operating from a suburb in

Genoa, managed by Camilla Ravera and assisted by Leonetti and Silone. Undoubtedly,

Togliatti continued to place great importance on this work. When Ravera, in June

1927, suggested the temporary relocation of the secretariat and press and propaganda

office abroad, Togliatti voiced his reservations that such a step would ‘move the

fulcrum away from Italy’.55 In the end, he agreed to the proposal, which resulted in

relocating with his family to Lugano.

Ercoli was at the same time very critical of the impatience of the youth. The first

conflict emerged at the PB in 1927, when Togliatti defended the position he had

adopted at the eighth plenum in support of the slogan ‘struggle for peace’. Longo

argued that, on the contrary, to agree to the proposal of the Italian delegation was ‘to

simplistically juxtapose war and peace, taking away from the issue any social content of

class’, and in so doing weaken the effectiveness of the work of the party in Italy, which

should be aimed towards ‘bringing down the capitalist regime’. Togliatti rejected this

line of reasoning as wholly ‘wrong’, because it did not take into account actual power

relations.56

The PCI was brought back to the crude reality of these power relations in the

summer of 1927 by the arrests which affected its apparatus. On 17 August, in a

meeting of the PB, Ercoli made a number of serious criticisms of the organisational

work already carried out. They had much in common with those of the youth, who

complained that party cadres faced inevitable defeat without proper support from the

party. But, contrary to Longo and Secchia, who attributed the organisational debacle

mainly to abstract slogans that failed to speak to the working-class and peasant base,

Ercoli supported still the line defined at the Lyons congress. He accused Longo of an

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 55

ideology and a method that were ‘a long way from that method of objective analysis of

events and understanding of the duties in relation to them, to which [method of

analysis] our party was called by the International after the first two years of its

existence and that it is nowadays striving to adhere to’.57 This was in substance an

accusation, barely disguised, of Bordighism.

The PCI’s organisational conference, held in Basel in January 1928, marked

something of a truce between the PB and the youth. Longo agreed not to speak during

the debate so as not to exacerbate the controversy. Togliatti left it to Grieco to report

on the Italian situation, though he did point out that if a mistake had been made by

the party, it was to have set for the masses objectives that were impossible to realise. In

his report to the CC in June 1928, he stressed that ‘the organisation of the state, the

mobilisation of those sections of the masses which are not yet part of the working-class-

peasant bloc, takes place around the objective of the struggle for a republic and a

Constituent Assembly.’58 Togliatti’s intervention was making the same political point

as Gramsci. It may not have been a coincidence that he made it at a time when

Gramsci was on trial in Rome where he was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

Undeniably, the relationship between Togliatti and Gramsci, affected by the

episode of the letter of October 1926, had been abruptly curtailed. Togliatti had not

tried to communicate with the leaders of the party who had been arrested. He just

signed with other representatives of the PCI and Comintern a letter of greetings which

was sent to Scoccimarro ‘for everybody’ in October 1927, when their trial was expected

to be imminent.

Grieco was the one who sent the comrades in prison more detailed information on

the latest events and, in particular, on the expulsion of the Russian opposition in a

letter of 10 February 1928.59 Interestingly, Grieco’s initiative irritated Gramsci who

saw it as a dangerously thoughtless action which could worsen his legal position. Later,

worn down by anxiety and solitary confinement, Gramsci saw the letter as the first step

of a manoeuvre aimed at harming him.60 Did this hypothesis have a foundation?

Research tends to exclude the possibility.61 However, one has to cite the explicit

accusation included in a biographical note on Togliatti, obviously drafted by the cadre

section of the Comintern and dated 21 September 1940:

In 1939 the [ECCI] received an accusation directed at T.[ogliatti] by the widow of the

deceased leader of the PCI, Antonio Gramsci, according to whom Gramsci believed T. to be a

double-dealer who didn’t deserve to be trusted. To sustain it [the claim] the fact was cited that

T. never expressed his opinion before the official decision on an issue, and was shown to be

uncertain in the past: at crucial times in the party’s internal struggle, by disrupting the

attempts to free Gramsci through the exchange of prisoners, and finally in a number of other

episodes whilst Gramsci was in prison, episodes that Gramsci himself has taken as

provocations on the part of the Direzione of the PCI with the objective of preventing his

liberation.62

The note made explicit reference to the ‘communications by Gramsci’s widow and

her sisters to the cadres section’ of the ECCI, which have only recently been found.

56 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

They are evidence of a considerable hostility towards Togliatti, especially from Giulia

Gramsci’s elder sister, Eugenia Schucht.

It will be shown below that the entire biographical note on Togliatti dated 21

September 1940 was apparently intended to show him in a bad light. It will also,

however, be evident that the reliable facts reveal that the hypothesis of a ‘plot’ does not

stand up to scrutiny. Undoubtedly Togliatti refrained from direct contact with

Gramsci. He observed the rule of not writing to imprisoned party leaders. Because of

this, he became the target of Terracini’s bitter sarcasm. In reply to Grieco, who had

made some ironic comments about Togliatti’s ‘stinginess’ with regard to his reluctance

to write, Terracini said:

Give my regards to Palmiro. If in order to have a letter from him it sufficed to defeat and

overcome his rabbinism, I would set up a credit with my bankers of fourteen kopeks; but to

write one needs, in addition to a stamp, also a certain amount of feelings and impulses that are

not transferable and interchangeable, therefore I renounce the pleasure of reading him.63

It is well known, however, that an indirect communication was kept up by

Togliatti and Gramsci via an intermediary: Piero Sraffa, the great economist, who was

Professor at Cagliari University and later at Trinity College in Cambridge.64 But above

all, as far as 1928 is concerned, there is no evidence that Togliatti intended in any way

to undermine Gramsci’s leading role. Nor did he seem embarrassed by the fact that the

letter of October 1926 would have shown Gramsci in a ‘bad light’ in Moscow. For

example, the article that Togliatti wrote for Lo Stato Operaio in October 1927: a truly

felt tribute to the ‘place of honour’ that Gramsci held in the history of the PCI.65 No

less significant were the steps that Togliatti took with Comintern and Soviet diplomats

in order to obtain Gramsci’s release. First, in September 1927, via the discreet

intervention of Pacelli, the papal nuncio in Berlin, he explored the possibility of an

exchange with high-ranking priests held prisoner in Russia. Then – in the summer of

1928 – he asked Bukharin to urge the crew of the Soviet icebreaker Krassin, which had

rescued an Italian Arctic expedition, to ask for Gramsci’s release.66 These attempts

came to nothing, probably because of Mussolini’s resolute personal opposition. They

were, however, testimony to a commitment that was significant also at the level of

human solidarity with the friend who had ‘fallen’. After all, Gramsci’s political line was

not then under discussion: Togliatti went to the Comintern’s sixth world congress

determined to defend a stance that was essentially consistent with Gramsci’s thought.

NO TO A STRUGGLE WITHOUT PRINCIPLES

At the sixth congress that opened in Moscow on 17 July 1928, the atmosphere was

uneasy and tense. Increasingly, worrying rumours filtered through to the delegates of a

new fissure in the Russian leadership, that had continued to deepen both about the

analysis of the international outlook and domestic political economic choices.67 A

complex realignment was taking place among the various factions. Part of the

Trotskyist group was keen on a rapprochement with Stalin in the struggle against the

‘right’, in support of a political line that included parts of the opposition’s

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 57

‘industrialising’ programme. Bukharin, on the other hand, had a secret meeting with

Kamenev on 11 July. He proposed to him and Zinoviev that they form a bloc against

Stalin, whom he accused of being ‘a schemer without principles, capable of doing

anything to preserve his power’. Togliatti, who had arrived in Moscow a few days

before the start of the congress as head of the Italian delegation, was baffled and

uncomfortable. He was summoned by Bukharin and listened to what a few months

later he would describe as ‘his outpourings’.

Judging by what an anonymous informer said about Togliatti to Trotsky, who was

trying to discover the mood of the foreign delegates from exile in Alma Ata, the Italian

leader was worried:

The tragedy of the situation is that it is impossible to speak the truth on the more important

and vital problems at hand. We cannot speak. In this climate to speak the truth would have

the same effect as a bomb explosion. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the majority of those

who are taking part in the congress were swept away from the face of the earth. I am seriously

worried. It is a pity that Bordiga is not here. He would have had an important historical role.

He would have told us all the truth.68

It may be the case that the informer embroidered and exaggerated Togliatti’s

declarations. Nevertheless, the statements attributed to him revealed a widespread

uneasiness. The theses on the international situation presented by Bukharin should

have shed meaningful light on the climate of the congress: they were delivered to all

delegations without being first approved by the Russians. The latter, moreover,

disagreed with their content and made at least four crucial amendments.

The first amendment stressed more strongly the precarious character of capitalist

stabilisation. The second stressed the need to fight against social democracy, and

particularly its left wing. The third insisted on the need to fight against not only the

‘right deviation’ inside the communist movement, but also against ‘conciliatory’

tendencies towards such a deviation. Finally, the fourth insisted explicitly on the

unavoidable ‘iron discipline in the party’. In the long ‘impromptu’ speech that

Bukharin delivered to the congress, with a style that revealed both his skilfulness and

his limits as a political leader, he formally accepted the amendments, but blurred their

political significance and largely stripped them of substance.

Togliatti’s speech, read on 28 July, welcomed the fact the Bukharin had spoken of

‘capitalist stabilisation’ without resort to one of the many adjectives employed by other

delegates to counterbalance it. The speech put into perspective the meaning of the

alleged ‘radicalisation’ of the masses, seeing in it the sign of ‘a greater resistance to the

political and economic offensive by the bourgeoisie’, but not yet the signal of a struggle

for power. Above all, the speech warned that this struggle should not be viewed as a

spontaneous and automatic process, but was rather fostered by the proactive and

continuous intervention of the communist parties. In his closing remarks, Togliatti –

the only one among the participants to follow up on the points that Bukharin had

made on the subject – discussed energetically the issue of internal democracy within

the affiliated communist parties and the Comintern. He complained that in many

58 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

instances the system of open political debate had been replaced by ‘that of the fight

without scruples, and of compromises among different groups’. Referring to the last

words by Goethe on his deathbed (‘more light’), he did not hesitate to issue a warning

that sounded quite dramatic. ‘The proletarian vanguard cannot fight in the dark! The

leadership of the revolution cannot be moulded in a struggle devoid of principles!’

But Togliatti could not make this final plea to the delegates. His speech was cut

short for having overrun the time assigned to those on the platform. Later he was

pressured not to include the sentences quoted in the official version of the minutes. His

speech was apparently received with coldness; the stenographer’s record does not

register any applause. It was a courageous and non-conformist speech given that the

prevailing climate at the congress was one of marked radicalism and triumphal

unanimity, with little inclination for restrained reasoning and nuance.69

It was not only in the debate on Bukharin’s report that Togliatti showed himself to

be out of synchrony with the prevailing mood inside the Comintern. Simultaneously

with the sixth congress, he published in the theoretical review of the International a

very important article on fascism, which went against the prevailing analysis. Though

not denying that there was, in general terms, a process of reactionary transformation of

the bourgeois state, he argued that this process could assume the contours of fascism

only under specific conditions, namely in the presence of a weak economic structure

that forced the bourgeoisie to exercise more intense pressure in order to keep ‘total

control’ on the political and economic life of the country, and ‘of a shift and mass

movement of the urban and rural lower and middle classes’.

Togliatti therefore concluded that ‘fascism is a particular, specific reactionary

form’, indeed ‘altogether more coherent reactionary system than has been in existence

in countries where capitalism has reached a certain degree of development’. He

identified as basic traits of the ‘fascist typology’ the abolition of the parliamentary

system and the destruction of ‘the democratic formal freedoms’ which implied the

refutation of any compromise with social democracy.70 On this point he distanced

himself from the trend gaining ground in the Comintern of ranking fascism and social

democracy as equivalents, not only as ideological tendencies but also in practice. The

former was ‘a movement of the lower and middle classes dominated by the upper class

and the landowners’, whereas the latter ‘is a movement that has working-class and

lower-class support and […] is acknowledged by large masses of workers as the

traditional organisation of their class’.71

In the debate about the programme of the International, Ercoli stressed that it

should not weaken or conceal ‘the fundamental idea that “the new economic politics”

is the typical politics in a transitional period’ and therefore ‘the assertion that in this

period the economic growth of socialism is gradual’. Such a precise formulation did

not lack significance: it gave support to Bukharin’s theses against Stalin at a time when

the question as to whether or not NEP would continue was the main point of

contention in the Russian party.72

Togliatti’s speech was also notable for being the first that he delivered on a subject

of general interest (and not a specifically Italian issue) since becoming a member of the

ECCI. This was undeniably a sign of his authority as a leader of the Comintern. He

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 59

was also asked to criticise social democracy’s position on the colonial issue; not, in

truth, a subject he was familiar with. 73 Even so, his polemic was merciless and focused

on demolishing the thesis of ‘good colonialism’ by pointing out the contrast between

the declaration of principles contained in the resolution of the Socialist International at

its Brussels congress and the actual stances taken by individual socialist parties. These

parties were blamed for performing an ideological cover up of imperialism, hiding the

real face of colonialism in order to ‘break the forces of the national revolutionary

movement and prevent its development’.74

Italian issues were not singled out for special attention during the congress debates.

However, they were addressed soon after in a commission held by the Latin Secretariat,

to which Togliatti presented a long self-critical report.75 For the first time, the Italian

communist leader admitted explicitly that the PCI, after the special laws, had not

immediately grasped the changing situation and carried out the necessary

‘organisational retreat’. The main mistake had been ‘not to understand in time that we

could and should have taken advantage of every legal and semi-legal opportunity still

allowed by the Italian situation’. It was necessary to utilise the fascist unions to

disseminate basic demands (the right to elect workers’ commissions, the observance of

agreements, a basic level of internal democracy) with the aim of inoculating them ‘with

the virus of the class struggle’.

However, Togliatti refused quite bluntly to widen the self-criticism to the overall

political line the party had pursued since the Lyons congress. He maintained support

for making ‘gradual political demands’, first and foremost that of the Republican

Assembly. Indeed, he directed criticism at Longo, who – as part of the Italian

delegation at the sixth congress – had again expressed his open disagreement with the

prevailing PCI line.76 Crossing swords with him, Togliatti endorsed ‘the method’ that

distinguished the Italian party, a method based on open debate and on everyone’s right

to express his or her opinion, together with the duty ‘that when there is a outcome, this

is an agreement that holds for everyone’.77 For the time being, this endorsement was

not challenged and the Comintern reaffirmed their full confidence in Togliatti and the

leading group gathered around him in the PCI.

TASCA IN MOSCOW, TOGLIATTI IN PARIS

The Comintern’s sixth world congress confirmed Togliatti in his posts as a member of

the ECCI and the presidium. Eventually, the proposal of employing him permanently

in the Comintern apparatus, either in Berlin or Moscow, was abandoned altogether

and his activity focused on leading the Italian party. The most pressing objectives were

to overcome the protracted organisational crisis that had beset the PCI for over a year

and to restore reliable links with Italy. Togliatti’s analysis of the country’s situation,

which he put to the party’s CC in October, did not challenge the political line that had

developed over the past two years. But he did suggest that, given the Italian situation,

‘sudden changes [could] quickly come about’.78

Come the world congress, however, and the Comintern’s attention reverted to the

problems of the Soviet party and the new line of the International. The crisis

originated, once again, within the KPD, wherein the so-called group of the

60 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

‘conciliators’ – in other words, the most moderate wing of the KPD – tried to change

the ‘left’ course prevailing in the party by taking advantage of an embezzlement issue in

the Hamburg federation, which had, it seemed, been ‘covered up’ by the KPD

chairman, Ernst Thälmann. On 26 September, the CC decided to take the measure of

suspending him from his duties until the case had been looked into further.

Concerned that the ‘conciliators’ – potential allies of Bukharin’ – might be able to

take over the leadership of the KPD, Stalin succeeded in blocking the suspension. On

6 October, the Comintern presidium met without Bukharin and Humbert-Droz

(among others), and forced the KPD PB to go back on its decision. The presidium

further urged the removal of the ‘conciliators’ from the party’s governing bodies.

Although always implicitly acknowledged, the supremacy of the Russian party had

never before manifested itself in such a blatant way and beyond all statutory rule inside

the Comintern.79

From September 1928, the PCI representative in Moscow and member of the

ECCI was Angelo Tasca, also known as ‘Serra’. He had been nominated by the Italian

delegation to the sixth congress, and the choice had left some people puzzled, given

that Tasca had almost always been in the opposition group and consistently critical

towards the majority. It was only from the beginning of 1927 that he had started to

appear fully integrated within the leadership group, when he made a major

contribution to the elaboration of the party line. Specifically, he distinguished himself

for an in-depth analysis of the fascist economic policy. It is possible that Togliatti, who

was instrumental in the choice to keep him as a delegate to the Comintern, really

believed that the experience of working within the International’s executive bodies

would lead to the ‘absorption [of Serra] into the leading nucleus of the party and of the

employment of his political and leadership skills’. This, Togliatti continued, would

enable him ‘to overcome and tone down’ his past disagreements with Serra.80

When the crisis of the KPD broke out, Tasca had not yet left for Moscow. In a

‘confidential and personal’ letter of 6 October, Togliatti revealed himself to be very

concerned and warned Tasca ‘not to let himself be dragged, in any way, over the

tumultuous and unsafe ground of the struggle of one group against another’ because

‘on this ground one can get lost’. However, by keeping ‘to the ground of general

method of direction’, he added, ‘we may look, perhaps, provincial or cautious, but we

can ensure the ability of exercising a minimum amount of influence, today, or

tomorrow’.81

Tasca at first seemed to abide by the warning. But the situation evolved in an

unexpected way. At the end of September, Bukharin took a stand against the ‘hyper-

industrialising’ trends in the Soviet party and attacked (though obliquely), Stalin’s line.

The latter’s response was immediate: a harsh campaign was promoted against the ‘right

deviation’, still unnamed but easily recognisable to the rank-and-file of the Soviet

party. Meanwhile, in the space of a few weeks, Bukharin and his supporters were

divested of many key positions in the press and the party.

Togliatti was by now experienced enough to pick up these signs of a renewed crisis

and to realise that it would not leave the Comintern unaffected. His conduct was very

prudent; on the one hand, he did not disavow Tasca’s reservations about the internal

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 61

regime of the Comintern and supported his criticism of the ECCI’s intervention into

the German question. On the other, he distanced himself from Bukharin on the issue

of the timing of the development of socialist growth, showing that he shared Stalin’s

theory about the ‘danger of the right’ which could hinder it.82 Moreover, Togliatti

informed Tasca that a meeting of the Italian CC had taken place in mid-December in

Switzerland, which Manuilsky had attended. Because the minutes of this meeting are

missing, its significance can only be pieced together on the basis of Togliatti’s detailed

summary. According to this, the meeting resolved to write two resolutions on the

German issue: a public one ‘that in essence would have given support to the German

CC in its fight against the right’ but expressed reservations as to its conduct toward the

‘conciliators’. The other, a private one, would have expressed criticism of the way in

which the Comintern ‘tends to settle issues internal to the KPD’ and from this ‘go

back to an evaluation of the poor internal conduct of the parties and the communist

International more generally’.

This system is bad and is getting worse [Togliatti allegedly said to Manuilsky]. Group and

faction struggle is spreading to all parties. When the faction struggle rages, internal democracy

ceases to exist. We therefore have a situation that distorts the development of our parties and

in addition prevents a clear resolution of political problems.83

This must be reported as an alleged comment because, in a subsequent letter from

Tasca to Togliatti on 25 December, Manuilsky ‘has here announced a great victory: he

has won you over’.84 Indeed, the ‘private’ resolution – which later became a letter,

equally ‘private’ to the Russian PB – seems to have disappeared from the archives,

whereas the ‘public’ resolution considerably diluted the reservations that Ercoli had

confided to Tasca.85

Perhaps already in the meeting with Manuilsky in Switzerland Togliatti had been

confronted with a stark choice of either-or: side with the position already prevailing in

the Comintern, or be openly against it. As it happened, the situation became more

complicated following a meeting of the ECCI presidium on 19 December, in which

Tasca – who had abstained from voting on a proposal outlining disciplinary action

against certain leaders of the KPD – was accused of ‘mobilising’ the PCI against the

Comintern. Stalin himself attacked Tasca with extreme harshness and accused him and

Humbert-Droz of ‘cowardly opportunism’.86

On 27 December, Togliatti, probably still unaware of this incident, wrote to Serra

to confirm that Tasca’s position ‘did not meet, after all, our disagreement’, while

simultaneously taking definite steps to distance himself from any ‘deviation’ which

Tasca might express. Moreover, he warned Serra about the tone of the letters that he

had sent to the party (and on the too ‘public’ use he had made of them), which made

clear that he was not prepared to follow Tasca down a blind alley.87

It may be an exaggeration to talk of a ‘u-turn’ by Togliatti.88 It can be argued,

however, that until he thought it was possible to aim fire at the ‘German target’

(Tasca’s words) without affecting the Russian party, he did not withdraw his support

for Serra, although he always expressed it in prudent tones. But as soon as the dissent

62 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

turned towards the direction of the Russian party, Ercoli reacted automatically in the

same manner that had brought him into conflict with Gramsci in 1926. He defended

at any cost the political line embodied by the Bolshevik majority as being the compass

of the international communist movement and sole guarantee of the possibility of

world revolution. His stand in relation to the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet

Union in January was a clear example of this:

In judging the conduct of the Trotskyites we cannot stand ‘above the rabble’ and be impartial

observers. We are not impartial observers. We are actors in the revolution and we must

consider ourselves all citizens of the Soviet State, champions of the legitimacy of the Soviet

system, the only legitimacy we recognise.89

A FIRST RIGHTING OF COURSE

Between the end of 1928 and the beginning of 1930, Tasca became more and more

critical, not only of the ‘regime’ that the majority of the Russian party had put in place

in the Comintern, but also of its domestic economic policy and its analysis of the

international situation. This was the substance of the very long memorandum that he

handed to the Italian CC that met in Paris between 25 February and 3 March 1929.90

The shortcoming of his analysis, for in other aspects it was extremely precise, was that

it did not offer alternatives. Tasca knew, after all, that the PCI could not afford the

luxury of a rupture with the Comintern. Indeed, if we go by what Togliatti wrote to

Tosco (Germanetto) on 21 February 1929 after his arrival in France and meeting the

secretariat, ‘the first thing that [Serra] said was that he did not think the party could

take the same attitude that he had taken’.91

In Togliatti’s view, a moral stand separated from, and indeed incompatible, with a

concrete political struggle – although more and more difficult to fight – seemed totally

sterile. His irritation was evident in a letter to Grieco on 28 May, following Serra’s

refusal to be part of the Italian delegation to the tenth ECCI plenum. ‘But should we

[…] let him, after he has put the party in the position it now occupies with respect to

the International, stand aside and wait for the judgement of history?’92 This behaviour

was unacceptable to Togliatti, perhaps because he had and would continue to have to

fight the same temptation within himself.

Ignazio Silone would perceptibly observe in January 1930:

From 1927 to 1929 … Ercoli and Garlandi [Grieco] proved to be much more skilful than

they are reputed to be. But in this situation (and there was no alternative) they have been

victims: they have been condemned to an enduring role of conciliation; they have worried

more about the party than their own biography (for intellectuals, this is virtue taken to a

degree of heroism and this is what has distinguished them from Tasca), but it is my

impression that what happened has crippled their political ability and reduced their authority

in the Centre.93

It will soon become evident that this last comment was appropriate. In the CC of 3

March 1929, Togliatti had notably changed his position. He criticised the

interpretation (that was in essence Bukharin’s) of a ‘third period’ that stressed the so-

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 63

called ‘evolutionary’ elements of its process and underestimated ‘the development of the

components that characterised the present time from others’. He adopted Stalin’s

position on the ‘radicalisation’ of the masses. He supported, in clear contradiction to

what he had contended in his debate with the youth that transitional programmes

should be employed only in an ‘acute revolutionary situation’. He also aligned himself

without hesitation to the politics of the Soviet majority on the issue of the

collectivisation of the land and of forced industrialisation.94

In the same vein, Togliatti’s attack on Tasca was carried out mercilessly; no blows

were spared. ‘The way comrade Stalin has described Serra, by saying that he is an

opportunistic hypocrite, reflects the truth.’ Tasca’s aim ‘is to succeed, by any means, in

cracking the unity of our CC, to sow uncertainty and doubt, which would allow him

to smuggle in, without obstacles, his opportunistic merchandise’.95

None of the other speeches that followed, although unanimous in condemning

Tasca’s position, contained such harsh words. This animosity can only be explained by

Togliatti’s eagerness to distance himself from a comrade with whom he had, between

1927 and 1928, collaborated closely and with the determination, soon to be

vindicated, not to be involved in his ‘political disgrace’. But a more subtle element

reinforced his new hostility: the study of the human psyche argues that we fight against

behaviour that we have repressed and removed from our consciousness. Concluding his

damning speech, in which he asked for Tasca’s expulsion, Togliatti enunciated what

had been his own internal reasoning, revealing how difficult it had been for him to

disavow so much of his own political and theoretical work of the previous three years:

If you feel you are worthless beside the united will of the party and of the International, then

do what the party and the International ask you to do, say: I acknowledge, I humble myself

before the will of the International and of the party. I will shut up and sign. This you must do

if you are aware of the situation’s need.96

It was a line of conduct that had a negative influence on the party’s ability to analyse

the Italian situation, which itself did not give rise to optimistic predictions.

On 11 February 1929 , the Lateran pacts were signed between the Italian state and

the Catholic Church, and a parliamentary general election was called for 2 March.97

This was clearly, and it is hard to believe that it escaped Togliatti, compelling evidence

of the strength and stability of the fascist regime. But his public reading of the new

situation conformed to the Comintern’s diagnosis of the growing radicalisation of the

working class and ‘putrefaction’ of capitalist stabilisation. The agreement between the

Vatican and Mussolini in his view represented ‘the temporary widening of the social

support’ of the regime through the assimilation of the organisational and

propagandistic instruments of the Church. However, the firm coherence of the

capitalist ‘power bloc’ also exacerbated its contradictions by getting rid of not only a

potential Catholic opposition, but also intermediate liberal and social democratic

formations.98

The PCI was essentially in agreement with this analysis. Tasca was unanimously

accused of ‘opportunism’, but the PB also rejected his resignation. Was it a last attempt

64 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

to ‘rescue’ him? More likely, the PCI leaders made it a point of honour to avoid

employing organisational sanctions against political dissent, a method which, at the

sixth congress, Togliatti had criticised the major communist parties for deploying.

However, the communist parties’ ability to sustain ‘diversity’ became a major issue

inside the Comintern. In February, the Russian PB severely condemned Bukharin’s

‘deviation to the right’, and he was summarily divested of all his power within the

Comintern.

The new course now predominated inside all the major communist parties,

especially the KPD, wherein Thälmann and Remmele took control by expelling the

representatives of the ‘right’ and removing the ‘conciliators’ from all positions of office.

The ban preventing demonstrations on 1 May, issued by the social democratic chief of

police in Berlin, Zörgiebel, was defied by communists taking to the streets. In the

ensuing clashes, the police killed 25 people and injured 36 more. The KPD leadership

interpreted these bloody events as a confirmation of the ‘fascisisation’ of social

democracy. Togliatti, who had gone to Berlin to take part in a KPD congress

(afterwards postponed), drew from the attitude of the German party, as he wrote to

Grieco on 14 May, ‘a conclusively favourable impression’,99 evidence that the

widespread extremist fever had, by this time, affected him too.

UNDER INDICTMENT AT THE TENTH PLENUM

The tenth plenum of the ECCI (3–9 July 1929) represented, as is well known, a

turning point in the history of the communist movement. All the ‘elements that were

present at the sixth congress, albeit blurred and projected onto a long-term historical

scale, were here repeated and reasserted in a brutal schematic manner, impoverished

and trivialised’.100 The same happened to the analysis of capitalism, with the definite

emergence of a purely catastrophic concept of the ‘third period’. A similar

bastardisation occurred in the thesis on the ‘fascisisation’ of the bourgeois state and the

transformation of social democracy into ‘social fascism’.

Togliatti’s speech, delivered in plenary session on 8 July, conformed to the

prevailing climate. He still devoted a fairly in-depth analysis to Italian fascism,

encapsulating the changes that had occurred in its social basis and organisational

structure. But he appeared to think that it was changing into ‘a reactionary regime

similar to those whose development we can witness in countries where social

democracy exists with substantial mass support’. In contradiction to what he had

declared in 1927–28, he acknowledged that ‘all intermediate elements disappear’ and

he did not talk at all of the ‘people’s revolution’ but instead of a ‘proletarian revolution

[that] is on the agenda’.

He was extremely harsh towards Tasca. In answer to Manuilsky, who criticised

Togliatti severely for not having yet pushed the PCI to expel him, he explained that

this step had not been taken because the PB thought it should involve ‘the masses of

our party’ in the fight against Tasca, but he pledged that disciplinary measures would

soon follow.101

As a further proof of the ‘day of reckoning’ climate that had emerged in the

Comintern towards the PCI, not even this self-criticism was deemed sufficient.

MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS 65

Kuusinen invited Togliatti to put aside ‘this sentimentalism, this non-political tact’

shown towards Tasca, and reminded him that he had employed the same ‘tact’ with

regard to Trotsky at the eighth plenum. To this, the KPD’s Ulbricht insinuated that

‘perhaps it is something more than tact’, while Heinz Neumann commented ironically

on the fact that Serra ‘has gone beyond the Ercoli’s columns of opportunism’.102

Although Togliatti had retreated, he continued to defend some of his earlier

formulations, e.g. with regard to trade union tactics. On 16 July, he made a speech on

the reports of Thälmann and Lozovsky, challenging their analysis that it was now

superfluous to take over the trade union apparat because there was an irreversible

process of fusion in place between the reformist unions and the machinery of the

bourgeois state. The machinery of trade union organisation, he argued, was not

constituted merely by its top, but also by its intermediate and lower levels. The latter

could, by patient labour, be controlled, by the communists.103

On 19 July, Togliatti delivered the plenum’s closing address. This was evidence of

his continuing importance inside the Comintern and, perhaps, a way of tempering the

criticism moved against him. Yet, it was also a means of compelling him into a public

and unconditional alignment with the new political line. His speech, bland and

without enthusiasm, made the required obeisance. Nevertheless, the proceedings of the

Italian commission, taking place that same day, showed him in a different light.104

Here, Togliatti’s introductory report focused mainly on organising the clandestine

work performed by the PCI and the difficulties met in trying to rebuild the party in

Italy. But the following debate was intense and fractious. The failure to expel Tasca

had become a minor point, whereas the issue of revising the entire political line of the

PCI as formulated from the start of the Gramscian leadership now came to the fore.

Manuilsky aimed his fire at the overestimated and unsuitable employment of

transitional slogans, notably the one for a Republican Assembly based on workers and

peasants’ committees. In particular, he criticised the lack of clarity with regard to the

need for proletarian hegemony. Vasiliev echoed him and emphasised, in particular, the

requirement to apply the label of ‘social fascism’ to Italian social democracy. The

Italian delegates objected, pointing to the importance of their experience in relation to

the position adopted during the Matteotti crisis. They did not agree with the (overly

simplistic) equation of fascism and social democracy. ‘We cannot say that Matteotti

got into power and then had the workers shot in the streets,’ retorted Togliatti to

Vasiliev, and soon after he anticipated that, although a section of Italian social

democracy could make a pact with fascism, the rest would hold on to an anti-fascist

stance. Above all, this highlighted the need for a differentiated analysis for different

situations in different countries.

On the quality of the Italian revolution, Togliatti replied to Manuilsky:

Is it or isn’t it right to debate these issues with the comrades within the party? If the

Comintern says that it isn’t, then we will not do it any more; everyone of us will think about

them and will not talk about them any more; we will just say that the anti-fascist revolution is

a proletarian revolution. But any one of us will think that it is not at all certain that we will be

66 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

in charge of its direction from the start and will think that we will only conquer it during the

struggle.105

Soon after, in reply to Manuilsky who had attributed to the PCI the fault of

‘particularism’, he said:

We have always said that it was the duty of our party to study the specific Italian situation

[…] If the Comintern asks us not do it any more, we won’t do it any more […] If doing this

is to be ‘particular’, we won’t do it any more, but since we cannot be stopped from thinking,

we will keep it to ourselves and we will limit ourselves to generic statements.106

These exchanges were a telling sign of the climate that had taken hold in the

Comintern and, indeed, marked out the constraints limiting the PCI’s political

discussion in the subsequent period. The price paid for observing Comintern discipline

was obviously very high. But a small, illegal party, relying financially on the help of the

Comintern, did not really have any other choice but to abide by this discipline, even

though sacrificing its own margin of autonomy in the process. Togliatti understood

this and, perhaps, thought that only by avoiding an open break in the Lyons’

leadership could the party keep alive the continuity of spirit that had guided them in

the struggle against fascism. In November 1929, Tasca – now expelled from the party

– would reveal he had gleaned from ‘a comrade member of the PCI secretariat’ (a

confidential remark made by Ercoli): ‘We must give in on the Russian and

international issues in order to save the Italian politics of the party. Otherwise,

Moscow will have no scruples in putting together a left leadership with some boys

from the Lenin School. This would spell disaster [for] our work of many years.’107

What was retained of the political line of 1926–28 will be discussed below.

Togliatti knew very well that after the dressing down to which the PCI had been

subjected at the tenth plenum, the dissent harboured for a long time by the youths

(and not only by them) in the party, would come to the fore.

Soon after his return to Paris from Moscow, and after meeting some comrades of

the PB who were obviously critical towards him, he apparently told Camilla Ravera

that he had thought about standing aside and going back ‘to an in-depth study of the

problems, with a mind free from petty intrigues, resentments [and] suspicions that are

mortifying and upsetting’.108 If he had really felt this temptation, he overcame it much

more quickly than in 1923. Even so, it was not without difficulty that Togliatti

admitted at a PB meeting on 29 August to having made a ‘bigger effort to stifle any

feeling of vexation and amour-propre.’109

Indeed, Togliatti had a dark and troubled period ahead of him, one of the most

complex and problematic in his long political career. A comment – which would not

be appropriate to describe Togliatti’s entire political life – by Massimo Salvadori

described this specific moment aptly: ‘a strong personality that recognises in

conformism the vital prerequisite of international communism and who directs his

actions in accord with an ethic of Stalinist-internationalist responsibility.’110

4

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM

THE TURN

On his return from the tenth plenum, Togliatti could observe from private

conversations that a number of comrades were losing confidence in him. Then, at the

meeting of the PCI PB held in Paris on 28–29 August 1929, all the party’s most

authoritative leaders, with the exception of Ruggiero Grieco and to some extent

Camilla Ravera, engaged in a fierce and concerted attack against his political

leadership. It is not easy to sum up the nature of their accusations, which were varied

and also contradictory. It is not surprising that the youths, whose criticisms of 1927–

28 about ‘democraticism’ had been validated by the ECCI, asked for a change of

political line based on open self-criticism. It was more difficult to understand the

position of Leonetti, Tresso and Ravazzoli, who accused Togliatti of ‘opportunism’

even though they held divergent opinions. Leonetti, and especially Ravazzoli, were

nominal supporters of the view that the Italian situation could be radicalised towards

greater democracy. Tresso, on the other hand, explicitly accused Togliatti of ‘Tasca-

isms’ and seemed to agree, even more enthusiastically than the youths, with the tenth

plenum theses on the ‘fascisisation’ of social democracy.

Personal resentments probably also played a part; resentments that had been

harboured and repressed for a long time, fed by Togliatti’s work ethic and personality.

At work, he demanded as much from others as he did from himself. He was reserved

and distant, and could sometimes appear irritatingly arrogant. The suffocating

atmosphere within a small executive group increasingly detached from the masses,

along with its inclination to cling to Byzantine arguments, also made the confrontation

even more unpleasant. At the PB, Togliatti was up against a wall of cool indifference, if

not open hostility. Nevertheless, he was determined not to make himself vulnerable to

criticisms. Although he realised that the party’s ‘change of direction’ would have to be

based on deep political analysis and radical choices, he himself seemed little inclined to

self-criticism.

He did, however, acknowledge that the situation in Italy had changed dramatically

to become more radical. He also conceded that the slogan of the Republican Assembly

based on workers’ and peasants’ committees was no longer relevant. He recognised the

serious organisational crisis affecting the party and the need to find new solutions to

resolve it. But he also energetically defended the PCI’s past practice, emphasising that

‘it would be an error to say that the political line of our party during these past three

years was wrong.’ Nor did he spare the Comintern, which he said ‘can criticise

everything, having for years approved of everything’. Not surprisingly, the delegate

68 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

from the Comintern present at the meeting commented that ‘the tone of comrade

Togliatti’s self criticism, yesterday, […] was rather inadequate.’1

Togliatti’s skilful self-defence took his opponents by surprise. A week later, when

the PB reported to the CC, it was apparently united. The meeting was called mainly to

close the ‘Tasca case’. Tasca had refused to sign a humiliating declaration of self-

criticism about his alleged ‘deviations’. As a result, he was unanimously expelled from

the party. Togliatti, whose addresses to the ex-comrade from L’Ordine Nuovo had

become harsher in the past few months, also distanced himself explicitly from

Bukharin whom he criticised for having overestimated capitalism’s ability to overcome

its contradictions and solve the general crisis that would determine its inevitable

collapse. However, he focused mainly on those aspects of ‘opportunistic deviation’

which affected the Italian situation. He now tried to identify in Italy the nascent

symptoms – present at the level of ‘general and confused aspiration’ – of a

revolutionary radicalisation.2

A clear and unequivocal correction to the line maintained by the PCI since the

Lyons congress emerged from this meeting of the CC in early September.

Circumscribed by the criticisms of the Comintern and a growing internal opposition,

Togliatti went down a path that led him to abandon ‘shreds of his political standpoint

with every meeting’, although he made this manoeuvre reluctantly and by continuing

to draw distinctions and caveats on points of detail.3 He eventually stated

unequivocally, however, that the party ‘would commit a serious mistake in believing

that the Italian situation is an exceptional situation in which one could not recognise

the same features that the ECCI had delineated as occurring worldwide’.4 Afterwards,

in an article for Lo Stato Operaio in November 1929, he offered an official

renunciation of the PCI’s support for the slogan demanding a Republican Assembly.

To the question ‘are we moving towards an acute revolutionary situation in Italy?’,5 he

answered yes without hesitation. He also accepted the theory of ‘social fascism’

completely and without reservations: ‘fascism and social democracy go the same way

[…] Trend, programme and aims are the same.’ Even on the trade union issue, he

complied without resistance with the directives sanctioned by the tenth plenum: the

clandestine CGIL broke away definitively from the social democratic Amsterdam

federation and affiliated to the RILU.

Togliatti’s position within the leadership was, at least temporarily, consolidated by

this CC meeting. Meanwhile, a decisive new site of conflict emerged: the problem of

the party’s activity in Italy. At the end of December 1929, Luigi Longo (Gallo)

submitted to the secretariat a project that envisaged that ‘all the party organisation’

should return to Italy and have the country as its fulcrum. The project caused a deep

fracture in the PB: Leonetti, Ravazzoli and Tresso (who presented a ‘counter-project’)

believed that it was dangerous to rebuild politically operational internal leadership.

They argued that it was necessary ‘to avoid wasting energies, or wearing them out or

destroying them in objectives that can be achieved with less waste’ and as an alternative

suggested strengthening the already existing regional committees.6

This difference of opinion was not about evaluating the radical potential of the

Italian situation, which was now accepted by everyone on the PB, nor about the need

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 69

to address the problem of reorganisation. The differences were initially about methods

of reorganisation. However, after the political and personal antipathy exhibited

towards Togliatti at the August PB, they took on an additional significance, becoming

part of a more general internecine conflict. Togliatti thus sided immediately with the

‘Gallo project’. In a long letter to Grieco on 25 December 1929, he wrote ‘the Italian

situation is changing and we may find ourselves in the presence of a completely new

situation sooner than we think.’ Thus, the need for ‘a systematic activity of political-

organisational leadership within the party’.7 In the secretariat discussion, Longo and

Secchia supported this position, whereas Tresso opposed it. Togliatti this time was not

inclined to mediate; in fact, he took the initiative to force the situation. ‘You

understand,’ he wrote to Grieco on 7 January 1930, ‘how the issues will become

extreme in the CC and it won’t be easy to find a unanimous solution, as we have

previously been able to do.’8

The following day, he delivered a speech to the CC of the FGCI that was to all

effect a manifesto for the ‘svolta’ (the turn). Togliatti’s view was concise: ‘We are

moving towards an insurrectional situation, we are moving towards civil war.’ He

excluded ‘the possibility of a so-called “transitional phase”, or in other words a period

of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that would precede the proletarian revolution’.

Hence, the party in Italy was called to assume ‘new duties’. Even though the situation

was ‘inexorably driven forward by a number of objective factors’ it was mistaken to

suppose that the shift of the masses towards revolutionary conciousness could happen

‘spontaneously’ without political mass work carried out daily and locally.

THE BATTLE AGAINST THE ‘THREE’ AND BORDIGA’S EXPULSION

Togliatti’s speech of 8 January completed the revolution in his political position. But

how can his unconditional alignment to the theses of the tenth plenum, his volte-face,

be explained? Undoubtedly, Togliatti realised that the alliance with the youths and his

conversion to their position would represent the safest way to maintain his leadership

of the party. There were other elements, however, that strengthened his belief in this

choice. Between the end of October and the beginning of December 1929, two

processes were set in motion which, without exaggeration, can be said to have changed

thoroughly and irreversibly the world stage: a dramatic and global crisis of capitalism

precipitated by the Wall Street crash; and the forced collectivisation of Soviet

agriculture. The latter, together with intensive industrialisation, marked the start of the

‘revolution from above’, destined within a few years to transform the Soviet Union to

the rank of a world superpower.

The resounding contrast between capitalism in disarray and socialism under

construction, and the idea that history would compel humankind to choose between a

ruinous capitalism and a bounteous socialism, became not only a recurring theme of

Comintern propaganda, but also an integral element of the militants’ mental make-up.

Togliatti, too, was irrevocably affected by it.

The political and personal fissures within the PCI, which had lain dormant

through much of 1927–28, now flared. On 10 January, the PB split. Four voted for

the ‘Gallo project’ (Togliatti, Ravera, Longo and Secchia); three voted against it

70 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

(Leonetti, Ravazzoli and Tresso). Silone, who was convalescing in Switzerland,

announced a few days later that he was against an organisational solution that ‘would

last just the brief time necessary to behead our party (it does not take much to behead a

microcephalous organism) and to debase it in the eyes of the grass roots for ever’.10

The conflict soon intensified. Togliatti became the target of serious personal

accusations. His wife Rita had misplaced money intended for the party, and this gave

Leonetti and Ravazzoli the excuse to demand that both husband and wife should be

‘blamed’.11 The Comintern was concerned about the worsening internal situation and

wanted to avoid an irreparable fracture. In a telegram of 21 January, it imposed the

postponement of the next CC and summoned a delegation of the PCI to Moscow.

There, Togliatti and Ravazzoli took part in an extended presidium held at the

beginning of February. Togliatti presented his analysis of the maturating revolutionary

situation and outlined the need for a ‘widespread change of direction’ in the leadership

and organisational methods of the PCI.12 His theses, which were also discussed by the

Italian commission of the Latin Secretariat, apparently convinced the executive organs

of the International. Even Ravazzoli appeared more conciliating. Although he did not

disavow his objection to the ‘Gallo project’, neither did he support Silone’s rejection of

the ‘svolta’.

On 2 February, from Moscow, Grieco informed the PCI secretariat that ‘the

commission has unanimously pronounced, without hesitation and with the greatest

vigour, in favour of the line of the PB majority, rejecting the line and proposals of the

minority.’ Although the ‘svolta’ had been sanctioned by the International, the dispute

in the top ranks of the PCI did not subside. On the contrary, it assumed – as Togliatti

told Grieco on 11 March – the characteristics ‘of a brawl, something disheartening and

frightening’.13

The decisive clash took place at the CC held in Liège on 20–23 March 1930. In

Togliatti’s opinion, the ‘knot’ of dissent within the PB had to be cut ‘by brute force’,

that is to say ‘employing radical disciplinary measures’. The positions of the ‘three’, as

Tresso, Leonetti and Ravazzoli came to be known, still differed considerably from one

another, but they now shared a more cautious interpretation of the degree of

revolutionary development of the Italian situation. Consequently, they judged the

disappearance of the intermediate formations and ‘fascisisation’ of social democracy to

be less significant than the majority. Nevertheless, they did not dispute the line of the

tenth plenum or the legitimacy of the Comintern’s internal regime.

Their feelings of resentment towards Togliatti were still strong: ‘We all know, in

the International and in the party, that Ercoli is an opportunist and a political parasite,’

said Leonetti, concluding his speech. However, moving the confrontation onto a

personal level did not benefit them. Grieco replied energetically: ‘Ercoli represents a

political line, the political line of the party and the [ECCI], and […] therefore we take

any attack against Ercoli as an attack against the party and the International.’14

A comment that Camilla Ravera made in her memoirs, written 40 years later,

conveyed the feelings of confusion and laceration that, she believed, affected everyone

who took part in that dramatic meeting:

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 71

I remember that central committee as one of the most difficult and sad moments in my

militancy. All the debate of those months had taken place in an unhealthy atmosphere;

vitiated by motives, manoeuvres and objectives that were absurd. Comrades with whom we

had worked under difficult circumstances, with enthusiasm and trustingly, were now moving

away, and the way we were losing them was much more bitter and hurtful than the way in

which we were losing precious and dear comrades who were torn from us, separated from us

by the iron bars of their prison cells.15

Most probably, Togliatti shared these feelings – and some of his observations

revealed the bitterness he felt about being the object of denigration – but it did not

affect his determination. Moreover, the CC meted out the disciplinary measures

against his opponents which he had recommended: Silone and Ravazzoli were

excluded; Leonetti was demoted to ‘candidate member’; Tresso was excluded from the

PB.

Unexpectedly, within this environment poisoned by personal and political

squabbles, came the news of Bordiga’s expulsion from the party. The accusations made

at the March CC against the ex-secretary of the PCI were of having sympathised with

Trotsky following his expulsion from the Soviet Union, of having worked to break up

the PCI, and of ‘having behaved, at the end of his deportation, in a manner that was

not compatible with being in the party’. It is not on record that the ECCI called for his

expulsion. It seems more likely that Ercoli – recalling the criticism he had been subject

to for the delayed expulsion of Tasca – preferred to pre-empt another rebuke by taking

the initiative. At the same time, the article that he wrote for Lo Stato Operaio to

comment on the expulsion did not include any of the denigrating aspects that had

characterised the break up with Tasca. The article focused mainly on developing

criticisms of the ideological foundations of Bordighism, with particular reference to the

polemical writings of 1925–26.16 Moreover, in the January issue of the review, the

article was preceded by the publication of an unfinished essay by Gramsci on the

‘questione meridionale’ (southern Italy question). The essay was described as the ‘best

document of communist political thought, incomparably profound, strong, unique,

with ample possibilities of development’.17 Bearing in mind that Gramsci’s essay was

consistent with the Lyons political perspective, it is apparent that although Togliatti

was preparing a radical change in the direction of the political line of the PCI, he was

also taking the precaution of not burning all his bridges behind him.

Bordiga’s expulsion was approved unanimously, including the ‘three’. They had

apparently accepted the disciplinary measures taken against them, and they were

anxious to prove their loyalty to the party. They pledged themselves to implement with

‘faithfulness and enthusiasm’, as Leonetti declared, the resolution approving the ‘Gallo

project’. However, they soon forged relationships with circles of the Trotskyite

opposition based in Paris. Leonetti penned a number of harsh attacks against the PCI

line and specifically against Ercoli’s ‘opportunism’, which were published in the

magazine La Verité. They also contacted Trotsky directly, expressing their intention of

joining the international opposition of the left.18

Their conduct provided the justification for Togliatti’s harsh reaction. He had an

additional incentive, to prove his own bona fides to Moscow. The ECCI, in fact,

72 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

looked upon his change of direction with a certain amount of suspicion. Grieco

himself, the man closest to Togliatti in the leadership group of the PCI, had some

misgivings. The youths, meanwhile, gave enthusiastic support to the new political line,

which they could accurately claim to have conceived. They did not, however, lay claim

to the party leadership.

Obviously, the youths’ enthusiasm caused some problems for Togliatti. Moscow

had judged very harshly an article by the secretary of the FGCI (Secchia) that proposed

the formation of groups ready for terrorist actions. Togliatti had to intervene to tone

down their expectations.19 In truth, Togliatti did not think his leadership secure;

therefore, he sought to create an executive which was cohesive and could work well

together. He did not intend to let the ‘three’, although defeated, create a future

alternative to his leadership. When it was clear that Leonetti was the author of the

articles in La Verité, Togliatti took advantage of the situation. Although the ‘three’

were called to Moscow, Togliatti audaciously pre-empted the ECCI, presenting it with

a fait accompli. On 9 June, the CC expelled – on Togliatti’s suggestion – Leonetti and

Ravazzoli. Tresso was asked to dissociate himself from them. He refused and replied

with a harsh attack against the politics of the party and a final insult to Togliatti: ‘he

was always very steady in his wavering.’ He was expelled.20 A decision regarding Silone

was postponed. Togliatti showed him particular consideration, not only in the friendly

tone of some personal letters, but also in the supportive style of the notation he

contributed to one of Silone’s articles on fascism, in which Silone refuted the equation

of fascism and social democracy.21

Whatever the reasons,22 Togliatti’s attitude towards Silone is also evidence,

perhaps, of the lingering uneasiness which he still felt towards the line of the tenth

plenum. According to Silone, Togliatti went twice to visit him in Switzerland: the first

time, probably, in the spring of 1930, the second time about a year later, when

Togliatti tried to convince him to distance himself from the opposition. Silone

reported that during the first visit:

[Togliatti] explained to me at length, simply and honestly, the reasons for the line of conduct

he had chosen after a lengthy reflection. The actual situation of the International, he said, is

neither satisfying nor pleasant. Our good will cannot change it. It is the result of objective

historical circumstances which we must recognise. The shapes of the proletarian revolution are

not arbitrary. If they don’t match our expectation, that is too bad. And in any case what is the

alternative? What did happen to the communists who broke up with their party? See to what a

disastrous end social democracy has come ?23

In his report to the Italian commission on 19–24 July 1930 in Moscow, Togliatti

softened the statements about the imminence of an acute revolutionary situation and

civil war that he had made previously. He instead anticipated ‘the beginning of a

political crisis of fascism’. The speeches responding to him, especially those made by

Manuilsky and Kolarov, revealed that in Moscow too there were serious reservations

about an analysis considered too optimistic. There were grave doubts that the PCI

could exercise an effective influence on the opposition to fascism developing in Italy.24

The Comintern, having initially criticised the Italian party from ‘the left’, now

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 73

intervened to correct the balance. For the PCI, this meant curbing the organisational

and insurrectional enthusiasm of the youth. Ironically, it also helped strengthen

Ercoli’s position at the head of the party at a time when he became the target of a new

set of criticisms.

GRAMSCI AND TERRACINI

After the tenth plenum, Togliatti had concentrated single-mindedly on retaining his

leadership over the PCI. Much more than in the past, his activity was focused on the

leadership of the PCI, whereas his participation in the work of the Comintern became

more intermittent. It can, indeed, be argued that once the new line prevailed in the

Comintern, which Togliatti, initially at least, was reluctant to accept, he chose to

concentrate his political activity in areas where he could, to some extent, ‘govern’ its

effects and measure its application. Certainly, from 1929 to 1934, he took care

personally of every detail, no matter how small, of the workings of the PCI.

The meeting of the Italian commission coincided with another serious blow to the

party. On 10 July, just a month after the internal leadership was established, Camilla

Ravera was arrested and the party’s plan to pursue the ‘Gallo project’ collapsed.

Immediately, doubts re-emerged about the soundness of the choices made, some of

which were voiced by comrades in prison. In a letter of August 1930 to the external

leadership, Umberto Terracini questioned the method and content of the ‘svolta’,

rejected the analysis of the beginning of a revolutionary period and refuted the thesis of

the ‘fascisisation’ of international social democracy and, especially, of Italian social

democracy.25

Togliatti answered briefly on 12 September. He attributed Terracini’s disapproval

to the lack of information at his disposal and suspected that the ‘three’ had exercised

some influence on Terracini’s position, which was not, in fact, the case.26 Shortly after,

he wrote to Berti, who in the meantime had become the PCI representative in

Moscow, clarifying what he understood his relationship with the comrades in prison to

be:

We informed Umberto, briefly, in May, of the situation. […] We don’t think it useful or

advisable for a comrade in his situation to participate actively in the daily leadership of the

party […] We have now answered him in the most explicit way with this first letter […]

There is nothing to hide […] There is a disagreement with him that cannot be disguised.27

Although Terracini did not hesitate to condemn the ‘three’ for their secessionist

attitudes, he nevertheless did not change his opinion on the substance of the political

issue under discussion. Terracini’s view coincided in the main with Gramsci’s. Gramsci

was radically opposed to the new line and he made no attempt to hide his disapproval.

He continued his conversations with his prison comrades, proposing the hypothesis of

a ‘democratic interim’ after the fall of fascism, and maintaining that the slogan

demanding a Constituent Assembly was still legitimate.28 Togliatti knew about

Gramsci’s position, certainly by March 1931, when a letter from Terracini to the

external leadership explained that ‘the rumour that Antonio disagrees, radically, with

74 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the party line is spreading amongst our groups in prison, and becoming stronger; you

can imagine with what repercussions.’29

The majority of the party rank-and-file – i.e. the few cadres still active clandestinely

and those other few who were active abroad – did not know about this disagreement.

No mention of it appeared in the party’s correspondence with the Comintern.

Togliatti may have wanted to pre-empt the appearance of a new ‘case’, which the

dissemination of the criticisms coming from the comrades in prison could have

created. He may also have been determined to shield Terracini and Gramsci from

possible disciplinary measures by the Comintern. For quite a lengthy period of time,

from June 1931 to December 1933, there were no theoretical-political references to

Gramsci in the Italian communist press. It is also significant that in the

‘autobiography’, dated 21 August 1932, which Togliatti wrote for the cadres’ section of

the Comintern summarising his political career in detail, he did not mention

Gramsci.30

From the summer of 1930, following the Italian commission, the reference points

of Togliatti’s political analysis remained constant until mid-1934. He continued to

declare that the European political scene was dominated by ‘the widespread tendency

of the bourgeois forces to converge towards outright reaction and [by] class differences

becoming inevitably more acute’.31 Nevertheless, Ercoli conceded that the main fault in

the party’s activity over the previous years had been of preserving too much the

‘characteristic “head-on” attack’; party activity had never been ‘sufficiently diverse,

wide-ranging and ingenious to enable us to fight inside enemy lines’, i.e. in mass

organisations. Consequently, the PCI leadership, prompted by Togliatti, adapted the

methods used to implement the ‘svolta’, taking particular care with regard to

deployment of the limited forces available.32

Such increased care could not be ascribed to Togliatti’s personal inclinations. It was

truly frustrating for him not to be involved personally in the clandestine work. In a

letter to Berti on 15 October 1930, in which he tried to put into perspective the

criticisms that Manuilsky had levelled at the PCI during the Italian commission,

Togliatti was candid:

When Manu suggests that those who write about the struggle for partial demands are idle

chatterers, does he mean that comrades from the PCI centre who have unfortunately been

directed to work abroad, largely doing paper work, research etc., should be sent back to do

organising and mass work in Italy? If this is the case then I agree with him and furthermore I

am grateful that he presents the issue in this way.33

The answer came at the end of January 1931, with a telegram from the ECCI

which categorically excluded Ercoli’s and Garlandi’s (Grieco) employment in Italy.34

The party complied with the decision without question; nevertheless, this must have

been a real sacrifice for Togliatti.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the ‘svolta’ had not met expectations. Bearing in mind the

extremely difficult circumstances in which the party operated, PCI activity revealed a

surprising vitality and was getting stronger. This contradicted Manuilsky’s harsh

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 75

description of the party as a mere ‘close circle of friends’. According to data that

Togliatti passed on to Berti at the end of August 1930 – probably exaggerated but still

important – the party had about 7,000 members.35 But the PCI’s agitation was not

channelled into any organised mass movement. Moreover, the police were vigilant and

struck back with efficiency. After the ‘collapse’ of the internal leadership headed by

Ravera, numerous and systematic arrests of communists took place all over Italy. The

party sustained a particularly serious blow when Secchia was arrested on 2 April 1931.

In the immediate aftermath, the party worked hard to hold, after five years struggle

for survival, a congress that would confirm its continuing vivacity. Twenty-eight

delegates from fascist Italy took part in the proceedings, in an act of defiance against

the regime and in contrast to those few congresses held abroad by the democratic and

socialist anti-fascist forces. The fourth PCI congress took place between Cologne and

Düsseldorf with the support of the KPD on 14–21 April 1931. We know the main

strands of Togliatti’s report. Still excluded were the ‘peaceful collapse of fascism

through the internal manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie’, as well as the possibility of a

‘democratic phase or, in other words, [a] stabilisation of the bourgeois regime into

forms not overtly reactionary’. Still lingering was the harsh polemic against the

‘counter-revolutionary’ role of the democratic anti-fascist and socialist forces. But, by

this time, the predictions were more cautious and stress was repeatedly placed on the

significance of mass action, especially on the need to ‘dismember’ the mass support of

fascism operating publicly and legally inside its own organisations.36

There were no disagreements during the debate at congress about these

prescriptions for action. Nor were there any references to the arguments of the ‘three’.

Togliatti gave Silone, who had become involved, partly out of naiveté, in a double-

dealing manoeuvre between the party and ‘the three’, a last chance: ‘either Pasquini

submits himself to the party, without reservations and double-dealings, giving all the

guarantees that he has been asked for, or he can leave the party.’ Silone chose the latter

and was expelled from the party in July 1931. His case was labelled as a ‘case of

political gangsterism’.

The new leadership elected at the fourth congress was significantly different from

the one that had been elected at the third. There were only two continuities: Togliatti,

who remained in the PB and was ‘responsible for the secretariat’, and Grieco. The CC

was now constituted principally of workers. There are no records to confirm Giorgio

Bocca’s hypothesis based on evidence given by Longo and Santhià, suggesting that the

Comintern was ready to approve the removal of Togliatti from the secretariat and his

replacement with a ‘diarchy’ represented by Grieco and Longo, a plan that was only

frustrated by Longo’s refusal.37 On the contrary, available evidence confirms that the

Comintern had complete, if not unconditional, trust in Togliatti and did not consider

any alternative to his leadership.

GERMANY: A KEY TO THE CRISIS

Between 1931 and 1933, Togliatti’s analysis of the international scenario was totally

aligned to the analysis of the Comintern. Germany continued to be a key factor in the

European political and social crisis. The conciliatory attitude of the German Social

76 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Democratic Party (SPD) towards the deflationist politics of the Brüning government,

as unpopular as they were ineffectual, reinforced the left opposition within the party

and induced the KPD to persevere in its indiscriminate attack against a ‘social fascism’

whose left wing they considered its most dangerous disguise.

This KPD line, founded on the assumption that the ‘main blow’ should be struck

against social democracy, reached its climax in the summer of 1931 when the self-

styled ‘national opposition’ (the DNVP, Stahlhelm and Nazis) called for a referendum

to disband the Prussian regional parliament with the objective of toppling a

government presided over by the social democrat Otto Braun. The KPD voted with

the opposition against the government, justifying their choice in terms of dealing a

fatal blow to ‘social fascism’. The referendum was not successful. The membership of

the SPD united and significant numbers of communist voted with them, refusing to

side with the Nazis and the nationalist right wing. The sole consequence of the KPD’s

stand was to make it even more difficult for workers to unite against the Nazi danger.

Togliatti’s comments on this episode agreed with the Comintern press. The argument

was plain: German social democracy was the ‘strongest reactionary organisation, which

was able to keep millions of workers chained to the wagon of capitalism’; communist

support of its politics – even indirect – ‘would have been a monstrosity’.38 Not even in

the months that followed did Togliatti show a specific sensitivity for the hard-won

revision of course which began to appear from the spring of 1932 in the KPD in the

form of oblique and qualified support for an ‘anti-fascist action’ that would also

mobilise social democratic workers.

The developments taking place in Germany were the focus of the twelfth plenum

of the ECCI (27 August–15 September 1932). Togliatti not only participated in the

wider discussion, but also delivered the closing speech as he had done at the tenth

plenum. This indicated that he still had an important role to play in the ECCI. The

PCI, however, was reproached for having disengaged from the life and debates of the

Comintern.39 The main thesis presented by Kuusinen and Manuilsky posited that ‘the

end of capitalist stabilisation had begun’. But an important qualification followed:

there was not yet ‘an immediate revolutionary situation in the most important and

crucial capitalist countries’.40

Togliatti accepted these reference points without significant hesitation. The core of

his address was the condemnation of what he called the ‘false analogies’ between the

German situation of 1932 and the Italian situation of ten years previously. The

method of ‘differentiated analysis’, of which Togliatti was a master, with its warning

that ‘the course of development of fascism in Italy […] should not be taken as the

compulsory, classic course in every country’, did not help this time. To understand the

dramatic state of emergency that the communist movement was facing, it was actually

more of an obstacle and exhausted itself in an acid diatribe against Trotsky.41

Trotsky had published in the spring of 1932 one of his most insightful writings on

the German situation. He made explicit reference to Togliatti’s 1928 theory on the

irreducible antagonism that existed between fascism and social democracy, and

contrasted the accuracy of that analysis with the ‘servile solicitude’ that Togliatti had

displayed in ‘moving to “social fascism” positions’.42 Togliatti’s reply accused Trotsky,

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 77

in a rather heavy handed manner, of assigning to the petit bourgeoisie a determining

role in the process of the development of fascism, and presuming that this

phenomenon was independent from the interests and actions of financial capital.

Togliatti accused him further of ‘being hypnotised by that typical coup d’état, half

plebeian and half dynastic and military that the March on Rome had been’.43 It

followed that the misrepresentation of the development of Italian fascism and its

seizure of power was at the root of the ‘panic propaganda, defeatism and provocation’

that Trotsky was conducting about the German situation.

Having expected this virulent attack against a ‘renegade of Marxism and

communism’, towards whom he had been judged too soft in the past, Togliatti used

his conclusions from the Italian example to highlight differences within the German

situation and to justify the politics of the Comintern. The only accurate comparison

which Togliatti discerned between the two historical situations was that the Italian case

proved that ‘even the most ferocious fascist dictatorship can, at specific times, couple

with aspects of the parliamentary system and with the party system’. This analysis

allowed him to say that the governments of Von Papen and Brüning had already

exhibited characteristics of a fascist dictatorship, although not yet ‘fully developed’.44

We must note that in the context of his analysis, so deeply vitiated by simplifications,

the call to the KPD to employ in the best possible way the tactic of the ‘united front’

was of little value. Especially because it was accompanied by an insistence on the

‘interpenetration of social democracy with bourgeois reaction and fascism’, and also

with the warning ‘not to trust the “leftist” manoeuvring of social democracy’.45

Many years later, looking back in 1959, Togliatti offered an appraisal which was

the most critical to have been made within the communist movement.

It is especially important to understand the prospect that was started by the advance of

fascism. That prospect of an attack that would destroy every democratic freedom and

institution. Talking of social fascism meant, in essence, to presume that reformist leaders and

social democracy shared this aim. But this was an untruth, because it could and did happen

that a section, and a considerable one, of social democracy sided with the democratic

institutions. […] As a political position, [the thesis of ‘social fascism’] corresponded with the

sadly customary mistake of not being able to discern different things: in this case, it assumed it

best to keep the workers’ and communist movement distinct, apart from each other, and in

opposition to one another.46

Nevertheless, after only four months after the closing of the twelfth plenum, Hitler

came to power in Germany. At this time, Togliatti completely and without reservation

shared in the tragically mistaken perspective which he only recognised in hindsight..

THE ‘SVOLTA WITHIN THE SVOLTA’ AND ‘LEGAL WORK’

Togliatti’s analysis of the Italian situation in 1931–32 was a more complex

proposition. His basic strategic evaluation was that the anti-fascist revolution would

‘either be a proletarian revolution, or it won’t be at all’. If the democratic or social

democratic parties prevailed among the masses then ‘a period of extremely acute and

open class struggle’ would start, in which they would have ‘an openly reactionary

78 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

function, speedily moving to exercise the same repressive function that the fascists are

exercising now’.47

Against this background, immediately after the fourth congress of the PCI, a

profound change was proposed in the working practices of the party, which was also

reflected in the party’s political line. Ernesto Ragionieri called this change the ‘svolta

within the svolta’.48 It had cautiously been suggested in a speech Togliatti made to the

Latin Secretariat in July 1931 in Moscow. The Comintern obviously approved it, since

it had already moved to curb the revolutionary enthusiasm of the PCI. The change was

illustrated at the meeting of the party CC, at the end of August. 49

From thereon, the PCI operated with the assumption that only unrelenting activity

conducted within the law would enable the growth of a mass movement. That meant

using all the institutions and occasions made available by fascism to create its own mass

support and deploy its social demagogy.50 Di Vittorio offered some resistance to this

approach. He would have preferred the activity of the clandestine CGIL. However,

Togliatti stood firm and defended his position before the International.51

The stress on the need for ‘legal work’ was the most obvious aspect of this

correction to the ‘svolta’, although it was not the only one. For example, Togliatti

consistently followed with the utmost interest the conflict between fascism and the

Vatican over the role of the Azione Cattolica.52 At the beginning of June, when the

conflict was in progress, he drafted a close analysis of it for a meeting of the PB,

emphasising that the Church was offering itself as a candidate ‘to take up the

succession’ of the dictatorship ‘as the sole system able to provide social stability’.53

Indeed, because ‘the Catholic organisation is the last element outside fascist

totalitarianism’, Ercoli appealed to the PCI internal centre ‘not to have any scruples

about getting one’s hand dirty by doing what the priests do’; i.e., to infiltrate the same

organisations.54

No less significant, and certainly more productive in terms of direct political effect,

was the growing attention that Ercoli was paying to the Giustizia e Libertà (GL)

movement.55 Up to the PCI’s Cologne congress, the communists had not clearly

understood the political nature of GL; they saw it as the left (and therefore the more

dangerous) current of social democracy. However, Italian communists became

increasingly interested in the idealist stirrings among anti-fascist middle-class

intellectuals, represented in the main by Rosselli’s movement.56 They were especially

concerned by the trend of the GL leadership to appropriate communist slogans for

their propaganda among the workers. Although he denied any theoretical originality to

Rosselli’s formulations, which he thought were typical of ‘the majority of fascist

political literature’, Togliatti was persuaded that ‘at the grass roots [of the GL], and in

its non-proletarian constituents, in certain student, professional and middle-class

intellectual groups, the original thrust was healthy; it was the thrust towards

revolutionary activity, triggered by harsh life experience’. Hence the need ‘to stimulate,

facilitate and organise’ the frustration emerging among these groups owing to the

programmatic eclecticism of the GL leadership.57

However, the attention devoted by the PCI to emulate and elaborate on the anti-

fascist activity of the GL ceased after the publication, at the end of January 1932, of

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 79

the GL’s ‘revolutionary programme’. Togliatti had already pointed out that even

towards ‘left-wing components of the groups operating in Italy’, it was necessary to

conduct ‘a remorseless, ideological criticism […] with the aim of establishing control’.

Giorgio Amendola was criticised for the way he had structured his work in Italy,58

which translated – he was reproachfully told – into a process towards ‘a united

ideological front’ with the GL and an underestimation of the importance of

independent ‘mass action’ within the petit bourgeoisie.59

At the same time, the PCI was experiencing severe difficulties from the police, as

their repressive measures became increasingly efficient. In the spring of 1932, all the

links between the centres of the party, at home and abroad, and in the grass-roots

organisations, were severed. Moscow increased its criticisms, often contradictory, of the

PCI’s organisational inadequacies. What emerged clearly was that the Comintern

apparatus was not well informed about Italian issues, even though large quantities of

information were being systematically gathered and transmitted from the external

leadership. There was also a detached patronising attitude, more characteristic of the

relation between master and servant than between ‘brother parties’. It reflected a

situation that had since at least 1928 become the rule within the Comintern, and

which made Togliatti uncomfortable. It is rare to find in his writings signs of

impatience or frustration, However, there is no lack of either in his speeches to the

ECCI’s Italian commissions, alongside surges of pride. ‘We may, perhaps, be the

smallest party of the Communist International, but our problems cannot be discussed

in this manner.’60

It is important to note that in the report Togliatti made to the Latin Secretariat in

August 1932, which addressed the unsatisfactory state of the relations between the PCI

and the Comintern, he asked the ECCI to send to the party a representative or

‘instructor’ who could follow its work closely.61 Since 1924–26, when Humbert-Droz

had fulfilled this role, there had been no such figure, perhaps because the dual function

that Togliatti performed, as leader of the PCI and trusted member of the inner circle of

the Comintern, made it superfluous. Togliatti, however, was evidently aware of the

pitfalls of having another ‘instructor’, since it would restrict even further the

‘sovereignty of the party’. Nevertheless, he would have agreed to it in order to mitigate

the chronic friction between the ECCI and the Italian party, and to make it more

difficult to shift the blame from the Comintern to the PCI, as practised by

functionaries of the apparatus. His request was never followed up, perhaps because the

PCI was not considered sufficiently important to deserve a ‘tutor’.

In October 1932, the PCI CC concluded that the party was dominated by ‘great

naiveté’ in its ‘technical’ work and ‘conspiratorial’ methods. Once again, however,

there was a political issue behind the organisational problem. It is difficult to piece

together the threads of the confrontation that took place in the PB, which pitted

Togliatti against Longo. Longo may not have agreed with shifting the axis of party

activity to inside fascist mass organisations. Simultaneously, in the wake of the

increasingly severe criticism made by the ECCI about the PCI’s alleged

‘Carbonarismo’,62 Longo was sent to represent the party in Moscow. He was therefore

relieved of any organisational responsibility.

80 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

It would not be appropriate to talk of a real crisis either in the party leadership or

in the personal relationship between its two key figures. There is no doubt, however,

that Togliatti’s position became stronger and that his personal prerogative inside the

PCI was consequently greater. Yet he still fluctuated between a greater awareness of the

structure of the anti-fascist currents and the tendency to withdraw into class and party

exclusivism.

This was evident in the reflections that Togliatti was drawing, more frequently

than in the past, about the history of the Italian workers’ movement. What emerged

was a reading of Italian socialism as ‘the awakening, the rebellion of an entire

population against everything that oppressed it, exploited it, that prevented it from

living’.63 He wrote two crucial articles, fifteen months apart from each other, marking

the deaths of Filippo Turati and Claudio Treves. The difference in tone between them

was not simply an indication of a political position evolving under the impact of events

and going far beyond the normal diatribes of anti-fascists in exile. The first article used

the life and experience of Turati as a symbol ‘of the betrayal and the failure’, which

summarised the experience of Italian socialism and ridiculed not only its ideological

stature but also demolished the human character.64 The second article identified a

positive function, at least partially, performed by reformism to improve ‘the abject

condition of the Italian working masses’, although without giving them ‘a complete

view of the problems that in Italy the proletariat had to confront as a revolutionary

class’.65

Togliatti was also busy with a laborious rethinking of the wider issue of Italian

history in the nineteenth century.66 In the article about the GL written in September

1931, his evaluation of the Italian Risorgimento had been more harsh and dismissive

than previously. Its heroes were ‘mediocre figures of provincial political men, of court

schemers, of intellectuals behind their times, of cardboard soldiers […] The tradition

of Risorgimento lives on […] in fascism, and it has been taken by fascism to the

extreme. If Mazzini were alive he would applaud the corporative doctrines, nor would

he disown Mussolini’s speeches on the “function of Italy in the world”’.67 However, in

a letter to Longo in May 1933, Togliatti expressed lesss severe, more favourable

thoughts on the role of Cattaneo and his ‘non-reactionary view of the relationship

between town and countryside’, on his essential ‘Jacobinism’, on his understanding of

the peasants’ issue and the need for a radical destruction of feudalism.68

This letter to Longo was written in May 1933, the article on Treves in July of the

same year; it is reasonable to say that in the subjects they discussed there is evidence of

the conflicting and difficult renewal of relations between PCI and PSI that were taking

place. But before looking at this relationship more closely, we need to examine

Togliatti’s reaction to the event that indirectly informed it: the Nazi seizure of power

in Germany.

THE GERMAN TRAGEDY AND THE DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL LINE

The prevailing attitude in the Comintern press during the first month of Hitler’s

chancellorship was to regard the Führer as a mere tool in a project of authoritarian

restoration controlled by big industry, the Junker and the army. There was also a

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 81

refusal to recognise that this was a serious defeat; it was even asserted that the Nazi

takeover of government would accelerate the proletarian revolution in Germany.

In his writings on the German situation at the beginning of 1933, Togliatti did not

contradict this analysis, but he added some significant aspects to correct it. He shifted

the focus from the function of ‘pacesetter’ for revolution which fascism was allegedly

performing to the internal contradictions inside the Nazis’ power bloc, stressing the

contrasts that were emerging among the several groups of the German bourgeoisie

because of the serious economic crisis and the international situation. Togliatti also had

concerns about the international implications: ‘the fascist dictatorship in Germany

spells out war, soon, for Europe.’ His polemic against social democracy was still

provocative, and not only in retrospect. Thus, his call to urgently restructure ‘in a new

way’ the formation of a united front appeared generic and perfunctory.69

The destruction of the political and economic organisations of the German

working class prompted a process of revision among the rival Internationals and their

respective parties. On 5 March 1933, the ECCI urged affiliated communist parties to

make ‘a further attempt to establish a united front with the social democratic masses’

and their parties, i.e., through direct negotiation with their responsible executive

organs, advising them, once they had reached an agreement, ‘to refrain, during the

common struggle against capital and fascism, from attacking social democratic

organisations’.70 The PCI followed these directives. The PB met on 10 March and

decided to present a political proposal for a united front in the struggle against fascism

to the PSI, the Maximalist Socialist Party (MPS)71 and the Republican Party.

Togliatti’s text was very cautious: his main concern was to prevent the formation of a

‘bloc’ of anti-fascist forces that would extend to the Trotskyite left and be dominated

by the Concentrazione antifascista,72 which would have isolated the communists even

more.73

In fact, the PSI rejected the proposal by laying down the precondition – to which

nearly every social democratic party adhered – of a ‘preliminary agreement’ between

the two Internationals based on ‘primary conditions for joint struggle’. The

negotiations went ahead with the small MPS, and Togliatti took part, together with

Berti and Di Vittorio, trying to anchor the agreement in immediate and non-

programmatic targets. This was the first time in many years that relations had resumed

with a non-communist organisation, albeit a small one. It is significant that Ercoli

reminded the PB on 4 May about the need of ‘doing more politics’.74

Even so, Togliatti’s writings in the communist papers published outside Italy were

very critical of the PSI, particularly Pietro Nenni, the man who with great courage had

begun to critically assess the whole experience of European social democracy.75

Meanwhile, given that every possibility of agreement with the Second International

had failed, the Comintern returned to an inflexible political line. A resolution by the

presidium on the German situation, which was approved at the beginning of April,

blamed social democracy as being mainly responsible for the Nazi dictatorship and

justified the actions of the KPD completely.

Some cautious afterthoughts notwithstanding, Togliatti lined up during the course

of 1933 behind an uncompromising defence of the political line pursued by the

82 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

communist movement since 1928. However, his approach was open to new ideas on at

least one level: the analysis of international politics. It was from examining the position

of Italy in an international context that his analysis became accurate and original.

Togliatti observed that Hitler’s rise to power had introduced into international

politics the trend to form ‘blocs with a specific military and political programme’.

These blocs pushed for territorial changes that could not take place without war.

Consequently, they drove the weakest imperialism (namely Italy) into a crisis whose

only way out would be to accelerate the race towards war. Hence the legitimation of

the revolutionary politics of the PCI was based directly on the ‘national interest’.76

The Italo-Soviet rapprochement in the summer of 1933, culminating in a friendship

pact between the two countries on 2 September, was at odds with this perspective.

Indeed, the reconciliation caused a scandal among the anti-fascists in exile. Togliatti

engaged in the usual defence of the Soviet foreign policy, claiming the Soviet Union’s

right to forge links with any state, even the most reactionary, so that it could ‘guarantee

the peace that the proletariat needed in order to build socialism’.77

There was nothing new in his defence; it utilised the assumption that communist

parties would conform to all the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy. In reality, a

gap was opening between the interests of the Soviet Union, which wanted to divide

German imperialism from Italian imperialism, if necessary by reinforcing the latter,

and the frontal opposition of the PCI to fascism’s foreign policy. Any further

development by Togliatti of ‘a foreign policy for the Italian proletariat’ would have

been crushed by this contradiction.

In this situation, suspended between the inertia of the old plans and the first timid

signs of renewal, towards the end of November 1933 Togliatti once again left for

Moscow to take part in the thirteenth ECCI plenum. The main report by Otto

Kuusinen confirmed the Comintern’s interpretation of the world economic situation,

from the perspective of the ‘widespread crisis’ of capitalism. However, there was a new

stress on the international situation, which had become a cause for concern because of

the aggressive Japanese imperialism in Asia and German imperialism in Europe.

Something new was also evident in the way the definition of fascism was framed: ‘an

open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, imperialist and chauvinistic

elements of finance capital.’ It followed that the fascist dictatorship was different from

the traditional forms of bourgeois democracy and opened the way to an evaluation of

fascism as the ‘foremost enemy’ of the communist movement. It also implied that

fascist dictatorship was not ‘an inevitable stage of the bourgeois dictatorship in every

country’, but instead depended on the relations between classes. Therefore, the role

that the political organisations of the working class could play became critical.

Important, finally, was the distinction between the class character and the social

structure of fascism. Whilst Kuusinen’s report stressed that fascism was useful to the

interests of the ‘higher bourgeoisie’, it also recognised the large and varied structure of

its mass support and the possibilities which were open to communist parties in trying

to widen the gap that this distinction created inside enemy lines.78

Togliatti’s address in the plenary session of 30 November was one of the few which

did not paraphrase Kuusinen’s opening speech and which contributed an original

THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM 83

analysis. Once again, his argument had to keep a difficult balance between the need to

reflect on what were the common and widespread characteristics of the fascist

phenomenon and the need to keep in sight ‘the study […] of every concrete situation

of every country in which the fascist movement is developing’. He acknowledged that

the opinion he had expressed at the sixth congress, that fascism was a product of weak

industrial systems, was wrong, and he now focused his attention on the fascist

ideology. He recognised its ‘superstructure function in the fierce struggle to take over

foreign markets, which paved the way for and prefigured a new cycle of imperialist

wars aimed at a new world order’. He also stressed that fascist ideology played a central

role in constituting its own mass support, and identified its substance in the myth of

the ‘strong state’, ‘nationalist pathos’, and an anti-capitalist demagogy significantly

inclined to make concessions to the illusion of ‘organised capitalism’.79

On this last point especially, the tension between the constraints imposed by the

International’s generic analysis and the new thoughts suggested by the Italian

experience was evident. Symptomatic of the generic analysis was the evaluation

Togliatti assigned to the New Deal. Following the line of the Comintern he identified

in it more than one aspect of similarity with fascism.80 Symptomatic of the specific

Italian case were the acknowledgements that fascism, on the economic level, at least

Italian fascism, was not synonymous with stagnation, and that Italian industry ‘from

the point of view of its internal organisation, had been brought by the fascists to a

degree of development closer to the more advanced countries’.81

Even so, Togliatti aligned himself unreservedly behind the general thesis that the

German working class had not been defeated, and was now, under the leadership of the

communist party, getting ready to answer the revolutionary call. He therefore ranked it

as a ‘counter-revolutionary crime’ to superimpose ‘an Italian perspective’ (i.e., a long-

term dictatorship) on Germany. However, between the lines, he also advanced the

hypothesis that the fall of the Nazi regime might not be followed by the proletarian

dictatorship.82 Paradoxically, the ‘double perspective’ that had been abandoned for Italy

was now proposed again for a situation deemed ‘more advanced’ from the point of

view of revolutionary development.

Togliatti again delivered the closing speech at the thirteenth plenum.83 The tone,

unusually for him, was emphatic. All the theoretical, political and propaganda aspects

of the ‘third period’ were present in his words, so that the speech became the seal to

both an historical era of the international communist movement and a particularly

troubled phase of his own life. New events would soon put an end to both, tipping the

balance between the thrust of conservative forces and the trend to renewal in favour of

the second.

5

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT

A SPELL OF INERTIA

The year 1934 marked a major change of direction in the Communist International’s

politics; a change that opened the way to the popular front against fascism. Between

April and May, Stalin concluded that a modus vivendi with Nazi Germany was

impossible and began manoeuvring for a political and military alliance with France.

Consequently, the Comintern could no longer dismiss as irrelevant the defence of the

bourgeois-democratic institutions in those countries which had fundamental strategic

reasons to check German expansionism. Moreover, moves in the same direction were

coming from the ECCI in response to the growing uneasiness of some communist

parties concerned about losing their political influence by persevering with ‘class

against class’.1

The Comintern’s political sea-change followed the February events in France and

Austria. In France, the fascist ligues had been conducting a virulent, reactionary and

anti-parliamentary unrest for several months. In response, the working-class parties

mobilised and called for street demonstrations which were at first unorganised. After

much hesitation, the PCF and Conféderation Générale du Travaille Unitaire (CGTU)

told their members to join both the general strike called by the ‘reformist’

Conféderation Générale du Travaille (CGT) and the large anti-fascist demonstration

called by the Socialist Party, Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) on 12

February.

Nearly five million workers joined the general strike that paralysed France; 100,000

demonstrators marched through the streets of Paris. The cortèges of socialists and

communists, initially divided, soon merged. For the first time, the French working

class stood as a truly united front against the fascist menace. Also on 12 February,

Austrian workers in Linz and Vienna demonstrated against the clerical-fascist

government of Dolfuss, which had disbanded the Viennese local authorities. Violent

battles raged for three days. Working-class neighbourhoods were bombed. More than a

thousand people were killed in the fighting and nine Schutzbündler – members of the

paramilitary organisation for social democratic self-defence – were hanged. The

Austrian SPD and the free unions were disbanded and banned, and another pillar of

the Socialist International crumbled under the impact of fascist reaction.

Togliatti, from Paris, could easily appraise the impact of these events, which struck

a deep chord with Italian immigrant workers. However, he only mentioned the French

situation in passing in the editorial that he wrote for the communist press,

concentrating instead on the ‘Austrian events’.2 His choice can be explained by his

interest in the detail of Italian fascist foreign policy, which was clearly influenced by

86 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the events taking place on the other side of the Brenner pass, the alpine pass between

Italy and Austria. Moreover, the Austrian situation apparently vindicated the ECCI’s

third period analysis of the relationship between crisis, fascism and proletarian

revolution. The February events in France, however, emphatically contradicted the line

of ‘class against class’. Firstly, in France, the thrust for a united front had been driven

from the base and imposed on both communist and socialist executives. Secondly, the

main objective of the mass mobilisation was unmistakably the defence of republican

institutions.

The Comintern press consistently ignored both these elements, and Togliatti’s

article in the March issue of Lo Stato Operaio was no exception. Despite an insightful

analysis on the process of ‘fascisisation’ of the political life of the Third Republic it did

not acknowledge either of the two novel elements in the situation. Moreover,

Togliatti’s harsh denunciation of the counter-revolutionary role of social democracy:

‘the more the socialist leaders move, with their words, towards the “left”, the more

persistent, tireless, relentless, must be our struggle against them.’ The PCF was warned

to beware; amongst its ranks there might be ‘the emergence of an opportunistic

current’ in favour of ‘forming a tactical alliance between our party and social

democracy’.3

Compared with the PCF and the Comintern, Togliatti’s position was by no means

‘conservative’. In February, Thorez and Dimitrov held very similar public positions.

But inside the executive circle, there had been serious clashes for weeks between those

whom E. H. Carr has called the ‘flexible’ (Dimitrov, Manuilsky and Kuusinen) and the

‘hardliners’ (Knorin, Lozovsky and Kun). 4 Dimitrov had met Stalin on 7 April to

broach his conclusion that the primary political confrontation against social democracy

had to be abandoned. Stalin signalled support for this change, and Dimitrov was

moved onto the political secretariat of the Comintern, in pole position to dominate it.

On 23 May, two long articles were published in Pravda. They signalled a definite

realignment inside the Comintern with regard to French politics. Under the pretence

of a fictitious continuity, the political line of the Comintern was undergoing a radical

change. And whilst France was its testing ground, it was not to be confined solely to

that country.

Togliatti, who was by now an adept interpreter of the workings of the

International, realised that two different lines were clashing inside the ECCI. He

prudently did not commit himself to either. The PCI was incurring severe criticism

from the Comintern, because its activities had produced so few positive results. Its

secretary, in particular, with his Bukharinist past, had to watch his step, and he was

well aware of it.

Togliatti’s apprehension was obvious in a letter of 9 February. Worried by

Manuilsky’s article in Bolshevik, which linked Togliatti with other leaders suspected of

‘right wing opportunism’, Ercoli asked Mario Montagnana, representing the PCI at the

ECCI, to ‘tell comrade Manuilsky that […] I am doing everything I can to enable our

party to conduct the struggle against social democracy in a way that will close off any

opportunity for them to manoeuvre’.5

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 87

It would be simplistic to view Togliatti’s behaviour merely in terms of tactical

caution. Several years later, he wrote:

In the life of a party there is always a spell of inertia. When a sectarian scheme prevails, this

spell of inertia is at its highest. Where the party is unused to internal debate, to collective

elaboration of its politics and initiatives, to having the greater possible number of participants

contribute to this elaboration, the weight of immobility is heaviest.6

This observation accurately depicted the situation of the PCI in the first half of 1934.

The party could not but feel it was ‘a persecuted and illegal political force, isolated

from direct debate with other political forces’, and also marked by an ‘unmistakable

party patriotism’, especially felt against the forces of the socialist tradition.7 This helps

to explain why the term ‘social fascism’ emerged in Togliatti’s writings with a growing

insistence and, it seemed, a growing conviction, just when the Comintern was ready to

abandon it. Several elements contributed to Togliatti’s attitude: a rooted ‘intellectual

contempt’ for Italian socialism; a more recent, but no less deep, impatience towards the

GL and its tendency to frame the fight against fascism in terms of ‘moral

incompatibility’; and the belief, probably made stronger by the breaking up of the

Concentrazione antifascista in May 1934, that Italian social democracy had entered a

final crisis and should be attacked without respite to the end.

RESERVATIONS AND VACILLATIONS

Meanwhile, the Comintern’s realignment with regard to French politics had taken

place. On 26 June, the national conference of the PCI (held in Ivry) gave the

secretariat the mandate to propose to the SFIO a united pact against fascism. The

decision had been urged by an intervention of the ECCI and was the prelude to a

radical change of course throughout the Comintern.

In a letter to Stalin of 1 July, Dimitrov again questioned a number of issues which

had previously been the foundations of the Comintern line. He expressed his doubts

that social democracy was ‘always and on any occasion the principal supporter of the

bourgeoisie’; he criticised the theory that ‘all social democratic groups are the main

enemy’ and the ‘perfunctory definition of all executive cadres of the social democratic

parties and reformist unions as wilful traitors of the working class’. He urged the

Comintern ‘to give up the position that sees the likelihood of the united front only as a

grass-roots movement and […] consider opportunistic any parallel attempt to also

address the top levels of the executive bodies of the social democratic party’.8

It is not clear whether Togliatti was aware of this letter. However, it is possible that

– since he had been designated to speak by the presidium on 28 May on one of the

four points on the agenda for the seventh world congress – he might have known the

broad outline of the discussion, which had been taking place since the beginning of

June.

The designation of Togliatti as a speaker with Dimitrov, Manuilsky and the

German Wilhelm Pieck, a list which excluded the hardliners, suggests that Moscow

considered him suitable to defend the new political line. Yet, judging by his

88 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

contributions, Togliatti behaved more like a punctilious spokesperson discharging his

duty than a staunch supporter of the new line. His behaviour was prudent: ideas about

renewal coexisted and alternated with elements of continuity. For example, his position

on a pact of unity of action with the PSI, which was discussed by the PCI PB on 17

July. On the one hand, he was careful not to commit to a large programmatic initiative

and to limit the agreement to the tangible ground of struggle for clearly defined

objectives. On the other, he expressed interest in the role that the pact ‘could have in

the process of aggregating anti-fascist forces’. Here the minutes of the meeting reported

an interesting and succinct note: ‘door open to the GL’.9

In its final draft, signed on 17 August, the pact on the unity of action specified

only limited objectives: the struggle against Italian intervention in Austria, which was

becoming a real threat after the pro-Nazi putsch there of 25 July; a campaign for a

general amnesty in Italy and for the liberation of all the victims of international

fascism; a commitment to defend and improve the lives of workers; and to defend their

civil liberties, freedom of press, and the right to organise and to strike. The text of the

agreement, unlike the one between the PCF and the SFIO signed on 27 July, was

accompanied by two parallel declarations by the parties, suggesting that both parties

had reservations about the new political line.10 Togliatti entertained these reservations

also at a more general level. In a telegram signed by him and sent by Montagnana to

Moscow the day after the agreement, he pointed out that, ‘given the risk of construing

the united front as a softening of the differences with social democracy, we must not

weaken the ideological struggle against the latter whilst nevertheless now developing

the politics of a united front’, and that ‘we must intensify the campaign against the

tendency among the Italian and foreign socialists to establish alliances with fascism.’11

Also, in an article for La Voce Operaia on 8 September, Togliatti reiterated a very

narrow notion of the united front: ‘we pay something – that is to say we make some

formal concession – but not of principle, never essential – to the socialist leaders. By so

doing we get access to the masses whom our propaganda has not yet won over and the

possibility of now winning them through action.’12

However, the lesson of the French February events did not go unheeded. The

Italian communist leader’s assessment of the united action in France was published in

the July issue of Lo Stato Operaio, and provided a forceful summary. It may have also

expressed an oblique self-criticism:

Ten years spent to prove, with the most sophisticated arguments and eloquent speeches, that

we have no responsibility for the split inside the working class, that this was the responsibility

of international social democracy, would not have moved us forward as did the practical

action of the French party. This has shown that communists will not hinder the achievement

of the unity of class struggle against fascism, rather that they want to build it.13

BACK IN MOSCOW

Togliatti arrived in Moscow at the end of August 1934. Unlike 1928, when he had

opposed the ECCI’s request to settle in Berlin as a WEB official, he was apparently

pleased to be transferred to the Soviet capital. Admittedly, the transfer meant leaving

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 89

the active leadership of the PCI, even though his formal authority as ‘leader of the

party’ was unchanged and he continued to play a decisive role in the direction of the

external centre. However, Togliatti – unlike seven years before – did not this time raise

objections about the decision. He probably thought that the situation within the PCI

was more stable and did not now harbour any hopes for a change in the Italian

situation which would, in the short term, affect the survival of fascism. But above all,

he recognised the political importance of his transfer, as being part of a larger design of

renewal at the top of the Comintern and linked closely to the change in the political

line.14

The subject of the seventh congress report assigned to him, ‘The Planning for an

Imperialist War and the Duties of the Communist Parties’, was connected to new

developments in Soviet foreign policy. Thus, it is plausible that he was chosen as a

speaker in equal measure by the leading group of the Soviet party and the Soviet state,

therefore by Stalin himself, and by Comintern officials. Amongst the latter, Manuilsky

may well have been the warmest supporter of Ercoli’s nomination. Between the two

men, the habit of effective collaboration was well developed; a relationship based on

respect, if not trust, had survived many stormy moments.

On the other hand, Dimitrov and Togliatti had never been very close, even though

the two men had been brought together under the same shadow of suspicion during

the darkest years of the ‘class against class’. They shared, however, a similar perspective

in that each had arrived at a differentiated analysis of fascism at European level. When

Togliatti had the opportunity to work more closely with Dimitrov he received an

indelible impression of his personality and political arguments. In the description that

he wrote of Dimitrov in 1957, one can detect behind the formal celebratory tone a

genuine personal admiration for him.

It was an appreciation based on an intellectual and human affinity. It is easy to see

a self-reflection in the portrayal of Dimitrov as familiar with ‘Goethe and Dante as

with Karl Marx, Heine and Voltaire as with Lenin and Stalin’, on whose desk one

could have found ‘at times of most demanding ECCI debates, next to a text about a

political resolution a volume by Ariosto or the latest novel from Paris’. But above all, it

was Dimitrov’s political example, his capacity to abandon a series of formulas which

had lost ‘their practical relevance’, that captivated Togliatti.15

In Moscow, Togliatti did not immediately resume a prominent role. Instead, he

emerged as a leader who was regaining influence after a period of absence. The

Comintern apparatus was very different in 1934 from the one in which he had worked

some years before. There was no trace of the bohemianism that characterised it in the

years when Zinoviev was leader, and which survived under the leadership of Bukharin.

The work was now performed via a dense network of central offices clustered around

the secretariats which were divided into groups of countries. The number of permanent

employees had increased, as had the number of Soviet personnel within their ranks.

The air was thick with an intricate but efficient bureaucracy, encumbered by tight

controls and scrutiny from above. The culture already suffered from a pervading

suspicion.

90 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

However, nothing had changed in the daily life of the Hotel Lux on Gorky Sreet,

still the headquarters of the foreign communist leaders. Its dusty corridors continued to

be populated by rats. The propusk – the pass stamped by the Soviet party – was still

required for every movement inside the Hotel, where the presence of the Soviet secret

police (GPU) had multiplied.16

How had Togliatti himself changed? Ernesto Ragionieri has drawn a concise

human and intellectual portrait:

The impression […] is of a personality that has definitively reached its intellectual and

political maturity, banishing any vestigial uncertainty about questions of judgement and

action. In his outward appearance the ‘official’ and the ‘illegal’ have gradually, over time,

taken over from the intellectual, who was not averse, at least in the beginning of his political

militancy, to preserve some obvious, though modest and unadorned, traces of that origin. He

dresses with a bourgeois shabby carelessness unrelieved by any colourful element, not even

those military accoutrements which some Comintern characters, also western, had adopted in

those years. His features are those of someone who has not forgotten how to smile. The eyes,

when they don’t express his mischievousness, are illuminated by the strong determination of

one who feels he is participating in a life and death struggle […] He has kept, perhaps

reinforced, his characteristics of being an implacable working machine, immune to changes

and fatigue […] His inner strength is his concentration on the work at hand.17

Very little had occurred in the private life of Ercoli. He now settled in Moscow

with his wife, Rita Montagnana, who also worked for the International, and their son

Aldo, who was nine years old in 1934. Aldo apparently was badly affected by material

and psychological hardship during Togliatti’s years in Moscow. Amongst other things,

this contributed to the weakening of the relationship between husband and wife.

Another woman in Togliatti’s life gained an increasing prominence, Elena Lebedeva –

a young secretary in the Comintern apparatus married to the Italian communist

Davide Maggioni.

Gianni Corbi, who has pieced together with sensitivity this story, wrote that it ‘had

not been, according to witnesses, a simple and banal “affair”, but on the contrary a

long and profound emotional relationship in which Togliatti acted as the shining

Pygmalion to Lebedeva’s Galatea. An intense bond, discreet but not to the extent of

being concealed from the small family circle of the Comintern and the Italian

immigration’. It is not known when the affair ended. We can speculate that if it lasted

it was given a serious blow by Maggioni’s suicide in Spain in July 1937. Elena was

there and Togliatti had also arrived around that time.18

On 5 September, soon after Ercoli arrived in Moscow, the decision was taken to

postpone the seventh world congress, due in October. Togliatti must have taken part

in the summit debates and probably retained a cautious view. At the first meeting of

the commission on the first point of the agenda for the world congress, on 29 August,

he pointed to the need to include in the report some mention of the ‘revolutionary

thrust in fascist countries’, especially in Germany.19 Both during this meeting and at

another of the political commission on 27 September, he reaffirmed that a ‘change in

tactics’ required ‘aiming the fire against social democracy, in order to avoid presenting

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 91

the issue as if our politics had been wrong and we were responsible for the success of

fascism’. If there had to be self-criticism, he said, this had to be carried forward ‘quite

ruthlessly’ by individual parties, not by the International.20

Togliatti was convinced that collaboration with the socialists was necessary,

although he recognised that ‘the united front does not erase the differences between the

two parties’. He did not, however, take so leading a position as his letter to Dozza

seemed to imply:

Mind you in all the discussions on the united front etc. here [in Moscow] I am the one who is

always stressing the importance of the successes gained [by united front activity] and who asks

to move more energetically on this path at international level.21

ON A MISSION TO PARIS AND BRUSSELS

Togliatti’s uneven tacking between support for the old line and openness to renewal

came from habitual caution, but also from the fact that the ECCI had not yet achieved

political clarity. The principal leaders in the Comintern, Dimitrov and Manuilsky,

certainly recognised the need to accurately appraise the advantages and risks that the

new line entailed. With this in mind, they assigned Togliatti an important and delicate

mission. Towards the middle of October, he was sent to Paris with a brief to organise

international solidarity with the Spanish proletariat. After the failed insurrection in the

Asturias, the working-class movement had suffered from severe repression by the

centre-right. Togliatti’s mission was part of a larger political design. On 10 October,

the ECCI had called on the Socialist International for ‘common action in support of

the struggling Spanish proletariat’. The French communist leaders, Cachin and

Thorez, following an ECCI mandate, met with Vandervelde and Adler in Brussels on

15 October, the first official joint meeting between delegations of the two

Internationals since the 1922 Berlin conference. Both were evidently trying to extend

at international level the unitary action that had been successful in France, even though

such an attempt was fraught with difficulty. Meanwhile, Spain was becoming more

important for the Comintern. The impending threat of fascism and a strong popular

mass mobilisation offered unique opportunities for the communists’ new political line.

Togliatti, who had in-depth knowledge of the Spanish situation, was now given a

particularly influential role with the Comintern’s new executive group. This new

position must have been close to his heart. On 19 November, from Paris, he asked

Manuilsky for authorisation to go to Spain ‘to examine and discuss in situ the

problems of the party’s political line, its organisation etc.’

The articles that he published on Spain in November in Correspondance

Internationale and Lo Stato Operaio are proof of the difficult development of the new

political position, not just for himself but for the Comintern more generally.22 In many

ways, the analysis that Togliatti outlined remained within the strategic strictures of the

twelfth ECCI plenum. The struggle of the Asturian proletariat, because it had

developed revolutionary committees and popular militias committed to revolutionary

objectives, had proved that ‘the victory of the revolution and the organisation of

proletarian power were a real, plausible and feasible objective’. The movement in Spain

92 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

had failed because of the betrayal of the anarchists in Catalonia and the fact that ‘the

large mass of peasant workers’ had been disillusioned and frustrated by a socialist

politics whose aim was to defend ‘stunted land reform projects of the coalition

governments’. The Spanish events had clearly proved that ‘a revolutionary strategy and

tactics cannot exist outside the theory and practice of Bolshevism.’

However, within this familiar formula a new and important element appeared: the

stress on the ‘popular’ character of the insurrection in the Asturias, an adjective that the

Comintern had abandoned after 1929. There was a notable reference to how a united

movement should organise and conduct an insurrectional strike:

The factory workers and peasant alliance, instead of being restricted to the Socialist Party and

the trade unions as the socialist leaders intended, should have been transformed into a larger

organised movement formed on a democratic basis, including all the anti-fascist masses.23

This point was, in fact, at the centre of Togliatti’s attention during the two months

of his mission in France: the development of the united front into the popular front,

pursued resolutely by the PCF. On this issue, however, Ercoli was still uncertain. In

general terms, he was not opposed to extending the scope of political alliances from the

working class to other social components. But he was, nevertheless, hesitant, believing

that such an extension could enmesh the communist party in a manoeuvre from the

top which might weaken both its ability to mobilise from below and its political

initiative. It is difficult to establish whether Togliatti’s concern merely reflected caution

in the Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, or whether he was also personally

convinced by a long-standing distrust of the French communists’ tendency to rally to

the republican institutions.

Giulio Cerreti’s testimony, published in 1973, favours the first hypothesis. In

1934, he was a member of the PCF CC. He confirmed what Thorez and Duclos had

already said in their memoirs. Togliatti, acting as a message bearer for the Comintern,

went to see Thorez a few hours before the latter was due to leave for Nantes, where on

24 October he should have launched the proposal for the broadening of the anti-fascist

united front to include the Radical Party. He advised him against taking a step that

was considered premature:

We must avoid, above all, making unnecessary favours to SFIO which would most certainly

have taken advantage of the contribution from the Radicals, forcing us to take an unnecessary

supporting role […] The Radicals were unpredictable allies and therefore unable to offer us

the certainty of a quantitative leap. The order was to wait for the masses to reach more

advanced positions and pave the way to a popular front agreement.

Cerreti added that in conversation that same evening, Togliatti expressed quite a

different opinion to him He said:

Before leaving Moscow, I suggested to Dimitrov and Manuilsky that by applying the brakes

we were running the risk of weakening the thrust of the masses towards broader democratic

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 93

and popular unity. It is my opinion that the French comrades were right to step on the

accelerator and take the initiative in Nantes.

Before taking his leave, Ercoli even said: ‘Go and see Maurice tomorrow morning, and

tell him to carry on.’24

However, available archive material and other personal recollections contradict

Cerreti’s account. Judging by the reports that Togliatti sent from Paris to Manuilsky in

November and December, it is clear that his distrust of French communist politics was

deep-rooted and even reflexive. On 19 November he expressed the opinion that ‘the

French comrades have not manoeuvred well, although they are, overall, correct.’25 The

same day he communicated to Clément and Maurice (Fried and Thorez) a series of

observations and proposals that sounded even more critical of the PCF’s pursuit of the

united and popular front. He concluded with this injunction:

Highlight more clearly and publicly the difference between our party’s policy and the

Socialist’ policy. Avoid attacks but, within the limits of the pact, criticise the Socialist Party for

its role in the current events of French politics.26

It would be wrong to see this position as merely a residual tendency to demarcate

the united front ‘from below’ from the one from ‘above’, although Togliatti was

concerned that the politics of the united front could be identified with the electoral

propaganda of the ‘block of the lefts’. In fact, the October–December 1934 mission

represented for Togliatti an opportunity for a thorough rethinking not only of the

political alliances of communist parties, but, more generally, of the issue of ‘transitional

objectives’ and their interaction with the struggle of the popular masses against fascism

and the defence of their economic interests.

The insistence with which the Belgian experience was cited and adopted as a

paradigm, proved that this was the favoured laboratory for this thinking, rather than

the French one. Togliatti went to Brussels in the first half of December 1934 and met,

in addition to the leaders of the Belgian party, two representatives of the socialist left,

Paul-Henri Spaak and Albert Marteaux. It was especially the conversations with Spaak,

who criticised the united front proposals by the communists for being ‘minimalist’,

which prompted Ercoli to confront the issues on the agenda in those countries where

the working-class struggle against fascism opened an opportunity for a united left to

seize power.

He was aware of the effect that plans for the restoration to health of capitalism,

which had found their most dramatic expression in Roosevelt’s New Deal, were having

on European social democracy, and also of the vacuum of theoretical analysis on the

subject in the communist movement. On 9 December, he wrote to Manuilsky:

A second point to which […] I want to draw your attention is the way we present our

governing plan. A little too removed from each particular country's reality and also leaving

unclear the issue of the first immediate revolutionary economic and political actions that we

are going to propose to respond to the situation […] Are we proposing as a programme of a

revolutionary workers’ government, a government that will not at the outset be a pure Soviet

94 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

government? Isn’t there something missing that prevents the socialist workers from

understanding and following us and that pushes them obliquely towards the reactionary

‘plans’ a la De Man?27

At the same time, he insisted that the popular front should not consist only of a

coalition of parties, but should also include new grass-roots and unitary organisations:

There should be two proposals at the outset: that the united front movement should consist

mainly of elected committees and that at the same time a self-defence mass movement should

also be fully developed. This is what the PCF always forget, and it is the key to every

revolutionary development of our united front, popular front politics etc.28

Democracy was stressed as an essential part of the new movement, more as a

process of political struggle than as a value in itself able to build a barrier against the

fascist threat. It was still from within a Leninist framework that Togliatti analysed the

class system and offered a revolutionary alternative for the West. Meanwhile, however,

the Comintern had taken the plunge. On 9 December, a meeting of the presidium

which Ercoli could not attend because he had not yet returned to Moscow, approved

Thorez’s report on the development of the French united front politics. Ten days later,

winding up a number of controversial meetings about the French situation, Kuusinen

and Manuilsky gave official approval to the PCF political line and gave unconditional

support to the popular front.

THE UNWRITTEN CHAPTER ON SELF-CRITICISM

Togliatti returned to Moscow towards the end of 1934. Clearly, the experience of his

mission in France and Belgium had been crucial. His speeches expressed an awareness

of his role as a member of a collective leadership, fully sharing in its effort to enforce a

change of direction in the aims of the international communist movement. This was

evident in his speech of 9 January 1935, at a joint meeting of the Comintern secretariat

and the politburo of the KPD.29 Togliatti had discussed the German situation six

months previously in an article which furnished a guarded analysis of the Rőhm and

SA massacre of 30 June 1934. The episode had been viewed as a step towards the

consolidation of Nazi power, rather than as evidence of a growing contradiction

between the NSDAP and its popular support. Then, the still implicit criticism directed

at the KPD was of not having understood that the struggle against the fascist regime

was to be conducted not as a ‘frontal attack’, but by taking into account the ‘masses’

and the types of organisations fostered by the dictatorship.30 In his speech of 9 January

1935, he went further, strongly criticising the KPD’s limited initiative and political

direction. Togliatti now condemned the German communists’ reluctance to employ

the united front tactic, their obstinacy in seeing it just as a way to absorb minor

socialist groups of the left, and their lacking the courage to address the German social

democratic leadership in exile, with whom an alliance was essential in order to win the

masses away from fascism.

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 95

‘To make politics’: this was the leitmotif of his contributions to the discussions on

the preliminary commissions for the seventh world congress. Togliatti must have felt

that the testing ground of the ability to ‘make politics’ for the communist movement

had become the issue of democracy. Obviously, the terms of the question were

different in different countries. It was one thing to understand ‘how we can achieve

more favourable conditions in those countries where there still is democracy’, another

to tackle the issue of political freedoms in a regime of fascist dictatorship.

However, Togliatti was in both cases especially sensitive to the issue of transitional

objectives, a question he had already raised in his reports to Manuilsky. On 26 April

1935, he stated:

We talk about the popular front, but they are just, almost always, words. The slogans for what

we call the popular front [in France] are incomplete, as is the united front slogan. This is

because, by and large, we haven’t changed, qualitatively […] our politics. I believe that for a

qualitative change we should here put forward some different transitional slogans.31

He had raised the same concern on 25 March in a letter he wrote to the comrades

of the PCI secretariat, in which he criticised the draft for a call to the Italian workers

because it lacked ‘partial political demands’ and ‘especially […] agitation with

democratic content’.32 Togliatti considered ‘without question' that a widening of the

mass movement would raise in Italy ‘a problem about liberties and immediate political

demands’. The issue of what would follow the demise of fascism thus reverted to the

terms that had preceded the Comintern’s change of line at the tenth plenum. It was a

process that ‘is perceived as longer and more complex, less mythical and more real’,33

even though the democratic objectives were still, for the time being, regarded as a

tactical instrument to facilitate the widening of working-class alliances. However, the

break with the theses of the ‘third period’ was a fait accompli. Togliatti, who was aware

of its significance, believed that it had to be explained and justified in the seventh

congress’s theses. In the preliminary meetings of the commissions, he repeatedly

stressed that the International needed to conduct an honest self-criticism of its past

actions. In his speech of 26 April he said:

I believe that a chapter offering self-criticism is absolutely necessary. If there isn’t going to be a

section or a chapter on self-criticism then I believe the meaning of these new theses will be

unclear: what are these new elements, what mistakes made by the communist parties and by

communists in general are we trying to correct with these theses; and how we can now explain

our tactics on the basis of the experience we have gained from past successes and failures.34

That chapter, however, was never written. The resistance from the hardliners of the

Comintern proved to be too strong. They were too deeply rooted to the principle of

the infallibility ‘of the General Staff of the revolution’. And, of course, if the

infallibility principle had been placed under scrutiny, an implicit blow would have

been delivered to Stalin’s prestige. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s words reverberated in the

report that Dimitrov presented at the seventh congress. In his most important public

contribution during the pre-congress debate, Togliatti had also called attention to the

96 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

‘new political problems’ created by the revival of united front politics. He again

proposed that ‘the organisation of the united front must be based on committees

elected and directly representing the grass roots.’ These committees were not to be

regarded – as social democratic leaders insisted – as an ‘infernal device contrived by the

Bolsheviks in order to disintegrate socialist parties’. On the contrary, they should be

employed to ‘involve and organise ever increasing numbers of people and guarantee the

maximum development of their initiative in the struggle’. He also pointed out the new

connotations that the struggle for power had now acquired: ‘the defence of democratic

bourgeois liberties [was] the historical and political ground necessary to the grouping

and organising of the mass forces that we must lead to seize power’ and reach ‘broader

objectives for the struggle’. Partial political and economic demands were no longer

enough. They had to be complemented by ‘transitional demands, that would open the

way to the struggle for power’.35

The connection between these two moments and their interaction was not yet

explicit, but the foundations for a new analysis of the transition to socialism were

clearly in place.

WHERE IS THE ‘MAIN ENEMY’?

The backdrop to Togliatti’s political analysis was a careful appraisal of the international

situation, which had been thrown into flux in the first half of 1935, having a profound

impact on the discourse of the international communist movement. Key moments had

been the French proposal for an ‘eastern pact’ to include Germany, Poland, the Soviet

Union, the Baltic States and Czechoslovakia; Soviet entry to the League of Nations;

and the beginning of negotiations (finalised in May 1935) for a mutual aid pact

between France and Russia. There was also the beginning of the Italian attack on

Ethiopia, the Saarland plebiscite (in January 1935, an overwhelming majority voted for

annexation by Germany), and Hitler’s decision in March – made in open

contravention to the Versailles treaty – to reintroduce military conscription.36

Togliatti detailed the consequences of these developments in a letter to the Italian

comrades dated 2 April 1935. In it he listed, one by one, the cornerstones of the

‘doctrine of the main enemy’ that was becoming central to Soviet foreign policy. With

an international situation characterised by a ‘deepening of all the conflicts connected

with the German situation and the demands made by Germany’ and by Germany’s

‘marked aggressiveness’ towards the Soviet Union, it was absolutely necessary to direct

vigorous ‘fire at German fascism’.37

It must be stressed that the ‘doctrine of the main enemy’ had two interpretations.38

Donald Sassoon observed that ‘it had to be decided whether this “main enemy” was to

be defined “ideologically” – in other words, fascism as opposed to socialism and liberal

democracy – or “geo-politically” – in other words, Nazi Germany as opposed to all the

other powers, including fascist Italy’.39

On the eve of the seventh world congress, Togliatti was evidently favouring the

second view. The defence of the Soviet Union was still the sole reason to contain and

isolate Hitler’s Germany. In answer to the Italian communists who interpreted the

fascist aggression in Africa as an escalation of tension amongst different imperial

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 97

powers, Togliatti agreed. However, he also reproached them for having forgotten that

the ‘most important thing, today, is to note the direct responsibility of Italian fascism

and of Mussolini for having promoted, aided and abetted Germany’s rearmament’.40

He urged them to do nothing which might promote rapprochement between Italy and

Germany, even at the cost of curtailing the campaign against the threat of war on

Ethiopia.

The French communists were also the target of his criticism. Following Thorez’s

speech to the Chamber, which argued against the scheme for two years’ military

service, Togliatti identified ‘a variation on the theme “the main enemy is in our

country”’. He objected that ‘in the given situation, it would be better to say that the

main enemy is German fascism attacking the S[oviet] U[nion]’.41 The advantage of this

analysis was that it identified the target clearly. But it also lost sight of the perception

of fascism as an ‘indivisible’ phenomenon.

LECTURES ON FASCISM

Although Togliatti was devoting increasing attention to the fragile balance of the

international system, he was not distracted from his analysing the specific

characteristics of Italian fascism. Already in October 1934, he had published in the

Comintern review an article of great breadth.42 In this, he anticipated the arguments

that he was later to discuss at greater length in a series of lectures to the Italian cadres

of the International Lenin School (ILS) between January and April 1935. Ernesto

Ragionieri found the lecture material only in 1970, in the form of shorthand notes

made by one of the students. In fact, the nine lectures were part of the larger ‘Corso

sugli avversari’ (‘Course on the Enemy’). Four more lectures are known: on the

anarchists, on the republicans and maximalists, on the trends of international social

democracy, and on the Italian socialists. Two others are lost.43

The fact that fascism was dealt with in a larger context, and so recognised as one of

the ‘adversaries’ of the communist movement – without discussing it as the main or

most dangerous – was a telling sign that some elements of continuity with the past

existed side by side with the new analyses. The result, as has been noted, was to

produce ‘different layers of ideological structure, not always coherent or compatible’.44

Examples of these dissonances abound. For example, in the first lecture Ercoli still

asserted that ‘we cannot set bourgeois democracy against dictatorship. Every

democracy is a dictatorship.’ He then reiterated that the fascist form of government

was more congenial to the bourgeoisie and that tendencies to make it their own existed

in every major capitalist country. However, he immediately qualified this point by

saying: ‘this does not mean that fascism is everywhere inevitable.’ He went on to stress

that ‘the possibilities of establishing a fascist dictatorship are inversely related to the

degree of proletariat's fighting spirit and to its ability to defend democratic

institutions.’45

The most original part of the lectures was their description and analysis of the

fascist workings of power, of the regime’s institutions and organisations. This is not to

say that his previous analysis had lacked significant ideas, at least from 1931. However,

the lectures of 1935 gave structure to these ideas and also fleshed out a more realistic

98 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

picture of the regime which, thanks to its widespread new mass organisations and their

joint methods of coercion and ideological-political manipulation, had the support of

various sectors of society. Terror in itself could not explain ‘where the strength of

Italian fascism lay’. It came from ‘the combination of openly violent methods and

terror with, more or less coercive, methods of enclosing the masses in […] a system of

multiple control, subtle, […] difficult to avoid and which allows the fascist ideologies

to penetrate them under different guises’.46 Indeed, illuminating the system of control

was the object of his lectures, representing ‘one of those rare instances when the

acquisition of political analysis, instead of laying down templates which restrict

historical research, provides meaningful suggestions’.47

However, the lectures had another role. The idea for the series apparently had the

personal approval of Manuilsky, one of the Comintern men closest to Stalin.48 It is

possible that Togliatti understood that the lectures would have more important

listeners than the Italian pupils of the ILS. Therefore, it is possible to argue that he

might have intended to send a message to the Soviet state-party machine along the

following lines: a system of control and management of society and economy will only

function successfully if it is founded not only on coercion but also on widespread

support.

Whether Togliatti’s lectures were appreciated by the Soviet apparat or not, the fact

remains that the ‘connecting fabric’ of the fascist regime power system was identified as

the fascist party and relabelled as a ‘new kind’ of bourgeois organisation. Togliatti once

again outlined the stages of its development until the moment the fascist party

disintegrated and entered into a symbiotic existence with the state. The peak expansion

of the Fascist National Party (PNF) organisations corresponded, therefore, to the

highest levels of bureaucratisation and de-politicisation of its members, together with

the removal of any remaining internal democracy. The proliferation of mass

organisations comparatively autonomous from the fascist party was viewed as a

necessary step to extinguish – or at least soften – the social tensions which the

continuing economic crisis was making endemic.

Togliatti scrutinised these organisations one by one, but he concentrated on the

fascist trade unions and the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (fascist work and recreational

clubs). The first were viewed as the more organic attempt to incorporate the working

class into the reactionary structure of the state, but on ‘more flexible terrain in the

structure of fascism and fascist dictatorship […] because within them class relations are

reflected in a direct and immediate manner’.49 Consequently, they constituted an

opening for the ‘legal’ work of the party. Also, in respect of the efforts to organise and

centralise the workers’ free time, Ercoli drew the conclusion that the communists

should not only overcome their prejudiced rejection of the dopolavoro, but get involved

in them and support all demands that would allow for some internal democracy.

Rather than oppose the tendency to socialisation that the clubs promoted, it should be

used to advantage.

In evaluating the fascist trade unions and the dopolavoro as being more than mere

propaganda feathers in the cap of the regime, but as viable, comparatively dynamic

institutions in civil society, Togliatti came close to the (as yet unknown to him)

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 99

analysis developed by Gramsci in the ‘Prison Notebooks’. The interest which both men

showed in this issue, although different in emphasis, came from ‘the need to place

under siege the fascist citadel, even though it appeared momentarily impregnable’.50

A final aspect of the lectures worth mentioning was their analysis of

‘corporativism’.51 Togliatti argued that corporativism could not be dismissed simply as

a demagogic slogan to deceive the masses but there was in fact correspondence between

corporativism and the kind of structure which fascism was trying to give the Italian

economy. However, Togliatti was sceptical about the substance of state interventionist

declarations which had embellished Mussolini’s speeches from the beginning of 1933.

He considered them nothing more than ‘the propagandistic expression of what has

happened under pressure caused by the crisis’, and ‘the intervention of finance capital

in the organisation of the national economy via the state machinery’.52 This

consideration echoed the argument – first expressed in 1929–30 against the theory of

‘organised capitalism’ accredited to Bukharin – that no self-reform of capitalism could

succeed. Togliatti now re-deployed the point against the interest in ‘planism’ gaining

currency among some social democrats.

Once he had underlined the corporazioni’s close dependency on the government

(which made it an almost total example of top-down bureaucracy and decision making

aimed at stifling any possible conflict in the civil society), Togliatti dismissed the

possibility of transforming or using them. It is notable that he rejected any comparison

between the corporations and the parliamentary system. He made a significant

admission, which proved he was reconsidering his evaluation of the democratic

bourgeoisie: ‘the parliament is always, in greater or lesser measure, a result, a finishing

point, a revolutionary achievement of the masses, an achievement of the democratic-

bourgeois revolution […] We must therefore see in parliament something that is

linked to these masses.’53

Togliatti went further. The second lecture on corporativism ended with the

statement that ‘the key to unmasking fascism is represented by the immediate, most

basic economic demands’. But that was, in itself, insufficient. There was also the need

‘for political demands’ and those ‘cannot but have a democratic content, cannot but

dominate people’s civil liberties’.54 It is not known whether this theme was developed

and explained further in a following lecture. In any case, the political message that the

lectures wanted to deliver was clear: ‘It is a mistake to think that totalitarianism closes

the way to the masses in their struggle for democratic achievements […]

Totalitarianism does not close the party’s way to the struggle, but it opens new ways.’55

It is not arbitrary to connect the idea of the ‘new party’ that Togliatti developed in

1944 to his analysis of fascist mass politics of the Corso sugli Avversari.

THE SEVENTH CONGRESS

At the beginning of the summer of 1935, the long period of preparation for the

seventh world congress ended at last. In the last few months, opinion in the ECCI and

leading parties had moved in favour of those demanding political change. They had

received Stalin’s crucial support, although he had been reluctant at the beginning and

not enthusiastic about the irreversibility of the change. The congress was consequently

100 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

invited to endorse an already existing policy shift. Nevertheless, the concern that the

ECCI could be weakened by a too close revaluation of its political methods of the

previous five years meant that the new line was partially clouded by ambiguity. The

conference mood kept swinging between self-justification and a new chapter in the

Comintern’s collective destiny.

The opening session, on 25 July 1935, included, in addition to the report by

Wilhelm Pieck on the activity of the ECCI and the welcome of numerous Soviet

workers’ delegations, a message to Stalin. This had never occurred before at the

worldwide proceedings of the communist movement; Lenin had never been paid this

honour. It was the first instance of many at the congress, and was evidence of the

frenzied tone that the ‘cult of personality’ around the Soviet leader had reached.

Togliatti was called to read it on behalf ‘of the army of millions of soldiers of the world

proletarian revolution’.56 Why was Togliatti chosen to perform this ritual, a call that

could not but be interpreted as an honour? It is possible that the alleged directors of

the operation, Dimitrov and Manuilsky, who were keen to assign to Togliatti a leading

role in the management of the new International line, had arranged this opportunity to

‘cleanse’ him, once and for all, of his Bukharinist past. It would be more interesting to

know whether Togliatti was unconditionally sharing, besides the message’s emphatic

tone, the international communist movement’s public reverence for Stalin. Tito, who

met Togliatti at the end of the congress, noticed in him ‘a certain degree of restraint’

and a ‘mild form of irony’.57 But these, as we know, were constant traits of Togliatti’s

character and in 1935 could not possibly have been a sign of substantial reservations on

his part. Almost certainly, Togliatti interpreted the wave of repression that took place

following Kirov’s assassination in December 1934 as a legitimate self-defence action by

the revolutionary regime, and did not conceive that responsibility for their excesses

rested with Stalin. We can infer, therefore, that Ercoli agreed with, if not the tone,

then the substance of the message that he read on the first day of the congress, in

which he identified Stalin, without reservation, with the successes of building of

socialism and the hope of worldwide revolution.

Togliatti had not intervened in the debate on Dimitrov’s report. He spoke next, on

10–11 August, to present his report on ‘the preparation of a new world war by the

imperialists and the tasks of the Communist International’.58 In a rare film of the

occasion, Togliatti looks obviously nervous: wearing his dark double-breasted suit, he

read out his report in fluent French but with an unequivocal Piedmont accent; the

gestures accompanying his most important passages appear exaggerated due to the

amateurish camera work.

Before starting his analysis, Ercoli emphasised that the strategy devised by the sixth

congress was still valid in its broad outline, showing the need to confirm continuity

with the earlier line, and which ran through his report like a red thread. According to

Togliatti, the roots of change in the international situation were growing Soviet power,

Japanese aggression in the Far East, and the Nazi victory in Germany. Taken together,

these factors had brought great instability in capitalist relations, which had already

been disrupted by the international economic crisis. The communists, explained

Togliatti, ‘have no tears to shed for the demise of the hateful scheme of looting

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 101

established by Versailles’. However, its disappearance signalled ‘the shift to the use of

force to settle any critical issue’ and put the threat of a new imperialist conflict on the

agenda.

His criticism of Japanese imperialism and, in even greater measure, German

fascism as the main advocates of war, replicated Dimitrov’s report. Yet, Togliatti’s

speech still mirrored some of the characteristic traits of the Comintern’s earlier analysis.

Great Britain was denounced with particular harshness not only as the ‘champion of

colonial oppression’, but also for encouraging Nazism and seeking to channel the

aggression of Japanese and German imperialism into an anti-Soviet front. The role of

the United States was underestimated: they were ‘still considered to be concerned with

their interests in the Pacific rather than more broadly as a “world power”’.59

Significantly, however, Togliatti still regarded the differences between Great

Britain and the United States as ‘the deeper opposition amongst those which are

tearing apart the imperialist world’. He regarded the French bourgeoisie as ‘still

relatively intelligent’ and therefore able to recognise the threat posed by Hitler’s

expansionism to its own security. He urged delegates, however, not to entertain too

many hopes of the coherence of France’s peace policy.

Looking at the international role of Italian fascism, Togliatti did not refer to the

possibility of a rapprochement between Italy and Germany. On the contrary, he

underlined their continuing disagreement about Austria. He also dedicated an entire

section of his report to Italian colonial expansionism. He made a forthright, passionate

declaration of solidarity with the Abyssinian people. His words provoked an angry

reaction from the head of the Italian embassy in Moscow, who wrote to Rome

pointing out the ‘paragraph of this filthy report’, where ‘the renegade Ercoli […] is

voicing his spite for the fascist regime’.60 Togliatti viewed the Italian threat against

Ethiopia mainly from the perspective of the rivalry between two imperialist powers,

Italy and Great Britain, rather than assigning the Ethiopian resistance any political

substance.

Togliatti’s analysis was more coherent and closely argued than reports on the threat

of war delivered at previous meetings of the Comintern. These had viewed the whole

international scene as an undifferentiated antithesis between the capitalist world and

the Soviet Union; their prevailing tone was a generic alarmism about the imminence of

an imperialist attack against the USSR. Dimitrov’s report had clearly distinguished

between the democratic bourgeoisie and fascist dictatorship. Similarly, Togliatti’s

report did not apportion equal responsibility to individual imperialist powers for a

likely outbreak of war. Invoking Lenin’s authority, Ercoli insisted that revolutionary

tactics entailed the employment, no matter how small, of every conflict of interest in

the enemy camp. Some of the big powers ‘are interested in defending the status quo

and a temporary and conditional defence of the peace’. This had to be taken into

account not only by Soviet policy, but also by the proletariat and the communist

parties in capitalist countries. They had to adopt ‘a positive position on foreign policy

issues’, promoting all the processes that would delay the outbreak of war and opposing

‘everything that represents a threat to peace’.

102 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

However, Togliatti’s report made no mention of an underlying ideological contrast

between democratic and fascist states and the societies which they ruled. He did not

introduce ‘value judgements between “main enemy” and secondary enemies’. This

omission may have been due to ‘a particular caution in Soviet foreign policy which

was conducted so as to keep open any possible tactical manoeuvring. Its direction did

not rule out the possibility that the inevitability of war would, in the long run, render

the antinomy between fascism and anti-fascism meaningless’.61

Togliatti’s report devoted special attention to an analysis of the Soviet Union’s

‘peace policy’. He highlighted its underlying coherence but also its extraordinary

flexibility. Defending the mutual aid pacts between the Soviet Union and France and

Czechoslovakia, he confirmed in clear terms a fundamental principle of the communist

movement’s strategy:

For us there is no question that there is an identity of purposes between the Soviet Union’s

peace policy and the working class’ and communist parties’ politics in capitalist countries …

We defend the Soviet Union not only in general terms; we also defend in concrete terms its

entire politics and its every action.

Ercoli followed this statement with a clarification of great theoretical value, which

revealed an awareness of the intricate knots that would soon form in communist

policy: ‘this identity of purpose does not mean an identity of actions on every issue

amongst the communist parties that are still striving to reach the Soviet Union’s power

and tactical positions.’ Indeed, he drew attention to the different positions taken by the

Soviet government and the PCF on the issue of French rearmament. But he also

evaded the problem of reconciling the revolutionary programmes of communist parties

with the need to avoid compromising the alliance between the Soviet Union and some

capitalist states. In fact, by stressing the idea of a total identity of interests between the

international communist movement and the Soviet Union, Togliatti implicitly

excluded any autonomy for affiliated parties.

In the concluding section, Togliatti proposed again and with great vigour the

slogan ‘struggle for peace’, which he had defended in the debates of the eighth plenum,

and which was now reappearing in official ECCI documents after a long absence. He

focused especially on the evolution taking place in social democracy at the

international level. He highlighted the many nuances in the pacifist movement, and

insisted on the need to penetrate its ranks. He reasserted that it was necessary to link

the struggle for peace with the workers’ struggle for immediate economic demands.

Ercoli proposed the democratisation of the army, the offer of political rights to

soldiers, purging the army of fascist officers, and the transformation of the bourgeois

army into a ‘people’s army with a close bond with civil society’. His proposition moved

away from the traditional revolutionary defeatism which he felt could divide the

communists from the masses. On the contrary, the forthcoming war would demand

the closest bond between army and civilian population.

The debate on Togliatti’s report during the plenary session was comparatively brief

and not worthy of note. The most meaningful contributions addressed issues at a

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 103

more general level. They were made by the delegates from Czechoslovakia and

Holland, classified by the speaker as ‘small and weak’ countries. Both stated

unequivocally that in the event of a German attack the communist party would avoid

any tendency to adopt ‘national nihilism’ and would instead concentrate on opposing

the aggression.

Togliatti’s brief closing speech after the debate concentrated on this issue: national

wars in Europe were undoubtedly possible, and the proletariat’s participation and

support in these kinds of wars was not only acceptable but necessary, provided that its

temporary collaboration with the bourgeoisie did not imply the renunciation of class

struggle.

Faced with the issue of the struggle against war, there was and is still a tendency to adopt a

fatalistic attitude, due to a pedantic distortion of the proper meaning of the Marxist dictum

that it is impossible to separate war and capitalist regimes […] We must passionately put

forward the view that today, not only is it possible to defer it, but given some specific

circumstances, it is even possible to prevent the outbreak of a new imperialist war.62

THE INTRICACY OF THE NEW LINE

At the closing of the seventh world congress, Togliatti was reconfirmed as a member of

the ECCI and presidium. He was also appointed to the ECCI secretariat, which had

again been restructured, becoming officially the decision-making organ of the

Comintern. At its helm was Georgi Dimitrov, the true protagonist of the current

political change. The team by his side included, in addition to Ercoli, Manuilsky,

Pieck, Kuusinen, Marty and Gottwald, with Florin, Wang Ming and Moskvin as

candidate members. Not all were enthusiastic supporters of the new line, although they

had each distanced themselves from ‘class against class’. Revealing of the degree of

control exercised by Stalin’s office over the Comintern was the presence in the ECCI

secretariat of Moskvin from the NKVD, the powerful and ubiquitous Soviet security

police.

In this small circle, after Dimitrov, Manuilsky and Kuusinen, Togliatti was the

leader with the most international experience. Proof of this were the duties he was

formally assigned. At the meeting of the secretariat on 7 September 1935, he was

designated as ‘responsible for the middle-European countries’, including specifically

Austria, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, and as

‘representing the general secretary in his absence’.63 In the following months, he was

assigned an additional, important responsibility for the agit-prop section.

These assignments entailed a number of particularly significant duties. First, to

oversight of the relationships with the various committees and movements of the

struggle for peace, which meant that Togliatti became the principal interlocutor with

the Socialist International; second, the organisation of an effective campaign against

Trotskyism and, therefore, support for the first big Moscow show trial, which took

place in August 1936. The burden of these assignments at one point became too much,

even for such ‘a relentless working machine’ as Ercoli. In May 1936, he asked

Dimitrov for a different working schedule.64

104 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

These responsibilities kept Togliatti fully occupied. They also showed that in

interpreting the seventh world congress line he kept veering between the need for

renewal and the inclination to restrict the degree of political change to well-defined

borders. An example of the first instance was the important speech he gave at the

organisational conference of the KPD, held on 13–15 October in the Moscow suburbs.

The speech, beyond its content aimed at winning over to the seventh congress line the

recalcitrant German party, showed a self-assured Togliatti, fully aware of the

responsibilities of his role as international leader. A role ‘officially’ sanctioned by

Manuilsky’s numerous interjections during his report of ‘Right! Very good!’65

Ercoli would return to the issue of the German party a few weeks later in an

address at the presidium on Pieck’s report. Amongst other things, Togliatti’s address

revealed an oblique smugness at the reversal of roles which had taken place between the

PCI and the KPD since the tenth plenum in 1929. It was now his turn, having

previously been charged with the barely disguised accusation of ‘opportunism’, to aim

a few pedantic blows at the sibling party, citing the PCI’s fighting activities as an

example to be emulated. The need for a united front was also stressed. However,

Togliatti warned the KPD of the danger of letting itself be dragged by those ‘generals

without soldiers’, who were the leaders of social democracy in exile, ‘in a never-ending

and futile discussion on the future: how are we going to deploy in Germany the

perspective of the seventh congress in the creation of a popular front government […]

what will this government programme be like? Will it or will it not call a national

assembly, which constitution are we going to have after the overthrowing of the

dictatorship?’66

This impatience with the more general aspects of strategy and programme, already

a sign of a narrower interpretation of the seventh congress’s decisions, became explicit

in the address to the presidium on 9 January 1936, which was devoted to the ‘Czech

issue’. Ercoli had accused the Czech party of having exaggerated, for opportunistic

reasons, the line of the seventh congress.67 Of more interest were, however, the ideas

and proposals which Togliatti contributed between the end of 1935 and the end of

1936 to the debate that took place in the Comintern on how to prevent a war. The

issue, already discussed by Ercoli in his report to the world congress, came to the fore

in concrete terms during the Ethiopian crisis in the autumn of 1935.

After some initial preliminaries, Dimitrov sent an appeal on behalf of the ECCI to

the Socialist International on 25 September proposing to start immediately

negotiations to agree on a common action for peace. The following day, Togliatti

reported back to the ECCI presidium. His report did not make any accusations against

social democracy, and was far from being an ultimatum. It was especially noteworthy

that he spoke not only of the need to organise mass action ‘against fascism and war’,

but also about the need to ‘consider the League of Nations and its statutes as a weapon

to use, at a given time, if and when possible, to stop a war’. Indeed, he did not exclude

in principle to pronounce in favour of sanctions, also military, ‘in the event of fascist

Italy or Germany starting the war’.68

However, the ECCI’s analysis of fascist aggression against Ethiopia soon returned

to the more restrictive interpretation of the ‘main enemy’ doctrine as discussed above.

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 105

Consequently, the main concern was still to avoid facilitating and, if possible, to hinder

rapprochement between Italy and Germany. Echoes of this interpretation were also

found in the article that Togliatti wrote for the November issue of the Comintern

review, where he maintained a detached equidistance ‘from both the Italian and

English imperialist bandits’. For Togliatti, Britain’s claim to defend the League of

Nations and its statutes was aimed at ‘undermining France’s effectiveness’ within the

latter, setting the scene for a shift in the European politics aimed at isolating the Soviet

Union ‘and supporting ever more definitely the aggressive politics of national-

socialism’.

In view of such a scenario, Ercoli re-launched the objective of placing ‘at the core

of the autonomous initiative of the working class, the direct action of the all-in class

organisations led by the proletariat’, supporting the League of Nations sanctions

against Italy, but regarding them as ‘secondary’. It was an uncompromising line,

probably prompted by the refusal of the Socialist International to consider Dimitrov’s

proposal, which had been made in October, for a united international front. But it was

motivated by increasing suspicion of social democracy. Togliatti’s polemic against

social democracy resumed the harsh tones he had not employed for months. His target

was not only ‘the reactionary right’, but also the incoherence and hesitation of

‘elements of the left’, especially Otto Bauer, whom he charged with holding out his

hand to ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyism’.69

Historical research on the subject has revealed how the development of Soviet

foreign policy towards European ‘collective security’ during the second half of the

1930s had an agenda which extended well beyond discriminating between fascism and

democracy. Its objective was to keep the Soviet Union out of any future conflict for as

long as possible. The Comintern position must have been influenced by this

overarching motive, although it is undeniable that there was, especially in Dimitrov’s

approach, an honest will to link the defence of peace and the struggle against fascism.70

This ambivalence was reflected in Togliatti’s attitude, which was subject to

frequent swings and changes. At the end of 1935 he had adopted a position which

favoured the demands of a sort of Soviet ‘holy selfishness’ by distancing himself in

equal measure from rival imperialisms, But in the spring of 1936, after the shock of

Hitler’s initiative remilitarising the Rhineland, he was again in the frontline, next to

Dimitrov, in a battle to make the Comintern’s political line explicitly anti-fascist.

Deserving mention in this respect was his contribution to the presidium debate

during the meeting of 23–31 March 1936. His first speech, on 24 March, discussed

how to prevent conflict, deploring the risk of paralysis inherent in the widespread ‘fear’

of war. He went so far as listing the practical measures that could stop German

imperialism: an intervention by the British fleet, the breaking off of Poland’s

diplomatic relations with Germany, or an action by the French army on the Rhine. In

reply to Moskvin, who interrupted him saying ‘this is war’, he said:

This could be the means of toppling Hitler’s dictatorship. We must pay attention to the fear

of war disguised as the defence of peace […] The balance of power in Europe offers strong

opportunities for preventing war.71

106 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Two days later, especially rebutting Pieck, he criticised the comrades’ ‘fatalism …

who think we haven’t much to lose by a war’.72 On 1 April, whilst explaining the

resolution approved that same day, he concluded that the communists had to appear as

staunch supporters of peace, because ‘a bad peace’ was in any case better than a war.73

A few weeks later, on 19 May 1936 during a meeting of the secretariat, Togliatti’s

main concern was that the rapprochement between Italy and Germany would translate

into a formal alliance. But surprisingly, the reason offered for his concern was not the

threat which a Hitler–Mussolini axis would entail for Soviet security, but rather the

danger of a military dictatorship in Austria, an immediate threat against

Czechoslovakia and the consequent worsening of the threat of war in Central Europe,

and – last but not least – the isolation of France which would result in the weakening

of the popular front.74

THE ‘NATIONAL RECONCILIATION’ POLITICAL INITIATIVE

In the months that followed the seventh world congress, Togliatti exercised his ECCI

duties well beyond the ‘territorial’ scope of his assigned secretariat. These interfered

especially with, and caused problems for, his unquestioned role as PCI leader. Ruggiero

Grieco, in Paris, was only the co-ordinator of the PCI secretariat.

Togliatti’s dual role was demanding, and increasingly so following the outbreak of

the Ethiopian war. For the PCI was no longer a small, clandestine and persecuted

party: it had become an important pawn in the general Comintern strategy of the

‘struggle for peace’ and Soviet foreign policy.

The intensive correspondence between the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936

amongst the PCI’s external leadership was a reminder to Ercoli that he still had

important party responsibilities. The consequence was a divergence of judgements and

opinions, sometimes well-defined, sometimes less so, which in the words of Giorgio

Amendola – who witnessed it – ‘became paralysing in the long run’.75 This fragile

situation had its roots in the different appraisals made by Moscow and Paris of the

Ethiopian war and its effects on Italy. Influenced by the political climate of unity that

had settled on the French left, the exiled Italian communist leaders, especially Grieco

and Longo, shared in the common hope of the anti-fascist emigrants that the fascist

regime, following a likely military failure, would be shaken by a serious crisis. This

hope fed the revival of the debate on the ‘succession’ to the political-institutional

structures of fascism. The debate was an expression, sometimes in naïve terms, of the

effort to adapt the slogans of the popular front to the Italian situation. At a congress of

the Italian emigrants against the Abyssinian war, held on 12–13 October 1935 in

Brussels, Grieco even claimed that if the developing situation should allow a

government to form which ‘was ready to defend all popular civil liberties’ and make

‘the rich’ pay the price of the crisis, ‘we would support, from within or without, such a

government’.76

Togliatti intervened immediately to correct this line. Already in a letter to the PCI

secretariat, probably written before the results of the Brussels congress were known, he

forecast that ‘the first thrust for a political change in the country’ would not come

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 107

‘from the anti-fascist ranks, but from a sector of the fascist ranks’. He therefore insisted

that the party seek to ‘bring together all the currents of opposition to fascism’ both

within and also outside fascism. ‘This,’ he affirmed, ‘is for us today the issue of the

popular front.’77

In a further letter of 26 October, probably addressed to Grieco, he made his doubts

about the PCI politics more explicit. He thought Grieco’s declaration in Brussels

‘naïve’ and ‘unnecessary’. The hypothesis of a popular front government and possible

communist participation in it was not yet relevant to Italy, where the situation ‘is not

like the French one’. The need was to ‘have a firmer line against social democracy and

similar organisations’. Togliatti even implied that in France too the PCF’s entry into a

popular front government represented a danger: ‘what I am saying goes not only for us,

but also for Maurizio.’78

This heated debate continued until 1936. Togliatti placed under meticulous

critical analysis the stances of the PCI leadership in Paris, and was reluctant to commit

the party and himself too wholeheartedly to an alliance with anti-fascist emigrant

groups. Sceptical about the results which had been achieved so far from united action

with socialists, he counselled the need to ‘give our agitation a greater anti-capitalist

quality than an anti-fascist one’.79

At the root of this attitude was, perhaps, the covert and quite obscure dynamics at

play within the ECCI, where Dimitrov’s more open line did not always meet the

approval of the more cautious Manuilsky, to whom Ercoli was still very close. But,

equally, if not more important, was Togliatti’s analysis of the fascist regime and his

realistic appraisal of the reasons for its strength, as well as an ingrained mistrust,

nourished by a ‘superiority complex’, of the non-communist anti-fascist organisations.

These reasons came to the fore again in his address to the Italian commission of the

ECCI presidium on 5 February 1936. Here the PCI was reproached for

‘overestimating the development of the revolutionary crisis and … underestimating the

strength that the fascist dictatorship still possesses’. Instead of wasting time in ‘building

hypotheses, abstract discussions on the government or the regime which would follow

the downfall of Mussolini’, as the comrades of the external leadership have done, all the

activity of the PCI should converge into the effort to break up the existing connections

between the rank-and-file fascist organisations and the leaders of the fascist

dictatorship’.80 The case for his prescription would have been strengthened by the

Italian fascist victory in the Ethiopian war, the capture of Addis Ababa and the

proclamation of the empire (5 May 1936). Stung by previous criticism, the PCI

leadership in Paris was more influenced by the strengthening of mass support for the

regime that flanked these events, rather than by the electoral victories of the popular

front coalitions in Spain and France and their significance in the opposing tenets

fascism and anti-fascism.

Already in May, the PCI PB had decided to start ‘a broad fraternisation activity’

with the grass roots of fascist organisations and a campaign against ‘the group of

tycoons who were starving and oppressing the country’. August 1936 saw the

publication in Lo Stato Operaio of the famous appeal: ‘Reconciliation of the Italian

people to save Italy.’ Undersigned by the most important party cadres who had

108 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

emigrated to Moscow or France, the appeal appropriated the fascist programme of

1919. Its radical objectives made it ‘a programme of freedom’, able according to the

communist leadership of gaining mass support not only amongst ‘the fascist old guard’

and the younger generation, but also amongst Catholics, liberals and socialists’.81

The manifesto, which caused immediate doubts in the other anti-fascist parties and

was also received with considerable bafflement by communist militants both abroad

and in Italy, especially those in gaol, was the manifest expression not only of the

practical difficulties of the Italian situation, but also of the deep political indecision in

the PCI leadership during 1936. The manifesto was an attempt to comply with the

requests coming from Moscow and Togliatti to promote social agitation rather than

activity of a political-institutional nature. It was also an awkward imitation of the

patriotism that had characterised the electoral campaign of the PCF. Thorez had made

ample use of the term ‘reconciliation’, while the condemnation of the ‘tycoons and

sharks’ exposed as the true enemies of the Italian people echoed the PCF’s attack

against the ‘two hundred families’ who owned the French economy.

In the list of 62 communist leaders who signed the manifesto (‘with their real

names, professional qualifications and honorific titles, i.e. the years they had spent in

gaol’, as Giorgio Amendola reported82) the signature of ‘Palmiro Togliatti (Ercoli),

from Turin, ex-chief editor of the Turin’s newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo, member of the

Communist International Secretariat’, was the first. Many years later, Umberto

Massola, a militant close to Ercoli, claimed that Togliatti’s signature had been

appended without his knowledge.83 According to Giuseppe Berti when Togliatti saw

the issue of Lo Stato Operaio with the appeal he asked ‘how come you signed this

bullshit?’ When Berti pointed out that his signature was also there, Togliatti smiled

bitterly and said ‘yes, they have lost their minds, they are irresponsible.’84

Yet, the appeal expressed, perhaps naively, the same idea of a confluence between

the anti-fascist opposition and fascist opposition for which Togliatti had argued in

previous months. Indeed, a report that Togliatti sent to Dimitrov and Manuilsky on

10 February 1937 showed that the line of ‘agitation on the fascist programme of 1919’

had been agreed in ‘conversations we had with Furini in July’.85 Nor is it plausible that

Grieco, worried as he always was about ‘the party leader’s’ opinion, would have signed

with Togliatti’s name on a document of that importance without consulting him.

However, in September 1936, the international situation and the place of fascist

Italy within it were considerably different from when the manifesto had first been

conceived. There was a civil war in Spain and Stalin’s decision to intervene in support

of the republican government was in the air, though not already implemented.

Moreover, Ercoli’s outburst at Berti represented not only a desire to distance himself

from a slogan that had become awkward (by unloading all of its responsibility

ungenerously and unreasonably on the Parisian leadership). It also showed his

intention to target the radical interpretation of the ‘reconciliation’ line that had been

emerging and sometimes prevailing in the meetings of the PB and CC during August

and September. The main bone of contention was the pronouncement of Mario

Montagnana, who even claimed that ‘we want now to improve fascism because we

cannot do more’ and ‘our comrades must become leaders of the fascist leaders’. Longo,

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 109

Grieco and Dozza argued against this, but such an important document as Egidio

Gennari’s September report to the CC essentially reflected Montagnana’s line.86

From Moscow there was an immediate intervention to correct the manifesto’s drift.

In conversations with two Italian cadres, Domenico Ciufoli and Aladino Bibolotti, in

November 1936 and February 1937, Ercoli pointed out that the discussion was not

about ‘reconciliation with the fascist regime’ but about ‘the reconciliation of the Italian

people in order to defeat fascism’. In addition, he advised that ‘we will have to

highlight the novel aspect in the issue of democracy. That is to say, the working class

has taken democracy’s future in hand.’87 This was a clear reference to the war in Spain.

In a report to ‘the special group of Italian comrades’ who lived in Moscow, some of

whom were about to join the International Brigade, Togliatti discussed in a concise,

clear manner some of the basic points about the struggle against fascism and for

democracy, demonstrating that his analysis had developed considerably and moved

away from the cautious attitude of the previous year:

Communists are today definitely at the forefront of the struggle for the defence and the

achievement of democracy, because the struggle is today, everywhere in the world, between

fascism and democracy. This line of the defence of democracy must be implemented with the

utmost courage and determination, renouncing any political excursions which could weaken

the struggle itself.88

Togliatti stressed that fascism ‘has annihilated many of the basic achievements of

the bourgeois revolution’, ‘civilisation has regressed […] it has destroyed the respect for

human identity’ and therefore ‘issues that had been overcome in the course of history,

such as achieving freedom of thought, of belief and of association’, were again everyday

problems. The PCI leader dispelled any possible misunderstanding about the warnings

he had given a few months previously which had been wrongly interpreted as

prioritising ‘anti-capitalism’ rather than ‘anti-fascism’. He claimed ‘fascism cannot be

reformed […] fascism must be overcome by a violent revolution […] We tie ourselves

to the masses influenced by fascism in order to lead them through the class struggle, to

overthrow fascism.89 He was also less reticent about discussing what would follow

fascism:

The first stage, the present stage, is Democracy, the new kind of Democracy, the Democracy

achieved by a struggle spearheaded by the working class (Italian workers would be content, in

any case, to recover the old style democracy: local councils, internal commissions, the

parliament etc. etc.) […] The necessary stage of gaining and re-gaining democracy cannot be

viewed as a finishing point or the end of the line. However, we must take care not to

underestimate its importance. Today there has to be an actual and resolute fight for this stage,

for the democratic republic. We must believe in it.89

How much did Togliatti ‘believe in it’? He certainly now seemed to be more

flexible about the need for the PCI to expect a rigid separation between the phases of

democratic and socialist revolution. This separation had initially characterised

communist interpretations of the revolutionary process. The idea was now emerging,

110 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

however, that the bigger problem for a socialist revolution in 1930s Europe was the

democratic reorganisation of the masses and the struggle to consolidate democratic

achievements and enable further developments. His thought was clearly influenced by

the international circumstances produced by the war in Spain. But it is his analysis of

Italian fascism itself that added new angles and new suggestions to the lectures of 1935:

Fascism has divided, broken, annihilated, all the relationships between man and man since it

began its organisation, because it has activated the sterilising virus of blind obedience which

finds expression in the slogan ‘credere, obbedire, combattere [believe, obey, fight]’. We

communists must resume the defence of human freedom, give back faith to Italians, urge

them to unite, discuss, fight … We must provoke a wave of horror and reprobation against

the perversion of human sentiment perpetrated by the fascists among the Italian people […]

We must fight against the anti-nation feeling.91

With the re-appropriation of the universal values of democracy, the debate on the

different means and possible outcomes involved in the ‘succession’ to fascism was freed

of the ambiguities which had stifled it at the end of 1935. In the conversations with

Bibolotti, Togliatti hinted at the possibility of ‘studying how to present the issue of a

Constituent Assembly.’ Indeed, Gramsci had pointed in this direction in his last

political message to the party: ‘The popular front in Italy is the Constituent Assembly’.

Already, in April 1937, Montagnana had written to Togliatti asking for his opinion on

this matter. In the summer, the PCI leadership in Paris discussed it again in view of the

renewal of united action with the PSI.92 In the ensuing pact, signed on 26 July, the key

word ‘Costituente’ did not appear. There was reference, however, to a new democracy

‘manned by the working class, and giving bread, peace and freedom to the people,

taking the necessary measures to uproot the economic foundations of reaction and of

fascism […] opening the way to the march toward socialism’. This was the culmination

of a long and difficult process of analysis. It was also the beginning of a new idea of

‘progressive democracy’, whose gestation would prove protracted. It was significant

that Togliatti justified this analysis by citing the later developments in Gramsci’s

thought. Togliatti attributed to him the idea that ‘a period of struggle is necessary to

win democratic freedoms, and the working class has to lead this struggle.’93

GRAMSCI’S DEATH AND LEGACY

The news of Gramsci’s death on 27 April 1937 precipitated a wave of emotion and

outrage amongst Italian anti-fascist émigrés that must have affected Togliatti with a

special intensity. Though affected by disagreements in 1926 and 1930–33, the two

men’s bond had remained strong and profound at the intellectual and political level.

Togliatti had kept to the ‘order of silence’ that the Comintern had imposed over

Gramsci and his work from early 1931 to December 1933. We know, however, that

from the moment Gramsci was arrested until the eve of his death Togliatti had

regularly asked for and received news, via Tatiana Schucht and Piero Sraffa, about the

physical and psychological state of his comrade. He had also actively endeavoured to

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 111

free him. In Moscow, Togliatti had followed the vicissitudes endured by Gramsci’s

family with an anxiety that is evident in a passage of a letter to Sraffa on 12 May 1937:

Giulia is still unwell, the children are fine, but I am worried about the eldest, Delio. He was

badly hit by the news, so much so that he is ill, feverish; he is, all things considered, extremely

sensitive. But he is growing up in an environment that is not good for him, and I don’t know

how to take him somewhere else. Let me know, please, what Antonio’s worries and wishes

were in this respect.94

Intense emotion, albeit overlain by his typical reserve, infused the article, in most

aspects wholly ‘political’, which Togliatti wrote about Gramsci’s death. In the brief

character sketch drawn there was a feeling of painful nostalgia for the habitual ties of

friendship that death had severed:

He emanated energy, serenity, optimism; he could impose on himself the strictest work

discipline, but he enjoyed every aspect of life […] He used the weapons of laughter and

mockery in equal measure to expose the conceit and duplicity of those who preached sermons

to the people in the interest of the ruling classes.95

The piece appeared in Lo Stato Operaio, entitled ‘Antonio Gramsci, Leader of the

Italian Working Class’. The title recalled that of the article written in 1927 soon after

Gramsci – then secretary of the party – had been arrested, ‘Antonio Gramsci, A Leader

of the Working Class’. By omitting the indefinite article and adding the adjective

(‘Italian’), the title signalled the fundamental thesis of its text: to present Gramsci as

the architect in the transformation of Italian socialism from a movement of exploited

classes fighting for their social emancipation to the force that would become the

driving engine of the whole Italian society’s renewal. It must be said that such a ‘place

of honour’ was not a foregone conclusion at the time, nor was the inclusion of Gramsci

in the gallery of ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroes’ of the communist movement. Of special

significance in this respect was a letter that Ercoli wrote to Dimitrov on 21 May 1937.

He commented on the possibility of transferring Gramsci’s ashes to Moscow:

a) the transfer would be desirable if special honours, as leader of the Italian proletariat, were

paid to comrade Gramsci, as it was done for comrade Ruthenberg [the secretary of the

American communist party whose ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall in 1927]; b) the

transfer wouldn’t be appropriate if comrade Gramsci’s ashes were merely entombed in a

Moscow cemetery as a matter of routine.96

Evidently, the political currents in Moscow were not right to confer the sort of

‘honour’ on Gramsci that Togliatti felt was his due, and he could only register his

opinion. It is also possible, however, that he wanted to leave his friend’s ashes in Italy.

Togliatti wished to claim for Gramsci a uniquely prominent role in the history and

thought of Italian culture, as well as in the history of the Italian workers’ party. To

claim the ground for the first part of this role, he portrayed him as the ‘first Marxist –

the first real Marxist, thorough and coherent’. To fulfil the second he stated forcefully

112 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

that ‘Gramsci was not the “intellectual”, “scholar”, “writer” that some of the

posthumous praise has led us to believe’; ‘above all Gramsci was and is a party man’.97

Togliatti’s argument developed along these two, entwining, planes. It was the first

stage of a political and cultural process aiming at the independent theoretical

legitimisation of PCI politics confined within a secure loyalty to the Bolshevik

tradition. According to what Togliatti wrote to Sraffa, he had lacked any ‘knowledge,

even approximate’, of Gramsci’s prison notebooks. That said, in urging Manuilsky on

11 May to intervene via Soviet diplomatic channels, he told him ‘it is of the outmost

importance that these notebooks reach us intact and as soon as possible.’98

Thus, Togliatti’s evident intention of using Gramsci’s thought to restore Marxism

in Italy was based on his writings of the decade between 1917 and 1926, and is notable

for the elements he extracted and highlighted from Gramsci’s work in these nine years.

Togliatti bestowed on Gramsci the merit of having understood, before anyone else in

Italy, ‘the international value of Lenin’s teaching’ and the Bolshevik revolution, and of

having, on the basis of this experience, brought forward ‘the idea of the proletarian

dictatorship as one of Marxism’s fundamental tenets’. Togliatti referred to the Ordine

nuovo movement and to factory councils. He modernised their lesson and claimed that

they had the merit of having already structured and correctly solved ‘the issue of the

driving forces of the Italian revolution and the peasants’ issue, as a corollary to the issue

of the proletarian dictatorship’.99

In a similar modernisation of Gramsci’s lesson, Togliatti praised ‘the intelligent

and brave tactic adopted by the PCI in the wake of Matteotti’s assassination’ when ‘the

crucial message of Gramsci’s action is the word ‘unity’; unity of the whole working

class, unity of peasants and workers, unity of North and South, unity of the people as a

whole.’100 But Togliatti appealed most explicitly to Gramsci’s analysis in support of the

party’s political line in the last section of the article:

Lately, having learned and reflected on the decisions of the International Seventh Congress,

his whole thought was focused on the search for concrete forms of the anti-fascist popular

front in Italy […] His fundamental idea was that after fifteen years of fascist dictatorship,

which had created disarray in the working class, it was impossible for the class struggle to

develop in the same way that the proletariat had adopted just after the war. A period of

struggle for democratic liberties was essential; and the working class must lead this struggle.101

Togliatti’s writing on Gramsci exhibits substantial distortions. For example, his

assertion of a connection between Gramsci’s analysis of democracy and the

‘conclusions of the seventh congress’ failed to acknowledge that Gramsci had argued

for the hypothesis of a transitional democratic phase well before 1935, Togliatti also

falsified the date when a divergence of ideas between Gramsci and Bordiga occurred,

moving their disagreement back to 1917 and depicting Bordiga as a ‘Trotskyite rogue’

and a ‘traitor’. Even less credible was his claim that ‘Stalin’s oeuvre’ had exerted a

profound influence on Gramsci’s writings between 1924 and 1926, and that in order

to read ‘the original’ the Sardinian communist even ‘studied the Russian language’.

Togliatti had no evidence for claiming that Gramsci had called Trotsky a ‘whore of

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 113

fascism’ from prison in 1930. The criticisms in the ‘Notebooks’ directed to ‘Leone

Davidovici’, while open to a negative interpretation, never included personal abuse.

Togliatti may have intended these propagandistic distortions to protect Gramsci’s

memory and his writings from the likely criticisms and even condemnation that his

position in 1926 and 1930–33 would have raised in the prevailing climate of

conformism in the international communist movement. It has to be remembered that

on 8 May 1937, Tasca published in Nuovo Avanti extracts from Gramsci’s letter of

October 1926 and, in particular, the excerpt where Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky,

although identified as responsible for the crisis in the Russian leadership, were also said

to ‘have powerfully contributed to our education on the revolution’. Togliatti was

unquestionably aware of the effect that such a statement would have had in Moscow,

where a campaign was raging against these ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’. A campaign to

which, as we shall see, he also contributed. But when in 1938 the PCI leadership

decided to draw up a document openly disavowing the ‘mistakes made toward

Trotskyism in 1926–27’, Togliatti discouraged the comrades against such public self-

criticism:

It is not advisable to keep talking about these events from the past in such a manner. It would

be a mistake to tie the future life of the party to this foundation. What happened cannot be

undone. But the future must not be tied to the past.102

In light of this statement – which was remarkably frank in view of the potential

problems with the more zealous custodians of Stalin’s orthodoxy – the view that the

distortions in his writings of 1937 had the objective of ‘saving the heritage of tradition

attached to Gramsci’s experience and improvement’103 gains credibility. Nevertheless,

they exemplified, above all, the atmosphere in Moscow in 1936–38.

THE MOSCOW TRIALS AND THE PURGES

Towards the middle of 1937, the wave of mass political terror reached its apogee in the

Soviet Union. In August 1936, Moscow held the first ‘show trial’ against Zinoviev,

Kamenev and other representatives of past oppositions. They were charged with

terrorist activities organised in collaboration with Trotsky and of having plotted to kill

the Soviet party leadership, including Stalin, in order to restore capitalism in the

USSR. Their confessions were the only ‘proof’ offered in evidence against them. But

the confessions also implicated – in an infernal chain – other oppositionists. The most

prominent were sentenced to death.

The year 1937 started with a new public trial against a ‘conspirators centre’, which

was alleged to have included ex-Trotskyists such as Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov and

other officials of the Heavy Industry Commission. Whereas Zinoviev and Kamenev

had been accused of being counter-revolutionaries, the accusations in this second show

trial centred on the crime of having betrayed the motherland. The accused were alleged

to have conspired, on Trotsky’s orders, with Germany and Japan, and the accused were

therefore condemned not only as terrorists and saboteurs, but also as conscious agents

of international fascism.

114 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Predictably, the only evidence was that supplied by prisoners’ confessions. The

verdict was the death penalty for thirteen of the accused and heavy detention sentences

for the remaining four. A month later, the CC of the Soviet party held a meeting

which marked the defeat of resistance against the wave of repression and an

intensification of the mass terror. Stalin himself had suggested the employment of ‘new

methods’, which now affected not only the leading ‘oppositionists’ but also local and

regional party cadres, intellectuals, the army, the Comintern apparatus and tens of

thousands of communists and citizens. Even whilst the proceedings of the CC were

taking place, Bukharin and Rykov were being arrested. It is estimated that 100 of the

140 members of the CC were arrested and ‘disposed of’ without trial. Similarly, it is

reckoned that over half the delegates attending the seventeenth party congress in

January 1934 disappeared during the wave of repression.

The Comintern press gave great prominence to the outcome of the trials and the

unbelievable confessions of the accused. From the beginning, with a perverted effort to

explain the dramatic events in the Soviet Union along the line ratified by the seventh

congress, it qualified its contribution to the Soviet’s misleading propaganda campaign

by insisting on ‘Trotskyism’ (a word that no longer designated a known historical

phenomenon, but rather everything that Stalin’s dictatorship attacked in order to

consolidate its power) as an ‘agency of fascism in the working class’. One of Togliatti’s

writings published in the Comintern review a few weeks before from the first Moscow

trial reflected this perversion.104 After denouncing the action of the ‘counter-

revolutionary Trotskyite sect’ as fascism, he concluded that ‘the working class will not

defeat its enemies if it allows agents sent by these enemies within its ranks.’

The article is an example, astonishing to us today, of what Ernst Fischer termed

‘the jargon of a delirious bureaucracy’, which affected the entire communist press,

without exception. It was a jargon belonging to an aberration which, according to

Fischer, had entered ‘like a prehistoric monster into a world that had hitherto looked

to Marx and Lenin, to reason, and rights of man’.105 This world was light years away

from the intellectual rigour of the ‘differentiated analysis’ of many of Togliatti’s

writings, including ‘On the Peculiarities of the Spanish Revolution’, produced in the

same weeks.

To what extent Ercoli really believed in what he was writing is not clear. We do

not know whether he corroborated out of cynical political opportunism, or because he

was pressurised. Many years later, in a soon to be renowned interview published in the

May–June 1956 issue of Nuovi Argomenti, Togliatti said:

The communist leaders had no reason to doubt the legality of the charges, above all because

they knew that the leaders of the old opposition groups (Trotskyites and the right), defeated at

a political level and amongst the masses, were not averse to continuing their fight using

terrorist means […] The fact that all the accused confessed occasioned surprise and discussions

amongst us, but nothing else […] About the first trials, which we mainly discussed because

the following trials were in the main not public, my opinion today is that both aspects were

present […] the attempts of the opposition to conspire against the regime and carry out

terrorist acts and also the employment of morally culpable illegal judicial methods.106

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 115

Though shrouded in reticence, this comment also reflected what must have been

Togliatti’s belief 20 years previously. This was a belief rooted in a very specific

historical and psychological context. The full, unconditional identification with the

Soviet party’s every choice regulated the behaviour of the international communist

movement. Moreover, at least since 1927, the accusation that many opposition groups

were agents of the counter-revolution had been a recurring motif. The trials of 1930–

31 had introduced the notion that enemies of Soviet power did not shy away from the

use of sabotage and terrorism, and this had been greatly strengthened by Kirov’s

assassination in 1934. Nor can we underestimate the tendency, reinforced by the

politics of ‘class against class’ but with older origins, to conflate the forces hostile to

‘Leninism’ (‘social fascism’ first, then ‘Hitlerite-Trotskyism’). Lastly, the persuasive

strength of Stalin’s theoretical analysis, articulated for the first time in 1933 and

repeated obsessively in 1936–38, no doubt had an influence: ‘the more we advance, the

more we succeed, the more the residue of the old, defeated exploiting classes will

become fierce […] the more they will make recourse to desperate fighting actions, the

last actions of those destined to die’.107

Although Togliatti’s political culture had been nourished in this breeding ground,

he had also developed some strong antibodies against its poison. It has been often

argued that he must have known of the systematic process of manufacturing false

evidence through ‘confessions’. After all, he occupied one of the highest positions in

the Comintern hierarchy and moved within the inner circle of Stalin’s collaborators.

But we also know that the Comintern apparatus was not informed about the

inquisitorial activities conducted by the NKVD. Moreover, an ‘inside’ knowledge of

Stalin’s power system might have made the idea more plausible that the only way to

topple such a system, founded on an iron and comprehensive control of every aspect of

society, as well as mass support, was through conspiracy and terrorism.

Togliatti must certainly have asked himself some questions, especially during the

massive repression that affected not only the Comintern apparatus but also the foreign

communists living in the Soviet Union. From the end of April 1937 until the summer,

many high-profile Comintern leaders and ex-leaders were arrested, for instance Knorin,

Piatnitsky and Kun. Cadres from nearly every communist party were subject from the

beginning of the ‘great purges’ to greater or lesser losses. Sometimes, as in the Italian

case, the losses were not leadership, but proletarian cadres who had emigrated to the

Soviet Union. Of those arrested, a few survived. Many were shot without trial; others

died in labour camps or prison.108

It is difficult to believe that in the face of this wave of repression, Togliatti’s beliefs

were not, at least in part, shaken, especially since the KPD, which was the

responsibility of his secretariat, was one of the worst hit. Ernst Fischer in his memoirs

reported a conversation with Togliatti in spring 1937. After making it clear that he

thought Moskvin, the NKVD man who controlled the Comintern’s ‘security’ on

behalf of Yezhov and Stalin, to be a ‘criminal’, Togliatti had added:

Everything has become an inextricable tangle where no one is comfortable any more. Stalin’s

enemies, certainly, Trotskyites, foreign powers’ agents. But we cannot explain what is

116 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

happening along these lines. There is more: ancient rivalries, unreasonable ambitions,

persecution mania real and fictional […] It’s a tragic, transitional period influenced by a series

of contributing circumstances, a dark cloud obscuring what we are aiming at […] If we return

to our countries, we must be clear from the beginning: the fight for socialism is a fight for

greater democracy. If we are not going to be the most coherent democrats, history will pass us

by.109

Fischer’s recollection may have been influenced by Togliatti’s behaviour in the

subsequent years. But it nevertheless provides a precious snapshot of Togliatti’s doubts,

disheartenment, and efforts to overcome his forebodings.

The Comintern apparatus apparently acquiesced, passively and silently, the

repressive wave. Its press did not give any information about the arrests, with only

some obscure references to the infiltration of agents provocateurs in the communist

ranks indicating the events taking place. Some leaders in the presidium and secretariat

did their best on several occasions to defend against the NKVD’s arbitrary actions.

Dimitrov sent letters to the heads of the party, NKVD executive and the prosecutors

requesting that many of those arrested from the Comintern be freed.110

How did Togliatti conduct himself in this context? There are few direct accounts

of his behaviour during this tragic period. In addition to the role he played in

disbanding the Polish party, we have the account of Herbert Wehner, who portrayed

him as a rather humble inquisitor. In a meeting he chaired, Ercoli challenged a

German communist, Hermann Schubert, about a conversation – of which he knew

through an informant’s letter – in which the unfortunate man had compared Lenin to

Trotsky. When Schubert tried to explain the context and meaning of his words,

Togliatti interrupted him, asking him to answer only whether the reported facts were

true. Shortly afterwards, Schubert was arrested.111 But Margarethe Buber Neumann,

the widow of Heinz Neumann, another German communist who disappeared during

the ‘great purges’, recalled that in the summer of 1936: ‘Togliatti pressurised the

Comintern cadres office, until he was given the exit visas he had requested’ for Willi

Münzenberg and his wife, who were in imminent danger of being arrested. Allegedly,

Togliatti convinced Stalin that Münzenberg, the tireless organiser of Workers’ Aid and

the peace congresses, was the best man to organise, in France, the despatch of weapons

and volunteers to Spain on behalf of the Comintern.112 In addition, Jules Humbert-

Droz had no doubts that in the summer of 1938 Togliatti intervened in his favour,

saving him from arrest and probably much worse.113

In both cases, Togliatti intervened to help comrades against whom unjust

suspicions were mounting, but who had not yet been arrested. Even before his

departure from Moscow in June 1937, he attempted to free comrades already in the

hands of the NKVD, especially the dozens of Italian exiles arrested. The historian

Friedrich Firsov found at least four cases in which Dimitrov was pressurised by

Togliatti to intervene in defence of Italian communists arrested by the NKVD, albeit

without success.114 Nevertheless, although he probably had some serious doubts about

the guilt of those accused, Togliatti concealed most of them. It was, again, Ernst

Fischer who advanced the hypothesis that – like all other Comintern leaders – Togliatti

must have considered the possibility that the NKVD was gathering material to

THE SEASON OF THE POPULAR FRONT 117

‘liquidate’ him. It was not a far fetched hypothesis.115 Firsov calculated that ‘no

Comintern leader was safe from Stalin’ at this time, and recalled that in the de-

Stalinisation years, during the trial of one of Yezhov’s aids, the investigating judge

(Lanfang), clarified that there had been ‘material prepared, though not circulated, on

Dimitrov, Pieck, Florin, Pollitt, Ulbricht, Marty, Kuusinen and other leaders’.116 To

this list, Krimov – Dimitrov’s main reporter on Chinese issues, who was arrested in

1938 and then rehabilitated in 1954 just in time to witness the trial of his accuser –

added Togliatti’s name.117 For his part, Togliatti – when asked by the communist

writer and journalist Davide Lajolo in 1956 whether it had been possible to oppose the

string of abuses and repressions – replied: ‘If I had tried to do it they would have killed

me. History will judge if it would have been better to die or live in order to save the

party.’118

Behind the portentousness of these words, which hardly reflect Togliatti’s

restrained manner during the de-Stalinisation years, their actual content probably

reflected his reasoning in 1936–38. There was an episode, not entirely clear to this day,

which confirms this supposition. In March 1938, Paolo Robotti was arrested in

Moscow. He had been the leader of the Italian section of the then disbanded exiles’

club, and was married to one of Togliatti’s sisters-in-law, Elena Montagnana. Robotti

was in jail for eighteen months and underwent ‘heavy interrogations’ to make him

confess ‘the anti-revolutionary duties he had been assigned by the leaders of his party’.

The target might have been Togliatti, who was in Spain at the time, but not necessarily

beyond the NKVD’s reach. In Togliatti’s case, as for Dimitrov, it is possible that false

evidence was gathered not in order to prepare a trial, but rather to blackmail him.

Robotti endured torture and was freed in September 1939. Togliatti met him soon

after he returned to Moscow in the spring of 1940. Robotti recalled:

I told him some details of my ‘adventure’ while he listened pensively. I understood that some

of the things I was telling him, he had surmised from afar. ‘As far as I could,’ he said, ‘I have

contained and prevented certain things, even though I was far away.’119

In fact, Togliatti had more than ‘surmised’. In the Comintern archives there is,

signed by Ercoli, a ‘character note’ on Robotti written in July 1939, when the

unfortunate man was still in prison. The note is two pages, written in dispassionate,

formal prose, reporting Robotti’s biographical details and his merits as a communist.

But it also tells of his ‘tendency to strain pointlessly the relationships with his

comrades’. Robotti had, indeed, not been light handed with the exiles’ club.120 It was

probably true that all Togliatti could do was ‘contain’ rather than ‘stop’. But we cannot

forget that, doubts and turmoil notwithstanding, there was on his part – as Spriano

noted – ‘not only agreement but initiative in the fight against Trotskyism’.121 His

duties as leader of the agit-prop section of the Comintern placed him on the ‘front

line’. In December 1935, well before the trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev, Ercoli

had submitted to the secretariat a resolution ‘on the fight against Trotskyism in

capitalist countries’. It exposed as especially dangerous the influence of Trotskyism

‘amongst those social democratic elements and organisations leaning towards united

118 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

front revolutionary politics’ and urged the need to fight openly against ‘any inclination

of corrupt liberalism towards Trotskyism’s viewpoint’.122

Togliatti continued to adhere to this political line with regard to the PCI. He did

not spare any effort in warning the Paris centre to be extremely vigilant and

uncompromising towards manifestations of Trotskyism. His warnings became more

and more frequent especially at the beginning of 1937, during the time of the trial

against the ‘parallel centre’. In conversations with Bibolotti, he complained that Lo

Stato Operaio was not conducting a strategic campaign against Trotskyism and urged

him ‘to liquidate the tendencies that believe Trotskyism is a wing of the workers’

movement’. ‘It is an agent of fascism. There are recent proofs of its links with

Germany, with Gestapo and also Japan.’ In a note sent to the PB on 14 February, he

stressed the need to ‘Italianise the fight against Trotskyism’, directing it ‘against

Bordiga and his kind’.123 This reference to Bordiga was more the result of Togliatti’s

desire for an easy target than a serious evaluation of the negligible influence of the

Neapolitan leader. The repeated suggestions of their weakness in the fight against

Trotskyism subsequently became a nagging problem for the PCI leadership in Paris,

who sought to comply with the instructions coming from Moscow and Togliatti about

the need for ‘revolutionary alertness’. Their efforts redoubled after Giuseppe Berti, sent

to Paris by the Comintern in the spring of 1937 to ‘inspect’ the PCI leadership, carried

out his mandate with grim inquisitorial zeal.

Despite their desperate attempts, the PCI CC was disbanded in the summer of

1938. Togliatti’s role, according to the current documentation, is not clear. The

impression, however, is that he contributed to the start of the process which then

became out of hand, and that he tried belatedly to repair the damage caused.124 In fact,

from mid-1937, Togliatti had less time to devote to the PCI. His influence – if not his

authority – consequently lessened. The front where Ercoli was now called to act was

Spain, steeped in the blood of a civil war.

6

EUROPE IN THE STORM

SPAIN: THE TEST BED OF ‘NEW DEMOCRACY’

By mid-June 1937, Togliatti was back in France. The ECCI secretariat had instructed

him to organise a meeting of delegations from the two Internationals for 21 June in

Annemasse, Savoy. The meeting was called to prepare the ground for collaboration

towards the ‘moral and material’ aid to Republican Spain. It was an important

assignment, especially from a political perspective expressed concisely as: ‘everything

must be done to avoid a break, to obtain a positive outcome, even if it is a partial one.’1

The resulting talks were not productive, as the Socialist International was paralysed

by internal conflict. From the final meeting in Paris on 9 July, only a cautious joint

declaration emerged. It expressed ‘general agreement on the actions to take in support

of Republican Spain’.2 However, no joint common actions followed. In his report of 8

July to Moscow, Togliatti stressed that ‘new steps forward can only be the result of

continuous, persistent action, carried out with method and intelligence, consolidating

the little that has been achieved so as not to provide excuses for the reactionary

elements who will do everything in their power to minimise what has been achieved

still further.’3

Togliatti’s assignment in France was evidently intended to be short term. He had

written to Moscow in July that ‘if I don’t receive additional instructions from you, I

will return as planned.’ But ‘additional instructions’ arrived. He had to reach Spain

and work there, in Valencia, alongside the leadership of the Spanish Communist Party

(PCE). This, too, was supposed to be a short mission of limited scope. It became,

almost without warning, an all-encompassing commitment on the ‘hottest’ front of the

international communist movement.

Being a ‘professional revolutionary’, Togliatti agreed to go without objections, even

though it meant that his work and everyday life were totally disrupted. His wife Rita

joined him in Spain and remained by his side until the end of the assignment. His son

Aldo, twelve years old at the time, stayed in the Soviet Union in the care of the

Ivanovo Institute, where many children lived in the same situation. The separation

from his parents was a serious trauma, and left indelible marks on his life. For two

years, he waited anxiously for their return. His short but frequent letters to ‘chers

maman et papa’ written in a shaky French, mixed scanty information about his

communal life and repeated reassurances (‘je me porte bien’) with requests for exotic

stamps and adventure books. Requests that were, unfailingly, and one wonders how,

met. Only occasionally (‘viens plus vite si tu peux’), the letters revealed the anguish of

separation. These squared sheets of paper, covered by a child’s handwriting reached

120 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

their destination via the International’s couriers. They were touching, emblematic

testimony; similar to the tragedies unfolding in many revolutionaries’ families.4

The ECCI decision to send Togliatti to Spain was probably motivated by the less

than satisfying relationship between the several Comintern ‘advisers’ in Spain

(Codovilla, Gerö, Dahlem, Stepanov) and the PCE’s leadership at a moment when the

PCE had gained a greater political influence in the Spanish republican government,

and also within the management of the military operations. Of all those in the

Comintern leadership, Togliatti was the best placed to unravel the complex knot of the

Spanish situation. More than anybody else, he had systematically studied and acquired

knowledge of Spanish conditions.5 His interest, as we have seen, had a long history.

Since 1934 his analysis and research had significantly influenced the Comintern line

on Spain. In November 1934, in the wake of the Asturias’ insurrection, his main

concern had been to reassert that the situation was ripe for the socialist revolution in

Spain and that its failure was due to the ‘betrayal’ of the anarchists and the incoherence

of the socialists.

However, a few months later, on the eve of the seventh world congress, he had

instead reached the conclusion that ‘in its present stage the Spanish revolution still had

the characteristics of a bourgeois-democratic revolution’.6 This fresh analysis

presupposed a backwardness in social and economic relations that Spain had partly

overcome in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it met the political need to start ‘a vast anti-

fascist front’ that hinged on the alliance between working class and peasants. It was an

attempt to adapt the Leninist framework of 1905, to entrust to this alliance the

realisation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution as a step on the way towards a

socialist revolution within an historical context dominated by the threat of fascism.

The popular front coalition’s victory in February 1936 and the civil war did not

change Togliatti’s analysis. He wrote in October 1936:

Spain is not ready yet for the Socialist revolution and every attempt to put it on the agenda

would only result in the splintering of the united front in defence of the republic, which

would only benefit the fascists.7

This position was clearly in line with Soviet foreign policy, which – at the time

Togliatti’s article was published – was still dominated by the hope that the ‘non-

intervention’ pact put forward by the French government would be achieved.

Nonetheless, it also expressed a real awareness of the difficulties of the war. Above all, it

retained the balance between the need to develop a revolutionary process and the

obligation to avoid alienating the support for the republic by the country’s democratic

bourgeoisie, as well as the favourable neutrality of the non-fascist powers abroad.

The effort to offer a theoretical justification for this difficult conciliatory line was

clearly expressed in the Comintern secretariat’s resolution of 19 September. It was

reinforced in the address delivered by Dimitrov during the preceding discussion, which

Togliatti probably attended. The Bulgarian leader insisted that ‘in the present

transitional phase of the international relations, the issue of the bourgeois-democratic

state cannot be tackled as before.’ He identified the objective of the Spanish people’s

EUROPE IN THE STORM 121

fight as being ‘a specific kind of state with an authentic popular democracy: not […] a

Soviet state, but an anti-fascist State leaning to the left, with which those bourgeoisie,

who are truly of the left, will collaborate’.8

It fell to Togliatti to articulate these ideas more systematically in an article that

appeared in the Comintern press towards the end of October 1936, and was soon

translated into several languages, becoming a semi-official expression of the communist

position. Compared to the political line of the seventh world congress, and to his own

position expressed in previous articles on Spain, it was a significant development.

Togliatti stressed again that the fight of the Spanish people had the characteristics of a

‘national revolutionary war’; the objective of achieving a ‘bourgeois-democratic

revolution’, which would solve the land reform issue and eliminate all remnants of

feudalism, was accompanied by an awareness that the working class had a more

important role in this process:

The democratic republic that is taking shape in Spain does not resemble the usual bourgeois-

democratic republic. It is formed in the fire of a civil war where the working class has a

leading role […] The essential characteristic of this new democratic republic is that fascism,

which has risen against the people, is crushed by the armed people. As a consequence there is

no place, in this republic, for this enemy of the people.9

The essential characteristic of this ‘democracy of a new kind’ was that it destroyed

‘the basic foundations of fascism’. Moreover, the confiscation of the land and the

activities of those who supported the rebels, along with the growing ‘regulation of the

country’s overall economic life’, were ‘all prerequisites for its further development’.

The originality of the contents of this ‘model’ could only have been assessed if it had

survived. The defeat of the republic made this impossible. Still, Togliatti’s writing

represented an attempt to overcome the sharp divide between the defence of

democracy and the struggle for socialism, which the seventh world congress had not

bridged. However, alongside his interpretation of the Spanish revolution, another

continued to coexist which met more closely the interests of Soviet foreign policy in its

aim of avoiding compromising its alliance with the Western powers. This second

interpretation was advanced authoritatively by Stalin himself. It framed the whole

experience within the boundaries of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ phase of the

revolution.10 As the military situation became more serious, and as the workings of the

republic’s democratic life failed to function, Togliatti himself embraced this more

restrictive interpretation.

THE INHERENT WEAKNESSES OF THE REPUBLICAN FRONT

‘Alfredo’ – Togliatti’s nom de guerre in Spain – quickly assessed the situation after

arriving in Valencia on 14 July 1937.11 The outcome of the civil war was not yet

determined, but its course did not seem favourable to the republic. The republican

government, now based in Valencia, controlled about a third of the national territory.

However, it was divided by deep internal rivalries and the mutual suspicions of the

forces that supported it. Juan Negrin, the socialist who replaced Largo Caballero as

122 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

president of the council (Caballero was compelled to resign following the May revolt in

Barcelona), was co-ordinating the military operations more energetically, but his

authority was disputed by the Caballerites and the anarchists. The PCE, which had

contributed to Caballero’s enforced departure and considered it a success for its

political line, gained political influence in the government and energetically supported

Negrin. But its unscrupulous way of taking over power positions by placing its own

men in strategic military and state positions, and its obvious will to obliterate the

extreme left wing in the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of

Marxist Unity; POUM) – comparing it to a ‘fascist fifth column’ – raised strong

concerns among the government’s other supporters.

The influence that a large number of Comintern advisers were exercising on the

republican government’s politics was still, however, crucial. Togliatti alerted Moscow

to his concerns, describing the advisers’ activities in a letter to Dimitrov and Manuilsky

of 15 September 1937:

It has become my firm belief that it is necessary to radically change the working methods of

your ‘advisers’ over here […] It is necessary […] 1) that your ‘advisers’ don’t confuse the

Spanish comrades by pushing them down the wrong path, both with the fabrication of

makeshift and wrong theories, and a misplaced political anxiety that together with the Spanish

comrades’ anxiety will bit by bit put the party’s tactic out of synch […] 2) that your advisers

stop seeing themselves as the ‘owners’ of the party and the Spanish comrades as good for

nothing, they have to stop taking the Spanish comrades’ places with the excuse that they can

act ‘more quickly’ or ‘more effectively’, etc.12

One of the objectives of Togliatti’s assignment was to resolve this situation. His

mandate did not have specific boundaries and he had considerable personal authority

that flowed directly from the ECCI secretariat. But, in the beginning, he confronted

many obstacles, and his wishes were not always granted. For instance, both Codovilla

and André Marty (a member of the ECCI secretariat and, from October 1936,

commander in-chief of the International Brigades) were called back to Moscow for a

short time, only to return to Spain against Togliatti’s will.

Togliatti attended regularly the meetings of the highest political organs of the

PCE.13 His working style differed considerably from that of the ‘advisers’. His main

concern was to see the PCE’s leaders mature without stifling their initiative. Santiago

Carrillo, who was then the leader of the youth federation, vividly described Togliatti’s

attitude:

I remember […] my first meetings at the Politburo […] In my mind’s eye I can see Togliatti

do his crosswords whilst the discussion is developing. He was always doing something else.

One could get the impression that he wasn’t listening, that he was not following the thread of

the argument, but suddenly, he would raise his head and speak. However, he never imposed

his view; if he had something to say he would support someone else’s argument, develop it so

that his contributions were always tactful. If there were difficult decisions to make it was his

habit to say: ‘You should decide.’14

EUROPE IN THE STORM 123

During the 20 months that he spent in Spain, Togliatti was almost completely

absorbed by his duty as adviser. 15 The main evidence of his activities are the telegrams,

partly explicit and partly coded which he regularly sent to Moscow and the reports that

he wrote for Manuilsky and Dimitrov between August 1937 and May 1939.16 This

body of evidence shows that in the Comintern’s often contradictory political picture,

Togliatti more than anybody else wanted to ‘avoid any unnecessary disagreement that

could weaken the united front against the enemy, to appease any premature conflict

within the popular front, to keep in check the revolutionary eagerness, the personal

attacks, the sectarian and confrontational attitudes towards the different partners in the

government.’17

At least ten of the reports written by Togliatti were extensive; they included

detailed information on military logistics and political analyses of great breadth. The

last and longest was compiled in Moscow after the war and included an assessment all

the more interesting because it rehearsed and confirmed most of the analyses made ‘in

the heat of the moment’ during previous months. It opened with his strong affirmation

of the ‘soundness of the popular front policy’ that had ‘allowed the Spanish people to

counter the fascist offensive for 32 months’. The final defeat, in Togliatti’s view, was

due to the international situation. The French and British policy of ‘non-intervention’

aided the fascist forces that had intervened to support Franco. But, he further added, ‘a

more efficient and protracted resistance, and more substantial successes would have

been possible, even in this unfavourable situation, if it had not been for a series of

inner weaknesses that contributed to lessen, and in the end break, the resistance of the

people, their army and their government’.

Togliatti dedicated much energy to analysing these ‘inner weaknesses’. We should,

therefore, examine them closely from the final assessment he made to the criticisms

that were present in his earlier reports. The first aspect concerned the idea of a

‘democratic and anti-fascist revolution’, as expressed in October 1936. In his final

review of 21 May 1939, he wrote:

During the war there was never in existence a genuine democratic regime in the Spanish

democratic republic and in the political life of the country. On the contrary, the parties’ and

trade union leaders have always tried to oppose the active and consistent participation on a

democratic basis of the grassroots in the management of the political life […] Therefore we

have little by little fallen back into the old systems of reactionary organisation of Spanish

political life […]

Such severe criticism had already emerged in a report written on 30 August 1937.

‘What is most striking is the absence of those democratic systems that would allow the

participation of large masses in the life and politics of the country.’ In this, Togliatti

did not spare the PCE, which ‘has not realised that one of the fundamental causes of

the republic’s weakness is the absence of democracy’, but had focused ‘instead on the

fight, vitally necessary, to seize the centres of powers, especially the army’s, more than

on the strengthening and systematic organising of the relations between the party and

the grassroots’.

124 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

An additional point, made in the report of 21 May 1937, was the division of the

forces which had coalesced in the popular front. The unity of the various parties and

organisations was in many respects ‘formal, superficial. It did not develop into a frank

recognition of the need for collaboration with all the anti-fascist forces in order to

shape a common programme […] to organise the resistance and defeat the enemy’. In

conclusion, unity became merely ‘a slogan that everybody waved around, whilst in the

country fierce discord reigned and, consequently, unprecedented chaos’.

Togliatti had formulated this analysis quite quickly. The report of 30 August 1937

had already identified ‘an ever increasing tendency to create an opposition bloc against

the new government, that is at the same time also an enemy bloc against the

communist party’, and which constituted mainly anarchists and ‘Caballeristas’.

Togliatti warned of the danger of its activities. The bloc could rely on the support of

the trade union centres, and also fed on the exhaustion of a civil population who had

endured a great deal. But it would appeal to ‘the wavering sectors of the petty

bourgeoisie and relics of the bourgeoisie’. This was a pitfall which Togliatti saw

looming alongside ‘the issue that the war should come to an end through a

compromise with the enemy’. On 25 November 1937, he wrote that it was ‘the central

issue of the entire Spanish politics, the touchstone of every party, organisations,

politicians and so on and, in some respect also, of our party’s, a test of its political skill

and the strength of its positions and links with the grassroots’.

As the war was coming to its resolution, Togliatti’s reports revealed the growing

isolation of the PCE. This was the result of the widespread and aggressive proselytising

that the party had carried out in the first months of the conflict, its systematic attempt

at ‘occupying power positions’, exacerbated by the scarcely concealed resistance with

which its proposals were met by the government and which in the end mirrored the

fragility of the popular front’s grassroots. In this context, the energies of the party were

employed in a nerve-wracking struggle against the supporters of peaceful compromise

and in a frantic search for allies who later proved to be wavering and fickle. Togliatti

was, himself, partially enmeshed in this logic, but his analysis of the political powers on

the ground and their mutual relationships preserved a remarkable clarity. The PCE’s

political activity continued to be the object of his measured but resolute criticism. In

the report of 30 August 1937, he paid a generous tribute to its merits: ‘It has become

an important party that unquestionably includes within its ranks the best kinds of

people. It is full of fighting spirit, enthusiasm and initiative. Its authority has grown

enormously.’ But he also noted that ‘the success achieved in defeating Largo

Caballero’s government has given vertigo to some of the comrades’ and ‘encouraged

the idea that the party could put forward the issue of its hegemony and fight openly for

it in the government and the country’. This was an issue that Alfredo believed to be

premature since, as he repeated on 21 May 1939, ‘although [the party] has developed

considerably during the war, it has not been able to gain a significant influence in two

major working-class centres, Barcelona and Madrid.’ In a letter of 12 January 1939

from Barcelona, probably addressed to Pedro Checa, he expressed his objection to the

trend expressed in the last report from Santiago Carillo, attributing the party’s isolation

to persecutions and its being deprived of political offices. He observed:

EUROPE IN THE STORM 125

There is no doubt that the party has many enemies. There are many enemies of unity, driven

partly by personal, group interests etc., and partly directly by fascism through a thousand

different channels […] But equally there is no doubt that the large mass of people wants to

win the war and therefore wants unity. A large section – we can safely say the majority – ofthe party leadership and the other non-communist organisations also want to win the war.18

Given this situation, Togliatti identified the underlying cause of the PCE’s

isolation as being its inability to present a perspective to the masses that was new and

different from the other parties. ‘The defence of the party’s “position”’, he warned,

‘can never be divorced from the defence of a number of tangible decisions and

solutions, that come from the comprehension of the needs of the popular masses.’ By

way of example, he criticised the government’s suppression of small peasant trading

and the excessive support it provided for the farming colectividades (collectives).

There is no doubt that in many cases the farmer, who is now a collectivist, still wants the land

and wants to be a smallholder […] But no one is helping him to leave the colectividad, no one

reminds him that the colectividad is voluntary. Voluntary means that one can leave it and be

given the land to which he is entitled and a title deed. Why are the farmers not given the title

deeds to which they are entitled? This suggests to them that the land division which has been

carried out is temporary and provisional, and that the republican system is provisional.19

Another crucial issue in Togliatti’s final assessment of the civil war was the legacy

of the historic division of the Spanish workers’ movement, ‘not merely in two but three

factions (communists, social democrats and anarchists)’. He immediately identified the

role of the anarchists as key to the situation. It was critically important that the PCE

maintain good relations with the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) in order to

push for synthesis and the ‘organic union’ of a single party of the proletariat, albeit

fully ‘Bolshevised’. The party had to ‘avoid the judging of considering the cadres of the

historical old “left” all by the same yardstick’ (using the equation ‘Caballerites =

counterrevolutionary = enemy of the party’). In addition, Togliatti was even more

concerned with ‘finding in a link with the healthy side of the CNT [Confederación

Nacional del Trabajo] the backing for the fight against surrenderers and traitors’.20

Of interest here is the difference not only of tone but also of content in his

assessment of the POUM. For Andrés Nin’s small party, which had been critical of

popular front politics from the outset, the alleged accusation of ‘Trotskyism’ was

compounded and also confirmed by its role in the events that unfolded in Barcelona in

May 1937. Togliatti’s condemnation was beyond reproach. There was further criticism

of the ‘scandalous’ results of the trial conducted by the government against the POUM

leaders, a trial that had ended ‘in no serious conviction’ (when, in fact, sentences of up

to fifteen years were meted out). Conversely, there was a constant appeal for united

action with the anarchists in recognition of the notable grassroots’ support they

retained. If, in the article of October 1936 discussing workers’ organisations, Ercoli

had still clung to the idea that the existence of the CNT was a symptom of the

economic backwardness of the country and regional particularism, first-hand

knowledge of Spain moved him to modify, at least in part, his opinion and make every

126 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

effort to ensure ‘that the PCE adopt a positive attitude towards the anarchists’,

targeting the political differences within its leadership in order to win over the CNT’s

proletarian base.

This was not, in fact, another proposal for a ‘united front from below’. In fact,

Togliatti pointed out that ‘relationships at the base are getting better, but slowly’.21

The aim was to involve the anarchists in the government of the country. This was

actually achieved after Prieto’s resignation from the war cabinet and the formation of

Negrin’s second government in April 1938.

Togliatti played a considerable role in this crucial phase. The situation in the

Republic was again serious. After retaking Teruel, the rebels had started an offensive

across the entire eastern front and managed to divide the republic’s territory in two,

before halting on the Mediterranean. Barcelona, the seat of the republican government,

was the target of a series of heavy bombardments aimed at wearing down the civil

population’s morale. Loss of morale and the willingness to negotiate a peace

compromise, which Franco’s supporters were resolutely set against, were both

increasing inside the government’s officials; for example, the defence minister, the

socialist Indalecio Prieto, and the Republic’s president, Manuel Azaña.

Against this background, surprisingly and unexpectedly, Stalin’s instructions

arrived on 17 February to push the PCE out of the government. Together with the

instruction to keep the PCF out of the new popular front government, led in France by

Léon Blum, this diktat was intended to appease British and French public opinion.22 In

a report, probably prepared soon after, Togliatti did not seek to hide the seriousness of

the situation. Rather, he stated that for the PCE to leave the government would have

been an admission of defeat.23 The important telegram which he sent to Moscow on

March 18 read: ‘The government is practically paralysed by the behaviour of Azaña

and the Republican party’s ministers who are openly talking of a compromise with

Franco,’ It then described the party’s political line: a) fight in every possible way the

compromise proposals; b) ask the government to declare martial law in the country; c)

maintain a ‘direct connection with Negrin and the socialist party so as to frustrate the

attempts of the supporters of a compromise’, and bring under Negrin’s control the war

ministry whilst at the same time giving to a communist the post of army commissar-in-

chief. He stressed the need of ‘strengthening the cohesion of the popular front by

deploying every means to win the republicans over to an active war policy’, and insisted

on the urgency to gain the CNT’s support with the view to having one of its

representatives in the government as minister without portfolio. Togliatti even

suggested forming ‘a new government with representatives of the communist party and

trade union organisations, in case of extreme need and open betrayal’. The telegram

ended with: ‘Answer quickly if you agree with this line, which has been set by the CC

of the party and which in my opinion, corresponds to the situation.’24

In substance, Alfredo was pressing for the party’s total involvement in Negrin’s

government and, moreover, for a strengthening of its role, so that a more energetic lead

in the war would take place. The line he proposed found, at least partially, practical

application. On 20 March, the Comintern revoked its directives. In April, there was a

government reshuffle. Prieto was removed and Negrin acquired the war portfolio. A

EUROPE IN THE STORM 127

CNT representative entered government. The communists did not leave the

government, although they were reduced to one minister, Vicente Uribe, instead of

two. The communist minister for education, Jesus Hernandez, became army

commissar of the central area.

In order to be fully implemented, Alfredo’s proposals would have needed more

substantial support from the Soviets. But the international context, dominated by the

echoes of the Anschluss (12 March), led the Soviet Union to be cautious about

continuing its commitment to republican Spain. Even the reopening of the Franco-

Spanish border (through which the Soviet supply line to the loyalists ran) approved by

Blum’s second government, had a short life. It was closed by the Daladier government

in June. Under these conditions, Moscow was more inclined to delay the defeat of the

Republic, deemed inevitable from a military point of view, than to deploy its resources

in seizing a victory in which it had stopped believing. Republican Spain’s only hope of

recovery lay in the option of absorbing the civil war into a European war, an option

that in 1938 could not be excluded.

WHY HOLD OUT TO THE END?

In the second half of August, the republican army launched an offensive at the river

Ebro. Meanwhile, the Sudeten crisis was looming between Hitler and Czechoslovakia,

and a worsening of relations between France, Great Britain and Germany was

probable. In the hope of reducing the Soviet Union’s international isolation in the

impending crisis, and in order to avoid handing Spain over to Hitler and Mussolini,

the Comintern – evidently with Stalin’s consent – made an important decision. After a

series of meetings in Moscow with the Spanish envoys (at which Ercoli was present), it

ordered an end to International Brigades’ active combat. A resolution of the ECCI

secretariat on 3 September 1938, to which Togliatti made a considerable contribution,

stated that there was the seed in Franco’s camp ‘of a deep political division [between]

the agents of the foreign invaders and the good Spaniards who refuse to countenance

the looting of their own country by the Italian and German fascists’. Therefore, it was

possible to achieve ‘a loyal agreement amongst all Spanish patriots, on condition that

the foreign occupation troops are expelled from Spain’.25

It is difficult to say whether Alfredo actually believed in this possibility, although,

in many ways, it was similar to the scheme of ‘national reconciliation’ that the PCI had

put forward in 1936. Perhaps, more importantly, it conformed to the tactics of the

Soviet diplomacy. However, the 3 September resolution turned out to be fruitless. The

capitulation of the Western powers to the fascists at Munich in August damaged

seriously, if not yet fatally, the chances of the Republic and accelerated the process of

internal disintegration of the popular front. The failure in the autumn of the

republican counter-offensive on the Ebro led to a huge offensive from Franco’s army,

which culminated in the occupation of Catalonia in January 1939.

Togliatti, who in November 1937 had followed the emergency relocation of the

government and PCE leadership, left Valencia for Barcelona. He remained on the last

free corner of Catalan ground until February 1939. There he carried out, with his

usual sangfroid, his ‘practical’ duties. He organised road patrols, set up a radio station,

128 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

and published a newspaper. All his efforts were aimed at containing the demoralisation

and disillusion which were erupting behind the republican lines. He also employed

‘resolute, draconian, decisive disciplinary measures’ in order to strengthen the role of

the communist party. On 28 January, after the capitulation of Barcelona he sent the

following telegram to Moscow:

After having fought with every means to correct the errors, defects, and acts of betrayal of the

many government bodies, and also faced with the general disheartenment that is threatening

to become a catastrophe, we have managed to win for the party the direct control of the last

line and the greatest effort of resistance. We demand [of Negrin] a free hand in this work. We

are positive that he will let us act and that he will help.

On 2 February, he told the ECCI secretariat again that a ‘prolonged resistance,

lasting until the stabilisation of a front on Catalan territory’ was possible ‘on condition

of being able to restore order and discipline’. But, on 8 February, Catalonia was lost.

The following day, Togliatti crossed the border and reached Toulouse. On 16

February, he flew back to Madrid which, with south-eastern provinces and the

Mediterranean coast between Valencia and Almeria, represented the last bastion of

republican resistance.

In the last three months of the war, it became clear that Alfredo was manoeuvring

to prevent the adoption of an all-out resistance line, which would lead the communists

into sterile isolation. Support for this line was not lacking and found expression in the

special conference of the Madrid branch of the PCE on 9–10 February. Since Togliatti

had not yet returned from Toulouse, Stepanov took the opportunity to carry a very

harsh line aimed at divesting the Negrin government of its authority, effectively ceding

its powers to a war council controlled by the PCE.26

We know from Stepanov’s account that Togliatti later reproached the PCE for

having presented itself too much as the war party and for not having developed the

case for peace when it had become an important issue for the masses who supported

the Republic.27 It was a complex issue. It was a question of finding a delicate balance

which would not tip over into a compromise with those who wanted ‘to give in’, but

would at the same time give the party the opportunity of recovery without having to

start from scratch.

With Alfredo’s return to Spain, these issues were temporarily settled. But on 27

February, the governments of Paris and London made their intentions clear by

granting diplomatic recognition to Franco’s government. Amongst the republicans,

momentum was building to break the alliance with the communists. On the same day,

Togliatti wired Moscow to say that ‘an army coup by some commander-in-chief was

probable’. Naming Colonel Casado Matallana he asked:

If this is the case, or in order to prevent it, do you think it possible that David [a code name

for the party] could take control by seizing all positions of power and also the direction of the

war, albeit with the danger of almost total political isolation, of reduced power of resistance

and with the danger of losing the leadership of the cadres?

EUROPE IN THE STORM 129

In the report written on 21 May 1939, he recalled being ‘induced to advise the

party against taking this path’ not only to avoid becoming ‘responsible for breaking up

the popular front with the use of arms’ but above all ‘because the masses, confused and

wishing only for peace, would not have followed us and also the army led by the

communists would not have given us support with the necessary energy and decision’.

The night between 5 and 6 March 1939, Togliatti’s fears came true. Colonel

Casado and General Miaja carried out a coup d’état, toppling the Negrin government

and forming a defence junta without PCE representatives. Its intention was to bargain

for an ‘honourable’ surrender. Alfredo showed extraordinary courage at this time.

News of the ‘defeatist revolt’ reached him in El Palmar, near Murcia, where he had

moved along with the PCE executive. The majority of the Spanish executive then flew

to safety, while Togliatti, Pedro Checa and a secretary of the united youth

organisation, Fernando Claudin, decided to remain ‘both to attempt a counter-

offensive and as a last resort to organise the safe escape of the more important local

cadres’.28 They were arrested by forces loyal to Casado, detained for a few hours, and

then released. They reached Albacete, where, on 9 March, Togliatti and Checa drew

up a document which they authorised as a statement from the PCE PB.29 Their main

concern was ‘to gain a few days’. In the report that Alfredo sent to Moscow on 12

March, he explained that the aim was to ‘achieve the reorganisation of the republican

junta, the end of the anti-communist campaign, the return of the p.[arty] to a period

of intense legal work, the rebuilding of the popular front, etc., etc.’ In fact, the

objective was perhaps more modest: a resistance of a further few months or at least a

few weeks would allow, irrespective of possible changes in the international situation,

the smooth evacuation of those fighters who were most vulnerable to the risk of

reprisal. For this reason, Togliatti remained in Spain until the very last minute. This is

how he recalled his eventful departure:

We found out that on the hills behind Cartagena there were still three small aeroplanes of a

flying school, in a military field. We occupied the field by surprise and locked up the security

guards in a warehouse. We then took the planes, which were boarded by the last group of

communist leaders still left in the country. It was the morning of 25 March 1939. Togliatti’s

plane was the last to take off. It was cold and the engine wouldn’t start. The mechanic refused

to board, but the plane managed to take off as the security guards, locked in the warehouse,

managed to free themselves and started to frantically shoot at the plane as it was slowly

gaining flight.30

Eventful, too, was the landing in Algeria. Rather than land in Orano as expected,

the wind forced the plane to the beach of a small village named Mostaganem. Three

days later, Franco’s troops entered Madrid and the Republic’s ‘heroic epic’ came to an

end.

THE MOSCOW INTERLUDE

Togliatti left Spain at least once in the summer of 1938 to travel to Moscow, breaking

his journey back in Paris. The reasons for his return to Moscow must have been

important. It is likely that he was needed to contribute to the Comintern’s

130 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

consultations on Spanish politics. Certainly, he also had to confirm the serious

decisions that the Comintern took towards the Polish Communist Party (KPP).31 In

August 1938, the presidium resolved to disband the KPP, which was supposedly

‘polluted by spies and agents provocateurs’. Ercoli’s was amongst the six signatures on

the resolution, all of which belonged to members of the secretariat.

The decision had no precedent in the history of the Comintern. Togliatti must

have realised its significance and had probably been expecting it. Arrests of the KPP

leadership had already taken place towards the end of the spring of 1937 when he was

still in Moscow. It seems that at the beginning of the summer of 1937, Manuilsky told

the presidium that already in 1920 a group of agents of the Polish government had

infiltrated the KPP leadership.32 In February 1938, an article from Warsaw in the

Comintern review had made the same claim. Thus, the official endorsement of the

dissolution of the party was a final act of a long-standing process. It seems that

preparations for the ‘trial’ against the KPP were proceeding under Stalin’s personal

instruction between the end of June and the beginning of September 1937. The

decision to sanction the dissolution was signed by the ECCI in August 1938 ‘on a

document that had already been typed, without previous drafts or notes or discussions’.

The leaders of the Polish party had meanwhile been called back to Moscow on various

pretences, and were either already under arrest or in some cases already ‘liquidated’.33

Togliatti, therefore, endorsed the death sentences – probably already carried out –

of several KPP leaders. Was he convinced of the charges levelled against them? We can

only make the same assumptions that we made with regard to his attitude towards the

trials against the ‘Bolshevik old guard’. But we can also add that the relentless

provocation by the fascist police and the obsessive idea of the enemy’s infiltration into

his own party ranks might have taken hold on Togliatti. He was, after all, the leader of

a clandestine party who had, more than others, experienced – and was experiencing –

the tangible effects of repression.

In the specific instance of the KPP, he did not ‘follow its activities and affairs

closely’, as he later told his first biographers in 1953.34 His duties in the ECCI

secretariat did not cover Poland, which was under the jurisdiction of Manuilsky.

Nevertheless, the accusations that were directed at leaders whom he had known for

more than ten years could hardly have seemed entirely credible. One has to wonder

whether Togliatti had realised what consequences that the dissolution of the KPP was

intended by Stalin to have on the international alliances of the Soviet Union and,

therefore, the future of anti-fascist popular fronts. The reasons for the dissolution of

the KPP were accurately analysed in the hypothesis put forward in 1976 by the

American historian M. K. Dziewanowski:

Stalin was probably of the idea that in the case of another ‘revolutionary situation’ in Poland,

the Red Army would have been more useful than the KPP. He was aware that any kind of

agreement with Hitler would have raised a very likely opposition in the ranks of the KPP since

the party would not have consented to such a step without protesting, given on the one hand

a large presence of Jewish members in its ranks and on the other the growing influence of

Polish nationalism.35

EUROPE IN THE STORM 131

That Stalin was already taking into consideration a probable reversal of the

alliances before the Munich pact is more than just conjecture. It is, however,

improbable that the higher leaders of the Comintern knew about these plans more

than a few days before the German–Soviet pact was concluded in August 1939.36

Having shared in the responsibility for a decision which many years later he called

‘wrong and catastrophic’, Togliatti left Moscow on 4 September. It is certain that

during his short stay he also realised how deep the crisis was between the Italian

external leadership and the Comintern. Hence his decision, obviously approved if not

instigated, by the Comintern leadership, to stop over in Paris in order to somehow

resolve the situation.

The PCI had been the target of severe criticisms from the ECCI since at least the

spring of 1937, primarily on account of its alleged weakness in the fight against

Trotskyism. Togliatti had, at first, contributed to these criticisms. Accusations of ‘scant

vigilance’ against the enemies within multiplied and were often informed by the

suspicion that agents provocateurs had infiltrated the party’s organisations and even its

leadership. The outcome of the inquiry carried out by Berti ‘on the work of the cadres’,

made public in a report of September 1938, not only failed to dispel these suspicions,

but actually fuelled them.

The PCI’s political line was itself criticised by the International, especially for

having given too much relevance after the Anschluss to the Italian national interests

threatened by Nazi Germany. The party was accused of forgetting that Italy itself was

not a country under attack, but rather an imperialist aggressor. In April 1938, the

ECCI invited delegates from the PCI to Moscow for an assessment of the party’s

situation. Grieco and Dozza, who formed part of the delegation, were the main targets

of the criticism, primarily for their political mistakes and alleged weakness in their

‘revolutionary vigilance’. Manuilsky systematically repeated his harsh accusations, and

it was decided to dissolve the party’s CC and assign its reorganisation to a closed

‘ideological centre’, with Berti in charge. Grieco and Montagnana joined Togliatti in

Spain at the beginning of August, where they informed him about the difficulties of

reorganising the party, a process which included personal tensions and differences.37

This was the situation when Togliatti took part in a meeting of the secretariat on

16 September 1938 in Paris. His presence apparently helped to dissipate the poisoned

atmosphere. Discussing Togliatti’s speech, Di Vittorio said: ‘Alfredo has shown how it

is possible to expose the sores without hurting anybody’s self-esteem, upholding the

general interest of the party and setting up the right conditions to overcome its

problems.’38 But his opening speech had been anything but kind. Togliatti reported,

without dissociating himself from the criticisms, ‘the pathetic effects’ that the party’s

recent activities had had on Moscow. He did not demur from saying that ‘elements of

a battle against Er.[coli]’ were also discernible, meaning attempts to exclude him from

the management of the party. However, he did not insist on this last point and, in

more general terms, as noted previously with regard to his reticence to revive the

political issue around Gramsci’s letter of October 1926, he advised against ‘tying the

party’s future to issues of the past’. He urged them instead to ‘create a situation that

would enable the comrades to collaborate with one another’.39

132 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

His insistence that Grieco should continue to be part of the inner circle was typical

of his methods. Togliatti wanted to avoid exacerbating the disagreements, and to

employ different forces and ideas as well as wanting to avoid further upheaval in the

party’s shell-shocked cadre. At the political level, Togliatti urged against overlooking

the different strands emerging in the Italian bourgeoisie in respect to foreign politics:

‘without relinquishing our fight against Italian Nationalism [we must] work on these

differences.’40 Although cautiously, he was trying to salvage at least one of the footholds

of Italian communism’s theories of the previous two years, the need to start from the

potential oppositions that existed in the country and within fascism itself in order to

develop a united anti-fascist position.

Togliatti would not return to an in-depth analysis of the Italian party’s situation

until a year later. After the PCI secretariat’s meeting in Paris on 16 September, he

returned to Spain where, as we have seen, he was witness of and protagonist in the

dramatic end to the civil war. From Algeria, which he reached holding a false Chilean

passport, he went to Marseilles and then Le Havre. From Le Havre, he sailed to the

Soviet Union. He arrived in Moscow on 12 May 1939 and, on 21 May, wrote his final

report on Spain.

ON THE EVE OF WAR

How was Ercoli received in Moscow after his hard Spanish trial? On the surface, he

was highly regarded and there were no problems about his reinstatement in the top

echelon of the International. But the documentation that has recently emerged from

the Comintern archives show a different picture. In March, Dimitrov had received a

report prepared by Stella Blagoeva, based on accusations made by the Schucht sisters,

which fuelled suspicions about Togliatti’s behaviour towards Gramsci.41 Moreover, a

resolution of the secretariat on 28 July severely criticised the ‘conciliatory’ attitude that

the PCE had entertained in the last months of the Spanish civil war. Togliatti, though

his name was not mentioned, was reproached for having failed to delineate clearly a

line of attack against the Casado junta, with the consequence that ‘the party had been

defeated by its own mistakes’.42

These were shadows that took a long time to disappear. But this time, Togliatti

stayed in Moscow for only a few weeks. War was imminent. The Nazi occupation of

Czechoslovakia in March, the Italian occupation of Albania in April and the ‘iron pact’

between Italy and Germany in May signalled that it was inevitable. Against this

background, the duties of the leading members of the Comintern were redefined. It

was in connection with this redefinition that Togliatti’s next trip took place. He

arrived in Paris in July 1939.

In actual fact, Alfredo had been called to the French capital by the Direzione of the

PCI, since it had not been able, as planned, to send a delegation to Moscow. Informing

Dimitrov of the request, Togliatti pointed out that it ‘matches my deepest wish to

“Italianise” my future work’43 and, in a subsequent letter to Manuilsky, he provided a

cutting critique of PCI politics. He particularly accused the party of being ‘more and

more removed from the Italian reality’ and of neglecting the non-clandestine means to

pursue the fight against fascism. He criticised the ‘too many’ concessions made in order

EUROPE IN THE STORM 133

to achieve a union of the anti-fascist emigration and a ‘politics of the popular front

always construed in rather reformist and patriotic terms’.44

This veritable cahier de doléances showed Togliatti as a rather forbidding supporter

of the International line during the last months of peace; a line that, having in essence

given up trying to prevent war, aimed to keep the Soviet Union safely aloof and

therefore to promote a rather instrumental and restrictive idea of the popular front. In

addition, on arrival in Paris in August 1939, Togliatti knew that he had more

important assignments than to ‘restore order’ in the Italian party.45 It seems that

Dimitrov had already, at the end of 1938, considered the possibility of setting up a

‘reserve’ executive centre of the Comintern over the Soviet border, with Togliatti as its

leader.46 Indeed, on 4 September, as the war had just broken out, a coded telegram

signed ‘Daniel’ (Dimitrov), who did not yet know that Alfredo had been arrested, was

sent from Moscow with very clear instructions:

Alfredo, Clement [Fried] and Luis [Codovilla] must be sent to a neutral country and organise

the business centre of our company there. This centre must communicate immediately with

headquarters; set up connections with the branches of the company; develop the commercial

activity and stop our competitors from taking advantage of the current situation to the

detriment of our business.47

Nevertheless, Togliatti also had good reason to take a lead as supervisor of the PCI

Direzione. Notwithstanding the good results recorded at the level of unity of action

with the exiled anti-fascist forces, especially with the PSI, the Italian party had gained

little ground in the esteem of the ECCI. During the eighteenth congress of the Soviet

party in March, Manuilsky once again stressed the PCI’s ‘big weakness’.48 The mixture

of (contradictory) criticism and accusation coming from Moscow weighed heavily on

the ‘extended meeting of the party’s foreign centre’ held on 11–13 August. Togliatti

attended, although Berti gave the opening speech. According to the latter, ‘there were

no hints either in my report or in Togliatti’s conclusions of the imminent storm that

was going to hit us in the next few days.’49 But according to Umberto Massola, another

participant, Togliatti thought war inevitable and added that ‘it won’t be a surprise if at

a certain point there should be new conditions which will contribute to change the

present relations between the USSR and other countries.’50 Beyond even important

differences, such as this, accounts agree about the political substance of the conclusions

of the August meeting. With the impending German attack on Poland, it was

necessary to insist that Britain and France overcome their hesitations about establishing

a military alliance with the Soviet Union and form as soon as possible an anti-Hitler

alliance.51

Only ten days later, the world learned the astounding news that a non-aggression

pact had been signed by Germany and the Soviet Union. Embarrassment and

bewilderment were the predominant feelings for many communists. The image of the

Soviet Union as bastion of international anti-fascism developed over the previous five

years was tarnished, whilst for the first time since 1934 the two main objectives of the

134 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

communist movement, the fight against international fascism and the defence of the

motherland of socialism, moved directly into opposition.

Although, from the outset, there was deep mystification within sections of the

Comintern, there was in general no hesitation in justifying the pact as a clever move by

the Soviet Union to counter the Western democracies’ plan to redirect Hitler’s

expansionism towards the Soviet Union. Initially, too, the accusation remained that

Hitler’s fascism was the main instigator of the war threat and, once the war broke out a

few days later, its main trigger. Consequently, on 2–3 September, the French and

British communists voted in parliament in favour of war credits, whilst their leaders

answered without hesitation the call to arms. This happened in France despite the fact

that government repression had already hit the PCF hard. From 25 August,

communist newspapers had been suppressed.

The PCI and Togliatti aligned themselves to this political line, which had in any

case been promoted by the ECCI leadership until 7 September at least. Two days after

the pact, Togliatti told Celeste Negarville that if war broke out the French party should

‘behave like Clemenceau before entering government during the war of 1914–18, that

is to criticise harshly all the weaknesses shown by the government in conducting the

war’.52 As far as the PCI was concerned, Togliatti wrote a Dichiarazione (published on

25 August) in which, though supporting without reservation the German–Soviet pact,

he asserted that ‘if war should break out despite everything […] we will fight without

hesitation to bring about the military and political defeat, the crumbling of fascism.’53

He stressed this commitment more explicitly in an ‘open letter to the Italian socialist

party’, wherein he suggested that in order to defeat fascism ‘we will take every

opportunity we are offered, entering, if necessary, the French army to fight against the

fascists and help in their defeat as we did in Spain and Guadalajara’.54 The letter, not

published because the exiles’ newspaper to which it was addressed, La Voce degli

italiani, had been forced to stop publication, was Togliatti’s last political act before war

broke out. The French police arrested him on 1 September 1939.

THE MOST TRYING TIMES

Ercoli fell into the hands of the Sûreté a few hours after Germany’s attack on Poland.

The French police, after the public prosecutor’s office had opened proceedings against

the PCF on the grounds of high treason because it had not dissociated itself from the

German–Soviet pact, carried out searches of communist party branches. The same day,

the searches reached one of the offices made available to the Italian comrades in exile.

Togliatti had sometimes worked and, perhaps, slept there since he had returned to

Paris in July. The police found him with Cesare Marcucci and Cesare Massini, two

cadres whose job was to file newspaper cuttings and correspondence from Italy. The

three were repeatedly beaten. Togliatti, however, the only one without legal papers,

was not recognised. The police apparently believed his statement about being a lawyer

from Genoa, who had emigrated with a forged passport to escape the fascist

persecution. He was, therefore, only charged with using a forged document and with

possession of ‘material of foreign origin or inspiration’ and sent to Fresnes’ gaol.

EUROPE IN THE STORM 135

What would the French government have gained by undertaking a legal action

against Togliatti, targeting an individual who was persecuted and banned by the fascist

regime and running the risk of making him – hard on the heels of Dimitrov – the hero

of an exemplary trial?55 On this reading of the situation, the alleged blindness of the

French authorities seems more like the blindness of someone who who has covered his

own eyes. It is, indeed, difficult to believe that whilst his arrest might have been

accidental, the authorities did not realise how big their catch had been. Moreover,

discreetly but efficiently, many influential forces were mobilised to intercede for him.

The direction of the operation was apparently undertaken by Clément, also known as

Eugen Fried, the ECCI representative with the PCF. He had escaped to Brussels but

maintained good relations with men of the state apparatus who were sympathetic

because of their experience of the popular front.56 Giulio Cerreti, who had been

Clément’s close collaborator, wrote in his memoirs that ‘nothing was left to chance

about Togliatti’s release. High profile people of the Third Republic took an interest in

it, amongst them a minister very close to the Bench.’

Cerreti maintained that ‘there was recourse to large sums of money’ (allegedly

$4,000) and his statement is endorsed by material in the Comintern archives. It is

likely that the Soviet embassy in Paris and its secret service operatives also got involved.

The latter, it seems, were well known to Pierre Loewell, the lawyer assigned to

Togliatti’s defence.57 Moreover, Ercoli himself, on his arrest, managed to pass on to

Baldina Di Vittorio (who visited him in gaol) a message for Berti urging him to ‘place

everything in the personal trust of Giorgio’ (Dimitrov).58 Dimitrov, in turn, sent a

steady stream of coded telegrams to Paris. For example, on 8 February 1940, he wrote:

‘Have to push for Alfredo’s rescue. We think not all opportunities have been

exploited.’59

All these efforts were successful. After six months in prison, first in Fresnes and

then at la Santé, during which time his main concern was to avoid being recognised,

Togliatti’s file went on to the second permanent military tribunal in Paris. At the trial,

held at the end of February, the only charge against Togliatti was that he had used a

forged document. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment, which he had

already served whilst awaiting trial. On 9 March, Alfredo himself wired Dimitrov:

Condemned to six months and released on 2 March. The police gave me three days with the

requirement that I must be available for a new assessment of the situation. But all this has taken

place under such circumstances that I thought it was best to go somewhere safe in order to avoid a

new arrest under much more serious conditions. I am in hiding and won’t be able to leave France

for a while because no doubt borders have been alerted and they are actively looking for me. I

await your advice and orders. I am taking advantage of the situation to put some order in the

Italian work, which is not going well.60

Togliatti stayed in Paris for over a month. He lived in Massola’s house where he

was able to carve out short spells of domestic serenity reading Kipling to his host’s

daughter. Otherwise it was a month of intense activity. He met several PCF comrades

and regained control of both the political and organisational direction of the PCI. The

party was in disarray following the arrest of important cadres and disagreement

136 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

amongst those remaining about how to evaluate the ongoing war. Togliatti gave a clear

and unswerving direction to the situation. Whether he completely believed or not in

the ‘Clemenceau hypothesis’, which he had discussed with Negarville following the

German–Soviet pact, there was no more time to pursue it. The Soviet Union had

reinforced the pact with Germany and exploited the opportunity offered by the secret

protocol of 23 August to occupy the eastern Polish regions, setting up military bases in

the Baltic countries and, finally, had declared war on Finland.

According to new directives set out in an article by Dimitrov, which appeared in

the Comintern’s review in October, the Second World War had to be considered as

the First had been: that is, as an ‘unjust, reactionary, imperialistic’ war aimed at

dividing up the world. The distinction that had been posited until a few weeks earlier

between aggressor states and peaceful states became meaningless, while the thesis

claiming that the French and British imperialists ‘presented themselves […] as the

most staunch supporters of the war’ gained in stature. Therefore, the communists and

the working class had to lead a coherent struggle against the war and their own

country’s imperialism. The effectiveness of this struggle depended on the unity of the

working class and its allied social components, but ‘today this unity is possible only

without, and indeed against, the social democratic leaders who have defected to the

bourgeoisie’.61

Togliatti adopted this line without hesitation. Proof of his commitment is clear in

the short articles that he wrote for Lettere di Spartaco, a clandestine publication which

he wrote and edited after his release from prison:

Those who at a time of crisis lose their heads and their political direction are not

revolutionary, they are not communists. If you want to know where to go, find a good

compass: weigh the interests and the positions of the country where the revolution has already

triumphed, where the working class is in power and exercises its dictatorship. Turn your gaze

towards the star of the social revolution and the star of the Soviets and you will never be

wrong.62

In another article, Togliatti alluded (without mentioning any names) to the doubts and

hesitations emerging in part of the PCI leadership (Di Vittorio, Montagnana, Parodi)

with regard to the ECCI change of line:

[those comrades] persisted in making a sentimental distinction between the two imperialist

blocs at war, regarding the Anglo-French imperialist group sympathetically. They even

believed that Britain and France would show that they regarded the war as being against

‘Hitler’ and ‘for freedom’.63

His tone was scathing. But it was not Togliatti’s intention to pursue the argument,

or to make it public, because – he wrote – ‘now it seems that these hesitations, these

mistakes, this mystifications, have been overcome.’ His aim was rather to focus the

party’s attention toward the work to be done in Italy. To this end, he carried out a

practical reorganisation of the external leadership and sacked two prominent comrades,

Grieco and Berti.64

EUROPE IN THE STORM 137

We do not know what duties the ECCI had assigned for Togliatti or where they

intended him to be located after his release. However, it was clear that he wanted to

concentrate on the Italian situation, as he had told Dimitrov in June 1939. On 27

April 1940, he did in fact wire Moscow:

Clément thinks my job here is too dangerous. My opinion is that there is a risk and that the

opportunity to do some political work is not great. Nevertheless, it would be desirable for me

to remain in Paris because it would save more work later and would enable me to await

further developments.65

The project did not materialise. On 7 May Alfredo, who had in the meantime

crossed the Belgian border, wired Dimitrov to let him know that ‘in agreement with

Legros [Tréand] and for various reasons’ he thought it necessary to return to Moscow

as soon as possible. A German offensive on the Western front was expected and it was

advisable for him to leave for security reasons. On 8 May, he boarded a ship in

Amsterdam and, together with Grieco, arrived in the Soviet Union by sea.

There are indications that his reception in Moscow was not very welcoming. The

biographical note written by the cadre office on 21 September 1940 – which we

already cited in relation to its allegations about his attitude towards Gramsci66 –

suggested that there were ‘many unclear issues’ about the events surrounding his arrest

in Paris; it reproached him for ‘having failed precisely for the carelessness of which he

had accused others’. As mentioned before, the note highlighted the ‘negative’ moments

in Togliatti’s biography, especially 1923–24 and 1929–30. Apparently, someone in the

Comintern had spared no effort to undermine Togliatti’s status and expected to

remove him from his position.

In fact, for several months Ercoli’s duties in the secretariat were negligible. Most of

his efforts were devoted to ‘the Italian issue’, which was discussed by the secretariat and

the presidium. The latter’s resolution of 10 August directed some sharp criticism

towards the PCI. The Italian leaders were accused of having ‘failed completely in their

duty’, of having committed themselves ‘extremely late’ and fallen into ‘serious political

errors’, and of having ‘eradicated any concrete work of propaganda and agitation, as

well as party organisation’.87 Togliatti himself delivered the incriminating speech. The

resolution saw the dissolution of the PCI and the setting up, under Ercoli’s

management, of a ‘centre for the ideological and political guidance of the party’ staffed

by less important cadres. Not even Togliatti’s position was safe. In fact, Dimitrov – in

a meeting of the commission on 6 July – said that he ‘was too weak, too kind in

dealing with the issues of the Italian party; he goes where he can find less opposition in

order to save this or that comrade’.68

Why was the PCI such an important focus for the ECCI at this time? The reason

was that Italy had entered the war and treacherously attacked France. This represented

an opportune moment for Togliatti to unambiguously describe ‘Nazi-fascism’ as ‘the

main enemy’. Although it did not change the ‘imperialist’ nature of the war, the

vehement condemnation of fascist politics written by Togliatti on 2 July, and

138 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

subsequently included in all official documents of the PCI, renewed the link with the

analysis he had developed after 1934.

Amongst the objectives proposed by the PCI were those that sought to inspire the

Italian workers to a kind of anti-capitalist radicalism. Missing, moreover, was any

criticism aimed against the other anti-fascist forces. Whilst it was suggested that a

‘government of workers and peasants’ was the only one which ‘can put an end to the

capitalist’s exploitation and to the imperialist’s wars’, it was also said that the PCI was

‘ready to collaborate with all parties, organisations and groups that will actually fight to

accomplish the proposed objectives’.69

It is difficult to say when Togliatti began to realise that the ‘breathing space’ gained

by the Soviet Union in August 1939 would be shorter than Stalin expected. The first

indication of his returning to the ‘differentiated analysis’, which he had always

supported, was in a much reworked document that he presented in March 1941 to a

meeting of the presidium in which both the Italian and German situations were

analysed. The document analysed the Italian situation following nine months of

military defeats and forecast ‘an intensifying of the general dissatisfaction which will

also include the comparatively large sections of the bourgeoisie who have seen their

interests damaged’. The first duty of the PCI was ‘to create a link, a kind of bridge,

between the old anti-fascist elements of the working class and the opposition that is

mounting amongst the masses influenced by fascism and the Catholic masses’. The

identified objective was ‘the formation of a government relying on popular support,

and with full power to resolve the present situation and give the country peace’.

Initially, Togliatti argued against Varga, who reproached him for overestimating the

strength of fascism, and advised him not to entertain many hopes. ‘It is not accurate to

say that we already have in Italy today a general crisis of fascism. This is the beginning.’

He even believed premature the party’s adopting as its main slogan the ‘toppling of

Mussolini’. He also refrained from suggesting the kinds of prospects that would open

up after the dictatorship. This could only be decided by the ‘concrete development’ of

the struggle and the ability of the PCI to control it.70

Togliatti was not very optimistic in this respect. His contact with the small PCI

leadership still in France was occasional, but sufficient to give him, as he wrote in a

telegram to Fried in Belgium on 4 April 1941, the measure of the ‘huge imbalance

between the strength and activity of the party and the situation’. Alfredo, as he kept

signing himself, made the following suggestion to the Italian communists: ‘the people

must take control of the country in their hands and demand the formation of a

government rooted in the people which must make urgent plans to save the Italian

people from the catastrophe that is threatening them.’71 Even though the terms of this

suggestion were not specific, they still differed substantially from the more sectarian

and worker-ist style which had characterised his writing in the first months of 1940. A

few weeks later, in a manifesto compiled and dated ‘May 1941’, Togliatti made

unqualified accusations against German imperialism. Italy was running the risk of

becoming its vassal, as it had been at the ‘time of Franz Joseph, when the Germans

were domineering over our country and Italians were considered an inferior race,

incapable of self-government’. On the other hand, warm words of friendship were

EUROPE IN THE STORM 139

addressed to the ‘English people’, who ‘have never threatened the freedom of the

Italian people’ and have ‘in the past helped us to achieve our independence’. It was

evident that Togliatti anticipated that changes would soon take place on the

international stage, and was therefore adapting his more overtly political message

accordingly. Central to this was no longer the questionable demand for a ‘workers’ and

peasants’ government’. Instead, more realistically, he demanded the restoration of

‘constitutional guarantees and popular freedoms; a return to local councils and mayors

being elected by the people; and the release of all political prisoners and deportees’.72

THE WAR VIA RADIO

To Togliatti and the other Comintern, the German attack on the Soviet Union in June

1941 was less of a surprise than the German–Soviet pact in 1939. Ernst Fischer

recalled his intervention during a meeting that took place before France’s surrender

when he had urged the German comrades ‘to understand that the pact is indeed a fait

accompli, but it will not last for very long’.73 Obviously, Togliatti was taken aback by

Hitler’s sudden aggression and, above all, by the initial weakness of Soviet resistance.

But the new direction taken by the war, together with the redrawing of alliances,

embodied a possibility that he had considered and probably hoped for.

On the day of the German invasion, the ECCI secretariat appointed a ‘committee

of three’ to carry out the day-to-day management of the Comintern, comprised of

Ercoli, Dimitrov and Manuilsky.74 But although it seemed as if the clouds were lifting

over his political future, this proved illusory. On 12 July, José Diaz, secretary of the

PCE, communicated to Dimitrov via Blagoeva that he did not trust Togliatti. A week

later, he and Dolores Ibarruri repeated this charge to Dimitrov. In Togliatti there was

‘something foreign, that does not belong to us, even though there is no concrete

foundation for this’, he said. Dimitrov recorded it in his diary with the comment:

‘Gramsci’s family had first remarked about this’, and noted briefly: ‘We have agreed to

employ Ercoli for the time being only for the radio and other kinds of propaganda, but

not to involve him in strictly secret issues.’75

There is no record of when this political quarantine ended. According to Ninna

Bocenina, Togliatti’s personal secretary, he had an especially difficult time. In her

memoirs, written many years later, she recalled that on 16 or 17 October 1941,

Togliatti was detained and his offices searched by the NKVD. He went back to work

the following day, claiming that there had been a misunderstanding.76 There is no

further confirmation of these occurrences; in any case, the dates are not very reliable

because we know that on the night between 19 and 20 October, Ercoli arrived in Ufa,

the Baskiri capital, where the Comintern had moved its offices after Moscow was

evacuated. The day after (21 October), he was appointed as one of those in charge of

radio transmissions.77

Although the Comintern had always valued the radio, broadcasting now acquired a

crucial role, and considerable amounts of money, and human and technological

resources were invested in it. Togliatti, who had been in charge of broadcasting to Italy

prior to June 1941, was assigned the duty of setting up and organising this new and

ambitious propaganda machine. Each national section’s plans and the overall control of

140 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the broadcasts lay within his remit.78 His activity was hectic, and he had almost daily

written and telephone communications with Dimitrov. Togliatti acquired more

political weight and greater importance in this new role. But it was in the broadcasts to

Italy that he excelled. His best journalistic and propagandistic side, his analytic and

theorising skills released from the constraints of half-baked anti-fascism required by the

equidistance between the two ‘imperialist blocs’, emerged powerfully again.

We have details of almost every talk which, over nearly three years, Togliatti

broadcast to Italy. These included both daily news items, which he broadcast three

times a week from Radio Moscow under the pseudonym of Mario Correnti, and

scripts prepared for Radio Milano Libertà, which was also broadcasting from Moscow

(later from Ufa), but which told its audience that it was broadcasting from a

clandestine station in Italy.79 It is difficult to gauge how many people were able to

receive broadcasts from these two stations in Italy. Few Italians had powerful enough

radios to pick up the signals. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s speeches had a powerful role, not

so much in creating unrest as in giving a sense of direction to the disparate communist

cadres trying to reorganise the party in Italy.

The scripts for Radio Milano Libertà were structured and edited somewhat

differently. They comprised proper speeches, more solemn in style and rhetoric than

the broadcasts from Radio Moscow. Shorter and using the conceit of an impromptu

conversation – thus more congenial to the means employed (with which Togliatti was

not very familiar) – the broadcasts from Radio Milano Libertà sought to express the

propaganda and political activity of a ‘group of citizens of diverse political opinions

from fascism to communism’, of a ‘national front of all Italians to free Italy from fascist

tyranny and German servitude’. The broadcasts were aimed at an audience of average

Italians, wholly misinformed by 20 years of fascist propaganda and hard hit by the

consequences of a disastrous war. What was needed, first of all, was to break their

isolation and ignorance about the real development of the war. Starting from the

simplest facts that the fascist regime was hiding and misreporting, the broadcasts aimed

to explain clearly the war’s prospects and global dimension, to demonstrate that Italy

had entered a ‘one-way street’, and to persuade listeners that there was a way to avoid

catastrophe by ejecting fascism from power.

Togliatti soon found the right tone. Ferocious sarcasm and deep contempt – both

expressions of genuine emotion – were evident in some of his most poignant speeches,

for instance those dedicated to the ‘Armir’ tragedy, the ‘mercenary army’ of Italian

soldiers sent by Mussolini to Russia to die. Togliatti’s broadcasts were only superficially

in conflict with the opinions he was expressing in more private quarters, for instance in

his close correspondence from Ufa with Vincenzo Bianco, the PCI representative on

the ECCI. Bianco, at the beginning of February 1943, expressed his concern about the

serious state of health and high mortality of the Italian prisoners of war held in the

Soviet Union. He urged Togliatti to intervene with the leadership of the Comintern

and the Soviet state. Togliatti replied on 15 February:

EUROPE IN THE STORM 141

The more people realise that the aggression against other countries spells out ruin and death

for their own, spells out ruin and death for every individual citizen, the better it will be for the

future of Italy.80

Serious words which could have been interpreted as a typical expression of the

cynicism of which Togliatti was often accused. Alas, they rather belonged to the tragic

logic of a ruthless war that had reached its final throes and was imposing untold and

indiscriminate suffering on the civilian population, the soldiers at the front, and the

prisoners. This was a war that had become, because of its anti-fascist nature, a

confrontation between progress and reaction. As Togliatti explained: ‘It is difficult, if

not impossible, to differentiate between those people who are responsible for a political

choice and those who are not, especially when there is not a discernible open struggle

by the people against the politics of the ruling classes.’

It was the aim of beginning, by any means, such an ‘open struggle’ (even through

‘a pedagogy of suffering’ that outside such a dramatic context would appear pitiless)

that permeated Togliatti’s radio broadcasts. These were already striking in their

cultural breadth. His characteristically didactic ability found expression in a constant

number of literary references and historical allusions. Togliatti was evidently

implementing the suggestions he had made to Bibolotti in 1937, urging him ‘to

provoke a wave of horror and reproach against fascism’s perversion of the human spirit

in the Italian people’. Ercoli had written then:

All that was good and honourable in our people has been disowned, from Dante’s philosophy

onwards. The spirit of brutal animal destruction and death is glorified. If we take on the open

and courageous defence of these values, our party will acquire great status […]81

In Mario Correnti’s speeches (or in the contributions of the imaginary Latin and

history teachers which Togliatti wrote for Radio Milano Libertà), Italian history was re-

interpreted in order to counter the ways in which fascism had distorted and exploited

important national traditions. There were frequent references to the history of Rome in

an attempt to debunk the extravagant claims of ‘romanity’ which daily appeared in

fascist propaganda, and to counterpose the ‘social development and class content of

Roman society’. Reflections on the tradition of the Risorgimento went beyond the

‘struggle against fascism as one of the constant themes of our national life history’ to

recover its Jacobin values through praise of historical figures such as Mazzini and

Garibaldi.

At the political level, Togliatti’s broadcasts were striking for their analysis of the

forces engaged in the conflict and their long-range perspectives. From September 1941,

when the German army was recording one success after another and getting

dangerously close to Moscow, Togliatti was still certain that Germany could not win

the war. His confidence was not merely feigned for propaganda reasons. In listing the

reasons for his certainty of victory, he touched on precisely those political and military

issues that later historical studies on the Second World War identified as crucial.

142 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Two elements of his analysis deserve special mention. The first was the awareness

of the new situation brought about by Hitler’s isolation and his failure to transform the

war into a crusade against Bolshevism. The idea of ‘an allied bloc of democratic

countries’ emerged quite early in Togliatti’s discussions, before the United States

entered the war. He viewed the alliance as more than simply designating a temporary

military alliance against the common enemy, the idea was to make a combined effort

towards long-term prospects that would influence the development of international

relations after the war.82

Therefore, Togliatti’s conversations seldom mentioned communism and socialism

per se, although in extolling the successes of the Soviet armed forces and partisans, he

viewed them as an expression of a superior social and political system founded on a

deep popular consensus. Admiration for the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’ was

increasingly accompanied by expressions of warm support for democratic America.

The second element that emerged with great force in his early broadcasts dialogues

was confidence in the resistance by all peoples oppressed by Nazism, and the prediction

that ‘as soon as the war flares up again in the West, the resistance and guerilla warfare

will develop a momentum of such force never before seen in history, and will become a

modern Vesper.’83

For Italy, Togliatti insisted on the need for the broadest possible national front, a

prescription which followed Comintern instructions. It should ‘not exclude any

political tendency, any party interest, or shade of opinion’. It would have no ‘class or

party’ aim, ‘but be fundamentally and solely national’. The immediate objectives were

a separate peace with the Allies, the removal of Mussolini from power, the freedom of

the press and of speech, the right of association, and the ‘freedom’ for the Italian

people to determine their destiny.’84 To achieve them, no contribution could be

excluded: not that of the higher military echelons, or the monarchy (conspicuously

absent from Togliatti’s speeches was any attack on the House of Savoy), or even those

fascists in good faith, who were addressed in a tone which echoed the controversial

‘national reconciliation’:

We have to stop behaving towards the youths as the opponents of fascism have done for many

years, when they believed that nothing could be done with the generations educated by

fascism. The opposite is true. In these generations is present a national sentiment and the

aspiration to social justice which cannot but move them towards opposition, towards the open

fight against the regime of parasitic plutocracy and servitude to German imperialism.85

Togliatti’s appeals to active resistance became more frequent from the spring of

1943. First, he urged the organisation of strikes and boycotts of production, then,

more and more clearly, partisan guerilla warfare. It was not a coincidence that these

appeals became more frequent after the large workers’ strikes of March 1943. Although

he had no clear information about them, Togliatti recognised their importance

immediately, seeing them as evidence of the impending break-up of the ‘internal front’.

With the reappearance of workers as protagonists, Togliatti ventured a prediction that,

no doubt, overestimated their political weight and, conversely, underestimated the

EUROPE IN THE STORM 143

ruling conservative classes’ ability to counter-attack. In an article dated May–June

1943, after having stated that ‘amongst army and navy officers, in the Catholic

bourgeoisie, in royalist circles, amongst industrialists and intellectuals and even fascist

cadres there are ever growing numbers of people who recognise that Italy must break

with Germany before it is too late.’ He argued that ‘these opponents will only be

spurred into action by a broad and strong mass movement.’86

But this did not happen. Fascism was rather brought down by a palace revolution.

Before the coup d’état on 25 July 1943 sanctioned the end of the dictatorship which

forced him into exile, Togliatti had a leading role in the final act of the Comintern.

The dissolution of the Comintern had been suggested in a presidium document of 15

May, and was ratified in another on 8 June. Ercoli’s signature appeared on the first

document, whereas the second designated him as a member of a closed commission

whose duties were ‘to proceed to the actual liquidation of all the bodies, apparatus and

properties of the Communist International’.87

The decision did not take Togliatti by surprise. Already in April 1941 Dimitrov

had informed him that in conversation with Stalin ‘there had been a clear and blunt

question about the continuing existence of the CI.’88 Ercoli had also been involved

with the closed commission which had prepared the presidium resolution. According

to Veliko Vlahovic, he had then raised the issue ‘of the forms and methods of

collaboration between communist and workers’ parties after the victory over fascism, in

the absence of a Communist International’. He had drawn attention ‘to the

importance of bilateral and multilateral collaboration and even more to regional

collaboration [...] amongst the parties which operate and fight in similar conditions’.89

With regard to the reasons underlying the decision to dissolve the Comintern, it is

likely that Togliatti agreed with the official reasons given in the resolution of 15 May.

It stated that even before the war it had become clear that ‘solving the problems of the

workers’ movement in every individual country, via the means of an international

centre, had encountered insurmountable obstacles’. Ercoli had fully experienced this

reality during his tenure as a member of the Comintern secretariat. When he

commented on the resolution for Radio Milano Libertà on 25 May, he summarised and

interpreted it in a way that showed his unconditional support:

The pressing duty of the workers today, to which they have to dedicate all their strength, is to

defeat and destroy fascism […] The working-class vanguard, for its part, must contribute with

all its might to the speediest victory over Hitler and fascism. But this duty can only be

accomplished in the most proficient way, that is in the context of each separate country and

each discrete state.90

Togliatti, however, was well aware that the dissolution of the Comintern also

suited, at that point in time, Moscow’s political interests. It was an open gesture to

reassure friendly governments of the capitalist countries that the Soviet Union had

renounced ‘exporting’ the revolution, both during and after the war. In his radio

broadcast, Togliatti did not ignore this aspect, stressing that ‘thanks to this decision

144 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

every reason for distrust amongst the great democratic nations would disappear, and

their bloc would consolidate and become indestructible.’

It is likely that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Comintern Togliatti saw

new and challenging perspectives opening up. He told Giulio Cerreti:

For some parties, including ours, this measure represents a revolutionary act; a qualitative

jump towards the future […] Every party, although undergoing more or less deep crises of

adjustment, will in the end find its own path, and it will be a revolutionary path.91

After only a few weeks, the search for just such a path became the duty which Togliatti

was called to fulfil with maximum effort.

THE FALL OF FASCISM AND THE BADOGLIO ISSUE

Mussolini has been swept away by people’s rage, the army’s outrage, the whole country’s

rebellion … The chains that were tying us have been given the first decisive shake. Italy’s

resurrection has begun. It is now time to see it through to the end.92

With these words, Togliatti commented from Radio Milano Libertà on 26 July

1943 about the fall of fascism. He was, however, sceptical about the Badoglio

government’s will to implement the objectives he thought were essential: an immediate

armistice with the Allies; the ‘complete destruction, ruthless, leaving no residues’ of

every form of fascist organisation; and the restoration of the people’s ‘right to speak, to

meet, to rally, to have their publications and organisations’. On 3 August, he

unhesitatingly demanded:

Firstly, the resignation of the Badoglio government; secondly, the king’s abdication and the

end of the royal prerogative; thirdly, the formation of a provisional national government […]

which should unconditionally seek the people’s support […] break away from Germany and

move closer to the Allies to achieve peace.93

Togliatti’s speeches and writings referred repeatedly to these issues until the

armistice on 8 September. Any earlier illusions about the nature of the events of 25

July were abandoned. In an article addressed to the Soviet public, he wrote that it ‘had

been organised by the most reactionary elements with the aim to save, by this tactic,

the substance of the fascist dictatorship’. The criticism against Badoglio intensified. He

was identified as ‘the man acting for those groups which do not want to see the

people’s liberties reinstated in the nation because they know that this would lead to the

disappearance of their privileges’.94

The Comintern’s archives, however, reveal a split between Togliatti’s ‘public’

statements and the net of political initiatives that he was weaving in private. In a letter

to Dimitrov of 30 July 1943, while informing him that ‘our radio station is beginning

to fiercely attack the king, especially on issues of peace and his responsibility for overall

fascist politics,’ he added that in his view ‘the line should be checked and corrected’.

He thought that the king should abdicate and ‘the royal prerogative should be

abolished’. But what should be pursued in its place was ‘the formation of a national

EUROPE IN THE STORM 145

provisional government, with its foundations in the people, taking all necessary

measures to end the war and fascism, and to restore democratic freedoms’.95

From the beginning of the armistice on 8 September, Togliatti focused on Italy’s

position in the anti-German war. All other political issues were secondary for him.

Consequently, his references to the Badoglio government changed significantly.

Already, on 10 September, he had stated that if the Badoglio government was to hold

‘in its hands, openly and without hesitation, the banner of defending Italy against

Hitler’s aggression […] people will support it’.96 On 14 October, the day after Italy

declared war against Germany, Togliatti wrote to Dimitrov that Badoglio was likely to

ask the communists to enter the government, and that this would be difficult to refuse.

‘The biggest risk,’ he suggested, ‘would be for the communists to be isolated within the

united national front.’ Togliatti was also sure – though facts would prove him wrong –

that ‘our comrades who are working in Italy will not refuse Badoglio’s offer, unless we

exercise pressure on them through our radio broadcasts.’97

Two days later, acknowledging Badoglio’s commitment to broaden his government

to include representatives from the anti-fascist parties, he expressed the opinion that

the offer should be accepted, albeit with some very clear conditions: excluding from the

government ‘any fascist, semi-fascist, or fascist-like element, and any anti-democratic

and reactionary element’; taking ‘serious and resolute measures to uproot and destroy

any remnants of fascism and reaction’; granting immediate and complete freedom to

all the anti-fascist and democratic organisations and initiating the reinstatement of all

democratic freedoms; and renouncing ‘any imperialist politics, demands, claims or

schemes of any kind against other peoples or nations’.98

This political line differed from that adopted by the National Liberation

Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale; CLN) in Rome, which on 16 October

stated that ‘the achievement of a genuine and effective spiritual unity of the country’,

as demanded by a war of liberation, ‘cannot take place under the aegis of the present

government of Badoglio and the king’.99 For Togliatti, there were other possibilities,

probably because he was anticipating the likely results of the Moscow conference of the

foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain on 19–30

October 1943. The conference, in addition to issues about the allied powers’

collaboration, also discussed Italy and reached a joint conclusion which emphasised the

need to completely destroy fascism ‘in all its manifestations and derivates’ and urged

the participation in the Italian government ‘of those sections of the Italian people who

had always been opposed to fascism’.100

Given that Churchill was opposed to replacing Badoglio, and Roosevelt – although

not so convinced – seconded him, this could only mean the unconditional inclusion in

the Badoglio government of representatives from the anti-fascist parties. Indeed, the

Soviet Union, determined to have more influence on the Italian stage, had no wish to

annoy the Allies by raising the issue of Badoglio’s resignation, which would have

effectively ended the royal prerogative.

Togliatti’s amendments to his speeches and position were dictated partly by the

needs of Soviet diplomacy. But it is likely that he was also developing his own views

through acting as a ‘consultant’ to the Soviet leadership. The first hypothesis does not

146 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

exclude the second. Togliatti’s contributions in the two following months seem to

confirm both. If, on the one hand, he carefully avoided enforcing the terms and

substance of the Soviet Union’s position, he made an effort, on the other, to mediate

with those holding more radical positions in Italy, e.g. the CLN, the forces of the left,

and the PCI. Togliatti’s speech on 16 October caused great bewilderment in the core

PCI leadership in Rome. The Roman party centre – inspired mainly by the resolutely

uncompromising Mauro Scoccimarro – did not believe that the Badoglio government

could become democratic, and therefore interpreted the decisions of the Moscow

conference as an endorsement of its own position. It approved a resolution

wholeheartedly denouncing ‘the erroneous and far from real political situation’

described by Togliatti’s instructions. Giorgio Amendola went as far as saying that

though Ercoli was the party’s leader ‘at the moment he is not able to exercise this role

[…] he is not able to devise new instructions. The leadership of the party is today in

Italy’.101

Although he was unaware that his authority was then being questioned, Togliatti

continued to pay attention to the debates going on in Italy with regard to the

institutional issue and the powers of the CLN. In a broadcast of Radio Milano Libertà

on 5 November, he expressed his anti-monarchist position vehemently, stating that the

monarchy ‘by connecting itself to fascism and Mussolini has failed in its role as the

moderating body and caretaker of the country’s political stability, which should have

been its raison d’être’. He resolutely demanded the king’s abdication, an end to the

powers of the crown, the formation of a government which ‘must be in name and

substance provisional’, and the postponement of any decision on the institutional issue

until ‘a Constituent Assembly can be elected by the whole nation and called upon to

give the new Italian state a democratic constitution’.102

Togliatti considered these two last points to be fundamental. On 26 November,

speaking in Moscow at the Columns Hall of the trade unions’ headquarters, he

deemed the refusal by Vittorio Emanuele II to abdicate and ‘allow the creation of a

provisional regime until the convening of the Constituent Assembly’ to be ‘a serious

case, which should worry the genuine Italian democrats’. But he did not cling

stubbornly to any qualifying condition. Instead, he shifted the argument to another

level of greater breadth. He tried to outline in broad strokes the picture of Italian

democracy which would emerge after the war.

[It] will have to be a consistent anti-fascist democracy, a strong regime, founded on a wide

network of mass organisations, trade unions, co-operatives, and anti-fascist political parties. It

has to guarantee all popular freedoms: of speech and of the press, of assembly and association,

of commercial freedom, of religion and political propaganda, and to intervene forcefully

against any reactionary attempt to shrink or annihilate these freedoms.

This new democracy would eradicate the surviving vestiges of old-fashioned

regimes from the land, and – ‘with sensitive state intervention’ – prevent ‘plutocratic

groups’ from exploiting their monopoly over the country’s resources.103 Togliatti clearly

felt that it was an urgent necessity to unlock a situation that the British and Americans

EUROPE IN THE STORM 147

were apparently determined to ‘freeze’ until the liberation of Rome. His impatience

emerged in his talks on Radio Milano Libertà. On 12 January 1944, he charted the

path to follow on terms which later reappeared in the Salerno compromise. ‘The

speedy, no, immediate, formation of a national democratic government including all

the anti-fascist parties […] the public, official declaration by all participants – starting

with the king and Badoglio and then the parties – promising the people that the issue

of the structure of the state will be decided only by the people themselves, at the end of

the war, through the Constituent Assembly of the whole nation.’104 A week later, his

impatience was reflected in an historical parallel, which acquired special meaning, the

‘Aventine bloc’.105 The Aventine bloc ‘had solidified in a negative position, refusing to

use those concrete means which were available and would have been very effective in

removing Mussolini from power’. Togliatti said:

Today in the free zone it isn’t a question of driving away Mussolini, but of working and

fighting to drive out the Germans and destroy the remnants of fascism. Negative polemics and

criticisms are not enough to achieve this goal. We must act, and each one of us must act in his

own field. The politicians accepting their responsibilities for the political direction, and party

organisations and trade unions working hard amongst the masses.106

In stating that politicians had to accept their responsibilities for political direction,

Togliatti revealed his eagerness to return to an active role on the Italian political stage.

However, if the underlying course of communist politics was already in place, its

translation in tactical terms appeared difficult. In the Comintern archives, there is a

document entitled ‘Draft Reply to the Italian Comrades’ (Progetto di risposta ai

compagni italiani), probably composed by Togliatti and sent by Dimitrov to Molotov

on 24 January 1944. As a first point, in contradiction to Togliatti’s recent statements,

it stated:

The communists must not be part of the actual Badoglio government, first of all because this

government is not a democratic government leading an active war against the enemy, and

secondly, because the communists’ entry to the actual government would split the anti-fascist

national front and in this way strengthen the reactionary elements in the king’s and Badoglio’s

circle.107

The document clearly signalled a hardening of Ercoli’s position when compared to

that adopted during his radio broadcasts. The change in direction was probably due to

Dimitrov’s instructions and perhaps even the instructions of someone above him. It

has been argued convincingly that Vyshinsky, the Soviet representative on the

consultative committee of the Allied powers in Italy, who was on a mission in Italy,

played an important role in this. Vyshinsky was counting on the PCI’s

uncompromising line to achieve wider political influence for the Soviet Union in Italy.

To this end, he drew on the hard anti-monarchist stance expressed in January 1944 at

the Bari congress of the CLN.108 The Italian communists also informed the Soviets of

their own position, which was implacable. On 8 February, Dimitrov was sent a report

by Eugenio Reale, which said, amongst other things:

148 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

The southern Italian liberation committees have unanimously asked for the removal of the

king and for his worthy son to renounce the throne. We cannot ask for the punishment of

those responsible for the war without getting rid of them from the political stage, the biggest

actors and most directly responsible for all the disasters that have hit our country, for all the

blood that has been spilt in this conflict that the Italian people did not want.109

These developments placed Togliatti in a difficult position and probably compelled

him to adopt a position that he did not hold himself. On 26 February, he wrote and

signed a document titled ‘On the Duties of the Communists’ (Sui compiti all’ordine del

giorno dei comunisti) that expanded on the ‘Draft’ of 24 January. It was sent by

Dimitrov to Molotov on 1 March. In the words of the document, the communists:

[are] asking for the king’s abdication, as he was an accomplice in the setting up of the fascist

regime and Mussolini’s crimes. He is also a unifying centre, at this moment, of all the

reactionary forces, semi-fascist and fascist that are resisting the country’s democratisation […];

[Communists must] refuse to participate in the present Badoglio government and denounce

its politics as an obstacle to a true participation of the Italian people in the war against

Germany.110

Dimitrov’s accompanying message to Molotov stated that ‘it would be very useful

if you could meet comrade Ercoli in person. He leaves on Saturday 4 March 1944.’

Instead, on the night between 3 and 4 March, Togliatti met Stalin. The outcome of

this meeting was set out in a note Togliatti added to ‘On the Duties of the

Communists’. It contained verbatim the statement which he made to the press on his

arrival in Naples:

Considering that the present situation – where on the one hand there is a government that

does not have sufficient authority and on the other there is a bloc of six parties that don’t

participate in government – is merely weakening Italy and leads to the people’s ruin, the

communists are even ready to participate in a government without the king’s abdication, on

condition that the actual government will take immediate action to prosecute a war to expel

the Germans from the country; that it will implement the seven points of the Moscow

Conference; and that the king himself agrees to call, after the war, a Constituent Assembly

which will have conclusive decision making power on the issue of the monarchy and the

future system of governing of the country.111

On 5 March, Ercoli reported his exchange with Stalin in detail to Dimitrov. ‘The

existence of two camps (Badoglio–the king and the anti-fascist parties) weakens the

Italian people.’ Stalin went on:

This is an advantage for the English who want a weak Italy in the Mediterranean sea […] For

the Marxists form has never had a definite meaning. The substance of the issue is

fundamental. The king is no worse than Mussolini. If the king goes against the Germans there

is no need to call for his immediate abdication […] The most important thing is the unity of

the Italian people in the fight against the Germans, for a strong, independent Italy. Follow

this line without making any reference to the Russians.112

EUROPE IN THE STORM 149

Are we to conclude that what would become known as the ‘svolta di Salerno’ (the

Salerno turn; so-called because Salerno would be the seat of the new government) had

been imposed by Stalin on Togliatti? It would be reductive to set the issue in these

terms. As we have seen, the Italian communist leader had already developed, four

months previously, a position which favoured entry into the Badoglio government. He

had then changed it for reasons explained above, but was then probably very satisfied

by the outcome of his conversation with Stalin. We cannot, moreover, exclude the

possibility that he played an active role in the conversation and upheld the logical case

made in his radio broadcasts during the first half of January.

This is conjecture. But we can date with precision 5 March 1944 as the day when

Togliatti left Moscow to return to Italy after a long and increasingly impatient wait.

He had told Dimitrov on 27 July 1943, that his return was necessary and, on 3

August, wrote him that ‘the issue of his leaving for Italy was worrying him’. Every

delay, Togliatti feared, was potentially damaging, and he begged Dimitrov to help him.

On 14 October, he insisted on his return, along with those of his comrades ‘who had

an official position in the political life of the country’. He also insisted that his return

be arranged legally. Some objections were made, allegedly by Manuilsky. On 2

November, Togliatti wrote to him in the following terms:

I believe that given the new situation that has arisen from the Moscow conference the issue of

my return to Italy cannot be subject to questions of ‘principles’, but should only be a question

of practicality, that is obtaining authorisations, documents and adequate technical means […]

I insist on the fact that, considering the present situation in Italy, my staying here goes against

the interests of my party and our broader interests and has no positive meaning.113

On the same day, Dimitrov finally gave the necessary instructions. A few days later,

Togliatti asked the Badoglio government and the Allied consultative commission for

permission to return to the country ‘to take part in the struggle of the Italian people

against the common enemy’. The paperwork was delayed. First its progress was

obstructed by the Italian diplomatic bureaucracy. The Allies then procrastinated.

Finally, towards the end of January, the permit was given. On 16 February, Vyshinsky

instructed the Soviet authorities to facilitate Togliatti’s departure, which eventually

took place some two weeks later.114

7

NATIONAL UNITY

THE SALERNO TURN

Togliatti’s journey from Moscow to Italy lasted twenty days. From Moscow, he flew to

Baku, Teheran and then Cairo. He was probably still in Cairo when, on 14 March, it

was announced that the Soviet Union had recognised the Badoglio government.

Togliatti, as he claimed in 1951, had had ‘no inkling of it’.1 In the interview he gave to

a communist newspaper in Alger (where he arrived on 21 March), however, whilst

expressing his support for what had happened, he did not draw any serious political

conclusions from it, merely reasserting that the communists were in favour ‘of any

measure taken towards strengthening the country, and consolidating its unity during

the war.’2

In Alger, Togliatti boarded the freighter Ascania – ‘with best wishes for a pleasant

voyage’ from the polite British official who had been following his case – which was

sailing the Mediterranean as part of an escorted convoy.3 He arrived in Naples in the

late afternoon of 27 March. The town was engulfed in the fumes of an eruption at

Mount Vesuvius: ‘A shower of fine ash was hovering over the gulf, covering the fields

and the streets [...] The appearance of the motherland, after eighteen years of exile, was

somehow apocalyptic.’4

Naples also seemed to him apocalyptic. Severely tried by the war, the city looked

ill, ‘with a fever mixed with exhaustion, anxiety for the present and the future, the

anxious search for life’s necessities, to be obtained at any cost […] There was the

feeling that Italy, as an organised society, did not exist any more, that it had to be

rebuilt’. This first impression provides a key to understanding the political design he

would pursue in the following months.

It was night when Ercoli reported to the Neapolitan federation of the PCI and

made himself known to the comrades. One of them recalled:

We took him to the hall to admire our exhibition of posters and slogans on the walls. We

were waiting for the words ‘well done comrades’. Instead […] we quickly realised that for him

those posters and slogans were politically wrong.5

The PCI had called for its first national congress of the liberated regions. The start

of the proceedings was postponed by a day. On 1 April, Togliatti explained in a press

conference the new political line that the assembly had approved. In essence, he said

that it was time to bring to an end a situation with ‘on the one hand a government

with power but no authority, and on the other hand a popular movement with

authority but no power’. What was needed, therefore, was the ‘creation of a new

152 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

government, approved by the masses through the support of the anti-fascist parties’.

The latter, in turn, had not only to agree to the postponement of the institutional issue

but also avoid stubbornly insisting on the king’s abdication. Togliatti further added

that the communists had no preconditions for Badoglio presiding over the new

government. The important issues were that the government should secure ‘the unity

of the major anti-fascist parties’, organise ‘a truly effective war effort’, and prove

capable of ‘taking urgent measures to alleviate the suffering of the masses and

effectively counter any attempt by reaction forces to return’.6

The same day on which Togliatti announced the PCI’s proposal, the newspapers

reported extensively on an article that had appeared on 30 March in Izvestija, the

Soviet government daily. The article made clear that it was the wish of the three Allied

powers to see the Badoglio government broaden its democratic base.’7 This reinforced

the belief that the tactical move of the communist leader formed part of a foreign

policy plan pursued by the Soviet Union. Indeed, Benedetto Croce wrote in his diary

on 2 April:

It is a clever blow inflicted by the Republic of the Soviets on the Anglo-Americans, because

under the disguise of wanting to intensify the war against the Germans, it introduces the

communists into government, making them the initiators of a new politics above and against

the other parties, which will be forced to follow them without causing the communists any

embarrassment […]8

Pietro Nenni, too, though driven by opposite concerns from those of the liberal

philosopher, thought that ‘behind Ercoli there is Stalin, with the immense prestige

which comes with his victories.’9 The PCI leadership, in Rome and Milan, was sure

that the ‘participatory turning point’ was orchestrated by Moscow and precisely

because of this, although in some cases not entirely persuaded, they accepted it without

substantial reservations.

The issue of the link between the ‘Salerno turn’ and Soviet foreign policy has

always been a source of fascination for Italian historians. It has been rightly noted that

‘to doubt Togliatti’s belief in the correlation between Soviet politics and the interests of

the Italian people, represented by the PCI, is tantamount to denying one of the

touchstones of the ideological make up of a generation of communist cadres.’10

However, it would also be misleading to consider Togliatti as a mere passive executor

of a plan devised by an external source.’11 He was following a political line to which he

had himself contributed and in which he firmly believed. Togliatti’s realism

acknowledged that the power relations that now anticipated the future division of the

world were a fact against which anti-fascist policy and strategic choices had to be

measured. Given such a background, Togliatti ruled out the possibility of a

revolutionary outcome following the crisis opened up by Mussolini’s defeat in Italy,

especially because he had few illusions about the overall quality of the political and

social fabric of a country that contained a strong reactionary component which would

prove difficult to remove. That is how the policy of the Soviet Union, designed not to

challenge existing power relations but, on the contrary, to take advantage of them,

NATIONAL UNITY 153

corresponded objectively to the prospects emerging from within Italy. Recognising the

Badoglio government, especially, gave the PCI the opportunity to carry out a leading

role in the nation’s political life and thus gain credibility within a potentially hostile

state and society.

In any case, the PCI’s turn enabled the Italian political situation to emerge from an

impasse. Togliatti’s initiative, by breaking the deadlock surrounding the institutional

issue, avoided the real danger of destroying the unity of the anti-fascist forces and

propelling the right into collaboration with Badoglio. This, in turn, would have

isolated the left in sterile opposition. It is difficult to say if by dropping the demand for

Vittorio Emanuele III’s abdication Togliatti really aimed ‘to present the monarchy to

the people, so that they could judge it for what it was’, and so accelerate and make

more certain its demise.12 What is certain is that his initiative, by catching the

conservative forces off guard, led to the definitive dismissal of the ‘hypothesis of the

monarchic-administrative state’, which had been the basis of the first Badoglio

government before the armistice.13

Obviously, the ‘Salerno turn’ came at a cost. It worsened relations amongst the

parties of the left, although this was very quickly remedied. Nenni, for instance,

although concerned about the burden posed by the reactionary legacy of the royal

appointment and Badoglio’s presidency on the new government, excluded a split with

the communists. This, he reasoned, could have emerged out of ‘leftist intransigence’,

and was a position that some intellectuals might have appreciated. But it would have

allowed the situation to ‘degenerate, inevitably, either into maximalist or reactionary

positions’.14

The Action Party (Partito d’Azione; PdA), too, inheritor of ‘Giustizia e Libertà’,

though deeply divided within its various political and regional components,

acknowledged the turn as inevitable. However, it is hard to deny that the PCI and,

especially Togliatti, underestimated the legacy of social conservatism inherent in

preserving the state apparatus, the old political class, the bureaucracy and the power of

the bourgeois. Indeed, the consequences of this legacy would be felt later. For the time

being, the communists managed to ‘become, beyond their traditional class boundaries,

the focal point of real movement in society’.15 This was important and had far reaching

consequences, especially because the PCI’s position was able to bring those advantages

to fruition through an effort of ideological revision and structural self-reform.

IN THE GOVERNMENT WITH BADOGLIO

Naturally, the party was not entirely ready to welcome the change of course that

Togliatti proposed. However, the reappearance of the acknowledged leader of the PCI,

on terrain already prepared by intense Soviet diplomatic activity, prevented any

significant dissent or resistance. Whether out of genuine belief, or persuaded that it

met the more important needs of the Soviet Union, the change of course was accepted

without major upset. An intense debate did spark up between those who maintained

that the party had taken a wrong turn and wanted self-criticism of the underlying

political line that had been adopted until then, and those who saw the turn as

embarked upon for tactical reasons. But Togliatti did not encourage the debate. On

154 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the contrary, as Amendola recalled, he warned communists ‘to stop any argument, to

postpone the disagreements, old and new, until after the liberation; to achieve unity in

the party by carrying out the disciplined political line approved by the national

council’. Amendola himself remarked that it was ‘the end of a system of free debate.

This system had had its problems, but it had got us into the habit of frank exchanges,

which we would not easily regain’.16 This was one of the additional costs of the

‘Salerno turn’ and it was not negligible. But, in the meantime, the PCI could present

itself as a close-knit party, committed without reservation to implementing national

unity.

With regard to the other political forces, their reactions to Togliatti’s initiative

fluctuated between concern and a feeling of impotence in trying to oppose it, but there

was also a liberating relief. Bonomi, the president of the CLN, expressed with vigour

an opinion that was, after all, widely shared: ‘Togliatti, like a Greek philosopher, has

cut short all debates on the nature of movement by starting to walk.’17

The agreement concluded that Vittorio Emanuele III should retire from public life,

without a formal abdication, and at the liberation of Rome should transfer all his

powers to a lieutenant, namely the hereditary prince Umberto. With the last and by

now weak doubts of PdA and socialist members cast aside, the government took office

on 22 April. Togliatti became minister without portfolio. Despite the conviction with

which he had fought to achieve this outcome the ritual of swearing in to the sovereign,

who 23 years before had conferred power on Mussolini, must have caused him

embarrassment. He was to remember it as a ‘pathetic spectacle’:

The king had to read his declaration but he fumbled in a trouser pocket before finding the

crumpled piece of paper, and then reading it he stumbled and changed the text, so that two

different versions circulated. He looked grotesque. […] He couldn’t put two words together

that made sense, not even words of welcome.18

Despite everything he had a better understanding with Badoglio. Togliatti could at

least respect his old Piedmont soldierly pragmatism, whereas the diary he kept in these

weeks is full of almost contemptuous portraits of others involved in the political life of

the Southern kingdom. After years of activity as the leader of the international

communist movement, in the midst of momentous events, going back to a deeply

provincial political world must have been difficult and painful although there were

some positive moments about which Togliatti was smugly ironic. He wrote on 29

April to the comrades that had stayed behind in the Soviet Union:

Ended are the days of blissful life in hiding! And now after the new government has been formed

it’s even worse! The caretaker and the girl who makes my meals call me ‘sir’ (cavaliere)! But the

most curious thing is that, for the time being at least, no one can arrest me. The chiefs of police,

who are more or less the same people, look at me with a baffled expression, indeed they have to call

me ‘excellency’ and the carabinieri must salute me with a present arms!19

The Badoglio government was in office for only 50 days. Nine years later, Togliatti

credited it with having taken ‘some steps towards organising an Italian intervention in

NATIONAL UNITY 155

the war’, and of having brought some relief to the population of liberated Italy.

Looking back, his judgement was harsher towards the government that followed

immediately after the liberation of Rome under the presidency of Bonomi.20 Togliatti

himself had thought it best to remove Badoglio, whose continued presence in the

leadership, as he pointed out in an interview to L’Unità on 11 June, would have

generated an element of ‘very dangerous detachment’ between the government and the

masses of the new liberated provinces. He had accepted entry to the government once

more as minister without portfolio, but very soon realised that ‘the work of the

government and the parties which constitute it was carried out in an environment in

which the conservative and reactionary forces of Italian society were more active.’21

The reactionary inertia of a situation in which ‘the past is still poisoning the air and

the dead suffocates the living’ was one of the recurring themes in his writings of the

second half of 1944. Although in measured terms, he denounced ‘the feeling of

extreme sluggishness and even a sort of paralysis’ caused by the government’s action,

especially on the issue of the purges, considered to be one of the testing grounds on

which its ability to bring about renewal could be measured. Whilst the criterion of

‘striking hard on high and showing leniency below’ denoted a ‘far too easy convergence

of policies’, it was in reality applied haphazardly.22 The underlying reason for this

failure was the contradiction between being willing to carry out a de-fascisisation of the

government and having to use ‘organs of state’ (such as its judiciary and administrative

structure), which were still identical to those of fascism. As a minister, Togliatti had to

come to terms with an issue he had underestimated: the stumbling block created by the

continuity of the institutions and the authoritarian and centralising tradition of the

bureaucratic system.

The point that polarised the left and right, closely connected to the problem of the

purges, was the question of the powers of the CLNs. The conservative forces, sensing

the revolutionary potential of these organisations, began to question their function,

especially with regard to what would happen in a Northern Italy liberated by

insurrection. The Liberals, in particular, fought for recognition of the principle that

the CLNs were provisional and, as the liberated provinces were returned, one by one,

by the military government to the central administration, that the ordinary

administrative and controlling bodies should be restored. By contrast, the parties of the

left saw in the CLNs ‘the first cell of renewal of the Italian state’, able to breathe new

life into old institutions that in the south were reborn as blocs of political patronage

and shifting alliances.

In this respect, Togliatti was more cautious. The CLN appeared to him as the

political expression of anti-fascist unity and, from this perspective, he defended them

from the attack of the conservatives. He had no intention, however, of transforming

them in models of ‘direct democracy’ or into revolutionary institution.23

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY AND THE ‘NEW PARTY’

The elements on which Togliatti based the project of a ‘progressive democracy’, which

he wanted to build after the victorious outcome of the liberation struggle, were in fact

different. The characteristics of this project were, overall, rather general. Togliatti ran

156 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

through them at the Brancaccio Theatre in Rome on 9 July 1944,24 in similar terms to

those used in his speech at the Columns Hall in Moscow. Whilst not disavowing it

openly, he never endorsed the notion that the progressive democracy could be a

transitional phase towards socialism. His reserve on this issue, in equal measure, was

very likely due to the fear of venturing into an area that could provoke dissension

within the international communist movement, and the concern that he might alarm

those political forces he had chosen as interlocutors in Italy. But above all he was firmly

convinced that the only real corrective to bourgeois democracy was the action of a mass

communist party able to become ‘the solid nucleus of a society and a state in the

making, within the bourgeois society and state, exploiting their every contradiction and

division’.25

The critical function of the party was a constituent of the Leninist theoretical

tradition that continued into Stalin’s reinterpretation, and to which Togliatti was

sensitive. But the party that he had in mind was deeply different from the vanguard

party operating in a revolutionary situation, which according to him did not exist in

Italy. Faced by the disintegration of the fabric of the nation, the PCI had to carry out

tasks that were completely different from the past:

Here are the three new elements […] of our struggle and of our programme, at this moment

in time: 1) the national character of our party; 2) the active participation, and not simply in a

critical role, in a national government; and 3) our party must be a mass, popular party.26

While these elements were all connected, it was perhaps the first which introduced

the greatest novelty, even though it referred to Gramsci’s notion that the working class

had ‘in a sense to nationalise itself’ in order to be a hegemonic force in the

revolutionary process. The communist party had to be a ‘national’ party, insisted

Togliatti, because the working class was claiming the right to gather around itself ‘all

the forces that are aware of the general interest of the people and of their own country’.

However, a party that aspired to this role could not be ‘a small, closed association of

propagandists for the general ideas of communism and Marxism’, it had to be ‘a strong

party, solid, a mass party that was everywhere’.

Special attention, in this context, was given to the issue of women’s emancipation,

which from the time of his return to Italy Togliatti had considered a key component of

‘progressive democracy’; a democracy that had to go beyond the legal equality of

citizens to prove itself in terms of the substantive content of economic and social

existence. Drawing on a typical theme of liberal feminism, Togliatti indeed pointed

out that ‘the issue of women’s emancipation is not the problem of just one party nor of

just one class’, and required for its solution the creation ‘of a great organisation which

will speak for all women, with words of wisdom, fraternity, unity, national solidarity’.27

This function was to be carried out by the Italian Women’s Union (UDI), set up

in September 1944 on the initiative of a group of communist and socialist women

leaders, but which declared itself open to all Italian women, irrespective of faith or

political orientation. In the context of ‘democratic reconstruction’, as promoted by the

‘partito nuovo’ (see below), the UDI was to have a central role, as a mediating

NATIONAL UNITY 157

instrument across the social classes. Togliatti followed the development of the UDI

with particular interest. At the same time, he kept close supervision over issues relating

to women’s organisation within the party. Indeed, already during his stay in Naples, he

had proposed (and found some opposition especially from female comrades) to create

exclusively female party cells, in the belief that they were the most efficient instrument

with which to reconcile political commitments with those of work and family.28

From the very first days after his return, Togliatti threw himself into the task of

ensuring that these were the characteristics according to which the ‘partito nuovo’ (new

party) operated. He worked hard to overcome many of the obstacles to recruitment

coming from the party’s old cadres. ‘The Party’ – stated the Provisional Organisational

Rules, which he wrote and had approved on 22 June – ‘welcomes into its fold all the

workers and upright citizens who accept its political programme’, including those who

were card-carrying members of the Fascist National Party before 25 July 1943 ‘who

had not been directly responsible for fascist activities’. Those same rules indicated that

‘work place and local street organisations should be entrusted directly with the

enrolment to the party’, even though the final acceptance of the member was still

subject to approval by the federation executive.29

Togliatti insisted, also in his private correspondence with other leaders, on the

‘national’ characteristic of the party in order to prove that this was not a superficial

propaganda device. For instance, on 27 June 1944, he wrote to Scoccimarro:

The new government cannot find stability and carry out its work and this, I believe, is because

some of its members (both on the right and on the left) don’t think enough about the war and

think too much about political consolidation not in terms of the interests of the nation but in

terms of the interests of their party. When the right time comes we must make our voice

heard, as the only party that really knows what the nation needs.30

LA RINASCITA AND MEETING THE INTELLECTUALS

According to Togliatti, a cultural policy and relationship with the intelligentsia were

fundamental to the national character of the party. The review La Rinascita, first

published in June 1944,31 became the essential organ for a strong and influential

presence of the party on this terrain.

The importance that Togliatti attributed to the review can be seen not only by the

attention he gave to its overall layout, but also by his numerous contributions, from

the editorial to the feature article to the review, and by the punctilious guidance he

gave to the work of the other contributors. ‘The first and most important aim,’ he

wrote in the ‘Programma’ published in the first issue, was to ‘offer ideological guidance’

not only to the communist movement but also to ‘diverse forces’ which had the

intention of breaking with the past and of radically renewing the political and cultural

life of the nation.

Togliatti was very attentive towards the young intellectuals who had emerged

during the last years of fascism; he sought them out, approached them, flattered them

by his availability, and surprised them with his great knowledge and his familiarity

158 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

with their debates; he fascinated them with his clear thinking. This is how Fabrizio

Onofri, who met him after the liberation of Rome, remembered him:

Very friendly and inscrutable, sometimes sarcastic. He expressed himself with the humour of

an old professor talking to a class. He exuded a cold charm, like the engine of an electronic

machine; one could hear the soft purring of intelligence in motion.32

The review’s first issues focused on the effort to disseminate the principles of

historical materialism and, at the same time, engaged in a persistent polemic with

Benedetto Croce, who by announcing ‘the death of Marxism’ many years before, had,

according to Togliatti, ‘opened the way to fascist barbarism and degeneracy in the field

of thought and culture’. While collaborating with Croce on political grounds, Togliatti

did not spare strong attacks on the liberal philosopher. Above and beyond episodes in a

difficult personal relationship, which nevertheless had moments of human sympathy,

coming to terms with Croce was necessary to the project of restoring Marxism, which

Togliatti assigned to La Rinascita, using the debate with the liberal philosopher as the

party’s pars destruens. Its pars construens was instead represented by the attempt to

provide its readers with an anti-dogmatic version of Marxism, that was not mechanistic

or doctrinally abstract. The choice of citations from the ‘classics’ that the review offered

(starting with Engels’ famous letter to Bloch which stated that in the historical process

the structure was only determining ‘in the last instant’) was very illuminating in this

respect. But above all was the importance given to the significance of Gramsci’s

theoretical and political inheritance.33

Already, on 30 April 1944, in an article published in L’Unità, Togliatti had written

that ‘Antonio Gramsci is a man Italy will be proud of for centuries to come, because

his was certainly the best mind which in recent decades turned to the problems of

history, of the present and the future, searching and showing with the rigour of a

scientific Marxist and the passion of a proletarian leader the paths to renewal.’ He

made explicit reference to the ‘very precious material that will soon see publication’

contained in the prison notebooks. La Rinascita published in its first issue some

excerpts from the letters from prison, which included evaluations of Croce’s writings.

These were followed by the famous portrait of ‘our late lamented Teacher’ provided by

Gobetti in 1922. Gramsci’s legacy not only as a thinker but also as political leader was

evoked. Togliatti made a point of stressing whenever possible how strong the bond had

been between the ideals they shared and political collaboration, highlighting ‘the

unifying and national element of the thinking that guided us for decades in all our

work’.

La Rinascita provided the reader with a considerable variety of themes, which set it

apart from the increasing number of left-wing newspapers and periodicals which

appeared in the last years of the war and in the immediate postwar period. It paid due

tribute to the myth of the Soviet Union and Stalin (although overall the space

dedicated to these was limited); it paid attention to the course of the war and the

international situation, it dealt with the Italian situation through concrete analysis of

events, forces in operation, and the position of its opponents. Furthermore, from the

NATIONAL UNITY 159

beginning almost half of its pages were dedicated to introducing and discussing literary

and artistic developments. In this respect, Togliatti’s position in the beginning was very

open, as we can see from a letter of 22 February 1945 to the painter Mario Mafai,

where amongst other things he wrote:

I would like to […] let you know that today there isn’t an official party line with regard to

issues in art, and there couldn’t be one […] It would be […] not only unjust, but absurd if we

were to ask artists to sign up to a particular opinion as a condition of membership of the

party. And the artists themselves cannot contemplate it. We urge all artists to contribute to

our press by discussing the issues that interest them, and indeed the very difficulty of the

issues requires tolerance.34

An effort to understand, therefore, more than to judge and criticise, even the

directions and theses that one wished to do combat with. No doubt, the attraction and

growth of the ‘new party’ amongst the new generations of intellectuals had its roots

also in this approach.

RELATIONS WITH THE MASS PARTIES AND THE RISKS OF A ‘GREEK OUTCOME’

The effectiveness of the party and the opportunities offered by the ‘progressive

democracy’ found their testing ground in relations with other political forces. In the

speech Togliatti had given in the Columns Hall, his judgements on the parties that had

begun to re-emerge on the Italian political stage were influenced by the incomplete

nature of the information available. Very little was said in the speech about the socialist

party, simply stressing that ‘the task of uniting the diverse political organisations of the

working class in a single party will, no doubt, be on the agenda in the near future’.

Significantly, however, he acknowledged even at this point the importance of Christian

Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana; DC), whose grass roots, according to Togliatti,

were to be found ‘especially amongst the peasants and the Catholic organisations’, and

whose programme aimed at a ‘republic and the reconstruction of the country on a

democratic basis’. However, he had anticipated that ‘reactionary Catholic circles’

would make their influence felt. He had also dedicated great attention to what he

labelled ‘the liberal reconstruction party’, which he credited with being representative

‘of the interests of the bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie’, whereas his positive

opinion on the PdA – regarded ‘as the party of the urban lower-middle class’ –

contained a barely veiled scepticism about its ability to avoid falling apart (like its

predecessor in the Risorgimento).

These opinions were gradually revised once back in Italy. Togliatti was increasingly

losing confidence in the Italian Liberal Party (Partito Liberale Italiano; PLI), which he

identified as the centre where reactionary interests were being reorganised. He became

increasingly irritated by what he regarded as the abstract and unrealistic Jacobin

ambitions of the PdA. However, the role he saw for the two other ‘mass’ parties

evidently began to grow. The ‘pact of unity of action’ with the PSIUP (socialists)35 was

regarded as a great achievement, but was also viewed as the pivotal point in an alliance

between the three mass parties that ‘promised the struggle of the large communist

160 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

masses and the large Catholic masses for a programme of economic, political and social

regeneration’.36

The first step in this direction had already been taken with the reconstitution – on

a unified basis – of the CGIL. The aim was to extend this experience to the political

field. On 9 September, in a letter to De Gasperi, he proposed constituting ‘a bloc of

popular forces which will guarantee the triumph and stability of a democratic and

progressive regime to which the workers of our country aspire’.37

After the crisis of the Bonomi government, in a letter to Longo of 9 December

1944, he singled out amongst the problems which had delayed its resolution ‘the lack

of a special relationship, ratified by a political pact, amongst the large mass parties’.38

And again, in February 1945, leading up to the local elections which were to be held

after the liberation of the north, he advanced as ‘the best solution’, a ‘communist and

socialist combined list with the support of Christian Democracy’.39

Obviously, Togliatti believed that only a substantial unity between the three mass

parties, as an expression of the underlying forces of Italian society, would secure a

democratic transformation of the country and guarantee the complete legitimation of

the PCI. He also believed that the old forces of pre-fascist liberalism were going to be

the point of reference, although weakened, of future political negotiations. From such

a perspective, the DC – viewed as the party of ‘peasant Catholic masses’ that ‘had

suffered under fascism and hate fascism as much as we hate it’ – was endowed with an

objectively progressive role; that is, it could influence the future shape of middle-class

and liberal hegemony. The shortcomings of this analysis were that it equated the DC

with its supposed ‘popular’ supporters and underestimated the Catholic support

amongst the urban middle class, whilst it overestimated the room for manoeuvre

granted to the Catholic Party by the Church, which had in any case sent out

contradictory messages. Indeed, when the Vatican hierarchy condemned the Christian

left,40 Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, assistant at the Vatican state secretariat,

reassured Eugenio Reale (then foreign undersecretary in the Bonomi government and

Togliatti’s close collaborator) that ‘the Vatican has never claimed that there is

incompatibility between the Catholic faith and membership of a left-wing party, so a

Catholic can be a member of the socialist or communist party.’ He had even suggested

to his interlocutor a meeting ‘between His Holiness and the leader of your party, that

today has so much influence in Italy’.41

Nothing came of the suggestion and from Reale’s account it seems the objections

came mainly from the communist side. But the episode shows that the Cold War

climate was still far away. The importance that Togliatti gave to the relationship with

the Catholic world is confirmed by the close relationship that he developed, also at a

personal level, in 1944 with Franco Rodano, the most lively intellectual of ‘the

Catholic communists’, and his association with Don Giuseppe De Luca, another

distinguished member of the Vatican entourage.

Binding the DC to the anti-fascist alliance between the three mass parties was a

priority. Togliatti’s attitude during the Bonomi government’s crisis was proof of its

importance. The crisis began on 26 November, though it had brewing for some time

due to the disagreements that were dividing the coalition over the issue of the purges.

NATIONAL UNITY 161

The crisis was further aggravated by Bonomi, who instead of handing his resignation to

the CLN, handed it to the royal lieutenant. The PSIUP and the PdA hardened their

attitudes on this issue and refused to play a part in a new government led by the old

prime minister. Togliatti thought this was a problem of form, whereas he considered it

a priority to avoid breaking up the national unity that had been so painstakingly built.

In order to fend off the danger of isolating the left in opposition, and thus

consolidating a moderate centre-right bloc under the auspices of the monarchy, he

consented, half-heartedly, to the formation of a new Bonomi government and decided

to play a part in it, even without the socialists and the PdA. It was not an easy step to

take, and he tried to the last to convince at least the socialists to side with the PCI. On

7 December, he wrote to Nenni in urgent tones:

I fervently beg you, as a comrade and as a friend, to exert your influence so that your

leadership finds the way to give its support to the government […] I plead with you again not

to take a decision that could damage development towards a complete political union of the

working class, a development which has a crucial historical value and to which we have tied

the future of our parties and our names, and whose value goes beyond the contingency of a

ministerial crisis.42

Because of his decision to stay in government, Togliatti faced significant

opposition within the party. At the time of the vote on the issue, on 7 December, the

Direzione split and Scoccimarro, Di Vittorio and Spano voted against the secretary’s

proposal. This was the first time, since Togliatti’s return to Italy, that such clear dissent

had emerged; it was eventually overcome but it did leave a feeling of resentment.43

In any case, the PCI gained from the situation. Its position of legitimacy was

strengthened (confirmed by the vice-presidency conferred on Togliatti) and its

leadership of the left was reaffirmed without breaking the pact of unity with the

socialists. To be sure, so astute a politician as Togliatti must have been aware of the

cost involved in favouring a conservative policy of continuity within the state, with its

pre-fascist features, that Bonomi’s presidency and its relation with the monarchy

represented. Very likely, he believed (thus sharing the hopes of all the left) that this

negative element could be compensated by the approaching insurrection in the north.

The political weight that an insurrection (before the arrival of the Allies) could

have had on internal power relations was obvious to the communist leader, and was

reiterated in all his instructions to the comrades in the north. In this respect, it is

misleading to talk, as Giorgio Bocca has done, of his ‘mistrust’ of and ‘deafness’

towards the armed Resistance, as if he saw in it only the risks of ‘adventurism’.44

Togliatti’s support for the armed activities in occupied Italy, even the most

controversial, was total, without reservation. When, on 15 April 1944, a group of

partisans in Florence killed the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who had been education

minister and whom Mussolini had nominated president of the Italian Academy in the

northern sector of Italy still controlled by the fascists, Togliatti wrote in L’Unità a dry,

harsh comment on the event:

162 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Whoever betrays the motherland engaged in a deadly battle against the foreign invader, and

betrays human civilisation in the service of barbarism, must pay with his life. The execution of

Giovanni Gentile is a victory for our country in the tragic struggle in which it is engaged; it is

a triumph for the cause of justice. As citizens we honour with deep emotion and express our

gratitude to the young fighters who carried out this act of regeneration for the life of our

country.45

Then again, since June 1944, Togliatti had urged the communists in the north to

‘remember that the insurrection that we want does not aim to impose social and

political transformations in a socialist and communist direction, but aims at national

liberation and the obliteration of fascism.’46 Indeed, this instruction could not but be

strengthened after the Yalta conference had confirmed the inclusion of Italy in the

sphere of Anglo-American influence. Earlier, moreover, the repression by the British

occupation army of the Greek partisans’ opposition to attempts to reinstate the

monarchy had confirmed in the clearest terms the self-evident truth that Stalin had

expressed to the Yugoslav communist Gilas: ‘whoever occupies a country also imposes

his social system.’

Togliatti was very concerned about any development in the armed struggle that

might undermine the continuation of the ‘great alliance’ between the anti-fascist

powers after the end of the war. The ‘partisan’ element, in the original meaning of the

term, was in his view decisive in order to avoid a final resolution of the war merely in

terms of restoration. However, it also had to be kept in check and subordinated to a

war that was primarily ‘national’.

This view was not a mere alignment with the strategic interests of the Soviet

Union. Far from being just a pawn, Togliatti was a central character in the clash of

political lines within the communist movement. On the one side were those who

wanted to continue with the anti-fascist alliance beyond the end of the conflict, with

the view that this would guarantee an ‘open’ tension within the respective ‘spheres of

influence’ on which to build the foundations of the socialist struggle. On the other side

were supporters of unilateral action, aimed at making the most of the possibilities

provided by a victory over Germany in order to gain a better position for any later

clash with the capitalist world.47 Obviously, Togliatti supported the first view;

however, it was not so obvious that the northern communist leaders should support

without reservation the second, given that their main concern was to establish in

advance a position of strength for the communist party and its allies in liberated Italy.

The difference between these two positions, whilst not explicit, would weigh heavily on

future political discussion within the PCI.

Issues of international politics were not the only reason Togliatti wanted to avoid

the insurrection in the north breaking the bounds of national unity and becoming the

starting point for ‘a heightening of the political and class struggle’. In his speech to the

second national council of the PCI on 7 April 1945, after warning against the danger

of ‘gambling on probable rifts between the Great Powers’, he explained that to risk a

‘Greek outcome’ – in other words, ‘a violent clash, an armed conflict between the

armed forces of the anti-fascist front and the forces of the old police and the army led

by anti-democratic elements’ – would only result in ‘avoiding popular consultation

NATIONAL UNITY 163

[…], indefinitely prolong the occupation of Italy by the liberating allied forces and

therefore set up an almost insurmountable barrier to the advance of the democratic

forces’. Above all, he stressed, there was also the danger that there would emerge ‘in the

country, in addition to those already existing, a new split and division […] between a

democratic, anti-fascist and progressive north, and the rest of the country tied to anti-

democratic positions and kept against its will in pre-fascist conditions’.

He was also determined to ward off what he called a ’conservative’ trend, which

‘wanted to deaden the situation; to erode little by little the unity of the anti-fascist

front; to set to one side the liberation committees by arguing that they were no longer

necessary once the state apparatus began to work again; to govern with the old

bureaucratic and inquisitorial methods; to avoid contact between the government and

the people and postpone indefinitely the election of a Constituent Assembly’.48 The

aim of the insurrection, within its self-imposed limits, was above all to defeat this

project.

THE ‘WIND FROM THE NORTH’ AND THE PARRI GOVERNMENT

The north was liberated as Togliatti had hoped, through a popular insurrection that

did not cross over into revolution. Togliatti was, however, deeply impressed by the

picture that a liberated Northern Italy presented. His arrival in the northern towns was

accompanied by huge demonstrations that gave him an indication of the feelings and

expectations of the masses.

Meetings with the party rank-and-file, especially with the new generation born to

politics with the workers’ struggles of 1943–44 and the partisan war, had for Togliatti

some unexpected characteristics. In Turin, a group of six or seven ex-partisan comrades

literally ‘kidnapped’ him, arms in hand, and took him to a bar where for three of four

hours he was asked to explain what ‘progressive democracy’ was. The conversation,

recalled one of those present, was not easy, ‘we had weapons and we wanted to carry on

shooting.’ In the end the comrades were satisfied, were convinced by his arguments

and this unusual assembly came to an end leaving everybody ‘euphoric and happy’.49

This episode was evidence of the extraordinary charismatic power that Togliatti

exercised over party members, and also of his ‘pedagogic’ skills. It also made him aware

of the difficulty that the PCI rank-and-file had in accepting the party line, leading

Togliatti to radicalise his ‘public’ discourse in the weeks following the liberation. All

his writings and speeches during this period stressed the need to give the country ‘a

new political leadership’ and to bring about profound political change.

The idea of progressive democracy itself was redefined in bolder terms: ‘a

democratic regime that employs measures that are socialist in character, moves

therefore towards a regime […] with elements of society different from what existed

before fascism, different from what is in place in democratic countries of pure

capitalism.’50 At the same time, Togliatti seemed prepared to reassess the role of the

CLNs, which ‘must occupy the place that is due to them in the political life of the

country’ as organs ‘of popular self-government’ and even as ‘instances of direct

democracy that emerge from agreement between all parties and all mass organisations

that emerge from the people itself’.51

164 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

For the PCI secretary, however, the building of a new democracy ‘directly linked to

the popular masses’ was still founded on the collaboration of the mass parties rather

than the problematic institutionalisation of the CLN. This was the principle that

inspired his attitude during the negotiations to form the first government of a liberated

Italy. In the beginning, the PCI firmly supported Pietro Nenni’s nomination for the

presidency, which was nevertheless blocked by the conservative opposition. In turn, the

left prevented De Gasperi’s nomination, leading to a compromise solution in the form

of Ferruccio Parri. Parri was a leader of the PdA and a former commander-in-chief of

the partisan forces. Many regarded the choice, with conflicting feelings of enthusiasm

and concern, as the first consequence of the ‘wind from the north’, or the will for

radical renewal that had been expressed in the victorious insurrection. Togliatti’s

assessment was positive because ‘what has been broken, and surely for ever, is the

privilege of the ruling classes to hold the monopoly of certain important places in

government’, and because the communists were granted ‘equal access to political

leadership, and government’.52

More cautious was his assessment on the prime minister. He wrote to Longo on 18

June:

It seems to me, following the dealings we had, that with him we can definitely move towards

the constituent assembly and towards a republic. He won’t be so determined in the battle

against what is left of fascism. He is, in the end, completely insensitive to the social problems

and above all basically hostile to socialist developments.53

These reservations notwithstanding, Togliatti was really counting on the Parri

government as a means of accomplishing a radical transformation of the Italian

political scene. Indeed, after some hesitation, he agreed to be part of the government as

minister for justice. It was not an easy task. He found that the sovereignty of his

powers of action, in the institutional field, was curtailed by the powers of the allied

military administration. In addition, he also had to come to terms with a judicial

system that had not been purged and with a ministerial bureaucracy that had, in the

main, remained the same. Both were suspicious of a minister for justice who was also

the secretary of a party they regarded as a byword for subversion and disorder.54

His first act was the opening speech of 28 June 1945, which addressed all the

judicial authorities. Alongside serious but generic statements in the political-

institutional field (‘there cannot be a democratic state if the judiciary is not

independent of all political influence’), and the ritual reference to the ‘great tradition’

of which all Italian magistrates were heirs and contributors, he advanced a few themes

that became recurrent in Togliatti’s activity as minister, such as the commitment to

ensure the effective working of the instruments of extraordinary justice against acts of

collaboration and the need to stop as soon as possible all ‘illegal forms of reprisal

against those who had betrayed the motherland and brought the country to a

loathsome servitude’.55 However, Togliatti knew that he could not set the task of an

overall reform of the judiciary and of the laws inherited from the fascist regime as an

immediate objective. Doing so would have caused not only a head-on confrontation

NATIONAL UNITY 165

with conservative groups such as lawyers and especially magistrates, but also an

inevitable split in the government coalition. He tried, therefore, to introduce some

elements of renewal through more limited measures. Perhaps the more significant were

a circular about rendering non-punishable certain war activities of the partisans in

occupied Italy, and a project to reintroduce popular juries in the criminal court, so

implementing the principle of popular participation in the administration of justice.

But the bureaucratic structure of the ministry was left untouched; therefore, it

continued to be affected by the conservative, if not reactionary, directives of chief

executives and high-ranking career personnel. This would be confirmed, as we shall see

later, throughout the subsequent De Gasperi government.

FROM PARRI TO DE GASPERI: FOREIGN POLICY AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

Togliatti’s duties as minister obviously did not exhaust his whole commitment and

attention to the tasks facing the Parri government. The objective of the conservative

forces, however, was to delay as long as possible the political election date in order to

weaken the effects of the ‘wind from the north’. Togliatti seemed to be worried by the

prospects of a postponement. In a cabinet meeting of 30 October, he said:

It is obvious that the more we prolong the present situation, the more the country will

fragment. This is also true for the parties. The day agreement amongst parties ceases to exist,

no one can tell which path any one will take. The more we continue as at present, the smaller

becomes the number of those prepared to submit to a genuinely democratic decision by the

country.56

Togliatti focused on two other issues during the months the Parri government was

in office: foreign and economic policy. With regard to the first, his writings express

concern that, with the end of the war, there would be a deterioration in the alliance

between the great anti-fascist powers. The historical import of Hiroshima did not

elude him. Indeed, he wrote that ‘it makes the war lose its combative character and

take on instead a destructive significance blind to any sign of organised civilisation.’57

He was aware of the consequences that the (temporary) monopoly of nuclear weapons

could have on relations between the Anglo-Americans and Russians.

Against this background, it was even more myopic and irresponsible (as he accused

the conservative press of being) to speculate on the likely disagreements amongst the

great powers. The fierce polemic against the lack of ‘sense of reality, of proportion, of

the real national interests’, was also due to the concern that the situation could

replicate the tragic combination of ‘provincial ignorance and smugness’, ‘poor man’s

imperialism’ and ‘literati jingoism’ that in the first postwar years had constituted the

cultural ground of fascism. What worried Togliatti the most was the way that much of

the Italian press dealt with the Trieste issue; it had chosen to ‘irritate and reject

Yugoslavia […] with a kind of nationalistic campaign, and therefore to make any direct

negotiation impossible’. By so doing, the aim of ‘maintaining the Italian nature of the

city’ (of which Togliatti had no doubt) ‘had been made much more difficult’.58

166 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

The issue of Trieste had come to his attention when he was still in Moscow.

Already, on 24 September 1943, he had written to Dimitrov to say that he thought the

decision by the Slovenian Liberation Front to annexe Trieste and Istria ‘premature’,

and he advised ‘postponing the borders issue until the people themselves had the

chance of decide on it in complete freedom’.59 But as the military position of Tito’s

army gained strength, the Yugoslavs made it clear that, at the end of the conflict, their

aim was annexation; a demand that had also been supported by Vincenzo Bianco, ‘the

ambassador’ of the communist Northern Italy Direzione to the Slovenian Communist

Party.

Togliatti was, therefore, in a difficult position when he met the Slovenian

communist leader Kardelj on 17 October 1944 in Bari. On that occasion, in a message

he sent to Bianco, the PCI secretary had thought it positive that Venezia Giulia should

be liberated by Tito’s army and had instructed the PCI to collaborate ‘as closely as

possible with the Yugoslavian comrades in organising popular power in all liberated

regions’.60

Nevertheless, even then he had kept a clear distinction between occupation and

annexation, and later, from the spring of 1945, he warmly supported granting a large

degree of autonomy, even to the point of contemplating a possible independent state

for the region. Togliatti’s concern had increased after Yugoslavia had occupied the city

and, towards the middle of May, he sent a telegram to Stalin in which he criticised

Tito’s inclination to define Italian foreign policy as ‘imperialist’. He had warned of the

danger that the Trieste issue could trigger the formation of a reactionary front able to

link nationalism and anti-communism. This, he stressed, ran against the interests of

the PCI and of the Soviet Union.61

However, in Togliatti’s articles of the summer of 1945 there emerged a kind of

contrast between the clear way in which he had expressed his concern that the Trieste

issue could weaken the ‘great alliance’ and the uncertainty, if not ambiguity, of the

concrete proposals he put forward, due also to the difficulty of interpreting the real

intentions of the Soviets and the degree of their support for Tito.

Togliatti’s interventions in the field of political economy were less frequent and of

lesser magnitude. The PCI supported with conviction Parri’s attempt to begin the

country’s recovery at the expense, in first place, of the large monopoly industries,

which had amassed large profits during the fascist period. But the PCI was not able to

put up an effective fight against the conservative offensive that the economic powers

were mounting against the prime minister, who was accused of eroding the rights of

private property. At the economic convention that the party held in August in Rome,

Togliatti’s speech was notable for its moderation. He believed the priority was to defeat

the threat of inflation, which he felt could hand the middle classes over to the reaction,

and to concentrate on the need to increase work productivity and ‘make property

owners pay their taxes’. With regard to the path that reconstruction should take, he

was very sceptical about the possibility of ‘devising, at present, in Italy a national

economic plan’, and he went as far as to say that ‘even if we were, today, in power on

our own, we would appeal for reconstruction to the private sector, because we know

that there are tasks which we believe Italian society is not ready to undertake.’63

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This was not only a cautious ‘tactic’ imposed by the choice to subordinate the

struggle for economic transformation to political objectives, first amongst these the

election of a Constituent Assembly. The theoretical inheritance of the Third

International weighed heavily on Togliatti, with its distrust of planning theories and

controlling practices of the economic cycles implemented in many capitalist countries

before the war. Indeed, it was the whole economic culture of the Italian left that lagged

behind and appeared dependent on the hegemony of liberal economics, with which it

ended up sharing the idea that state intervention was equivalent in forms and means to

fascist corporativism.

Meanwhile, the work of the Parri government was made more difficult, not only

by objective conditions, but also by divisions between the parties that supported it. In

November, the PLI took the initiative and precipitated a crisis, listing ten serious

criticisms against the government. Togliatti described it as a ‘policy of progressive

distancing of a conservative group from the democratic and anti-fascist core of the

country’.64 But in concrete terms the PCI’s opposition to the collapse of the Parri

government was weak. It did not attempt any public mobilisation to stop it, both

because Togliatti was concerned that demonstrations would be too extreme and

because, disappointed by the government’s results, he hoped for a stronger leadership

based on agreement between the mass parties which in his view were the only ones able

to strengthen the foundations of the still fragile Italian democracy. There was the

danger that one of the representatives of pre-fascist liberalism could become prime

minister. The PCI wanted to avoid such a possibility at all costs. Togliatti was not

overenthusiastic about a presidency leaded by De Gasperi. In recent months, his

opinion of the DC had become more critical; in July, he wrote that ‘the leadership of

De Gasperi is not reassuring with regard to a development that won’t be along the lines

of Don Sturzo but more along the lines of Salazar or Dolfuss, that is to say, towards a

totalitarianism of a clerical kind.’65 In commenting on the final outcome of the crisis in

an interview with the L’Unità of 11 December, however, he did not seem too deceived:

De Gasperi is the leader of a party with mass support. This in itself makes him more

acceptable than those so-called ‘independent’ politicians who only answer for their behaviour

to their cronies and their own vanity. After the elections, however, when we and the socialists

will be, without doubt, representing the majority of the voters, a political agreement with the

Democrazia Cristiana could become the axis of government stability in a republican system. It

is since the liberation of Rome that we have been working with this aim in mind.

THE CRUCIAL PROBLEM OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

In the end, the conservative legacy weighed on the De Gasperi government more

heavily than on Parri’s. The first indication of this was the decision to replace the

prefects elected by the CLN with career state personnel. Togliatti, who was again part

of the government as minister for justice, made clear his reservations with regard to this

(‘we are making a mistake by dismissing the friends of democracy. We know how civil

servants of the old regime will behave in the new one’)66. But in the event, the left gave

in on this vital issue, confining itself to the condition that the prefects nominated had

168 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the unanimous approval of all the parties in the coalition. The fact that the situation

was not developing favourably for the left was proved by the split within the PdA,

which led eventually to its political demise. Togliatti’s comment was harsh (the ‘PdA

has not been able to become a great party gathering around itself those democratic

forces which for a hundred reasons cannot find a place in the traditional mass parties,

[…] because it has obstinately pursued somebody else’s path’), but could not disguise

his concern for a situation in which the disappearance of ‘one of the elements of a

healthy democracy’ would be for many ‘the dangerous loss of a point of reference’.67

The confrontation between the left and the conservatives soon reignited over the

crucial issue of the powers of the Constituent Assembly. The liberals’ aim was to take

away from the latter the final decision about the institutional form of the state and

entrust it to a popular referendum. They were hoping to appeal to the feelings of

affection for the royal family and the monarchy present in some parts of the country,

or perhaps they were relying above all on a further postponement of the elections. De

Gasperi, too, did not dislike the idea of a plebiscite. Liberals and Christian democrats

also agreed in not wanting to grant the Constituent Assembly legal powers or control

over the government’s actions. They were afraid that it could translate the Resistance’s

impetus for renewal into radical measures. On this issue, it was not hard for them to

gain the support of the Allies and take advantage of their influential ‘advice’.

The left was, therefore, in a difficult position: if it were to opt for an outright fight,

the consequence would have been a governmental crisis, an unavoidable postponement

of the elections, and the danger of a parallel offensive by the monarchy. At the meeting

of the PCI Direzione held on 16–18 February, Togliatti’s firm opinion was that the

decisive problem to be solved in order to strengthen the country’s democracy was the

institutional issue. Indeed, he went so far as to say that in his opinion De Gasperi was

working for ‘a republic with a crucifix, with the Pope as president’, which would have

been ‘although small, a step forward’.68 Ten days later, the cabinet came to a

compromise that took into account many of the demands of the conservatives, that is

to say a popular referendum at the same time as the election of a Constituent Assembly

which would not have ordinary legislative powers except to approve treaties and

electoral laws.

There is little doubt that Togliatti’s primary concern was to establish political

alliances, even at top level, before fostering socio-economic reforms and the

democratisation of the state. He regarded these alliances not only as the basic

requirement for achieving such reforms, but also the firmest guarantee that the new

democracy could hold out. As a minister, he also wanted to avoid introducing divisive

measures in the coalition government. This concern is confirmed by two provisions,

both passed towards the end of his mandate. The first was the decree of 31 May, which

ratified the independence of the judges and ended their subservience to political power

typical of the fascist regime. This was an important decree in principle, which

nevertheless left the existing internal control mechanisms intact and did not dismantle

the hierarchal organisation of the judiciary. The second decree was without a doubt the

most controversial of his career as minister for justice. The amnesty decreed on 22 June

1946 was mainly concerned with political crimes committed by the fascists. For

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Togliatti, it was an act of clemency needed to present the Republic ‘from its first steps

as a regime of peace and reconciliation for all good Italians’, and was at the same time

‘an act of strength and confidence in the future of the country’. However, it was clear

to the communist leader that the amnesty should not be extended to the most serious

cases that violated ‘the popular conscience and the principles of equity themselves’. In

the report with which he presented the decree Togliatti asserted:

To ignore this need, instead of contributing to the reconciliation, would contribute to

rekindling hatreds and ill-feeling, with consequences that all would certainly regret.69

Therefore the amnesty was ruled out for crimes committed by ‘people who

occupied top political, military or civilian positions’, and also in those cases where

there had been ‘massacres, exceptionally inhuman cruelty, homicide or looting, and for

crimes that had been committed for money’. This broad formulation, adopted because

of pressure from the conservative elements in government, actually gave considerable

discretional power to the judiciary, which used it to pass a number of shocking not

guilty verdicts. Far from the supposed ‘act of strength’, the amnesty ended up as

another sign of the weakness of the left, forced increasingly into defensive positions.

THE ROOTS OF ‘DUPLICITY’

Contributing to the government’s political line and his activity as minister were not

Togliatti’s only commitments. He was also deeply involved in party work. On 8

August, at the close of a meeting of the Northern Italy Direzione, his appointment as

secretary of the PCI was confirmed. The party he was leading was experiencing an

ongoing and turbulent transformation. At the end of the year, its membership was

approaching 1,800,000, whereas a year before it had amounted to 502,000, of which

105,000 were members in that part of Italy occupied by the Germans. Never before

had a popular party sunk such deep roots in Italian society. The backbone of the party

leadership was still mainly made up of the ‘professional revolutionaries’ who belonged

to the political generation of the clandestine years. The new PCI line and the

organisational apparatus that supported it, that is to say the ‘partito nuovo’, implied a

change of mentality that was nothing less than a cultural revolution. It was, therefore,

only accepted with many reservations. As for the party rank-and-file, it comprised

mainly militants who had joined during and soon after the Resistance. The formative

experience in their political development had been the liberation struggle; therefore,

the national and democratic strategy outlined by Togliatti to protract the anti-fascist

united front was, from this point of view, favourably met by this generation. On the

other hand, the armed struggle had raised, especially in Northern Italy, expectations of

radical change, which were in conflict with Togliatti’s strategy. Therefore, for certain

sectors of the party, including a section of its leadership, the acceptance of

parliamentary democracy was provisional and conditional, especially as the cohesive

element able to keep together the various ‘souls’ of the party were still the Soviet

Union, motherland of ‘socialism’, and Stalin himself. The latter was still the key figure

in the political and intellectual universe of Italian communism. These were the roots of

170 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

what Togliatti himself would later refer to as the ‘duplicity’ of the PCI, which did not

consist so much of deliberately disguising its aims behind a democratic façade that hid

any semblance of revolutionary strategy, but was rather the result of the presence – at a

moment in which it was making the switch from clandestinity to legality – of different

generations and different political lines within the party, which could, at least

potentially, be alternatives to one another.70

How much of this ‘duplicity’ was present in Togliatti’s personal attitude? The

communist leader really believed that for an indefinite period of time Italy could not

travel down the revolutionary path and that rebuilding a democratic fabric in the

country was necessary for the survival of the organised working-class movement. But in

Togliatti there remained the certainty that socialist democracy, as expressed in the

Soviet Union, was the most complete form of democracy possible, superior to the

democracy that the objective conditions in Italy would permit. From this point of

view, Togliatti accepted and capitalised on the ‘duplicity’ as a resource to be used in

the future, and above all as a safety valve through which to channel the mood and

expectations of a considerable section of the party’s rank-and-file.

It was a precarious balance, difficult to maintain. Indeed, Togliatti had no

intention of committing himself to an ideological revision that he regarded as

inconceivable, and that he would have found difficult to make acceptable to the rank-

and-file and important sections of the party leadership. Nevertheless, he did not want

expectations of a revolutionary ‘reckoning’ to be translated into attitudes that could

bring about the failure of the long-term strategic plan he was working on. For sure

there were indications of potential dangers, against which Togliatti reacted very

resolutely. His polemic against ‘illegal acts’ carried out by demobilised partisans in the

months following the Liberation was consistently harsh:

In the north, the Party must fight all forms of illegality. To guarantee that elections will take

place in the next three or four months we must keep order through the action of the Party.

This is especially important in the Emilia provinces, where illegal acts were more serious […]

You in Emilia have nowadays a special responsibility. You must give us the assurance that if

there will be struggles they will unfold under our leadership.71

The battle which Togliatti fought against a militarist and insurrectional tendency

in the party rank-and-file did not prevent some excesses from occurring. Excesses that

could, moreover, be explained as the consequence of what had been – in addition to a

liberation struggle – a civil war with class characteristics.71 But all in all, the opinion

expressed by Piero Calamandrei in the summer of 1946 was right in acknowledging

that Togliatti’s PCI had the merit of having brought back ‘amongst the masses

confused and dispersed by so many misfortunes the meaning of political discipline’.73

FROM THE FIFTH PCI CONGRESS TO THE ELECTIONS OF JUNE

This was, without doubt, one of the duties attributed by Togliatti to the ‘partito

nuovo’, a party whose birth certificate he had issued with a report to the fifth congress

of the PCI in Rome on 29 December 1945. The report opened with a long ‘historical’

NATIONAL UNITY 171

introduction, which stressed the delays accumulated in Italy’s political and social

development, as if wanting to define the context in which a renewal in the country’s

social and political structure could take place. Although he highlighted the ‘qualitative

leap forward’ that the Resistance had represented, Togliatti did not tire of denouncing

the dangers, far from being overcome, of a return to reaction. The main priority was

still the Constituent Assembly, even though ‘we have not yet accomplished great

revolutionary victories that could be ratified in a constitutional document of the state.’

Therefore, the new constitution had at the same time to bury a past of ‘social

conservativeness and political tyranny’ and represent ‘a programme for the future’,

setting out simultaneously the fundamental principles on which to base further

government activity. The stance on the alternative between republic and monarchy was

clear. Choosing the republic was a vital necessity for the dawning Italian democracy,

whose aims Togliatti outlined with clarity:

We want a republic organised on the basis of a representational parliamentary system, in other

words a democratic republic where all reforms with social content are pursued through

democratic methods.74

This objective met with the complete approval of the socialists. The unity between

the two left-wing parties had never been stronger, and the press of both parties

speculated on a possible fusion. Togliatti, concerned about vexing some of the

socialists, was cautious on the issue. Nenni was also against moving towards organic

unity, which in any case soon ceased to be a concrete political issue.

The communist secretary’s report was more critical than in the past of the DC, and

urged De Gasperi’s party to be clear on whether there was the possibility ‘of beginning

some common work towards setting up a genuine and solid system of freedom and

progress’. In the final section of his report, Togliatti specified with accuracy the

features of the ‘new party’. First of all, he suggested a change (later included in article 2

of the statutes) which introduced an essential amendment to the traditional communist

‘form of party’. Thus, membership of the party was going to be based solely on

agreeing to the party’s political programme, independently of declared religious faith

and ‘philosophical beliefs’. Members still had a duty to ‘increase their knowledge of the

classics of Marxism-Leninism’, but there was an outline of a first attempt to ‘secularise’

the party, which laid the foundations for a greater freedom of theoretical research.75

There was also an important insistence on internal democracy, which had to become a

feature of the party, and the indication of a discipline ‘which cannot and must not

resemble army discipline, or that of zombies’.

If the fifth congress was, for Togliatti, undoubtedly a big success and revealed a

party that had grown considerably and was firmly united around its secretary, the

results of the administrative elections, which were held in two rounds between 10

March and 7 April 1946, were not so encouraging. The PCI results were uneven and,

in more than one instance, surprisingly lower than the PSIUP’s. In addition, the DC

emerged crowned as the party with a relative majority. The PCI noted especially its

comparative failure in Northern Italy and its inability to penetrate the urban middle

172 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

classes. The self-criticism that followed, however, touched mainly on organisational

issues, for instance the deficiencies of trade union work. At the meeting of the

Direzione on 9 April, Togliatti said:

It would be a mistake if, on the basis of a few unsatisfactory results, we ushered in a critique of

the overall party line. This critique would push the party towards either reformism or a ‘class

against class’ left-ism which would make us lose our profile as a national party and as a party

that fights for the unity of the working classes.

In fact, Togliatti was more concerned about the second danger than the first. An

important passage in a letter of 15 April sent by the Direzione to the secretaries of the

provincial federations, criticised ‘behaviour that irritates people, makes them

antagonistic towards us, and which we must remedy as soon as possible’. The letter also

denounced, amongst other things, the tendency to disrupt meetings called by other

parties, the vandalising and smearing of opponents’ posters, ‘songs in bad taste […],

the use of unnecessary lorry-loads of rowdy comrades with red flags, and flags without

the tricolour bow’.76 The criticisms were also used as instructions for the forthcoming

electoral campaigns with regard to the referendum and the Constituent Assembly.

A NEW LIFE

With the elections of 2 June 1946 and the birth of the Republic, a new phase opened

up in Palmiro Togliatti’s life. He was at the height of his intellectual powers.

Strengthened by very harsh and difficult experiences, he had left behind the ‘heroic’

Republic and was entering a world that was almost new to him. Paolo Spriano has

pertinently written:

In the immediate post-war period when he truly became ‘the leader’ for great masses of

workers (before, for nearly twenty years, he had been ‘the secretary’ of a small clandestine

party with fragile roots in the country) the gulf between Togliatti and the other leaders, and

his break with the old tradition, became very clear. He was unusual compared to the model of

tribune or ‘apostle of socialism’ that had been projected by the Italian working-class

movement before fascism. One could see in his background the shadows of Gramsci, Stalin, a

long exile, a revolutionary training undertaken abroad more than in the motherland. He was a

cultured man – schooled in classical, humanist and judicial culture, he knew the law – and

intellectuals recognised him as such.77

Member of the Constituent Assembly, parliamentary group leader of his party, one

of the better-known figures on the Italian political scene, he was aware of the

advantages and disadvantages of being increasingly prominent. In portraying him, the

‘independent’ press oscillated between a certain nervous respect or reverence and a

preconceived resentment. The satiric press on the right caricatured him as being at

Moscow’s beck and call, often portraying him as a Russian mužik in traditional shirt

and boots.

Against this image, he presented another. This was more reassuring, severe in its

intellectual rigour and devotion to work, but not lacking a certain bonhomie. Vittorio

NATIONAL UNITY 173

Gorresio, one of the most meticulous reporters of Italian parliamentary life and,

undoubtedly, the most impartial and pragmatic observer of the activities of the Italian

communists, delighted in highlighting this trait. He wrote about Togliatti’s Roman

summers: ‘At midday he brought home bread and mozzarella in a paper bag and did

not set the table. In the evening he went to one or other modest pizzeria, he would eat

cod fillets and drink wine from Castelli Romani.’ He described his habits and the

things he enjoyed:

His origins and dispositions were middle class, and even though he did not have friends, in

the strict sense, he loved socialising with Amendola and Reale, two jovial Neapolitan

communists who could talk, both over dinner and while taking a stroll, about matters that

were not necessarily connected with the life of the party. He did not shy away from gossip, he

liked to indulge in mischievous behaviour and in jests, and a joke or a well pulled-off prank

delighted him.78

Within this picture, his flirtations with learning and scholarship were almost

legendary. It was with Gorresio, in fact, that he engaged in memorable interpretations

of thirteenth-century sonnets. Perhaps these small diversions were Togliatti’s way of

escaping the all-encompassing commitment of his public and party life.79 But

upheavals were also occurring in his private life. His marriage to Rita Montagnana had

long since deteriorated. Not even concern over their son Aldo could contribute to a

reconciliation. Aldo had returned from Moscow in the summer of 1945, and was

having problems settling into a normal life of study and work. He was withdrawing

into himself, showing the first symptoms of a nervous illness that would affect him

throughout his life.

Togliatti was deeply affected by his son’s problems. He tried to re-establish a

relationship with him but both found it difficult. Aldo tried to continue the studies he

had began in Moscow at Turin Polytechnic, but he soon stopped. He took part in the

life of the party, but this wearied him; he found a small job, but avoided his colleagues

and comrades, whose attentions embarrassed him. In 1951, he returned to the Soviet

Union for a period as a patient in a nursing home. His condition seemed to improve

but only briefly. The letters that his father wrote to him in those years, affectionate but

somehow ‘detached’, were proof of the slow, painful withering of their relationship. It

seemed as if Aldo was running away from him and his new family. For Togliatti, this

was a very private tragedy.80 He needed the warmth of familial affection; after the

liberation, he renewed contact with his two surviving siblings, Eugenio (who was

professor of mathematics at Genoa University) and Maria Cristina (who was teaching

literature in a secondary school in Turin). He had a great affection for his nieces and

nephews, especially for Luciana and Fernanda, the daughters of his younger brother

Enrico, who had died of a tumour in 1938. He followed the two young girls’ studies

and showered a lot of attention on them, as we can see in some letters where the depth

of his affection is always disguised behind a soft and gentle irony.81

In the summer of 1946, he met Nilde Iotti who became his life-long companion.

She was 26, an MP for Reggio Emilia at the Constituent Assembly, a graduate in

174 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

literature from the Catholic University in Milan, and teacher in a technical school in

Reggio Emilia. Nilde Iotti, who had taken part in the Resistance in the women’s

defence groups, was one of the most active leaders of the UDI. Iotti, too, was working

in the assembly sub-commission dealing with the rights and duties of citizens. Togliatti

very soon recognised her broad culture and her intellectual liveliness, as he fell under

the spell of her youthful beauty.82

Understandably, this chapter of Togliatti’s private life is shrouded in secrecy. Nilde

Iotti agreed to publish for the first time in 1993, to commemorate the centenary of her

companion’s birth, two short passages from letters that Togliatti had written in 1946.

She disclosed the existence of a larger epistolary legacy, inaccessible for the time being,

which could be of great interest to those interested in researching Togliatti’s human

and psychological traits. It would not be too far fetched to venture that in reinventing

his role as a leading figure in Italian politics – after years spent in circles of

clandestinity and exile – Togliatti was also influenced by the big change that had taken

place in his personal life; a relationship with a young woman, whose education differed

from his, and who had different political and cultural experiences but who was

certainly neither subordinate nor dependent.

Between Togliatti and Iotti there was almost love at first sight when they met in

the chambers of the Constituent Assembly. Their love grew rapidly and developed into

a relationship made stronger by the obstacles before it. The Italy of the post-liberation

period was not yet permeated by conformism and bigotry, as in the 1950s. On the

contrary, the country was swept by a wind of anti-conformism and joie de vivre that

challenged many taboos. However, the relationship between a leading politician and a

woman 27 years his junior caused curiosity, but also cast a shadow of scandal. The

shadow spread over the party, which was committed ‘to projecting an image of strict

moral rigour, on the one hand as the genuine inheritance of the working-class

movement and, on the other, a concession to the dominant culture and moral

sensibilities of a predominantly Catholic country’.83 For a party that had never wanted

to confront the divorce issue (though it would fight, with Togliatti, to ensure that the

principle of indissolubility of marriage would not form part of the constitution), it was

not easy to accept ‘a general secretary who was, if not guilty of bigamy, adulterous at

the very least’.84

Togliatti was uneasy about the situation. He found it difficult to put up with

conventions, with the need to surround his new relationship in secrecy. However, his

reaction was to reassert with pride the right to his own life choices. He wrote to Nilde

at the time:

In the bond which unites me to you I feel again the deepest inspiration of my life, that is of

being a rebel looking for freedom. I have always rejected and always thought that I should

never give in to conventional lies, to the aridity that kills life’s thrust.85

Soon he could not deal anymore with a situation that forced him into an ambiguous

conjugal cohabitation with Montagnana. He wrote to Eugenio Reale, a comrade who

was close to him at the time:

NATIONAL UNITY 175

This never-ending deferral of the resolution of my personal circumstances is making the

situation not simply difficult but unbearable and I am afraid will not put an end to possible

gossip but will make them flare up.86

The fact that the PCI secretary had to ask the party’s authorisation to leave the

conjugal home and find other accommodation (with the suggestion of forming a small

commission comprising ‘two comrades from the secretariat’ and ‘a third approved by

them’), and the fact that he declared himself ready to follow ‘any decision made’, goes

a long way towards explaining the nature of a truly all-absorbing institution such as a

communist party of the mid-1940s. Eventually, the authorisation was granted and

Togliatti left the large flat where he lived with Rita and moved temporarily to a two-

room loft conversion on the top floor of the PCI Direzione offices in Via Botteghe

Oscure. Very likely, this uncomfortable accommodation was also dictated by security

considerations. It was a while before Togliatti could ‘set up home’ with his companion.

Only after an attempt on his life (see below), a protracted convalescence and his return

to active political life, did he and Iotti move in together on the ground floor of a

bungalow in the Montesacro quarter, in a house that was party property. Pietro Secchia

and his wife were their neighbours.

As with many broken relationships, that between Togliatti and Rita Montagnana

left a train of painful consequences. The separation was made more difficult because

the two ex-spouses were both in the leading organisations of the PCI, because of

Togliatti’s higher ‘hierarchical’ position, and because of the painful issue of Aldo, who

lived with his mother until her death and never really accepted his father’s new family.

THE PROBLEM OF A DIFFICULT GOVERNMENTAL CO-HABITATION

The results of the double election on 2 June 1946 were contradictory. On the one

hand, the defeat of the monarchy meant the disappearance of one of the most

important centres of reaction, which the party had consistently fought against. At the

same time, the narrow margin of the republican victory confirmed that Togliatti’s

concern about the lingering presence of a strong reactionary component in Italian

society was justified – as was his cautious strategy. On the other hand, the outcome of

the elections of the Constituent Assembly confirmed a not very encouraging trend

already evident in the local elections. The PCI had 18.9 per cent of the votes, more

than 1 point below the socialist, whereas the DC reached 35.2 per cent of the vote.

The two working-class parties together did indeed have the relative majority in the

Assembly, but were far from the overall majority they had hoped for. Although

Togliatti never expected a resounding electoral victory, he had to come to terms with

the disappointment felt not only by the rank-and-file, but also within the leadership.

In short, the electoral results did not reflect the central role played by the party during

the Resistance and in the first year of political freedom.

The disappointment was obvious in Pietro Secchia’s speech during the debate that

took place at the meeting of the party Direzione on 20–21 June.87 His attack on the

strategy of ‘progressive democracy’ and the policy of alliances was not direct, but could

176 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

not be ignored. Perhaps the most worrying aspect for Togliatti was the hint at ‘the

isolation at international level’ of the party. This sounded like a criticism of the way in

which the PCI secretary had tried to keep a difficult balance between being loyal to the

Soviet Union and alliances in government at a time when Soviet policy was reacting to

a change in attitude of the Americans by foregrounding the ideological struggle against

the West.

Although Togliatti stressed the political significance of the Republican victory,

above all in internal party meetings, he embarked on an effort of self-critical analysis.

The explanation for the relative failure was, first, to be found in the ‘very poor or even

non-existent link’ that the party had established with the masses not involved in

politics and who, for the first time, had been asked to vote, especially among women.

Second, the inability to gain ground among the middle classes had contributed to the

party’s election result. With regard to foreign policy, as we shall see below, Togliatti

held firmly to his position.

In a relatively short time a new government was formed. This was presided over by

De Gasperi, as leader of the relative majority party, and extended to the Republican

Party, which had had some good electoral results. The PCI was also part of the

government with four ministers. Togliatti was not part of it and, a year later, he

claimed that his decision meant that he could express without hesitation the party’s

stand on foreign policy.88 Clearly, the latter consideration bore on his decision but the

decisive reason was the choice to dedicate more time to the political and organisational

leadership of the party. The repercussions of the unfavourable electoral results could

challenge the political line he was pursuing and, perhaps, he felt that the deterioration

of the international situation would not leave much time for the PCI to set firm roots

in Italian society.

For Togliatti, the fundamental strategic choice – to hold firm to the alliance

amongst the mass parties as the lynchpin of progressive democracy – was beyond

dispute. In the speech to the Constituent Assembly on 24 July, in which he defended

the PCI’s support for the second De Gasperi government, he was very clear with regard

to this issue. To those hankering back to the pre-fascist liberal system, and to the

growing wave of indifference and cynical denunciation of the party system, he replied

firmly: ‘The parties embody democracy getting organised. The large mass parties are

democracy asserting itself, conquering definite positions that will never be lost again.’89

Within this clear commitment, however, the PCI’s politics revealed more

independent features, especially in foreign and economic policy. The first of these grew

in importance over the second half of 1946. In a context marked by the worsening

relationship between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, Togliatti was still

fighting to avoid the idea of power blocs taking hold. ‘To accept the existence of

conflicting blocs,’ he argued at the PCI CC on 18 September 1946, ‘means to accept

the terms imposed by an opponent, by an enemy.’90 However, he made his criticism of

the Italian government more explicit, deeming it to be too contradictory and too weak

in the face of the demands of the Anglo-Saxon powers.

Significant from this point of view was his visit to Paris in mid-August. The official

reason for the visit was an exchange of views with the leaders of the PCF. But during

NATIONAL UNITY 177

the course of his visit, he also met Molotov, the leader of the Soviet delegation at the

peace conference, which caused uproar in the Italian press. His intention was to secure

a softening of the Soviet position, which was siding with the territorial demands of

Yugoslavia on the eastern Italian border. However, he only managed to extract a vague

commitment.91

This growing polemic against the United States and Great Britain was an

indication that – as the months went by – the ‘logic’ of polarisation was taking hold in

Togliatti. During a debate in the CC of 19–21 November, he accused American

imperialism of considering Italy ‘to be conquered ground’, and denounced it as ‘the

main enemy which we have to fight’. In such language there was already an indication

of his choosing sides, though Togliatti continued to deny this was so. Yet, within this

change of emphasis, there was also present an attempt to find a way – via a foreign

policy that claimed to be inspired by the preservation of national independence and

integrity – into a public opinion receptive to the sound of a nationalist tune and, thus,

of gaining support amongst the middle classes. Such calculations, however, proved to

lack foundation, and the initiative taken by the PCI secretary to travel to Belgrade in

order to convince Tito into direct negotiations with Italy to solve the Trieste issue

confirmed this.92 In an interview in L’Unità on 7 November, Togliatti declared Tito

ready to acknowledge that Trieste belonged to Italy provided Italy relinquished

Gorizia. But this option was rejected by both De Gasperi and Nenni (as soon as he

became foreign minister), and gave rise to a generally unfavourable reaction.

Trapped between the defence of the principle that Trieste was Italian and loyalty to

a Soviet Union that was now strongly supporting the Yugoslavs’ demands, Togliatti

was not able to return from Belgrade with the prestigious success he had hoped for. In

fact, he succeeded only in getting embroiled in a series of squabbles that increased the

tension with the government’s allies and lost him the support he had hoped to attract

for the party.

Greater autonomy for the PCI emerged in the realm of economic policy. The

second De Gasperi government was facing a difficult situation, marked by growing

inflation, increasing currency and stock exchange speculations, and spreading social

tension. The line of the treasury minister, Corbino, based on strict free market

principles, provoked growing dissatisfaction in the PCI, which could not ignore the

demands of the social classes it represented. On the other hand, the clear support given

by the communists to workers’ and peasant struggles (often led by communist party

cadres), brought them accusations of compromising the solidarity of the coalition

government with the alleged aim of appropriating power for themselves. In fact,

Togliatti wanted to control and channel the popular demands that were growing from

the base, using them as a means of making government policy more effective, and the

communist influence within government stronger.

Following Corbino’s resignation, which the party could claim was due to its

pressure, Togliatti launched, at the Direzione meeting of 18 December, a proposal for a

‘new course’ in the national economy. In this, he explained, ‘there should be wide

freedom of action for private initiative, but the state should intervene to stop

speculation with all possible means […] and at the same time exercise a guiding role

178 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

over economic renewal in the national interest.’ The aims specified were a strong

taxation policy, more decisive planning activity by the government, control on

productivity by the Consigli di gestione (management councils),93 effective control of

prices and an increase of food rations, the nationalisation of monopolies, and the start

of agricultural reform in favour of landless peasants.94 These were quite broad

proposals, and the party had little leverage with which to realise them. But the hope of

bringing about a shift in government economic policy was mainly based on the belief

that the DC was, despite everything, a reform party and therefore not ready to support

the more reactionary thrust of powerful economic forces.

The PCI leadership remained unable to grasp the notion that a conservative-led

capitalist restoration able to maintain the status quo without resorting to dictatorship

was regrouping around De Gasperi’s party. Consequently, Togliatti still believed the

PCI’s participation in government to be ‘something that was scarcely avoidable’. At the

CC in September, he put forward the suggestion of ‘formulating a concrete pact with

the Christian democrats and socialists, which would establish the boundaries of mutual

criticism and would clear the air amongst the parties’. In fact, even the relationship

with the PSIUP had worsened because, according to Togliatti, ‘anti-communism has

been given citizenship in that party.’

The results of the second round of local elections on 10 November 1946 seemed to

reward the more combative line adopted by the PCI, without negating the

fundamental coordinates of its strategy. The DC vote saw a real slump in the big towns

and, in some cases (Rome, Naples and Palermo), the party lost over half the votes

gained in June (mainly to the far right). The PSIUP, meanwhile, failed to replicate its

preceding results, especially in those places where it had not presented a united list

with the communists. As for the PCI, the party recorded a substantial increase,

overtaking the socialists nearly everywhere and gaining a foothold in many large cities

(Turin, Genoa, Florence) as the majority party. Although Togliatti did not abandon

his customary cautiousness, at the CC of 21 November he was very positive about the

situation.

But the November elections signalled a change which was very different from that

which the PCI hoped for. In the DC, the move to end the ‘forced cohabitation’ with

the communists in government as soon as possible became stronger, leaving as variables

only the time and manner in which to stop it. In the PSIUP, the current led by Saragat

was by now moving towards secession. The hoped-for link between the proletariat,

peasants and middle class, which had constituted the social basis of the ‘new course’

(and which Togliatti, in a speech he delivered in Reggio Emilia in September, had tried

to connect to a specific analysis of the class structure of Italian society95), was a process

that, save for some regions, did not take hold. The PCI leader was taking too much for

granted; the intent and interests of the popular classes were more divided and in

opposition to each other than he supposed.

Wishing to prevent the anxiety of the ‘confused middle classes’ becoming

crystallised into anti-democratic attitudes, Togliatti consented to start a dialogue with

Guglielmo Giannini, the leader of the L’Uomo Qualunque party that, in November,

had achieved considerable electoral success by playing on disaffection towards politics

NATIONAL UNITY 179

and nostalgia for the regime. Although well meant and understandable, the attempt

was short lived and inadvertently helped the Christian democrats exploit the

bafflement of the qualunquista base facing the sudden ‘pro-communism’ of its leader,

and gain back the support of a slice of the right-wing electorate they had lost.96

Meanwhile, the PCI held its third organisational conference on 6–10 January

1947. Pietro Secchia, who was in charge of party organisation, delivered the opening

speech. The report on the growth of the party was impressive. The PCI had grown to

over 2,100,000, an increase of nearly half-a-million in the last year. However, Secchia

did not indulge in any form of triumphalism; on the contrary, he complained of ‘an

imbalance, a gap between the political influence of the party and its organisational

strength’, and insisted on the need to infuse into the mass party the best characteristics

of the cadre party, such as party spirit, ideological cohesion, and a sense of discipline.

Significantly, Togliatti touched only briefly on the organisational issues and focused

instead on the political line, as if wanting to stress its continuity. He asserted that the

party had unquestionably overcome ‘the state of political, primitive Messianism […]

according to which the solution of all issues could achieved with a single battle’, and

although he forecast ‘months and perhaps a year of struggle, difficult struggles, hard

struggles’, he never questioned the need for ‘political activity aimed […] at widening

the frontiers of democracy; which would employ a democratic method to solve all

economic and political issues in Italy; activity that was coherently democratic to its

roots’. He warned that although an organisational strengthening of the party was

necessary, it was not enough:

If we want to be in time to block the road to reaction we must be able to broaden and

consolidate the democratic front, not only by strengthening our party and bringing under its

influence ever growing numbers of workers’ groups, but also by organising strong alliances

with those political forces that are able to act and move forward on the ground of

democracy.97

Having substantiated the foundations of the political line in this way, Togliatti

demonstrated that he shared Secchia’s idea that the party had to strengthen its

character as a cadre party and dedicate greater attention to the ideological education of

its members. ‘[Without] a revolutionary doctrine there is no revolutionary party.

Without a vanguard doctrine, there is no vanguard party. In our party these truths

have been somewhat forgotten.’ However, it was significant that the stress placed by

Togliatti on this ideological factor was related to the need to develop ‘an Italian road to

socialism’. Experience at international level had demonstrated – he argued – that ‘to

develop democracy to its utmost limit, which is that of socialism’, the working classes

could find ‘other roads, different from those travelled by the working class and workers

in the USSR, for example’.98 Indeed, discourse on ‘national roads’ had up to this point

been fully expressed across the international communist movement. Yet, between the

end of 1946 into early 1947, signals from Central and Eastern Europe suggested a

growing standardisation of ‘the new types of democracy’ there developing along the

lines of the Soviet model. The insistence of the PCI leader on the need to ‘learn the

180 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

very difficult art of seeing the broad picture and the particular, and of adjusting to the

latter without losing sight of the ultimate goal’ acquired, therefore, a significance that

could not be overestimated.

OPENINGS AND CONTRADICTIONS OF A CULTURAL POLICY

The course of PCI cultural policy, which from the autumn of 1946 developed along

contradictory lines, should also be viewed within this framework. In December, the

publication of the first series of Società, the review published in Florence by

intellectuals of a mainly idealist philosophical background who had decided to

‘embrace the cause of the proletariat’, came to an end. Togliatti was not convinced by

the review’s intention ‘of coming to terms with certain problems of national culture

(for example, with the experience of the Voce), of evaluating certain aspects of modern

European culture (from existentialism to neo-positivism), and opening up towards

classical Russian culture’.99

He thought the programme smacked of ‘syncretism’. He directed the same

accusation at another very dynamic review, equally close to the party, Elio Vittorini’s Il

Politecnico. Vittorini’s novel Uomini e no was held in high esteem by Togliatti and, in

October 1945, he wrote to the author in order to distance himself from a critique that

appeared in Unità, in which the novel was criticised as containing a certain

intellectualism. On that occasion, he said:

We cannot employ towards artistic creation the same measure we employ towards political

writings or propaganda publications. We can ask the artist to take reality into account, but to

fix the basic themes […] this is pedantry and a noose to choke the author.100

Barely a year later, this open attitude gave way to a more prescriptive formulation

of the duties attached to culture in the renewal of Italian society. Already in May–June

1946, Rinascita had published a harsh criticism of Il Politecnico penned by Mario

Alicata. The weekly was accused of having failed in its commitment to ‘re-establish a

productive “contact” between our culture and the interests and real concerns of the

popular Italian masses’, identifying as the root of this failure a ‘language […] that was

very “abstract” and “superficial’; in a word intellectualistic’. Vittorini had replied

forcefully, arguing for the autonomy of culture, understood as the ‘search for truth’,

from politics, which ‘belongs as a general rule to the level of everyday life’. In October,

Togliatti contributed to the discussion with a letter to Vittorini, which was published

in both Rinascita and Il Politecnico. His aim was to rebuff the commonplaces ‘on our

intolerance, on the suffocating control that we would like to exercise over intellectual

activities’. But he was keen to lay claim to the right, indeed the duty of the party, ‘to

enjoy freedom of movement, namely in the critical examination of the diverse cultural

directions that are emerging in the country’. He reproached the review for not having

kept its promises and of having indulged ‘the tendency to a kind of encyclopaedic

“culture”, where novelty, and what was different and surprising, had taken the place of

coherent choice and research towards definite objectives, and where news and

information had replaced thinking’.101

NATIONAL UNITY 181

Togliatti’s tone was calm; his intention was to avoid exacerbating the controversy.

Vittorini’s answer, too, though not backing away from his point of view, showed great

respect for his interlocutor. Only a strained interpretation could explain the

suspension, five months later, of the publication of Il Politecnico, as the result of PCI

censorship (although it was likely that the publisher Einaudi did not want to alienate

such an important ‘customer’). It was only much later, in September 1951, when

Vittorini announced that he considered his experience as a communist at an end, did

Togliatti write for him a tetchy and scornful farewell.102

However, there is no doubt that already in 1946–47 the Società affair and, to a

greater degree, that of Il Politecnico, revealed a change in the PCI’s attitude towards the

intelligentsia. Togliatti, especially, was strongly opposed to opening Italian culture to

the influence of the democratic European and American avant guard. His opposition

was founded on the assumption that those currents were alien to what he considered

the main current of national culture, which was the historicist tradition that stretched

from De Sanctis to Spaventa to Labriola, and which had functioned as the ‘ideology’ of

the democratic and popular movement. To be sure, his stance created a deep rift in the

relationship with modern and urban groups of the more modern caste of urbane

intellectuals. But in Italy, so ‘predominant was the influence of the “traditional

intellectuals” that their culture was distinguished not only (and not even so much) by

the historicism of Croce and Gentile, but rather by reactionary and spiritualistic

currents of thought’. Those were the currents which represented ‘the main enemy to be

defeated in order to bring about a profound renewal of Italian culture’.103 Togliatti’s

choice therefore was not only a consequence of his and the majority of the PCI leaders’

intellectual formation, but also a political assessment. On the other hand, the PCI

leader knew that to face this ‘main enemy’ in an effective way, and to assert a Marxist

hegemony over Italian culture, it was not enough to draw on ‘the philology and

scholarship of Italian historicism, nor on the weak developments in the socialist

countries’. Therefore, he did his best to publish Gramsci’s work which ‘flowed like new

blood in the veins of Italian culture’.104

An agreement had been struck with the Einaudi publishers from May 1945.

Einaudi was a ‘friendly’ publisher but not officially a communist, chosen by Togliatti

as the ‘most suitable channel, although not the only one, via which to inject a

knowledge of Marxism into Italian culture’.105 A party committee monitored the

progress of this policy under Togliatti’s direct supervision. And there was no doubt

that Togliatti ‘controlled the dissemination of Gramsci’s thought according to what he

considered was reconcilable between the politics of the partito nuovo and its belonging

to the international communist movement’.106 Therefore, there were adaptations and

cuts in both the Letters and the Notebooks, although they were less numerous than has

often been claimed. From the Letters, in particular, were omitted all passages which

could point to a less-than-idyllic relationship with the party whilst Gramsci was in and

out of prison. But political concerns did not substantially affect the nature of the work,

nor did the choice to organise the Notebooks thematically instead of chronologically

notably pervert Gramsci’s thought. In addition to making Gramsci’s writings more

accessible, it also corresponded to a specific interpretation. The Sardinian political

182 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

leader was presented ‘as a great intellectual and extremely accomplished scholar,

engaged in filial but vigorous polemic with Croce and in contemptuous opposition to a

Jesuitical tradition, philistine and fawning, typical of many scholars of our country’.107

From this point of view, the fact – accidental in itself – that the first volume of

Gramsci’s ‘literary inheritance’, a selection of letters from gaol, saw its publication in

the summer of 1947 (a few weeks after the conclusion of the anti-fascist unity

experience), took on a near symbolic significance. The extraordinary impact that the

book made proved how difficult it had become to isolate the communists, as if they

were foreign to Italian culture. Even more important, however, was the fact that the

publication of the Notebooks continued regularly – up to the most bitter years of the

Cold War and the Zhdanovian cultural freeze – favouring the development of

antibodies against the notion of a narrow, exploitative and ideological relationship

between intellectuals and party (to which, in some instances, Togliatti himself

capitulated, as we will see).108

THE TWILIGHT OF THE TRIPARTITE ALLIANCE

In those same days that the PCI held its third conference, a socialist split took place at

Palazzo Barberini.109 Togliatti deemed it ‘a crime against democracy and socialism’, but

deep down he probably rejoiced that the socialist party was now led by a group more

given to the politics of unity. The socialist split, however, provided the pretext for a

government crisis. De Gasperi, who had just returned from the United States where he

had attempted to secure a substantial loan for the Italian government, took advantage

of the withdrawal of the socialist ministers and Nenni to resign. There was,

undoubtedly, a convergence of interests between the Christian democrats’ wish to end

the ‘forced cohabitation’ and the demands of an American foreign policy increasingly

dominated by the logic of the Cold War and therefore inclined to encourage the

exclusion of communists from government.110 But it would have been unwise for De

Gasperi to take the responsibility for signing the peace treaty with the left in

opposition. His intention, therefore, was to test the ground and, if possible, to reduce

the influence of his allies.

The PCI reaction towards the January government crisis was ambivalent. On the

one hand, Togliatti spoke of ‘a decision, if not imposed, at the very least urged from

abroad’; in other words, coming from American conservative circles. This was an

attempt to remain faithful to the analysis that saw the DC as a party that essentially

represented popular interests and, moreover, to attribute the crisis to international

power relations. On the other hand, it underlined the anti-communist feeling that had

inspired the shaky and, ultimately, unrealistic conduct of the relative majority party. At

the Direzione of 4 February, when the crisis had already been resolved by the formation

of a tripartite government, Togliatti no longer made any reference to American

pressure. He said that the responsibility for the crisis lay with De Gasperi, whose intent

had been to have ‘a Christian democratic government with an appendage to the centre

and centre-left’. The fact that he had not been able to carry it out made the PCI

overrate its own strength. In actual fact, the January crisis did not leave the DC empty

handed. In the composition of the government, the conservative positions came out

NATIONAL UNITY 183

strengthened: the communists lost the ministry of finance and the socialists the foreign

affairs ministry. The approved programme, meanwhile, did not go beyond a series of

generic commitments which were subsequently ignored.

Togliatti still regarded the DC as a heterogeneous power bloc, divided by the

temptation to implement the more conservative line demanded by its right wing and

concern about losing the popular support allegedly assembled around its more

progressive sections. He probably still believed that part of the capitalistic bourgeoisie

was inclined to tolerate the survival of the tripartite alliance, counting on the

opposition within Italian capitalism between the speculative and productive sectors. In

fact, in the months which followed, the PCI was in a very difficult position and

returned to a more moderate industrial relations policy. Nevertheless it could not

afford to identify completely with the government’s decisions and therefore criticised

them in its press and at public meetings, thus providing a pretext for accusations about

a ‘twin track policy’.

It is against this background that the much-debated choice to vote in favour of

‘article 7’ of the future constitution, which stated that the relationship between the

Italian state and the Church be regulated by the 1929 Lateran treaties, came to be

made. From the time of his return to Italy, Togliatti had not taken a particularly firm

stand on this issue. At the CC meeting of November 1946, he had explained his

flexible approach in the debate about the indissolubility of marriage with the

consideration that ‘a political party does not fight all battles at the same time, and

above all does not enter into battle every time there is a provocation from its

opponent.’

We take on those battles which suit us at a specific time, and I would like to ask you if it is

expedient today to give Christian Democracy [the opportunity] to start, in the country, a

huge battle against us, saying that we want to break up the institution of the family.

The decision to dissociate the PCI from the other parties of the left at the time of

voting in the Constituent Assembly did not come out of the blue. The party

leadership, at least, had agreed with it by a large majority. The PCI was concerned that

faced with a negative result in the Assembly on the Lateran Treaties, the DC would call

for a referendum, which would place the Republic itself in jeopardy. It seems unlikely,

however, according to the testimonies of those present, that there was any negotiation

or that the communist choice was dictated by the hope of securing a place in

government. Togliatti knew that the latter depended on different, more critical,

international issues. Perhaps because he was becoming aware that the breaking up of

anti-fascist unity was moving closer, he tried to avoid its taking on the traumatic

features of a rupture on religious ground. His concern was that in a poorly secularised

country such as Italy, the Church could assemble around the issue a very large

consensus, sucking into an authoritarian restoration those who would have otherwise

been amenable to the notion of a progressive democracy. Moreover, Togliatti ‘wished

to enlist the support of the Vatican for a democratic constitution whose aim was to

184 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

give, especially in years to come, the best guarantee against attempts to exclude the PCI

from political legality’.111

If this did not bring any immediate advantage to the PCI (we only have to note the

exclusion from government and the excommunication of communists in 1949 by Pius

XII), then it prevented the ideological confrontation of the Cold War taking on a

religious dimension. Arguably, however, developments in Italian society – rather than

the responsible conduct of the PCI – did more to prevent this.

The issue, anyhow, had more to do generally with the overall conduct of the PCI

in the Constituent Assembly. The communists (and Togliatti in particular) took up a

very advanced position with regard to the broad characteristics of the constitution and

its socio-economic content (establishing strong agreement with the left of the DC).

They were definitely more conservative, and certainly less committed on issues of

religion, education, the family, and civil rights in general. There was no ‘tactical’

calculation behind this, but rather a shortcoming in the political culture of the party

that was only overcome later.

Meanwhile, faced by a serious growth of inflation, the actions of the government

appeared unsure and contradictory as economic interests applied pressure for a

deflationary policy. A comparison with the January crisis leaves little doubt about the

situation. On 12 March, Truman formulated the ‘doctrine’ that committed the United

States ‘to support the free countries’ who opposed communism. Obviously, this course

was going to have repercussions in Italian home affairs. The political stability expected

from the country in exchange for economic aid inevitably demanded the removal of

the communists and their allies from government.

In the discussion at the PCI Direzione of 16–18 April, there was still some

hesitation in acknowledging this reality. Togliatti himself did not seem to think that

the PCI’s presence in government would entail sacrificing American economic aid. He

assumed that this was in the United States’ interests, so as not to deprive themselves of

a vital safety valve for the over-production that was threatening its economy. But this

optimism was unfounded. Under pressure from the ecclesiastic hierarchy – encouraged,

no doubt, by Washington, and further alarmed by the defeat suffered in the Sicilian

local elections – De Gasperi had by then made his choice. Already in a radio broadcast,

on 28 April, and then two days later at a cabinet meeting, he virtually triggered the

crisis, stating that it was no longer possible to govern without the support of the

‘fourth party, the party of those who have the money and economic power’.

Initially, communist reaction was very cautious. At the Direzione on 5 May,

Togliatti seemed to believe that there was no plan to exclude the communists; rather,

at most, towards a widening of the ministerial corpus of non-party experts, and stated

that the PCI was not opposed in principle to supporting a minority DC government.

The article of 20 May, ‘Ma come sono cretini!’ (‘How Stupid They Are!’), in which he

answered with unusual virulence the insinuations by Sumner Welles (the American ex-

secretary of state who had claimed that the PCI was preparing for civil war because it

was receiving financial support from Moscow), could still be viewed as a final attempt

to present De Gasperi and the DC with the alternative between appearing consenting

victims to the ‘brutal offence against the whole nation’, which American interference

NATIONAL UNITY 185

represented, and a return to collaboration with the left. But the polemic that ensued

gave De Gasperi more leverage to pursue his project. On 26 May, the two leaders had a

long exchange, of which we a have a brief account from De Gasperi’s notes. Togliatti

was ready to ‘have done with the incident’ with an explanatory statement, and also to

provide ‘economic guarantees’ (in practical terms, to drop all proposals concerning

‘socialisation’). But, he warned: ‘we cannot accept being excluded, because otherwise

we would be accepting that we are not part of the nation.’ The following day, in a

letter still conciliatory in tone, he made a point to clarify what he had suggested:

To make aid conditional on […] a particular composition of our government, especially when

this would translate into the formation of a government that does not answer or correspond to

the democratic interests of the majority of the population, would mean, in our view, giving

the Italian government a colonialised character […] A political line leading to this conclusion

would be opposed by us in the most resolute way.112

But the resolution of the crisis was absolutely leading to the formation of a

government comprised only of Christian Democrats, qualified by the presence of

Einaudi in the treasury. The PSI and the PCI were excluded: the first would re-enter

government sixteen years later, the second never.

POLITICAL RUPTURE AND INSTITUTIONAL COMPROMISE

The ‘historical’ significance of the change was not immediately grasped by the PCI

leadership (including Togliatti), whose main concern – within the context of a severe

condemnation of the ‘path of conflict’ taken by De Gasperi – was to reassure public

opinion that there would be no violent or illegal reaction to the party’s expulsion from

government. He wrote in L’Unità on 30 May, ‘we are too conscientious and too aware

of our responsibilities, and too closely tied to those democratic achievements we have

fought for all our personal and party life, to rave about resorting to violence.’ The

measured tone of the answer, and the lack of any action of protest, might suggest that

the outcome of the crisis was regarded as nothing more than temporary and restoration

of the tripartite alliance a possibility. The Direzione issued a resolution along these lines

on 8 June. Also, on the issue of American financial aid toward reconstruction, which

had become one of the main causes of friction between the two great powers after the

announcement of the Marshall plan, Togliatti did not incline towards an outright

refusal. Before his speech to parliament, he sent Eugenio Reale a note:

In my speech on foreign policy, I would like to say – about the Marshall Plan – that I do not

believe Italy could have refused the offer. It could not do it 1) because that would have meant

a clash with the United States; 2) because it could have looked like an alliance with an Eastern

bloc; and 3) because some good can come of it. But we must go with an independent position

and in Paris defend our interests and the interests of European unity with an independent

spirit.113

186 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

In the report of 1 July to the CC, the tone was clearly different, probably in order

to deal with the frustration of the communist rank-and-file and, perhaps, also with the

impatience of a section of the leadership. On this occasion, Togliatti cautioned those

who regarded the PCI’s exclusion from government as temporary, and framed his

analysis within the context of a worsening international situation. The prospect for a

progressive democracy was still valid in Italy, but he did not exclude the possible need

for ‘violent and even armed conflict’. However, he was still adamant that the political

line pursued by the party whilst in government, and its restrained conduct after the

crisis, had been right. For the immediate future, Togliatti reaffirmed the aim of

‘creating as broad a bloc of democratic forces as possible’, hinging on the alliance with

the PSI but also open to the DC, or at least its left-wing. His strategy, therefore, was

linked to the approach he had pursued over the last three years. The difficulties in

realising it were not due to the consequences of past mistakes, but to the renewal of a

conservative offensive in Italy fed by the hardening of the international situation. A

letter of 16 August to the whole party, almost certainly penned by Togliatti,

acknowledged that ‘the party had been weak when relegated to the opposition’, but

was not especially strong on self-criticism.114

The truth was that Togliatti did not regard the political line he had pursued with

such determination in the previous years as closed, perhaps because he had not resigned

himself to the irreversibility of changes at international level. This, certainly, was what

emerged in the speech he delivered to the Constituent Assembly on 29 July 1947, on

the occasion of the ratification of the peace treaty. During the speech, after having

refuted the idea that democracy and socialism were incompatible (‘the whole of

modern European politics […] revolves around this reconciliation. Democracy and

socialism, united, must bring about Europe’s renewal’), he closed with an impassioned

call to resist ‘any attempt to divide the world into two opposing blocs, any attempt to

isolate from the world the more advanced forces of social progress, any attempt to

break the unity of Europe and the world, because any such attempt cannot be but the

first step towards new conflicts and, perhaps, a new war’.115

Although there was an unmistakable difference in tone and wording between the

speech delivered ‘behind closed doors’ to the party and that delivered to the

Constituent Assembly, it would be wrong to explain it as a mere sign of ‘duplicity’.

Togliatti did not intend to contribute to the escalating tension while the final

ratification of the Constitution was still at stake. Indeed, the support given by the PCI

to Orlando’s motion, which was aimed at postponing discussion and any final decision

on the peace treaty, was half-hearted (Nenni even alleged that some communist votes

were secretly ‘given as a gift’ to the government). Consequently, the Direzione of 24

July saw five comrades openly question the ‘manoeuvres’ of the secretary.116 The fact

was that, for Togliatti, the immediate ratification of the peace treaty was necessary to

avoid exacerbating those disagreements dividing the PCI and the DC on foreign

policy, and thus not impinge on the workings of the final stages of the Constituent

Assembly.

Togliatti was committed to giving the country a new constitution able to represent

a ‘programme for the state’ within which the guiding idea of a ‘progressive democracy’

NATIONAL UNITY 187

could be made explicit. His determination could only be explained by the extreme

importance he attributed to such a project.117 His conception of the constitution was

very clear from the start. It had to represent a clear break with the old system and the

‘conceptions of the old liberal doctrine’; it could not limit itself to being ‘non-fascist’,

rather it had to be ‘anti-fascist’. Togliatti knew very well that the new constitution did

not come in the wake of a revolution that had been accomplished, and therefore its

task was not to encode social changes that had already been achieved, but to be – as he

stated to the fifth PCI congress – ‘a constitution that buries once and for all a past of

social conservatism and reactionary tyranny, and will not allow their resurgence […]

Therefore […] a constitution whose uniqueness will be a programme for the future’.

It was not fortuitous, therefore, that Togliatti chose to be part of the sub-

commission drafting ‘the rights and duties of the citizens’, in which he took on the job

of studying the subject of ‘social rights’. To this end, he presented a report of great

breadth, the overall substance of which was brought together under section III of the

final text. In this way, Togliatti achieved not only a total collaboration with the

socialists, but also a productive engagement with the DC left. Togliatti himself

described it as the convergence of two ‘great currents’, two ‘solidarities’, one ‘human

and social’ typical of the workers’ parties, the other of Catholic origin and inspiration.

The tenacious efforts that he had made to achieve an agreement based on shared views

about practical issues, leaving aside ideological principles, did in the end fulfil the hope

that he had expressed a few weeks before the May crisis: that a ‘comparatively solid

common ground [could be identified] which would permit the building […] of a new

state, broad enough to go beyond what were incidental political agreements amongst

the parties [...] of the parliamentary majority’.118

Given these coordinates, the communists did not shy away from fighting on a

number of issues. If on the Concordat their position had been conciliatory, in other

instances, such as the indissolubility of marriage or private schools, there was

disagreement between a ‘secular’ majority and a conservative bloc gathered around the

DC. However, it was mainly on the overall design of the constitution that the

communists in parliament (and primarily Togliatti) concentrated their efforts. It was

commitment aimed at defending the vital role of parliament and parliamentary

government, identified as the guardian of the people’s sovereignty. The PCI, therefore,

was in favour of a one-chamber system and suspicious of bicameralism, which it

deemed to represent an obstacle to efficiency. The PCI did not hide its dislike of the

new institution of the the Constitutional Court, which was considered an

‘eccentricity’, a body described as one in which ‘no one knows what it is supposed to

be and, thanks to its institution, distinguished citizens will be raised above all

assemblies and the whole system of parliament and democracy in order to be their

judges’.119

Regional autonomy was also looked upon with suspicion by the PCI in the

beginning, with the exception of those regions under special statutes, both because of

concerns about taking away power from parliament and for fear that ‘breaking up the

country into segments’ could ‘erect a barrier against the spirit of progressive democracy

penetrating into the whole of Italy’. On this, as on the issue of the Constitutional

188 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Court, the future would prove the PCI’s hesitations mistaken. In a reversal of roles, the

left would eventually take on those institutional issues which they had regarded with

suspicion in the beginning.

For many years, the actual realisation of the constitution, which had been thwarted

and delayed by the power bloc which had gathered around the DC at its election

victory on 18 April 1948, was placed at the centre of the working-class struggle. This

reversed the ‘traditional assumption that […] linked the workers’ aspirations to

political subversion’.120 Togliatti was aware of the potential for developing this

perspective. He certainly did not idealise the constitution, proof of which is his

comment that ‘if the democratic focus want to bring about and develop a broad action

of renewal of Italian society, their hands will be tied by specific norms’ within it.121

However, it would remain undeniable to Togliatti that the constitution was a

‘guarantor’ of democratic development.

8

COLD WAR AND RETREAT

CRITICISMS BY COMINFORM

For the entire summer of 1947, the PCI’s political line was characterised by overall

moderation. Togliatti was motivated not only by the hope of a prompt return to

government, but also by the desire to obtain final approval of a draft for the

constitution which would ratify the gains of the struggle for liberation, together with

an institutional framework in which the PCI would be fully recognised. Nevertheless,

in view of the social tensions caused by the government’s economic policy, Togliatti

had to make certain concessions to the dissatisfaction voiced by the leaders of his own

party, who considered his position ‘too soft’.

However, a real change in the PCI line could only be detected after the beginning

of October. A meeting of nine communist parties took place on 22–26 September at

Szklarsa Poreba, in Polish Silesia; seven of the participants were those in power in the

‘People’s Democracies’, and they were joined by the French and Italian communist

parties. At the end of the proceedings, the formation of the Communist Information

Bureau – better known as Cominform – was announced; this was to be a permanent

agency, based in Belgrade, for consultation and coordination among the member

parties.

The invitation to participate was sent to the PCI leadership in August, and the

secretariat decided that Luigi Longo and Eugenio Reale would represent the party. We

do not know whether it is true, as Reale claims, that Togliatti was invited to speak in

person and declined on health grounds. It is probable, however, that he suspected that

a storm was brewing; this is shown by the tone of the instructions he gave to the

delegates, urging them ‘to stress to the conference the leading role of the Communist

Party in the partisan struggle, and the electoral weight of the party; if they complain

that we have not been able to take power, or that we have allowed ourselves to be

excluded from government’ – he added – ‘tell them that we could not transform Italy

into a second Greece. And this not only in our own interests, but in the interests of the

Soviets themselves’.1

Togliatti’s fears were not unfounded; not only did the principal document of the

conference, the report of the Soviet delegate Zhdanov, ratify the theory of a world

divided into two camps opposed on military, ideological and economic fronts; not only

was the scope for autonomy of the individual communist parties very much reduced;

but the policies of the PCI (and also those of the PCF) were harshly criticised.

Zhdanov accused them of docility in the face of their exclusion from government,

while the Yugoslav Kardeli launched fierce attacks, not only against ‘the deviation

towards opportunism and parliamentarianism’ of the Italian communists, but also

190 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

against their concept of alliances which, he said, ‘was the basis of their defeat’.2 It was

plain that the main target was the principal author of this policy – Togliatti – even

though his name was never mentioned. Longo staunchly defended the Party’s politics

during the Resistance, but acknowledged that its stance during the May crisis had not

been sufficiently vigorous, and that the international situation presented new

challenges for the Italian party as well.3

The setting up of Cominform had repercussions throughout Italy, in conjunction

with the increasingly hysterical campaign of the pro-government press about the ‘pre-

insurrectional’ nature of the social unrest of the previous weeks. The PCI reacted by

intensifying its polemic against ‘American imperialism’ and ‘the forces of reaction’. It is

evident nevertheless that, even if the change of direction announced at the ‘Polish

conference’ did not take Togliatti by surprise, it put him in grave difficulties. In fact, at

the meeting of the Direzione which took place on 7–10 October, some of the leading

figures (Colombi, Roasio – but also Longo and Secchia, with a more low profile

approach) welcomed the change of direction almost with relief, as a liberation from the

difficulties presented by a tactic of which they had never completely approved, and

which they now in any case considered to be out of date. In contrast, those who had

more enthusiastically supported Togliatti’s conception of ‘progressive democracy’

(Novella, Amendola, Negarville) seemed to be divided between defence of the line

followed hitherto, and awareness of the discontent rife within the party, besides being

aware in any case of the authoritativeness of the Soviet ‘call to order’. Only Umberto

Terracini did not hesitate to express his perplexity over a change of course which

appeared to isolate the PCI from Italian society, and his serious reservations about the

method. (The change of direction decided at Szklarska Poręba had at no time been

discussed with the parties expected to put it into effect.)4

Togliatti’s conclusions were cautious; nevertheless, he specifically stated that ‘the

critique […] does not attack all our political views’, and emphasised that it was

necessary to set it out ‘in such a way as not to anger or discourage the Party and the

working class, and to deflect the obsession with missed opportunities’. As far as

international politics were concerned, he made a firm choice to side with the Soviet

Union. On the other hand, he was not inclined to overturn his analysis of the current

situation in Italy, from which he derived his own political line.

There is no doubt, however, that the September 1947 change of direction made its

mark on Togliatti’s position; the reservations that the leaders of the party had had

about his line now seemed justified by the powerful support of the Soviet Union, so

that his freedom of action became objectively more limited. It is not surprising that

when Manlio Brosio, then ambassador in Moscow, met Togliatti in Rome in early

October, he noted in his diary that he found him ‘more concerned about the situation

of his party than about that of his country’, which, however, the communist leader said

was set to become ‘very serious’.5

Togliatti’s report to the CC of 11–13 November 1947 was significant in this

respect. He had by then accepted unreservedly Zhdanov’s theory of the division of the

world into two camps. A further dispute with Terracini on this topic had developed;

Terracini, not content with the reservations Togliatti had expressed to the Direzione,

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 191

had given an interview in which he claimed that the Soviet Union and the USA bore

equal responsibility for the deterioration of the international situation. Togliatti did

not hold back from criticising his old comrade from L’Ordine Nuovo in a harsh and

even ungenerous way, but refrained from openly challenging the substance of his

analysis, saying that he did not wish to ‘intensify the polemic’. It was as though he were

sending a message to anyone inside the party – and outside it – who wished to hear it;

it was impossible to avoid taking sides, and it was unthinkable not to choose the Soviet

Union; alignment with the authority of the ‘Bolsheviks’ was the price that had to be

paid for the preservation of ideological and political unity within the communist

movement. The price would prove to be very much higher than even Togliatti himself

could have thought. However, it is not without significance that the ‘Terracini case’

ended without disciplinary action against its protagonist, who was re-elected to the

Direzione two months later.6

Togliatti admitted that the ‘continual blackmail by the reactionary-imperialist

camp … had put excessive restraints on the enthusiasm of the democratic parties’, to

the extent that certain positions had ‘been abandoned without the necessary

confrontation’. He now warned especially seriously against ‘democratic-parliamentary

illusions’; he specified that the party would use all the opportunities for struggle offered

‘in the parliamentary sphere, in the field of bourgeois democracy which we have

conquered’, but its actions should be predominantly focused upon ‘the struggle of the

masses for the realisation of their demands’.

This stress on taking the offensive and on ‘the masses’ was echoed in all the

speeches of the discussion, its most influential proponents being Secchia and Longo.

Togliatti repeated it in his concluding remarks, in which, however, he was concerned

to remind his comrades not to give up ‘the idea of approaching all possible allies, not

to give up the art of politics which consists of neutralising the enemy, of differentiating

between enemies, of neutralising some and defeating others’.

THE DEFEAT OF THE POPULAR FRONT

An important test-bed for this new direction was represented by the elections planned

for the spring of 1948. Here, Togliatti found himself facing a situation which he had

perhaps not foreseen. The PSI had proposed an electoral front of the left, and even a

single list; as Nenni himself was to acknowledge, this proposal was motivated not only

by a genuine desire for unity but by a desire to camouflage in a single result the

expected electoral losses of the socialists, weakened by the split.7 This proposal was

definitely not in keeping with the PCI’s line before Salerno and from then on, which

was intended to build a formation of inter-class alliances. Nevertheless, Togliatti was

prepared to accept it, probably because he considered it in line with the directives of

the ‘Polish conference’ and with the aspirations of the party rank-and-file. It appears,

moreover, that his opinion of the DC had changed. In his November report to the

CC, he accused the DC of ‘having completely betrayed the cause of Italian democracy’,

and branded its activity ‘totalitarian in nature, infiltrating all the organisations and all

the machinery of the State’. When the sixth PCI congress took place in Milan between

192 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

5 and 10 January 1948, Togliatti certainly seemed to consider the DC as the enemy to

be defeated at all costs.

His report sought to establish a difficult balance between a series of important

concessions to critics of his present position and the defence of some basic principles,

continuing with the strategy elaborated during the preceding four years. His analysis of

the international situation now owed a great deal to Zhdanov’s concept of the two

camps. However, Togliatti did not seem to be prepared to sacrifice completely the

PCI’s decision-making autonomy; there was a significant passage of his report which

defended ‘our intention of finding the Italian way to a new kind of democracy, which

will open a path to the achievement of socialism’.

The report stressed the importance of the achievements of the workers’ movement

in Italy and asserted that ‘all in all, democracy in Italy [was] established, organised and

strong’, but his somewhat contradictory conclusion was that ‘no steps worthy of note

have been taken towards a democratic transformation of the structure of our country’.

The choice in favour of ‘progressive democracy’ was confirmed, but the path of

democratic legality, repeatedly advocated after 1944, was no longer presented as the

only practicable choice. ‘We are following a line of democratic action, but we will not

allow ourselves to be taken unaware by any provocation or any reactionary plan.’ The

accusation of undermining ‘the basis of the Republic and of democracy’ was turned

against the DC, which, under the influence of the Church hierarchies, had ‘perfected

its image as the leading party of the conservative and reactionary classes in Italy’: and

the final resolution approved by the congress called upon all workers ‘to unite and

organise in solidarity to prepare de facto [author’s emphasis] those social

transformations that Italy needs, and to be prepared to repel every reactionary threat’.8

The room for ambiguity present in such formulations does not really reflect the

stratagem of conscious ‘duplicity’ so much as the result of a secret disagreement among

the party leaders, which restricted Togliatti’s freedom of action. Nothing illustrates this

more clearly than a comment made by Pietro Secchia:

Togliatti’s report … is remarkably self-critical. He is evidently resentful of criticisms that had

come from outside [the party], and there is the usual tendency to get back into line, at least

verbally.9

It should not be forgotten that Secchia had been in Moscow a few weeks before the

congress, and had presented a memorandum to the Soviet leadership which expressed

unequivocally his opposition to Togliatti’s soft line. It is true that he found himself at a

fin de non recevoir, and that the Soviet leaders – Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov and Beria –

had informed him that the political line he was advocating (‘to conduct more decisive

political and economic struggles, of greater scope’) could lead to a result that the Soviet

Union wished to avoid, namely insurrection,10 but it is equally true that Moscow was

able to count on the existence of a substitute PCI leadership, if either the situation in

Italy or the international situation required it, and therefore Togliatti’s room for

manoeuvre was restricted. It was not fortuitous that Secchia was nominated vice-

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 193

secretary of the party after the congress, with an irregular procedure that gives rise to

suspicion of at least indirect pressure by the Soviet party.

This suspicion is confirmed by recent Soviet documents, from which it emerges

that, prior to the meetings noted in his diary, Secchia had had another meeting with

the Soviet leadership, at which sensitive topics were discussed. The first of these was

the question of financial support for the PCI, which Togliatti had refused in the past,

but which he was now requesting because ‘the situation in Italy [had] changed’ and

such support would ‘be in the interests, not only of the party, but of the entire

population of Italy’. The second, upon which Stalin particularly insisted, was that of

Togliatti’s safety and state of health. The record of this meeting deserves to be quoted

at length:

Comrade Stalin asks after Comrade Togliatti’s health, if he’s eating enough and getting

enough sleep. Comrade Secchia replies that Comrade Togliatti feels well, but needs to be kept

an eye on continually. If he remains unsupervised, he eats little, sleeps hardly at all, and works

too hard. Comrade Stalin says we must make sure that Comrade Togliatti eats 3 or 4 times a

day and gets more sleep. The CC of the Party should pass a resolution to keep an eye on

Comrade Togliatti’s health. Comrade Stalin asks me to pass on to Comrade Togliatti his

entreaty to take care of himself and not to overwork. Comrade Stalin repeats that the CC of

the Italian Communist Party should take care of this as well, otherwise Comrade Togliatti will

ruin his health, and this will be no use to anyone. It is not expedient that Comrade Togliatti

should lead an ascetic life. Comrade Secchia promises that everything possible will be done to

ensure that Comrade Togliatti takes care of his health.11

This curious duet gives the impression that ‘taking care of Comrade Togliatti’ refers

not only to his health, but to the need to place him under political surveillance.

Moscow also gave authoritative ‘advice’ on another important question. Secchia

had asked ‘whether we should control the numerical increase of party members […]

and create a party of cadres, or orient ourselves towards the creation of a broadly-based

mass party’. Stalin replied, ‘[where] other parties exist, communists cannot limit the

number of party members, because then people would join these other parties’, and he

also emphasised the need to ‘plan the work of Marxist education as well as possible,

since there are many uneducated elements among the new members’.12

This directive found a precise echo in the section of Togliatti’s report to the sixth

congress dealing with party organisation. Essentially, the secretary of the PCI tried to

salvage whatever possible, but at the expense of substantial concessions. He referred to

the necessity of not cancelling all the prerogatives that he had many times indicated as

being appropriate to the ‘partito nuovo’. But the changes made by the congress to its

statutes approved two years previously tended in the direction of a reinstatement of

more rigorous disciplinary criteria and greater organisational rigidity.

A Democratic Popular Front (DPF) had been officially formed on 27 December

1947, a short while before the PCI congress. Togliatti noted this with satisfaction in

his report, and confirmed his approval of the introduction of a unified electoral list. At

the same time, he appeared to adopt the view of Secchia and Longo, which saw the

DPF not merely as a simple electoral alliance, but as the climax of a great mass

194 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

movement, based on unitary, decentralised structures and functioning democratically.

However, the hope of widening the sphere of action of the DPF beyond the two

parties was to prove almost entirely vain.

The bitter tone of the election campaign has never subsequently been experienced

in the history of the Republic. The USA intervened with all its economic and political

power, giving maximum publicity to the aid provided to the Italian government, and

intimating that it would cease in the event of a victory by the DPF. The Catholic

Church entered the field en bloc, mobilising its peripheral organisations in support of

the DC, in the climate of a genuine crusade against communism. Togliatti responded

with high-profile annoyance to the excesses of the hostile propaganda, always

preferring to have recourse to reasoned, although somewhat didactic, argument rather

than invective, sometimes seasoning it with those barbs of fierce sarcasm which were

his wont. Only in the final stages of the campaign did he allow himself to be tempted

into using stronger language, for instance in the renowned speech in the Piazza San

Giovanni in Rome, in which he promised De Gasperi that after the DPF’s victory he

would apply his boots, properly hob-nailed, to ‘a part of his anatomy which I shall not

name’.13 But in general the secretary of the PCI appeared ill-at-ease in the climate of

Manichean conflict which was spreading across the country. In his editorial for the

February edition of Rinascita, he accused De Gasperi of ‘never opening his mouth [ ...]

except to say something expressing not only discord but actual incitement and

provocation to civil war’, of having spoken of ‘the last battle, of fighting and winning

now or never, facing death, etc. etc.’, and commented significantly, ‘these are things

which are said precisely when it is a case of civil war, and not of the free and

democratic manifestation of the will of the people.’

In reality, Togliatti himself did not exclude the possibility of civil war. In a meeting

with the Soviet ambassador Kostylev on 23 March, he observed that in the case of a

DPF victory, the DC and the forces of reaction could stage ‘a great political

provocation’, resulting in the ‘annulment of the elections’, and it appears that he asked

Kostylev to ‘pass his question on to our friends in Moscow – whether, in such

circumstances, armed insurrection by the forces of the Popular Front should be

initiated in order to seize power’. He added that, in such an eventuality, he could not

exclude the possibility that ‘an armed uprising by the Popular Front could lead to a

large-scale war, in which Yugoslavia and the other newly democratic countries would

participate on the side of the Popular Front against the USA, England, France and the

others’. Moscow was quick to reply; Molotov sent a telegram to Kostylev on 26 March,

advising recourse to arms only in the case of attacks on PCI offices, while ‘as regards

the seizure of power by armed insurrection, we consider that the PCI is currently in no

position to achieve this’.14

There is documentary evidence that the PCI was prepared to resort to force in the

event of a coup d’état by the DC. This likelihood was not at all remote, as George

Kennan, one of Marshall’s most influential advisers, had suggested the possibility of

outlawing the PCI before the elections on 18 April, and that the Italian government

had ordered ten million dollars’ worth of arms from the USA.15 It is, therefore, not

surprising that faced with the possibility of a civil war which could escalate into an

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 195

international conflict Togliatti should seek to ascertain what Stalin’s intentions were.

However, Kostylev’s report of the meeting sounds spurious when he lets it be

understood that Togliatti left it up to Moscow to decide whether the path of armed

insurrection should be followed, since all the information we have clearly indicates that

he was prepared to do everything in his power to prevent such an eventuality.

In any case, the DPF was damaged by its uncritical identification with the socialist

camp (and, in this respect, its unconditional approval of the use of force by the

communists in Czechoslovakia would turn out to be particularly imprudent). The

display of confidence that victory was certain was also no help to the forces of the left,

although in private, as several witnesses have confirmed, Togliatti’s attitude was

anything but jubilant – rather it betrayed a certain scepticism. It is even possible that

the leader of the PCI may not have felt too great a disappointment at the defeat of the

DPF, although he could certainly not have hoped that it would have been on such a

large scale. As he was perfectly well aware that the logic of the blocs was rigid, and that

it was unthinkable that the Americans would let such an important client/pawn as Italy

escape its control, he feared an election result of which the immediate consequence

might be a civil war, and which would certainly see the country drifting towards

authoritarian forms of government. So it is not improbable that Togliatti really did say,

when discussing the election results with Franco Rodano, ‘[These] are the best results

we could have obtained. This is fine.’16

In fact, the results represented a severe defeat for the forces of the left. The

Christian democrats received 48.5 per cent of the votes for the Chamber (lower house),

while the DPF picked up 31 per cent; in other words, almost 9 points less than the

sum total of the votes for the PCI and the PSIUP in the elections for the Constituent

Assembly. In total, 133 communist candidates were elected from the DPF (as opposed

to 104 in 1946), benefiting from the preference voting system in which party discipline

demonstrated its value, while only 50 socialists gained seats, as opposed to 115 in

1946. Togliatti was the first choice in the Rome constituency, gaining more than

97,000 preference votes.

From his first statement on, the secretary of the PCI distinguished between the

results obtained by the DPF, which he admitted to be less than had been hoped for,

and those recorded for the PCI, which were evidence of ‘an undeniable and remarkable

reinforcement of our influence among the masses’. He laid great stress on the ‘limits to

electoral freedom’ of Italian voters, due to the moral blackmail exercised by the

Church, the interference of the USA, pressure from the state, and the gerrymandering

which he was certain had occurred. But in more circumspect meetings of the Direzione

(26 April) and the PCI CC (4–6 May), Togliatti recognised the defeat for what it was:

a defeat which also affected the PCI, which had lost votes in Northern Italy and had

not succeeded in gaining the number of votes expected in the South. In an attempt to

explain these results, Togliatti gave the impression of running with the hare and

hunting with the hounds; it had been a mistake, he said, to play down propaganda for

socialism, but it had also been a mistake to neglect the search for allies in some

northern regions and provinces.17 Moreover, the defeat should be seen in an

international context, which gives some ground for optimism: ‘on the whole, in the

196 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

course of the last year, the forces of democracy, rather than those of imperialism and of

reaction, [had] been successful.’

Togliatti’s analysis of future prospects was uncertain; indeed, the insurmountable

limits of ‘Western’, or bourgeois, democracy had been revealed to be deluded, but the

hope of progressive democracy remained valid, as ‘a combination of parliamentary

methods and mass action, in order to win a majority and bring about profound

economic and political changes in our country’. The real danger of a DC-type of

‘political totalitarianism’, accompanied on the economic front by the danger of a

‘corporate regime’ and an encroaching clericalism in cultural life, offered the PCI new

opportunities to construct a broad system of social and political alliances against

reaction.

On the whole, Togliatti’s position on the day after the defeat of 18 April was that

of trying to reconcile conflicting needs. The first was that of not demoralising the party

cadres. The second was that of not laying himself open to further criticisms from

Moscow and the Cominform, which could undermine his authority. The third, finally,

was that of not abandoning the bases of a political approach in which he had not

ceased to believe. It can be said that he attained his first two objectives; the PCI took

the defeat on board without substantial damage to its organisational powers, and no

alternative strategy emerged within the party capable of challenging him. Nevertheless

– and in this sense the third objective cannot be said to have been fully attained – the

clarity of his political project was seriously compromised.

If there was no adequate scrutiny of the defeat of 18 April, it was also due to the

fact that two events occurred in the following months which laid greater claim to the

attention of the PCI: the split between the Cominform and Tito in June, and the

attempt on Togliatti’s life in July.

TITO’S ERRORS AND THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON 14 JULY

The Soviet–Yugoslav conflict had been brewing at least since the end of 1947. Beneath

the cloak of ideological differences, the nature of the conflict was very clear; Stalin

wished to suppress every possible alternative in the communist movement to his

hegemony and his ‘model’ of communism.18 The text of Stalin’s letter to Tito was

made available to the leaders of other Cominform members on 31 March. When

Togliatti arrived in Bucharest on 19 June to attend an emergency Cominform meeting,

he knew that the ‘excommunication’ of Tito’s party was on the agenda.

Although Togliatti did attempt in his speech not to limit his censure of the

Yugoslavian communists to terms of betrayal and ‘deviation’, but to include hints of

political themes more in keeping with an implied legitimisation of the PCI’s political

line, his acceptance of the Moscow line was no less complete and uncritical than that of

the other Cominform parties.19 His report to the leaders of the party on 28 June, when

he returned to Rome, made reference to the decision taken without the slightest doubt

as to its being just and necessary; furthermore, no dissenting voice was heard among

the party leaders, although a certain unease, soon overcome, did creep in among the

rank-and-file. On 2 July, Togliatti wrote an article for L’Unità which frequently

reproduced word for word the formulation of the Bucharest resolution; the policy of

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 197

the Yugoslav leaders in the rural areas was ‘full of confusion and errors, oscillating

between non-Marxist declarations about the leading role of the peasants […] and

extremist and demagogic measures against the peasant owners who cultivated the land’;

the Yugoslav party was ‘a militaristic organisation’ with no internal democracy, where

‘a regime of police surveillance and oriental despotism [was] in force, rather than one

of reciprocal criticism and self-criticism’.

It is difficult to believe that Togliatti was convinced of the truth of these

accusations, which were really just excuses, and often contradictory.20 But the

development of a conflict within the socialist camp presented him with a dilemma no

less drastic than the choice to be made at the division of the world into two camps; for

the Soviet Union or against the Soviet Union. Antonio Giolitti’s testimony is

significant in this respect:

I indicated to him that I was somewhat perturbed by this affair of Tito, that I was perplexed

by it; ‘Really’ – I started to say – ‘this affair is a bit strange …’, but I couldn’t even finish the

sentence. He shot me a furious glance, and shut my mouth almost with alarm; ‘Don’t dare

even say it! Be very careful not to have any doubts! Look, this is the touchstone. We must have

no doubts or hesitations. Our choice is one of principle. It’s not possible to ask whether Tito

is right in some respects, he must be completely in the wrong.’21

Within the Stalinist system, there were only two choices; either complete

subordination to the ‘leading state’ or a break with it. Togliatti knew this and accepted

it; this is why he decided not to seek an opportunity for mediation, although he must

have been aware that this would weaken his attempt to establish an ‘Italian road’ to

socialism. Other reasons may also have played a part in his decision to follow the

Cominform line; a way of getting even with the Yugoslav communists, who had

fiercely attacked the PCI at Szklarska Poreba; the fact that ‘an offensive by the

“hardliners”’, to be taken for granted in connection with any hypothetical distancing

from Moscow, would have given in to the aggressive side of ‘ambiguity’; and, last but

not least, the thorny question of Trieste. Objectively, in fact, the rupture between

Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union allowed the PCI to escape from the awkward position

in which it had for a long time found itself, with Togliatti personally obliged to search

for a solution which, while ensuring that Trieste remained Italian, would be

satisfactory for Tito and what was then his powerful protector.

Meanwhile, the rift in Italy caused by the election results of 18 April was revealed

in all its seriousness. After the election of Luigi Einaudi as President of the Republic

(the PCI and PSI voted against him), parliament was called upon to ratify the

agreement with the USA on the Marshall Plan, which had been initialled in Rome on

28 June. In his speech to the chamber of deputies on 10 July, Togliatti denounced this

as a danger to Italian independence, because it committed Italy to ‘the warlike policies

of the imperialist leaders of the United States’. One passage of his speech caused a

sensation:

198 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

If our country is indeed to be dragged along a path which leads to war, we also know what our

duty is in this case. Today the response to an imperialistic war will be revolt, will be

insurrection in defence of peace, of independence, of the future of our country!22

Three days later an editorial of the social democratic newspaper, excoriating the

‘arrogance with which Togliatti the Russian talks of revolt’, expressed its firm belief

that ‘the government of the Republic and the majority of Italians will have sufficient

courage, energy and decisiveness to nail Togliatti and his confederates to the wall of

their treachery. And we don’t mean this metaphorically.’23

This virulent prose is emblematic of the atmosphere which gave rise to the

assassination attempt on 14 July. Togliatti had just left Montecitorio, accompanied by

Nilde Iotti, when he was struck by three pistol shots fired by Antonio Pallante, a young

Sicilian of the extreme right, who was immediately arrested. He claimed that he had

been acting alone, and that he saw in Togliatti ‘the most dangerous element in Italian

political life, who is holding back the revival of our country with his activities as the

agent of a foreign power’. At the end of a fairly rapid trial, he was sentenced to 20 years

in prison, which was later reduced to 13, and further commuted. Years later, Togliatti

said that he did not exclude the possibility of an assassination attempt ‘deliberately

organised by unknown instigators’. Indeed, there was some discussion of Pallante’s

contact with fascist circles and with persons suspected of Mafia connections. But not

even the PCI appeared convinced by the theory of a plot; its leaders were more

concerned to emphasise the fact that the episode arose from a climate of anti-

communist hysteria fomented by the press and tolerated, to say the least, by the

government.

Wounded in the nape of the neck and, more seriously, in one lung, the secretary of

the PCI was rushed to the Policlinico,24 where he was operated on by a top surgeon. He

only lost consciousness for a short time, not without, it appears, finding time to

murmur to the comrades who had rushed to his side, ‘[Be] calm, do not lose your

heads!’ The operation was successful, but it was a week before Togliatti could be

considered out of danger.25

From the very first hour, the news of the attack caused a huge surge of emotion

and an impressively large, spontaneous mobilisation of the masses. Both the leadership

of the party and the CGIL were taken by surprise at the scale of the response, which in

not a few cases seemed to be on the point of turning into the decisive ‘push’ which

many had expected. The contingency plans which the party had prepared for a

hypothetical ‘provocation’ or coup d’état were put into action and, in some cases,

slipped out of the leadership’s control, especially with the intervention of the ex-

partisans. Longo and Secchia, the deputy secretaries who had taken over the leadership,

did not want an insurrection, at least not at that point in time and under conditions

they considered inauspicious. At the meeting of the Direzione on 14 July, however, not

all the members appeared equally determined to call off the revolt at once, and some

were inclined to give at least a show of force in a grand style. The CGIL was in a

difficult position, since its DC, social democrat and republican members were opposed

in principle to a political strike; but the general strike had spread throughout the

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 199

country before it was announced, so the problem was to establish a deadline and an

objective. The PCI defined this objective as the resignation of ‘the government of

conflict, of famine, of civil war’; an unrealistic objective, without getting involved in a

conflict of unforeseeable duration, which would increase the risks of the civil war

which the PCI was trying to prevent. Thus, on 16 July, the order was given to call off

the strike, without even obtaining the resignation of minister of the interior Scelba,

considered to be principally responsible for creating the atmosphere which gave rise to

the assassination attempt. Togliatti’s absence did not, therefore, prevent the PCI from

maintaining a line of conduct which he would most probably have followed himself if

he had been able to conduct effective leadership at that point. But this did not happen

without tensions which were to have long-lasting side-effects.26

By 6 August, there were already serious differences of opinion among the party

leaders. Secchia criticised a political stance which had left the party unprepared and

hesitant in the face of the first real test of strength since the Liberation. Longo did not

completely fall into line with this position, and moved the debate to a problem which

appeared more ‘technical’, that of being on guard against provocation. It was a delicate

topic, as Stalin had already sent a telegram on 14 July saying that he was ‘grieved that

Comrade Togliatti’s friends had not succeeded in protecting him’. It was a stern call to

order, the significance of which is not easy to interpret. (Was it a call to augment the

party’s paramilitary defence organisation? Or was it rather an attempt to set the PCI

leaders against one another, on the principle of ‘divide and rule’?) In any event, the

PCI leaders approved a resolution which explicitly recalled a phrase used by Stalin in

his report to the CC on 3 March 1937, ‘[We] must put an end to this opportunistic

bonhomie, which owes its existence to the mistaken supposition that the enemy will

become proportionately more docile and harmless as we increase our strength.’ It was

not a ‘neutral’ or ritual quotation; the CC referred to had paved the way for the most

terrible phase of mass terror in the Soviet Union. According to Caprara’s testimony,

Togliatti did not at all appreciate this embarrassing reference, and complained about it

in a meeting with Longo and Secchia on 20 September.27

The secretary of the PCI had recently returned to Rome after a convalescence of

several weeks. His most significant public statement during this period was an editorial

for L’Unità in which, having mentioned the ‘strong, overwhelming movement of

protest and struggle among the workers’ which followed the assassination attempt, he

commented almost with detachment, ‘[It] was essential for the workers to demonstrate

their strength, their desire for liberty and peace.’ However, he did not dwell on the

wave of repression that the government unleashed against the protagonists of this

movement, with thousands of arrests and house searches. It was as though he wished to

extinguish the fire. In the CC on 24 September, he was to resurrect the theory

propounded by the Comintern of a struggle against two opposing deviations; but the

core of his critique was directed against that section of the party ‘who believed that the

18 April was a defeat from which recovery was only possible with a vast insurrectionary

movement’. He did not hesitate to rebuke those who understood progressive

democracy to mean ‘a smooth advance towards socialism, without serious conflicts and

200 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

only via a series of compromises’, but he accompanied this criticism by specifying that

‘the question of a change of policy does not arise’.

Two days later, 26 September, Togliatti made a public return to political life at the

festival of L’Unità at the Foro Italico in Rome. An immense crowd, perhaps half a

million, listened to his speech. Togliatti ritornato, the film made by Carlo Lizzani at the

time, shows images that reveal the breadth and variety of the consensus enjoyed by the

PCI among the working classes of an Italian society which in many respects was still

closer to that of the 1930s than of the decade that was about to begin. Layers of

regional folklore were superimposed on the most ideologically correct symbols in the

communist firmament – the traditional portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. In

this sense, the event in the Foro Italico may be described as a celebration of the vitality

of a party which had overcome the defeat of 18 April and had reaffirmed its deep

popular roots.28 At the same time, it was a significant moment, if not precisely the

birth, of a naïve and spontaneous ‘cult’ of Togliatti, which would leave its mark on the

history of the party.

CAMPAIGN FOR PEACE IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLOCS

Togliatti’s return to political activity occurred in a phase during which the

international situation, increasingly dominated by the Cold War, left few margins for a

‘manoeuvre war’. The leader of the PCI chose a defensive retreat, not only in the

Italian sphere (where, as we shall see, this defensive position was to some extent

enforced), but at the international level as well. The second half of 1948 was the period

of the development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which saw

the Italian diplomatic service involved in complex negotiations of which parliament

was only given incomplete information at a later date. In fact, the idea that Italy should

extend its solidarity with the Western bloc to the point of participating in a military

alliance was unpopular in a country which had suffered greatly during five years of war;

even the parliamentary majority expressed reservations.

Togliatti’s irrevocable choice of loyalties undoubtedly prevented him from fully

understanding the developments in progress; the treaty in preparation seemed to him

nothing more than the logical and inevitable corollary of the Marshall Plan, itself

considered, in complete agreement with Zhdanov’s analysis, merely an imperialist

contrivance devised by the USA for the political and economic subjugation of western

Europe. This interpretation prevented him from perceiving the search for greater

national political autonomy which lay behind the admittedly somewhat nebulous

projects for a European federation, in which the Italian government was interested.

The leader of the PCI understood ‘Europeanism’ as merely a propaganda disguise for a

plan aimed at making the division of Europe permanent and at preparing for war with

the socialist camp.29

In March 1949, when it got to the point at which the debate in parliament closed

with the authorisation to conclude the negotiations for joining NATO, the left had

recourse to a tactic which they would subsequently only use in exceptional

circumstances; obstructionism. Togliatti accused the government of supporting a treaty

of an aggressively anti-Soviet nature, which exposed the country to the danger of

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 201

becoming a battlefield, and in any case reduced it to the status of a vassal of American

imperialism, depriving it of national sovereignty. But the major concern which

emerged from Togliatti’s argument was the concern about the ‘splitting of Italy into

two nations’, the incurable wound over and above the split sanctioned by the result of

18 April.30

His concern was to some extent shared by members of the parliamentary majority.

Piero Calamandrei distanced himself from the official position of the social democrats,

under whose auspices he had been elected, and outlined a vision that was to prove very

close to reality:

The military confrontation of the two camps, representing two opposing concepts of society,

will increase the severity of the internal conflicts within the parties giving political

disagreements a dangerous resemblance to civil war; and this could call into question our

constitutional liberties, which were established in times of peace and not on the eve of war, by

political events and not by some hypothetical fifth column; it will also increase the

resemblance of police measures to repressive emergency measures, the justification of which

will be attributed to the exigencies of military preparedness.31

In a last minute attempt to prevent too traumatic a split, Togliatti requested

immediately before the vote that the government should at least take a definite stand

against the stationing of foreign military bases in Italy. When put to the vote, the

proposal was defeated by a large majority; nevertheless, it was a noteworthy indication

of the objective of restoring national unity to Italian foreign policy, with its ‘bi-

partisan’ nature.

Meanwhile, however, Togliatti’s response to the government’s decision was to urge

the formation, ‘in every house, in every village, in every borough, in every city, in every

group of workers’, a broad ‘front for peace’, ‘broader than any party and any party

grouping, whether of the majority or the opposition’.32

The initiative thus announced became one of the major tasks of the PCI. Togliatti

advised the party leadership to consider ‘the danger of war’ as ‘real and not far distant’,

and did not hesitate to prepare the party for the possibility of ‘taking the traditional

measures which would enable us to face the contingency of civil war’. Although there

is, understandably, no trace of this in the reports of official meetings, we cannot

exclude the possibility that such measures had been taken, whether in the form of

reinforcement of the party’s paramilitary structures, or in the form of sabotage and

infiltration of party members into crucial sectors of the military.

There was no lack of indications of concern in this respect on the part of the

authorities responsible for public safety.33 Furthermore, even before the signing of the

NATO treaty, Togliatti had made it clear in his public statements to the press that in

the case of ‘a war which was not a conflict between nations, but a sort of ideological

class conflict, a war of reactionary and capitalist forces against social progress and the

workers, which would be a war against the USSR’, the communist position would be

one of ‘resisting the aggressors’ to the extent of assisting the Soviet army even if it

pursued the aggressor onto Italian territory.34 Though such statements undoubtedly

contributed to the survival of a ‘militaristic’ mentality among the rank-and-file and

202 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

even among the cadres, it is nevertheless true that Togliatti was alarmed at a certain

‘warlike fatalism’ which he saw developing within the party. At a meeting of the CC on

29 March, he warned them to beware of envisaging the campaign for peace as ‘a

covering action for a detachment sent in advance while the armies are preparing to

attack […] if we start to present ourselves as the party that’s gambling everything on

the prospect of war, we shall inevitably become isolated, our ties with the working

masses will be cut’.

In fact, the struggle to construct a ‘front for peace’ was to be a broad and articulate

initiative in the PCI’s search for new allies. Even choosing to use an instrument of

direct democracy provided for in the constitution of the Republic – the popular

petition – contributed to the deliberate positioning of the campaign for peace within a

legal framework. The reference to the value of peace, though it may have included

some instrumentality, allowed the PCI not only to reinforce its links of co-operation

with the socialists, but also to find common ground with areas of public opinion over

which it had no direct influence; it increased and deepened its influence in cultural

circles, and even penetrated the Catholic world, in some individual but highly

significant cases splitting its solid consensus in favour of the DC. At the end of 1950,

after the beginning of the Korean war, the petition against nuclear weapons launched

at Stockholm by the Committee for Peace gained the impressive number of 17 million

signatures in Italy, more than double the number of votes that the DPF had obtained

in 1948. Among the signatures were those of such notables as Gronchi, the DC leader

of the Chamber of Deputies and Vittorio Valletta, the chief executive of FIAT.

Reading Togliatti’s writings and speeches from this period, one gets the impression

that his desire for peace was genuine and sincere, and that his conviction that global

war could be avoided by a combination of Soviet ‘peace diplomacy’ and popular

protests in capitalist countries was stronger than the hopes of avoiding war he

cherished at the end of the 1930s; besides, he was well aware, as he said in a speech to

the Chamber on 13 July 1949, that ‘we have arrived at a point at which not only

European civilisation, but world civilisation, would be destroyed by a new war.’ It thus

seems that the calculation that the residual chances of the advance of socialism in

Europe and in Italy should be entrusted to a Soviet victory was far from Togliatti’s

mind, though it survived among the communist rank-and-file. In this sense, therefore,

there was no hidden agenda in the tenacity with which he pursued the campaign for

peace. Nevertheless, the constant, total identification with the views of the Soviet

leadership and the Manichean propensity to lay all the blame for international tension

on American imperialism represented a considerable limitation to the position of the

PCI, preventing the exploitation of the existing differences between the members of

NATO and within the centrist majority in Italy.

Such a one-sided view translated into an uncritical glorification by Togliatti of

everything that took place within the socialist ‘camp’. From the second half of 1948

onwards, the communist press seemed to want to make amends for the lukewarm

attitude for which the PCI had been reprimanded at Szklarska Poręba.35 A panegyric to

the regimes of progressive democracy was constructed on every possible occasion;

Togliatti was hardly ever in the first row of these choruses of praise, but he never

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 203

expressed any contrary opinion. When he visited Czechoslovakia in May 1949 and

Hungary in November, his reports on both occasions were enthusiastic. Furthermore,

he did not neglect the opportunity to confirm the superiority of the People’s

Democracies over Italy’s imperfect and precarious democracy.

It is noteworthy, however, that he never engaged in any kind of theoretical analysis

of their social structures and political systems, perhaps because the discrepancy between

the initial plans of the ‘new democracies’, drawn up before the glaciation of the Cold

War, and their essential identification with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in its

Soviet version had not escaped his notice. The only exception to this rule was a long

article in several instalments for Rinascita on ‘I comunisti e la rivoluzione cinese’, which,

significantly, did not appear under his own name but under the pseudonym ‘Antonio

Viale’. This article contains a pronounced and unconditional eulogy of the Chinese

Communist Party (CCP), which he considered ‘the richest in experience in the world,

after the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union’, and one is struck by his enthusiastic

comments dedicated to the programme passed by the Consultative Conference of the

Chinese People. Togliatti took care, however, not to acknowledge too great an

originality on the part of the CCP, to the extent that he felt it necessary to ridicule as

‘monstrous’ the ‘adversarial’ hypothesis that the CCP ‘could slip or fall into the path of

treachery followed by Tito’s gang’. In any case, his final forecast was marked by a

certain caution:

In the absence of industrial development, and thus of the growth of the working class, the

danger for the Communist Party and for the power that it wields is that of deviation towards a

petit-bourgeois, opportunistic path. On the other hand, if it should happen that the pace of

industrial development is forced, there is the opposite danger of the working class being

distanced from the agricultural masses, of neglect of agricultural problems, etc.36

His faith did not seem to be in the least shaken by the sinister shadow cast over the

People’s Democracies in 1949 by the show trials of certain important communist

leaders (the trial of Rajk in Hungary and of Kostov in Bulgaria), which called to mind

the great Stalinist terror of 1936–38. Neither his writings nor even his private

conversations show any element of doubt.37 He aligned himself rather with the rising

tide of invective against ‘Titoism’, which seemed quite soon to lose its connotations of

political ‘deviation’ and to assume the status of a conspiracy of spies and criminals. At

the same time, as shown by the report he was entrusted with at the November 1949

Cominform meeting in Hungary, Togliatti’s denunciation of social democracy echoed,

in part, the tones of a polemic against ‘social fascism’: it was labelled as ‘a bourgeois

party among the ranks of the working class’, ‘indispensable for the temporary salvation

of capitalism and imperialism’.38

THE ERA OF EXCOMMUNICATIONS

Without doubt, the insistence in communist propaganda touching on trends in

international politics was intended to give the activists a sense of connection with the

worldwide forces of socialism at a time characterised by isolation within national

204 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

politics. In Italy, indeed, the power bloc that had won on 18 April had become

consolidated, incorporating in a subordinate position on one side the declining PLI, on

the other the ‘third force’ of social democrats and republicans.39 For those on the left,

the parliamentary battle looked like becoming an exhausting labour of Sisyphus.

The decree of the Congregation of the Holy Office of July 1949, excommunicating

anyone professing ‘the materialist and anti-Christian doctrine of communism’,

represented a danger of further ghettoisation for the PCI. On the whole, the response

of the party appeared moderate. Togliatti believed that the moral values of religious

tradition were deeply rooted in an Italian society which was still largely rural, and it

would be counter-productive to attack them head-on. He therefore tried to check the

anti-clericalism of the militant base of the party, which was especially strong in certain

regions. The PCI tended rather to denounce the flagrant contradiction between the

Christian values of equality and solidarity, and the actions of the ‘group of Catholic

leaders’ who were ‘working in the interests of capitalist reaction, fascism and imperialist

warmongering’.40 It is worth noting that Stalin was in complete agreement with this

formulation; on 26 December 1949, when Togliatti was in Moscow at the celebrations

for the dictator’s 70th birthday, he made a note of the substance of a discussion he had

with Stalin, in which this topic had been discussed. After observing enigmatically that

‘there are some enemies (especially the Catholics) whom we must allow to come to

power in order to defeat them’, Stalin warned him not to attack religion, and added,

with an unexpected flash of humour, ‘[You] might just as well worship the Cat-

goddess, like the ancient Egyptians.’ But the problem was ‘to demonstrate how the

current wealth and power of the Church bore no relation to the message of the

Gospels’.41

In Italy, however, in spite of occasional touches of polemical exasperation, the

campaign against the Church as an institution never approached the virulent tones

used in the Iron Curtain countries. More serious were the reflections that the

ideological clash of the Cold War gave rise to in the cultural policy of the PCI. A clear

signal of the end of the open attitude which had on the whole characterised Togliatti’s

approach on this subject had already been given in his report to the sixth congress, in

which he had condemned as ‘defects of our intellectual comrades […] the tendency to

isolationism, their method of formulating problems in a way incomprehensible to the

masses, under the influence of degenerate forms of bourgeois culture’.42 Immediately

after the congress, Emilio Sereni was appointed to direct the cultural policy of the PCI.

Sereni was a noted scholar, who nevertheless presented himself as the spokesman of a

rigidly Zhdanovian concept of the relationship between culture and politics. Under

Sereni, the necessity of strengthening Marxist ideology within the party was

emphasised, while the most important aspect of the PCI’s cultural activity was the

mobilisation of the intellectuals in defence of peace.43 Togliatti did not always

demonstrate complete agreement with these concepts; much more than Sereni, he

emphasised in all his speeches between 1948 and 1951 the need for a serious campaign

against ‘clerical obscurantism’ (it was not fortuitous that in 1949 Togliatti edited the

translation of a paperback edition of Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance, which he

introduced with a brilliant preface44). In general, he took care not to break completely

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 205

with ‘progressive’ tendencies in history and the national tradition. In this context, an

initiative which he strongly supported was significant, namely the special edition of

Rinascita for the centenary of 1848, in which the praise of the ‘popular’ and ‘radical’

aspects of the Risorgimento would not preclude a relatively impartial assessment of the

role of the reformers and even of the conservatives; and, in Turin in April 1950, he

gave a surprising speech in which he proposed a partial re-evaluation of the role of

Giolitti, with the intention of contrasting the admittedly contradictory social and

political concessions of the Liberal prime minister with the authoritarian behaviour of

the ruling classes elected on 18 April.45

In spite of this, he continued to pay enthusiastic tribute to the worst aspects of

Zhdanovism. In the columns he wrote for Rinascita, using the pseudonym ‘Roderigo di

Castiglia’ from 1949, the chosen targets were – no less often than the clerics – the

champions of a certain liberal culture (from Croce to Salvemini to Salvatorelli), against

whom in the past he had used the rapier rather than the sabre. His polemic against

them, in particular against Croce, was caustic and violent.46

The charge most often levelled against ‘Roderigo’s’ targets was that of ‘anti-

communism’, a label which covered radically different positions; openly reactionary, or

merely conservative, or ex-communists, or finally those who, in the ideological clash

which was tearing the world apart, hesitated to side unreservedly with ‘the forces for

progress and peace’. The thing that Togliatti was least prepared to forgive, and which

constituted for him the surest evidence of anti-communism, was calling into question

the achievements of the Soviet Union or the socialist countries.

Occasionally he ventured into the territory of artistic styles, clearly contradicting

the criteria which he had set out in his letter to Vittorini of 7 October 1945. He

considered the first national exhibition of contemporary art, shown at Bologna in

October and November 1948, to be ‘an exhibition of dreadful nonsense’, and frankly

declared himself in favour of art which was at one and the same time educational and

capable of speaking ‘to the heart of the people’:

If your formulations, or figurative experiences, or polemical positions, or whatever else you

like to call them, don’t succeed in giving us works which inspire at least a spark of

understanding and emotion, allow us to observe that what you have produced may be

anything you like, but not a work of art […].47

About a year later, Massimo Mila, a former member of the PdA who had become

the music critic of the Turin edition of L’Unità, attacked the conference of Soviet

musicians, which had been harshly critical of the works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and

Khachaturian. Togliatti did not give this an easy ride. After attacking ‘that particular

degeneration of music which the vast majority of people today rejects’, he explicitly

charged the party, which ‘organises the better part of society’, with the responsibility

for ‘giving direction in the fields of art and culture’, and said that its task was to be ‘the

fitting bearer of the aspirations of the people, and of society in general, towards an art

which is at the apex of social life and does not decline into the by-ways of impotent

intellectual formalism’.48

206 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

In both cases, probably, Togliatti’s tone was all the sharper because he was giving

vent to his own idiosyncratic views about the most reckless styles of contemporary art.

This was not just a matter of taste, but owed its origins to his aversion to the cultural

movements of the 1910s and 1920s, which he thought had contributed to the climate

of irrationalism in which fascism and Nazism had originated.

SOCIAL CONFLICTS AND AUTHORITARIAN THREATS

The years 1949–50 were a period of serious conflict, not only of ideology and politics,

but on the social and economic fronts as well. The country was shaken by a series of

struggles; against industrial redundancies, for public control of the Marshall Plan

funds; above all, in rural areas, about the plans for agricultural reform.

Notwithstanding the trade union split49 and their isolation in parliament, the left-wing

parties, in particular the PCI, showed that they had maintained, when not increased,

their organising power and fighting spirit. But this capacity for survival was not

accompanied by a sufficiently deep understanding of the processes of transformation of

Italian society.50

In Rinascita and L’Unità, capitalism as a whole was usually defined as ‘a dying

bourgeois financial institution, which has no prospects and no ability to create any, as

anti-national and, above all, parasitic’. All Italian economic policy was seen in this light

in this rubric; stagnation in productivity was seen as a consequence of the Marshall

Plan, which was considered to be a method of impeding European economic recovery,

not of stimulating it. In his infrequent excursions into the field of economic analysis,

Togliatti endorsed this view of things with all his authority,

For almost all of 1949, the CGIL was stuck in a rigid defence of full employment,

which manifested itself in uncoordinated resistance by isolated groups of workers and

in some firms. Not until October, in its second congress, did the CGIL launch its

Piano del Lavoro (‘Labour Plan’), which represented the most comprehensive attempt

on the part of the left to propose an alternative economic policy to that of the

government. Inspired by a productivist spirit, based on the promotion of energy

generation, the development of public works, municipal housing and land reform, the

objectives of the Piano del Lavoro were to sustain employment, expand the internal

market, and overcome the most serious territorial disparities.51

Togliatti’s response to this initiative, which seemed to fit in with his vision of ‘a

radical structural reform’, was on the whole rather cautious. In his concluding speech

to the CC meeting of 14–16 December 1949, the secretary of the PCI implicitly

distanced himself from the way in which Di Vittorio had presented the initiative to the

CGIL congress, saying that the problem of ‘sacrifices’ on the part of the workers would

only arise if there were a government in which they were represented, and which

intended to implement the ‘plan’. Speaking in the inner circles of the party he was even

more explicitly critical.52 Altogether, the PCI appeared to envisage the Piano del Lavoro

as an instrument for mobilising the masses, the outcome of which could not fail to be

the defeat of the government, rather than as a sort of New Deal capable of seriously

tackling the problems of the Italian economy.

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 207

Discussion of the Piano del Lavoro had hardly started when what was perhaps the

most tragic episode of the workers’ struggle of that period occurred, on 9 January

1950. In Modena, the police fired on a group of protesters against the lockout at

Officine Orsi, killing six of the demonstrators. Tension rose dangerously throughout

the country. Togliatti himself appeared particularly shaken by this episode, which had

repercussions in his private life; he and Nilde Iotti adopted Marisa Malagoli, the seven-

year-old sister of one of the dead demonstrators.53 According to not a few accounts, he

was seen weeping at the funeral of the victims, which was unusual in a man who had

difficulty in showing his emotions.

The discussion among the party leadership which took place between 24–25

January was also very tense; Togliatti appeared concerned above all to keep control of

the situation against attacks by comrades who demanded a more combative approach.

He gave a prudent response to Secchia’s observation that ‘we cannot organise peaceful

demonstrations when we know that the police are going to open fire’:

Let’s examine each case in the light of the current situation. If we follow this path we’ll need

to create an armed organisation. It seems to me that this can’t be considered now. But we

must create a situation of extreme tension and political mobilisation, as in Modena.

The deaths in Modena were only the bloodiest links in a chain of massacres

committed by the forces of order or by hired assassins in the service of the landowners.

As well as the campaigns against industrial redundancies, the period between the end

of 1948 and the middle of 1950 also saw the development of intense rural struggles. In

1949 alone, armed intervention by the police against farm labourers and peasants

caused 30 deaths and about 100 injuries.

As Togliatti himself admitted to the Direzione on 24 November, the PCI was taken

somewhat by surprise by this series of struggles. However, the movement for land

occupation had ‘a positive value which has made the whole country aware of rural

problems and has enabled us to win over a section of the urban petit-bourgeoisie and

of the political elite in the South’. The struggle for land and for the rebirth of the

South, in which the communists played a leading role, did indeed contribute to the

growth of democracy in regions where the Resistance had not existed, breaking the old

social and political balance of power and contributing to the development of civic

awareness among the masses traditionally alienated from politics. However, the rural

struggles remained separate from those of industrial workers in the North, and

fragmented in their turn into a succession of campaigns whose aims were not entirely

compatible. The PCI lacked the capacity to unite the interests of the various

components of the rural struggles into a single strategic vision; the movement

succeeded in snatching partial victories in some of its demands, but not in influencing

the direction in which the dominant social forces were leading the country.54

There was a difference of opinion within the PCI leadership between those who

saw the campaign for agrarian reform as a campaign for the abolition of ‘residues of

feudalism’ in rural areas and as a completion of the democratic-bourgeois revolution

(Grieco, to whom Togliatti appeared closer), and those who considered it rather as

208 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

indivisible from the campaign against monopoly capitalism and thus identical with the

struggle for socialism, which was inseparable from the struggle for democracy

(Sereni).55

There were also divergent opinions within the leadership about the measures

adopted by the government in 1950 – specifically, the agrarian reform laws and the

setting-up of a ‘Fund for the Development of Southern Italy’. The question was

whether these laws represented a response, however partial, to the demands of the

popular movement and therefore deserved a favourable vote, or whether they should be

voted against because they avoided, or even obstructed, the realisation of structural

reforms. Togliatti was not in principle hostile to the acceptance of particular

government measures, even though they were limited and partial, provided they

formed part of an overall project whose philosophy he could agree with. In his speech

to the Chamber of 15 June 1949, he took the adjournment of the draft laws on

agrarian pacts as his cue to expound, not without a touch of amiable sarcasm, a general

position:

To those who […] claim that the implementation of social reforms would be the most

effective way of draining our Party, and Communism as a whole, of its content, and their

defeating us once and for all, we have just one thing to say; dear colleagues, drain us dry, drain

us as much as you like, we’ll always be in agreement with you every time you decide to

implement the reforms necessary to make our Party programme redundant.

In the case of the 1950s measures on land reform, the PCI held a negative view of

their overall design. Indeed, while they did break up the structure of latifundium (large

landed estates), creating a considerable number of small peasant holdings, they

simultaneously institutionalised the Christian democrats’ clientèle system of patronage

in the rural areas. This, in turn, reinforced the subordination of agriculture to finance

capital and industry. The PCI, therefore, voted against the proposals in parliament,

though not without serious internal debate.

The massacre at Modena coincided with the crisis of De Gasperi’s fifth

government, abandoned by the liberals – who were hostile to even the most timid

attempts at agrarian reform – and by the left wing of the social democrats. Togliatti,

however, had no illusions. His opinion of the left wing of the DC was harsh enough –

‘their Thomist communitarianism is a return to medieval corporatism […] In the

sphere of Italian politics today, as far as ideas are concerned, this is currently one of the

most reactionary groups’56 – and he was completely contemptuous of the social

democrats. In a venomous column for Rinascita in October 1949, he observed; ‘In the

field of social conservatism and anti-communism, a true priest will always defeat the

false priest, a renegade from the Socialist movement.’ Thus, his judgement of

government forces was uncompromising; ‘I don’t believe that you can become any

different from what you are today, while you are the government of anti-communism,

because anti-communism is a violation of the constitution, a war against a section of

the people, open illegality, a lie, a criminal outrage.’57

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 209

‘Violation against the Constitution’ – from the spring of 1949 onwards, this was to

be the leitmotiv of communist polemic. In his editorial for Rinascita in May 1949,

Togliatti wrote:

This current government is not the government of our Constitution; it is the government of

the power of the classes against which the new constitutional principles are directed, and who

are doing their utmost to evade and impede their being put into practice.

This interpretation might be too wide-ranging with regard to the programme of

the Constitution; but it did correspond to the aim of presenting the PCI as its surest

guarantor, and enabled the party to make the defence of constitutional liberties the

central axis of its policy. In the short term, this policy would not succeed in splitting

the solidarity of the majority, but it was to have the very important effect of making

the theme of defence of the institutions penetrate deeply into the party, and of creating

the awareness of being an integral part of the republican state, and even of representing

the safest defence against authoritarian encroachment. Togliatti genuinely believed that

constitutional liberties were threatened; not merely their effective exercise, but their

very existence, because he considered that there was a real danger of ‘the

implementation of an openly reactionary plan, even if concealed in clerical vestments’,

which would represent ‘extreme danger for the whole country’.

The PCI regarded the authoritarian aims of which De Gasperi’s government was

accused as closely connected with its total subservience to American policy. After the

outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the DC was accused of having ‘tried to

create in Italy an atmosphere of anti-socialist and anti-communist pogrom, which they

intended to use as a prelude to the suppression of certain democratic constitutional

liberties’.58

Nevertheless, Togliatti did not cease to pursue the objective of preventing the logic

of the Cold War – now closer than ever to becoming a real war – from completely

permeating Italian domestic policy. In L’Unità of 23 September he wrote:

If every serious internal conflict which attacks the bases of the social order with the aim of

transforming them were to become an armed international conflict, it is obvious that we are

heading towards the Third World War. But […] a dividing line can and must be established

and maintained between the two spheres (that of social reform and that of international

relations): that is, that regimes with different social structures can and must coexist,

collaborate and compete peacefully, and are not obliged to make war on each other.

THE ‘GREAT REFUSAL’ OF JANUARY 1951

The continuing fear of another war was one of the motives that induced the senior

members of the PCI to examine the possibility of ‘removing’ Togliatti from the

country for his own safety. Secchia and Colombi had already raised the question on 12

July 1950, but Togliatti maintained that ‘it would not be politically advisable to

disappear from Italy.’ The Party leaders thus confined themselves to advising him ‘not

to publicise his itineraries, his habits or his home address’.

210 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

However, on 22 August, Togliatti had a serious car accident; the car in which he

was travelling to go on holiday to Val d’Aosta left the road, and he suffered bruising

and a head-wound, which did not appear serious. There is no evidence that this was

anything but an accident, but the political climate was so tense that enemy conspiracies

were imagined behind every incident. On 13 September, Colombi stated to the

Direzione that the accident ‘at least showed that Togliatti was surrounded by

irresponsible comrades, not in the least up to their task’, and recommended that the

problem of his safety should be ‘looked at more closely’. The question was also raised

in a more general manner in a secret Cominform meeting in Bucharest in November

1950, in which the PCI delegate D’Onofrio suggested the possibility of sending

Togliatti abroad to be head of Cominform. Meanwhile, Togliatti’s state of health had

deteriorated, and his life was once more in danger; an operation was necessary to

remove a haematosis from his brain. The operation was perfectly successful, but a

period of rest in the Soviet Union was considered advisable, along with further medical

examination.59 In reality, on the point of leaving for Moscow, accompanied by Nilde

Iotti, Marisa and his personal secretary Luigi Amadesi, Togliatti must have realised that

the visit was as much for political reasons as for his health; and if he did not realise it

before, then the solicitous protocol with which he was surrounded during the journey

and on his arrival, with guards of honour and formal official receptions, would have

given him a hint.

On the evening after Togliatti’s arrival, Stalin visited the rest-home where he was

staying to enquire with concern after his health. A few days later, the Soviet dictator

summoned him to the Kremlin and outlined his proposal: Togliatti was to take over

the leadership of Cominform, perhaps settling in Prague, but in any case leaving Italy,

where his life was in danger. The secretary of the PCI temporised, not declining the

invitation at once, but to Amadesi he admitted that he was very annoyed. On 4

January, he wrote Stalin a long letter. Beginning with the caveat that ‘it was very

distressing to hold an opinion contrary to [yours],’ he justified his refusal with a

detailed list of reasons. He stated that his role in Italy was not merely that of secretary

of the PCI, but had developed into that of ‘leader of the entire opposition camp’. He

added that his departure would be interpreted as ‘a sign of the fact that the party no

longer considered it possible to preserve and defend its legal existence’ and would put

the party in an even more difficult position. He let it be known that finding a

replacement for him as general secretary could create ‘a tense situation within the

Party’, and quoted the example of his previous lengthy absence between 1934 and

1944. He did not fail to point out that the actions of Cominform had not been very

effective, turning out to be less important than the World Congress of Peace Partisans.

Finally, though acknowledging that they were ‘secondary considerations’, he

mentioned personal and psychological problems:

I spent 18 years of my life – 1926 to 1944 – in exile, far away from my country. This was

exceptionally difficult. When I returned to Italy, I needed all my strength to totally renovate

my work. I was able to do it, presenting myself as ‘an Italian communist politician’, and I thus

contributed to a rapid new development of the Party. It would seem inappropriate for me to

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 211

leave the country again when there are still great opportunities for work with the masses,

especially since I would find it very difficult to transform my life and work another time with

the same results.60

Togliatti concluded his letter by proposing that a member of the secretariat should

be invited to Moscow, to sound out the opinion of the party, and he put forward the

name of Secchia. Secchia arrived a few days later, accompanied by Longo; they both

listened to Togliatti repeat the grounds for his refusal, and then all three had a meeting

with Stalin, who insisted. Secchia recalls Stalin’s three principal reasons: 1) The

increasingly serious international situation required the development of Cominform,

which should be led by ‘a strong personality with authority and prestige’; 2) an

international conflict could escalate from one moment to the next, or the Western

communist parties could be outlawed, and ‘Togliatti must not be allowed to remain a

prisoner in enemy hands’; and 3) in such a serious situation, assassination attempts

against communist leaders were the order of the day (and Stalin was convinced that the

accident on 22 August had been an assassination attempt), so Togliatti should be

‘placed in safety and work abroad, at least for a certain period of time’. Secchia himself,

however, advanced the hypothesis that behind the pressing invitation from the Soviets

there lay ‘a less than complete convergence of views’, and added what, coming from

him, was really a rhetorical question: ‘Perhaps there was someone who thought that

Togliatti in Italy might put the brakes on a more decisive politics of struggle against

American imperialism?’61

Stalin agreed to refer the decision to the PCI Direzione, which met on 31 January.

The report of this meeting has not been discovered, but its result is recorded in the

testimonies of those present. A large majority decided to accept Stalin’s proposal,

which would necessitate Togliatti’s removal from Italy. As a potential successor to

Togliatti, Longo abstained, but it is not clear who voted against it; certainly Terracini,

and according to some witnesses, also Di Vittorio and Teresa Noce.

The protagonists have always attributed their reasons for this decision to Stalin’s

unquestioned authority and a real fear of an imminent world war. In reality, even

though these reasons were highly important, it is probably that some leading party

members thought of profiting by Togliatti’s absence to replace him at the head of the

PCI. We have already seen that there was no lack of internal disagreements, especially

after 1947; there is an informative note from the ministry of the interior in February

1950, which documents another difference of opinion with regard to the campaign for

peace. Togliatti was supposed to have accused Longo and Secchia of placing too much

emphasis on the French party, which led them to ‘commit a serious error, because the

PCF is now paying the price for relying too much on the street demonstrations of its

rank-and-file, instead of developing an efficient and wide-ranging propaganda effort, in

all ranks of society, against preparations for war’. Togliatti is said to have concluded,

‘[If] we were to fall into the same error, we could find ourselves isolated, not only from

the reactionaries but also from all those apolitical elements which desire nothing more

than peaceful coexistence.’62

212 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

The attitude of the press on Togliatti’s recovery from the operation is also

revealing. Even reliable newspapers such as La Stampa and Corriere della Sera gave

credence to the belief that Togliatti was leaving his post not for health reasons but for

political reasons.63 Secchia’s notes of a discussion between himself and Longo just after

the meeting on 31 January also confirmed that Togliatti’s relationship with his closest

colleagues was not idyllic. It appears that on that occasion Longo recalled the episode

of the interview with Terracini in October 1947, when Terracini ‘drew in his horns,

and if anyone else had any ambitions, he waited to see which way the wind was

blowing’; and he added that it would be possible to lead the party in the absence of

Togliatti, even if ‘difficulties’ on the part of Di Vittorio were likely, so that it was

necessary to consider his ‘replacement’.64

Be that as it may, the Direzione voted as described, and Togliatti had to be

informed. Secchia and Colombi took responsibility for this and returned to Moscow,

to be met with a most determined resistance on the part of the secretary, which was

perhaps unexpected. They left no argument untried in the attempt to convince

Togliatti; it appears that there was even a reference to the party’s critical attitude to his

relationship with Nilde Iotti. Secchia was later to admit that there were ‘those among

us’ who presented the latter as an example of ‘the long arm of the Vatican (her origins

in Azione Cattolica)’.65 But finally the two envoys realised that Togliatti’s refusal was

non-negotiable, so together with Togliatti they drafted a note informing Stalin. It

stated that the party leaders ‘were unanimously in agreement with the advice of the

Soviet comrades that Comrade Togliatti should not remain permanently in Italy’, and

that it would therefore be necessary to ‘find him a permanent place for work abroad

[…] without, however, preventing his presence in Italy in accordance with the

development of important political events. One such event is currently the party

congress’.

The key to the problem was thus in the evasiveness of the final sentence, and it is

clear that this was Togliatti’s own suggestion. The note added that the party leadership

considered it inopportune to place Togliatti at the head of an international

organisation, ‘because the government could take measures which would make it

difficult for him to return to Italy’, and also because ‘[All] comrade Togliatti’s strength

must be devoted to leading the PCI.’ At this point Stalin realised that this represented

the torpedoing of his initiative, and he ceased to insist upon it.

Iotti’s account of their return journey to Italy ‘does not hide the feeling of fear and

great uncertainty which dominated the last days of their stay in Moscow and Prague’:

So we left Moscow on a freezing night at the end of February ’51 for a long journey which

would take us to Prague via the Ukraine. None of the Soviet leaders came to say goodbye to

Togliatti at the station […] We arrived in Prague at the very time when the Sling-Svermova66

question, the first of a tragic series, was being broached in the CC. For two days we stayed in a

completely isolated villa. Togliatti only saw Slansky at a brief meeting after a meal. Finally we

were able to leave for Rome, full of concern and apprehension. Longo and Secchia came to

meet Togliatti at Venice. It was a difficult moment.67

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 213

PRIORITY OF PEACE TO BREAK THE ISOLATION

Togliatti returned to Italy just after the ‘Magnani case’ blew up, that is to say the most

serious case of internal dissent that had happened in the PCI since 1944. On 19

January 1951, at the congress of the Reggio Emilia federation, Valdo Magnani gave a

report as secretary, which he followed with ‘a completely personal speech by a simple

comrade’. In this, he denounced the view, ‘too easily tolerated in our party […] that in

the current phase of global struggle, revolution can only be achieved by the bayonets of

an army crossing our frontiers’, and insisted that this view was alienating the party

from national life and making it impossible for it to form political alliances. Some days

later, on 1 February, the federal committee of Reggio Emilia expelled him from the

PCI, as ‘a vulgar and despicable instrument in the hands of the forces of reaction,

deliberately infiltrating our party […] in order to strike it at the moment judged most

opportune by the instigators’. Later these ‘instigators’ would be characterised as the

‘Titoist traitors’, with whom Magnani, who had fought as a partisan in Yugoslavia, was

to renew political ties.68

The episode had no serious repercussions on the internal compactness of the PCI,

but for Togliatti it was disquieting; Magnani was one of the most brilliant and well-

educated cadres of the Resistance generation, a man who had grown up in the ‘partito

nuovo’, who represented its deep national and gradualist spirit. Furthermore, he was

Nilde Iotti’s cousin, which meant that he was also a personal friend of the party

secretary. Last but not least, the reasons which he gave for his resignation from the

party explicitly recalled Togliatti’s 1949 arguments against ‘fatalistic warmongering’. It

was enough to create an awkward situation for a secretary whose authority had recently

been called into question. This was another reason why Togliatti’s reaction was

exceptionally harsh; in L’Unità on 28 February, he declared, ‘[Even] in the mane of a

noble race-horse there are always two or three lice.’ Probably this attitude reveals an

equal measure of genuine disdain for an action which, according to classic stereotypes

of the communist movement, constituted desertion in the face of the enemy, and the

over-zealousness of someone who felt open to possible criticism.

Meanwhile, the seventh congress of the PCI was imminent. Togliatti, now

completely recovered, anticipated at the provincial congress of the federation in Milan

the most important political proposal to be contained in his report; he announced that

the PCI would be prepared to withdraw its opposition, ‘both within and outside

parliament’, to a government which, by radically altering the foreign policy pursued up

to that point, ‘would prevent Italy from being dragged into a new war’.

Togliatti must certainly have been aware that acceptance of his proposal would

have entailed no less than Italy leaving NATO, so it is unlikely that he was under any

illusions as to its attainability. Emphasising foreign policy, however, he was indeed

interested in opening a dialogue with men ‘coming from all parties’, including those

elements of the left of the DC who showed concern at Italy’s alignment with NATO

rearmament.69

Moreover, Togliatti’s concern over the international situation was sincerely felt. It

permeated his report to the seventh congress of the PCI (3–8 April 1951),70 which he

214 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

began by saying that ‘all the problems which today confront the peoples of Europe and

the entire world’ were linked to the prospect of a greater or lesser possibility that war

could break out within a relatively short period. Togliatti once again laid all the blame

for the increase of tension on the USA and its allies. With regard to Italian policy,

however, he adopted a more flexible, moderate position, declaring that ‘the political

platform of peace, labour and liberty which we propose for the whole of Italy’ was

simply the constitution of the Republic.

Even though at this time the PCI had turned inward on itself, intent on defending

its own spheres of operation rather than finding others in which to develop its

influence, this position – without openly posing the question – revived the model of a

party more open to, and aware of, the search for new alliances than that which had

established itself after 1948 under Secchia’s organisational leadership.

A few weeks after the communist congress, Italy was to experience its most

significant election since 1948; between the end of May and the beginning of June, the

municipal and provincial councils of a good part of Northern Italy were standing for

re-election. The Christian democrats sustained massive losses, but mainly to right-wing

monarchists and neo-fascists. The left-wing parties, who had stood with separate lists,

regained ground but lost many important seats; almost all the minor parties within the

coalition government experienced a marked downturn. Togliatti’s commentary,

marked with considerable optimism in public speeches and in the party press, was

much more critical within the Direzione. At the meeting on 16 June, he declared:

It has to be said that there is a body of citizens who did not vote for the Christian Democrats

and do not vote for us. Pressure, the situation with the police, etc; fair enough. But the fact

that in this situation we have not succeeded in capturing their interest is not positive.

This severe judgement (which appears not to have been shared by the other party

leaders) implied an indirect criticism of the organisational policy of the party, entrusted

to Secchia. For his part, Togliatti wished to exploit the local election results to revive a

political situation which appeared to have congealed; this was why, for instance, he

showed a certain interest in the internal problems of the social democrats. But the

formation in July of a new government – the seventh – under De Gasperi, did not hold

out much prospect of any significant change, in spite of the appointment of a

‘reformist’ like Vanoni to the finance ministry. The communist leader saw an

increasingly close relationship between ‘the inability of the government to initiate any

programme of economic recovery, of relief of the sufferings and hardships of a group of

citizens in need’, and its obedience ‘to the orders of the American general staff and its

costly policy of rearmament’.71

It was thus especially on the level of ‘international détente’ that Togliatti strove to

open a breach between his opponents. 1951 was the year which saw the PCI

completely committed to the campaign against the prospect of an integrated European

army linked to NATO, and in particular against the rearming of West Germany. The

PCI leader tried to outline an alternative foreign policy to that which the USA had

imposed upon Italy; while he rejected the choice of neutrality, maintaining that this

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 215

could only occur after the outbreak of war, not before, he revived the idea of building

and organising ‘serious cores of resistance in the West itself to the madness and

bellicose frenzy of the imperialist leaders of the USA’.72 Significant from this point of

view are the overtures made to the British Labour Party, wishing them success in the

forthcoming election, ‘because we cannot wish for the defeat of a party of the working

class, even though its leaders do not follow what we consider to be the correct political

line’.73

With regard to internal politics, Togliatti sought dialogue with forces outside the

left in Italy, for instance keeping open lines of communication with bona fide

exponents of European federalism, and above all making repeated advances towards the

Catholics, who precisely at this time were showing signs of disquiet on the subject of

increased military expenditure.74 In a series of speeches delivered in the early autumn,

Togliatti tried to open a discussion, based on mutual respect, on the vital topics of the

fate of humanity threatened by a catastrophic war.

However, this comparatively open position did not last beyond the end of 1951.

First, the increasingly close association of De Gasperi’s government with the initiatives

for the creation of a European army rid the communists of any illusions as to the

possible success of their attempts to initiate dialogue. Secondly, the disastrous flood in

Polesine (the Po delta) on 17 November gave rise to a serious clash between the

government and the left opposition; for the latter, the natural disaster was not merely

the work of fate, but was caused by failure to invest in the hydro-geological resources of

the peninsula, and this failure to invest was in its turn caused by the waste of resources

for which the government was responsible by prioritising military spending.

Meanwhile, the second round of local elections, scheduled for 25 May 1952, was

approaching, and this time the main focus was the South. This would mean dealing

with the threat represented by the revival of the monarchist and neo-fascist right.

There was a very real danger of a link between a section of the DC with forces of the

right; at the beginning of the year, under the illustrious name of Luigi Sturzo, founder

of the Partito Popolare, a mission to prevent the capital of Christendom from being run

by ‘a council of atheists and Freemasons’ had been initiated in Rome. This initiative,

orchestrated by Luigi Gedda, the newly-chosen leader of Catholic Action (Azione

Cattolica), was looked upon favourably by Pius XII, while De Gasperi was less

enthusiastic; his conception was one of a ‘protected democracy’, defended, even at the

cost of provisions skirting the extreme limits of constitutional law, both from the threat

of communism and from the risk of a return to quasi-fascist solutions. It was not

fortuitous that he included in the programme of his seventh government the passing of

a law (Legge Scelba), which limited the activity and propaganda of neo-fascist forces.

The ‘Scelba law’ had already been debated in parliament a year previously, causing a

certain embarrassment to the communists. Togliatti had written about it to

Scoccimarro in the following terms:

We are in favour of the measures against neo-fascism, and indeed for more severe measures.

But this does not mean that we have become part of the government majority, especially not

of a government like this … I would not even exclude the possibility that, having voted the

216 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

law article by article, we could give Scelba a surprise by defeating it in a secret ballot, thus

producing a vote of no confidence (as democrats and anti-fascists) in this government (of

scum).75

It would not come to that, and on 28 May 1952, the PCI voted in favour of the

law, although remaining sceptical as to its effective application. Undoubtedly, at least a

part of the DC saw the ‘Scelba law’ above all as an instrument of pressure against the

right, in order to use it in case of necessity. In the case of the local elections in Rome, it

was finally decided to do without its support, and ‘operation Sturzo’ was not put into

effect, both because of the revolt of some of the leaders of the DC and because of the

opposition of its allies in the ‘lay’ parties. The city administration was therefore gained

by a coalition, which replicated the political alignment of the government. On the

whole, however, the election results confirmed a trend favourable to the left-wing

parties, while the governmental bloc suffered heavy losses in favour of the right-wing

parties. On 4 June, in his comments to the Direzione about the right-wing gains,

Togliatti nonetheless tried not to exaggerate their importance:

It is a fact that there has been a shift to the right since the 18 April 1948, and we cannot

ignore it. It would however be an error to say that fascism is the principal danger. The

principal enemy is instead the Christian Democrats, which maintained a solid position as the

force of conservatism and reaction. […] The Christian Democrats will try to conduct

repressive actions without recourse to openly reactionary methods. Look for new alliances in

the anti-fascist arena, but do not forget that the enemy is the Christian Democrats.

In his report to the CC of 21 June, Togliatti resumed and developed this analysis.

He warned against the danger of a ‘reactionary transformation’ of Italian society,

towards which there were two paths which only appeared as alternatives; that of ‘open

struggle against the workers’ organisations and the democratic parties’, and that which

proposed to ‘reach a maximum of reactionary transformation’ by means of legislative

measures. Togliatti showed that he believed that, ‘for the moment’, the DC had chosen

this second path; but he recalled that the history of Europe between the wars had

shown that ‘one does not usually arrive at a Fascist regime by means of a frontal attack

by open reactionary forces.’

THE FIGHT AGAINST THE ‘SWINDLE LAW’

It was within the framework of this despondent analysis that Togliatti denounced for

the first time, in the harshest terms, the ‘monstrosity’ of a new ‘majoritarian’ electoral

law, which had begun to be discussed within the DC precisely during this period. The

law which, which was successfully nicknamed ‘Legge truffa’ (‘Swindle Law’), proposed

that, for election to the Camera, any party or group of ‘related’ parties which reached a

total of more than 50 per cent of the votes should be allocated 65 per cent of the seats.

Although the front comprising the majority was anything but solid, and several

leading figures in the parties allied to the DC declared themselves against the law,

Minister Scelba presented it to the Chamber on 21 October, and it was debated on 7

December. The stakes were high; if the centrist coalition were to gain two-thirds of the

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 217

seats, not only would the left-wing opposition be even more marginalised, but the

parliamentary majority would be dangerously close to the threshold necessary to

amend the Constitution.76 A dramatic debate lasting more than a month took place at

Montecitorio, which saw Togliatti act as a protagonist on the opposition side. The

highest point of his endeavour, in which the lesser motives of political polemic seemed

to have evaporated in the face of an anguished realisation of the gravity of the moment,

was the speech which he gave in the Chamber on 8 December, presenting and

expounding a preliminary question of unconstitutionality, delivering a bona fide lesson

in constitutional law which traced the history of the concept of representativeness in

modern parliaments. The discourse was maintained on a rigorous legal level; only in

his final words did Togliatti evoke the possible consequences of the violation of the

pact between different forces and interests ratified by the constitution, referring to a

statement made by Giovanni Amendola at the end of his vain struggle against the

Acerbo law in 1923. ‘[When] the constitutional order is destroyed, social revolution,

which only has the validity of force under a democratic order, achieves the status of a

right.’

The defence of the constitution assumed here accents of great sincerity and

emotion; the significance which the constitutional charter has held for the Italian

workers’ struggle for at least thirty years has rarely been expressed in such telling words:

The constitution is also a moment in the consciousness of humanity, an act of faith, and act of

hope. Linked to this republican constitution, with all its political, economic and social

content, is the hope of ever-increasing numbers of our people to be able to live better, no

longer to be abandoned, no longer to be proletarians, no longer to be exploited, to be able to

strip those highest in the state of power, privilege and corruption, and to progress towards this

objective in an atmosphere of tranquillity and peace, with the precise definition of their own

rights, interests and ideals.

In the Chamber, the battle against the ‘Swindle Law’ ended with the bill being passed

on 21 January. Right to the end, Togliatti strove to leave an opening, declaring himself

prepared to withdraw all his party’s amendments on condition that the law be

submitted to a referendum. However, there were definitely differences of opinion

within the PCI leadership as to the forms and extent of the mass mobilisation of

opposition to the law. Pietro Secchia’s testimony is clear:

What Togliatti says – that we were all in agreement about what form the struggle should take

–is not true. There were some who did all they could to push it to its limits, to turn it into a

great struggle (I was among them), but there were some who, concerned for the impression

that obstructionism might make on public opinion, sought instead to limit it, as they were

worried that it might lose them votes.77

Togliatti showed caution. Nenni noted significantly in his diary for 4 January,

‘Togliatti is afraid of a provocation which could put the PCI in danger, and is trying to

avoid it,’78 and the records of the PCI Direzione from a week later confirm his

impression. However, in the debate in the senate, the left decided to follow the path of

218 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

obstructionism right to the end; then in a coup de main Ruini, the president of the

senate, cut short the limits of the debate and moved to a vote, and the law was passed

on 29 March. It seems that at this point there was ‘a fairly agitated discussion’ between

Togliatti and Secchia about what line to take. The vice-secretary proposed a boycott of

the senate if Ruini remained its president, Togliatti objected that this would mean civil

war: ‘we have a parliamentary regime […] if we refuse to enter parliament, this would

mean taking the fight into a different terrain.’79

The question was resolved de facto when the senate was dissolved before its

constitutional term had expired (whereas the Camera had completed its mandate) and

was not recalled. On 30 March, the CGIL gave notice of a general strike against the

‘Swindle Law’; this was also a difficult decision, accepted rather than wanted by

Togliatti and Di Vittorio himself. During this last period, there was no lack of

disagreements between the two; but the polarisation of attitudes on the ‘Swindle Law’

reduced them to secondary importance. Undoubtedly, the two secretaries continued to

differ on the interpretation of the role of the trade unions. In the meeting of the

Direzione on 18 September 1952, Togliatti reminded the union of its role, strictly in

accordance with the ‘transmission belt’ theory, as ‘the organisation of the class fighting

for socialism, and schooling in socialism through the struggle for its immediate

demands’, whilst Di Vittorio showed some reservations towards an excessive ‘political

coloration’ of the CGIL. Apart from these differences, however, the two leaders seemed

to share the concern that the union should not be involved in a frontal assault on the

political arena, probably remembering the risks incurred in July 1948. On 30 March,

the decision was to some extent imposed by the atmosphere of great tension and by the

constant series of incidents that took place in the country. On the whole, the general

strike was successful, and undoubtedly contributed to the mass mobilisation against the

‘Swindle Law’ which was not to cease until the vote itself.

Meanwhile the death of Stalin and the accession to power of a collegiate

directorship in the Soviet Union had immediate repercussions on international

relations. The new Moscow leadership demonstrated a tendency to move more

dynamically, increasing initiatives towards détente. A few timid signs of openness were

also shown in the Western camp. Winston Churchill was one of the first to grasp the

nature of the new situation and, on 20 April, he declared himself prepared to reopen

dialogue with Moscow. For the first time since 1947, there were hopeful signs on the

horizon of international relations. Togliatti was the first to note the signs of change.

Already, on 17 October 1952, he had asserted in a speech to the Chamber that ‘one

cannot escape the impression that one stage of international politics is about to close

and another to open.’ He was now very ready to play the card of international détente

in the service of domestic politics. In a speech to the national council of the PCI on 15

April, he insisted on the opposition between ‘a concrete prospect of the end to

international tension’ and on the other hand the persistence of a Cold War climate in

Italy, of which the recently passed electoral law constituted the culmination. It was a

wide-ranging speech, which marked the opening of the PCI’s electoral campaign for

the elections planned for 7 June. He sounded an insistent note of warning against the

‘clericalisation’ of Italy; the clerical element was ‘the fount of illicit pressure on people’s

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 219

consciences, the fount of hypocrisy, the source of corruption’. Togliatti called for ‘a

clean sweep’ precisely to clear up corruption, in cases of which at this time the first

episodes of involvement by members of the DC were coming to light. The constructive

part of his speech, which consisted of a series of proposals for nationalisation of great

centres of economic power and rapid agrarian reform, was also less generic than usual.80

It was the speech of a leader confident in his party’s prospects, who realised that

deep chasms had been opened in the blocs of 18 April. The results of 7 June justified

his optimism. Although only defeated by 57,000 votes, the ‘Swindle Law’ did not

come into effect. The DC and allied parties received only 49.8 per cent of the votes for

election to the Chamber, and therefore had no right to the ‘prize’ of seats which an

absolute majority would have assured them. The left opposition parties received 37.3

per cent altogether; with 22.6 per cent, the PCI reached its historic maximum, almost

10 points ahead of the PSI, which, however, had recovered. In reality, the support of

minority lists had been vital for preventing the quota for the ‘Swindle Law’ from being

reached. Not merely the ‘independents’ of Unità popolare, led by Parri and Codignola,

and the Alleanza Democratica Nazionale (Democratic National Alliance) of ex-minister

Corbino – both treated very carefully by Togliatti – but also (although the PCI

preferred to ignore it) the Unione Socialista Italiana of Valdo Magnani. The

achievements of the monarchists and neo-fascists were also noteworthy. It would soon

become apparent that a new phase in Italian political life had begun.

TWO DIFFERENT CELEBRATIONS

Togliatti appeared to participate fully in the sense of loss felt among militant

communists after Stalin’s death. Among the Italian communists, no one had been as

close to Stalin as Togliatti; no one but Togliatti had so fully enjoyed Stalin’s

confidence; no one else was in a position to evaluate, apart from Stalin’s gifts as a

political strategist, the more alarming aspects of his personality, the unlimited

expansion of his power of life and death not only over millions of Soviet citizens but

over thousands and thousands of communists throughout the world; no one else was as

well-informed from within about the power systems that Stalin had built. Nevertheless,

the balance-sheet of Stalin’s deeds that Togliatti drew up the day after Stalin’s death

reveals not a shadow of doubt; there is only boundless admiration for the man whom

he defined, in his commemorative speech in the Chamber on 6 March, as ‘a giant in

thought and in action’. This was not merely due to the circumstances, imposed by the

solemnity of a moment in which even the enemies of the Georgian dictator paid their

respects; nor to the concern to avoid creating the slightest prospect of a breach in the

monolithic unity of the communist movement in a situation bearing many of the

aspects of the eve of war. There is no doubt that, apart from the sense of emptiness that

follows the closure of a phase of life, Togliatti experienced Stalin’s death as an

agonising trauma, laden with uncertainty about the future.

One may ask how this could be compatible with the critical intelligence that

Togliatti had so often demonstrated, with the sense of his own complex political

project, in many ways irreconcilable with the despotic, hierarchical practices so

inimical to the most elementary liberties, which Stalin had embodied for at least

220 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

twenty years. This, in turn, is to wonder at the greatest paradox of the twentieth

century, the phenomenon of communism, capable of mobilising the hopes and

energies of millions of human beings in the struggle for their own emancipation, and at

the same time of sacrificing the dignity and the lives of just as many.

The second issue of Rinascita for 1953 was entirely dedicated to the life and works

of Stalin, in open adulation. By a strange coincidence, the following number was in

large part given over to articles written ‘in commemoration of the 60th birthday of our

editor’. This circumstance, a coincidence but destined to become embarrassing in the

light of subsequent developments, offered the opportunity to dwell upon the

‘personality cult’ of Togliatti.

The adulation of the leader was a leitmotiv in all communist parties at the end of

the Stalinist era, and had its roots in the 1930s. Not even the PCI made an exception

to this rule. In 1937, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Lo Stato Operaio,

Ruggero Grieco wrote an openly hagiographic profile of ‘the leader of our party’. With

the return of Ercoli to Italy the celebration of the merits of the leader became common

currency in the party, but it only exceeded the bounds of good taste on a few occasions,

such as the greeting L’Unità addressed to him on his 52nd birthday, 25 March 1945:

It would of course be ridiculous for all communists to aim to equal the intelligence, the

political sense and the culture of the best among them […]; the human and political courage

he attains in his infinite devotion to the party means that our leader has no indecision with

regard to the newest and most audacious developments, provided that they are in conformity

with Marxism-Leninism.

One wonders whether it was from this panegyric that the right-wing satirical press

took its cue when it later nicknamed Togliatti ‘Il Migliore’ [the best], something which

the party officials deliberately ignored, precisely because of its provenance. But it was

not unknown for the militant rank-and-file to make use of it, with a basis of amused

irony.

Togliatti’s popularity grew after the assassination attempt and his return to political

life. But the ‘cult’ of his personality reached its culmination on the occasion of his 60th

birthday. We have already mentioned Rinascita, which dedicated three articles to him;

a ritualistic portrait by Pietro Secchia; a profile, bombastic in tone but not lacking in

acute observations, by Concetto Marchesi; and a serious essay by Giorgio Amendola on

Togliatti’s contribution to the struggle for the rebirth of the South.

In its turn, L’Unità republished many of Togliatti’s early writings and, on 26

March, the impassioned articles on the struggle against the ‘Swindle Law’ ceded the

honour of the front page to a running headline six columns wide, wishing ‘long life to

Togliatti, beloved leader of the Italian workers’. Over the following days the journal

gave pride of place to articles by Trombadori, Longo, Gullo, Ilija Ehrenburg and Di

Vittorio. It would be ungenerous to criticise the adulatory and edifying tone of these

articles, and there is no doubt that they were inspired by a genuine sentiment of

admiration. Certainly, the climate was that of Stalinist celebration, although somewhat

COLD WAR AND RETREAT 221

scaled down; it was repeated in the Soviet-style liturgies and in the ritual of gifts for the

secretary of the party.

The comrades were able to indulge their imaginations in the choice of gifts.81

There is a scrupulously compiled list of gifts among Togliatti’s papers; the prosaic

Piedmontese federations sent ‘a pair of mountain boots with rubber’ (Turin); ‘a suit’

made by textile workers and ‘towels from the drapers of Mongrando’ (Biella); ‘an

accordion’ from Rimini; ‘Cantù lace’ from Como; simply ‘a ham’ from Nuoro. Milan

went to greater lengths, as it were, with ‘a statue of Alberto da Giussano’; Naples

presented a silver-plated model ship with the motto ‘Towards socialism’, and Lucca

gave ‘a wood engraving of Stalin on black marble’. It is easy today to laugh at these

offerings, but in their diversity, which faithfully reflected ‘the links between islands of

well-being and oceans of poverty corresponding to a kaleidoscope of cultures, dialects

and separate identities’,82 they were an almost visible testimony of the PCI’s deep roots

within Italian society. It is difficult to determine how much of this ritual was organised

from above and how much it was spontaneous; one has the impression that the gifts

testify to a sincere affection for the leader on the part of the rank-and-file. The most

meaningful and authentic expression of this affection was, perhaps, the gift that

Togliatti received from the federation of Messina. It was a leather-bound volume with

the hammer and sickle embossed on the front cover, containing 500 pre-printed forms,

each filled in by a different hand and each containing a different pledge. Here is one

example:

Dear Comrade Togliatti, on the occasion of your sixtieth birthday, in your honour, in order

to strengthen our great party which, under your guidance, will ensure a regime of peace,

liberty and well-being for Italy and Sicily, I pledge to: follow party directives at all times,

however difficult; purchase a 200 lire contributory stamp; put up posters twice a week.

Pledges such as the above, or like the pledge ‘to get my wife to vote for a left-wing

party’, written in the shaky handwriting and approximate spelling of someone who was

barely literate, were accompanied by pledges written in confident scripts with

calligraphic flourishes, promising, for example, to ‘read the first volume of Das

Kapital’. In this case, the ‘personality cult’ was identical with the absolute dedication to

‘pedagogic concerns’ with which the PCI continued its attempt to ‘create Italians’.

How pleased and how much did Togliatti encourage the liturgies developing

around his personality? He probably considered them inevitable and also useful in

consolidating a leading role which had not been unquestioned; but it is also probable

that he was troubled by them. In November 1954 – long before the twentieth congress

of the CPSU, therefore – he wrote to his comrades in the leadership:

I see that the name of ‘Istituto Togliatti’ is still being used to designate our central school. I

wish to repeat that I am resolutely opposed to this usage. Names of the living are not given to

any organisation whatsoever, unless with the intention of wishing them dead. Furthermore,

this is detrimental to education within the party. It starts a personality cult, etc., etc. I

formally propose that this unpleasant and damaging tendency be abandoned.83

222 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Togliatti’s relationship with the rank-and-file of the party cannot easily be reduced

to stereotypes. Certainly, with advancing years, he came to dislike mingling in crowds.

In a letter to Paolo Bufalini of 13 October 1959, he explained his reasons for refusing

to be present at the festival of L’Unità in Rome:

I understand the affection for party leaders, but I don’t understand why it needs to be

expressed in such a brutal manner, with pushing, difficulty in moving about, hundreds of

handshakes, dozens of attempted embraces, and the ‘security service’ and so on. It’s a question

of party customs and almost of good manners.84

But this rather brusque and irritable attitude was contradicted by the great

availability he demonstrated toward the varied human problems of activists who

approached him. He replied personally to almost all the letters; some were political in

nature, and in such instances he patiently explained the party line, putting his

arguments calmly, giving the impression of putting himself ‘on the level’ of his

correspondent; but many letters were about personal problems (distress about a ‘de

facto marriage’ that could not be regularised, conflicts with parents, requests for

medical assistance). In every case Togliatti intervened, gave advice, showed an interest.

The most numerous requests were, of course, for recommendations for a job, to which

he usually replied that he would do his best, warning however that a recommendation

by the secretary of the PCI risked provoking the opposite effect to the one desired.85

Reading this correspondence produces a strong feeling of the very close ties

Togliatti had with the party as his own ‘creation’, of the attentive care he gave to the

development of this delicate organ; malleable and controllable to some extent indeed,

but diverse and complex enough to impose limits on the skill of its demiurge.

9

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF

CENTRISM

ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

During the weeks following the vote, Togliatti seemed aware of the new political

prospects that were opening up, both within Italy and internationally. The idea that

the project of authoritarian restoration initiated by the DC had suffered an irreparable

defeat, and that the situation in Italy could finally move forward, was clear in all his

speeches in the summer of 1953, and seemed to be confirmed by the Christian

Democrats’ difficulties in re-establishing a centrist majority. Togliatti was under no

illusions as to the possibility of the PCI’s immediate return to government. Rather, he

carefully considered the prospect of an opening to the PSI, which he did not view

negatively, provided it did not involve a rupture of left unity. In an interview with

Richard Crossman, when asked how the PCI would react to the entry of the socialists

into a coalition, he replied: ‘it would be a problem, but not an insuperable problem,’.1

On 14 June, he told Nenni that the problem of socialist participation in government

‘hasn’t arisen yet, but it will arise’, and added that ‘the communists will do all they can

to assist the PSI without compromising it.’ Nenni drew the conclusion from this that

‘we can expect a helping hand from the communists, rather than a brake on our

commitment.’2

There was a curious divergence between the impressions that Nenni and

Crossman, who had met Togliatti within a few days of each other, had of him; while to

Nenni he appeared ‘predominantly interested in Italy’s internal and social problems, in

the reduction of pressure from the employers and the police in the North, more with

respect to the unions than to the PCI’, Crossman thought him ‘less interested in

domestic policies than in foreign affairs’. The point was that Togliatti continued to see

in the international situation the principal key to initiating a change in Italian politics;

his concern was, therefore, to exploit to the maximum the favourable climate of détente

before the wind changed.

This is the background to the PCI’s attitude to the one-party government headed

by Pella, formed on 17 August after De Gasperi failed to obtain a vote of confidence in

the Chamber; a government, be it noted, which was able to avail itself in Parliament of

votes in favour by the monarchists and abstentions by the neo-fascists. The fact that

Pella’s first speech as prime minister was relaxed in tone towards the left-wing

opposition was certainly relevant.3 But the PCI’s calculated tolerance with regard to the

new prime minister depended on the secret hope of a foreign policy more independent

of the USA, even though tinged with a nationalistic colouring. In a certain sense, Pella

did not disappoint this hope. On 18 September, he proposed a plebiscite in the two

zones of the Free Territory of Trieste, letting it be understood that a solution

224 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

unfavourable to Italy would compromise the ratification of the treaty of the European

Defence Community. This initiative provoked a hard-line reaction from Yugoslavia

and irritated the United States and Britain; the British governor of Trieste even went

so far as to order troops to fire on a crowd of demonstrators demanding the return of

the city to Italy. Thus the only result that Pella achieved was to trigger a wave of

nationalism, which emphasised his government’s privileged relationship with the

Right, making him suspect even to the DC.

The PCI and Togliatti viewed the entire event in a contradictory manner. On the

one hand, Togliatti recognised that Pella’s initiative could be interpreted as ‘an

example of the Italian government’s attempt to shake off, or at least to loosen, the

chains of servitude to Atlantic politics’. On the other hand, he was sceptical as to the

possibility of holding the plebiscite, and forecast that its result would lead to a division

which was not to Italy’s benefit.4 He therefore restricted himself to demanding a

unified civil administration of the territory, a defensive, almost ‘wait and see’, position,

probably not unconnected with the indecisiveness of Soviet diplomacy.

Within a few months, however, the PCI’s attitude to Pella’s government became

much more critical. At the CC meeting of 7 December, Togliatti referred again to a

‘particularly difficult, confused, serious situation’, which seemed to him to be in sharp

contrast to the improvement in international relations. This analysis was accompanied

by closer examinations of the dissent apparent within the DC, and an invitation to

consider this party ‘solely as the enemy we have to face in a frontal attack’.

After Pella’s resignation, the task of forming a new government fell upon Fanfani, a

new man in the DC, the dynamic leader of the ‘Iniziativa democratica’ faction, which

was taking over the party. At first, this seemed to be a sign of change, and Togliatti

observed that ‘the rank-and-file of the Christian Democrats is starting to escape from

the leadership, and we must join with them’. But these hopes were short-lived; when

Fanfani introduced his programme on 29 January, anti-Marxist prejudice was

expressed in terms even more markedly ideological than those of Pella. This was not

sufficient, however, to win him the confidence of the Chamber; the crisis dragged on

for another two weeks and was only resolved on 18 February, with the formation of a

new DC–PSDI–PLI government, headed by Scelba, with the external support of the

Republican party. Certainly the presence of a series of ‘reforming’ ministers in some

important posts did not suffice to prevent this experiment from giving the impression

of extreme anti-communism.

Scelba, who had retained the ministry of the interior for himself, introduced a

series of measures aimed at reducing access to the magistracy and the army for the

communists, and striking at the commercial activity of trade with the Eastern bloc,

from which the PCI obtained a significant part of its finances, It is thus not surprising

that Togliatti’s attitude towards Scelba’s government was from the outset one of head-

on confrontation, with condemnation of its ‘out-and-out McCarthyism’.

However, Scelba’s government, elected by a narrow parliamentary majority, was in

difficulties. Its credit with public opinion was further damaged by a series of scandals

that came to light in the spring of 1954. The PCI’s condemnation of corruption as an

integral component of the DC regime became increasingly caustic. Togliatti, in

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 225

particular, gave a coherent account of it in his analysis of Italian capitalism, linking it

to ‘a rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a few rich people, who have almost

arrived at the peak of the economic pyramid by dint of speculative rather than

productive activities, and who possess none of the virtues of previous initiators and

organisers of new capitalist ventures’.5

The regressive tendency of Italian internal politics was in contrast to an

international situation that showed signs of change; Togliatti followed these

developments with his usual attentiveness. Certainly, his main interest was the foreign

policy of the Soviet Union, but he showed that he was prepared to use the ‘diplomacy

of co-existence’ on which the Soviets had embarked in grand style during these months

to stir up the stagnant waters of Italian politics. On 13 March, in a statement that

aroused great interest, Malenkov stated in no uncertain terms that a nuclear war would

mean ‘the end of civilisation’. Little more than a month later, at the CC of 12 April,

Togliatti developed this theme in dramatic terms. He declared that the use of nuclear

weapons could lead to ‘the destruction of all life on earth’. Using unusual and ‘non-

Marxist–Leninist’ terminology, he added that it was necessary to explore ‘the field of

relationships between all contemporary groups of humanity’, and to do this ‘in a

radically new spirit, because the problem confronting us is new, different, it has never

existed before’. A unified movement needed to be created, ‘a line-up of forces differing

from one another by virtue of their social and political natures, and which would

indeed be a movement for the preservation of human civilisation’. In Italy, this appeal

was addressed in the first instance to the ‘great mass of Catholics’, who ‘had much

more in common with the communist and socialist masses than with their leaders, and

especially with the leaders of the two blocs’:

We don’t ask the Catholic world to cease to be the Catholic world. […] We aim […] at

reciprocal understanding, which will above all permit the realisation that today’s task is to save

civilisation, and for this Catholics and Communists have the same objectives and can work

together to achieve them.6

This appeal was indeed greeted with some complaints from the Direzione.

According to Giorgio Amendola: ‘Secchia, who was seated next to me at the CC desk,

muttered snappily: ‘first we talked about “class”, then about “country”, now we’ve got

to “humanity” – where are we going next?’7

The resonance of Togliatti’s speech outside the party was remarkable, but its

political feedback was discouraging; apart from a few individuals, the response of

ecclesiastic circles and the DC was openly hostile, and the PCI secretary’s warning was

interpreted as a ‘trap’ to undermine Catholic unity.

The DC congress was held in Naples in June, and it was marked by the

appointment of the men of ‘Iniziativa democratica’ to the leadership, with Fanfani as

secretary. Fanfani aimed at a reorganisation of the DC so as to make it more

independent of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but showed no sign of openness towards

any political solution other than a centrist one. Togliatti did not deny that something

new had emerged from the congress; he recognised that the PCI was ‘starting to be

226 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

seen as an integral element of an historic situation, a fact that must be dealt with in a

positive manner’.8 But he remained sceptical: ‘the [DC] left has always acted in the

most reactionary manner. Nenni takes it for granted that Fanfani wants to bring about

democratic transformations. This is not true; it could lead to new disappointments.’9

The reluctance to take note of new developments in the DC and the open mistrust

with regard to Fanfani formed a singular contrast to the comments Togliatti made a

month later on the death of De Gasperi. The post mortem homage to his great

opponent that appeared in L’Unità was not only full of respect, it was also a political

message that dwelt above all on ‘what we had in common, what we experienced

together in a common aim, even if only temporarily’. In other words, Togliatti

expressed a strong nostalgia for the sort of ‘golden age’ that he considered the period of

the Constituent Assembly to have been, based on ‘acceptance of the widest and most

effective unity of popular forces for the safety and the good of all’. He concluded,

‘[This] should be the point of departure for anyone who truly wants to build and leave

a lasting impression.’10

DAYS OF RECKONING AND ATTEMPTS AT DIALOGUE

The summer of 1954, therefore, saw Togliatti attentive to new developments on the

national and international stage, but very cautious in interpreting them; hesitating, it

could be said, to launch a major political initiative. In one case during this period,

however, he did not hesitate: the case of the party’s internal struggle for organisational

renewal. There had indeed been latent dissent within the PCI leadership for some

time. Even the cautious opening towards Pella had been considered ‘excessive’ by

Pietro Secchia, who subsequently noted that ‘during these months a fairly clear

difference of opinion about the government and about the situation developed between

Togliatti and myself.’11 This difference of opinion was in fact only one of the many

points of divergence between the secretary and his deputy, who was responsible for

organisation; from 1953 onwards, the disagreement became irreconcilable.

Developments in the internal affairs of the Soviet party also contributed, albeit

indirectly, to the rekindling of the dispute. In July, Secchia met Malenkov, Molotov

and Khrushchev in Moscow. According to a later annotation by Secchia, Molotov told

him, ‘leadership has to be collective, do not make the same mistake that we made

because of an inferiority complex before the great leader – the “personality cult.”’12

In a detailed report to the Direzione on his return to Italy, the deputy secretary of

the PCI particularly emphasised this point. Clearly, the insistence on the negative

consequences of the ‘personality cult’ could be seen also as an indirect attack on

Togliatti. During the particularly animated discussion that followed, the latter spoke in

measured terms, as if to pour oil on troubled waters. ‘We ought to put this question to

the party, and this is not easy, in order not to diminish Stalin’s great legacy […] what

the Soviet comrades are doing shows that they have great ability, coolness and certainty

of judgement.’13It fell to Secchia himself to write an article for Rinascita reaffirming

that ‘the guiding principle of the party leadership must be one of collective leadership.

Individual decisions of a communist leader, even in the case of a great and strong

personality, are usually taken in isolation, and are therefore less reliable.’14

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 227

The deputy secretary of the PCI was probably counting on using this lever to

correct Togliatti’s line, which he considered too extreme. But the question of PCI

internal organisation raised by Soviet self-criticism also opened up another problematic

issue: the need for greater internal democracy and wider discussion with the rank-and-

file. Togliatti was well aware that under this heading Secchia’s management of the

organisation was open to many criticisms. His speech to the CC on 3 July 1953 had

already sounded like a criticism of Secchia’s organisation. After emphasising the role of

a party ‘more solidly linked to the masses […] continually finding and putting into

practice new, different, manifold forms’ of contact with society, he observed that the

PCI’s electoral results were most limited ‘precisely where […] we have a cadre reluctant

to move in this direction, a cadre tied to old, narrow, restricted, bureaucratic forms of

work’. The entire polemic was indirect and coded, and it is difficult to establish how

much of it would have been understood, not only by the rank-and-file, but even by the

intermediate cadres of the party. In any case, the conflict between Togliatti and Secchia

was becoming more embittered and had arrived at a point of no return.

A few weeks later, on 25 July, an occurrence that has never been completely

explained shook the party leaders. Giulio Seniga, a close collaborator of Secchia,

deputy head of organisation, disappeared from Rome with a considerable sum of

money and a large amount of confidential documents. He said that this action was

politically motivated; he wanted to shake the party up, give it back its revolutionary

lustre; perhaps he wanted to shake up Secchia himself, inspiring him to open conflict

with the secretary.

It was not until 13–14 October that the Direzione met to examine the case. Secchia

partially acknowledged his ‘lack of vigilance’, but he also raised the problem of ‘things

that need to be improved and altered about our work and our methods of leadership’,

pressing for greater freedom of discussion. After emphasising the ‘growth and

broadening of the collective nature of the leadership’, Togliatti declared that he had ‘no

problem should the question of the general secretary be posed’, although undoubtedly

aware of the fact that no one would have dreamed of raising the question of his

replacement, especially not at that point. Nevertheless, he was in favour of an

enlargement of the secretariat. The leadership decided to co-opt Amendola and

Giancarlo Pajetta. Togliatti affirmed, in a rather unconvincing manner, his ‘political

and personal confidence’ in Secchia, who was granted ‘a rest period of a few months’.

A month later, on 17 November, the Direzione approved a confidential resolution

which censured ‘Comrade Secchia’s grave responsibility’ in the affair, and levelled a

particularly serious accusation against him, close to that of factionalism. Immediately

after this meeting, the secretary formally criticised ‘the tendency of the organising

section to act like a closed group, imposing itself in its entirety on the organisation’.

This was the real charge against Secchia, who was obliged to re-write at least three

times a letter of self-criticism before it was approved at the meeting of 15 January

1955. It was evident that his political defeat was to be irrevocably ratified at this point.

Togliatti moved coldly and decisively throughout this affair; he did not criticise in

heightened tones, leaving this task to others, and tended to ‘depersonalise’ the polemic,

placing the emphasis rather on defects in organisational function. But he did not

228 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

appear disposed to offer his opponent the chance of retaining his responsibilities at the

head of the party. On 18 January, Secchia was excluded from the secretariat (although

he remained a member of the Direzione) and appointed regional secretary for

Lombardy. No motivation was given for this decision, and not even in the minutes of

the secretariat or any internal party communications.15 For years there was no mention

in the communist press of a political disagreement between Secchia and Togliatti,

except for haughty denials of the ‘amazing tall stories’ put out by the ‘bourgeois’

press.16

The PCI’s political difficulties at the end of 1954, of which this internal conflict

was a significant indication, also had an effect in the area of cultural politics. As far

back as March, in agreement with the secretary, a group of communist intellectuals

had founded a new periodical, Il Contemporaneo, which presented itself as open to the

most diverse political and cultural points of view. Throughout Italian culture,

communist intellectuals were increasing their efforts to develop research that would be

less subordinate to the immediate requirements of politics. The activity of the

historians in the orbit of the Istituto Gramsci was particularly intense; in response to a

request by some of these historians, a meeting to discuss the orientation and duties of

Marxist historiography in Italy took place in December 1954 at the Istituto itself. The

meeting was introduced by a speech from Arturo Colombi, a party leader of the ‘old

guard’. It was a speech based on a very rigid and schematic concept; communist

historians were urged to overcome ‘non-scientific concepts’, to combat ‘the residues of

subjectivism and idealism’, to watch out for ‘use of bourgeois works and historical

sources’ and, in the final analysis, not to forget that they were ‘not merely scholars, but

in the first instance combatants of the working class, militant Marxist-Leninists, who

fulfil an important function in the party with their writings on history’. The speech

provoked a lively and very critical discussion among the participants, and the way in

which Togliatti chose to intervene is significant. In a letter of 11 December to

Ambrogio Donini, then director of the Istituto Gramsci, he said that Colombi’s

statement had caused him ‘great perplexity and also some concern’, not only because it

identified Marxist historiography completely with the historiography of the workers’

movement, which was in fact a ‘limited and circumscribed field’ (of Marxist

historiography), but also because of its ‘poverty of information and documentation’,

and the hasty and superficial way in which the role of Gramsci had been discussed.

Colombi’s text was adequate as a lecture at a party school, but Togliatti thought it

‘completely inadequate’ for an audience of specialists. 17

Signs of a thaw on the ‘cultural front’ were increasing in these last months of

1954.18 The PCI showed itself sensitive to the ferment among those intellectuals who

had been rejected by the conservatives but still hesitated to commit themselves

unreservedly to the left. Significant in this respect was the peaceful dialogue that

Togliatti conducted with Norberto Bobbio. True, their positions remained far apart;

Bobbio had claimed universal relevance for the liberal idea of freedom, denying that

the extension of the sovereignty of the people and the expansion of equality were in

themselves valid guarantees of actual freedom, and hoping that the convergence of

measures, principles and juridical instruments which constituted ‘liberal government’

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 229

could be assimilated by communist systems. Togliatti condemned the liberal concept

for underestimating the real social substance of freedom. He denied, not without

justification, that liberalism had had the historic merit of being an obstacle to

dictatorship, as Bobbio claimed. He maintained, above all, an intransigent defence of

the superiority of socialist democracy as achieved in the Soviet Union, where, he said,

‘the transitory and inevitable limitations of the abstract and formal liberties of

privileged and limited social groups […] are the means to enable millions of people to

progress to the achievement of a new, rich, and complex personality.’ On the whole,

Togliatti’s tone was measured and calm, and his argument relied more on the strength

of fairly lucid reasoning than on invective and propagandistic declamation. Bobbio

himself acknowledged this development. Writing in reply to Togliatti’s first article, he

stated: ‘I believe that democracy needs intellectual intermediaries. Allow me to consider

it a good sign that Roderigo di Castiglia has considered it his duty to reply to one of

these.’19

‘PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE’ AND ‘STRUCTURAL REFORMS’

Things were also moving forward on the international front. The secretary of the PCI

welcomed France’s refusal to ratify the European Defence Community as ‘a great

victory for peace’, but the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO

caused him great anxiety, as this could constitute ‘an aggressive anti-Soviet military

bloc’ and would involve the abandonment of the ‘road to détente’.

On this issue there were, for the first time, signs of disagreement between the PCI

and the PSI on the subject of foreign policy, which Togliatti mentioned with concern

in the meetings of the leadership on 17 November and 29 December. Nenni felt that

there was now a tendency towards splits (‘in Korea, in Indochina, in Trieste, in

Germany’), so that ‘if an agreement between the blocs on arms limitation could be

reached, there could be a fairly long period of international calm’.20 Togliatti, on the

other hand, seemed convinced that there was imminent danger of war, and that this

was even increasing. It is difficult to say how much this fear was the expression of a

deep conviction and how much it was a function of the intensification of the new

Soviet ‘peace offensive’, as Nenni suspected.21 He certainly did not accept the

‘tendency towards splits’ as a peaceful and irreversible tendency; perhaps he deceived

himself into seeing in détente a way of loosening the oppressive and paralysing bonds

caused by the division of the world into two blocs. In reality, however, during the

1950s the existence and reinforcement of these bonds was the pre-condition for the

politics of détente that the two ‘great powers’ wished to develop, in conformity with

their interests. And Togliatti was enough of a realist to take note of this, in particular

with regard to a question with which he had always been much concerned, that of

Trieste.

In autumn 1954, the US and Great Britain renewed their previous proposal of

dividing the Free Territory along the boundary between Zone A and Zone B;

agreement was reached in October. Though hostile at first, Togliatti referred to this

proposal in very realistic terms at the meeting of the Direzione on 28 October: ‘this is a

230 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

new situation to which our politics must adapt’ and which ‘must throw into sharp

relief the abandonment of certain polemics conducted up till now’. Togliatti was, in

fact, aware that a rapprochement between Moscow and Belgrade was in progress, and

he evidently took it into account: ‘Is the establishment of a different relationship

between the USSR and Yugoslavia advantageous or not? The answer cannot be other

than affirmative. Tito flirted with the imperialists’ game, but did not get too deeply

involved.’ In short, at the point at which an agreement on Trieste was finally reached,

Togliatti had no intention of isolating himself by a refusal, with only the extreme right

for company, especially since Yugoslavia had ceased to be the ‘ideological enemy’ for

the socialist camp that it had been from 1948 onwards. It seemed, moreover, that the

hardest phase of the Cold War was nearing its end.

Togliatti tried to interpret in original terms the concept – not in itself new – of

‘peaceful co-existence’: ‘the civilisations which exist in this world, whatever their social

and political form, should not merely coexist separately, but recognise each other and

be more involved in reciprocal emulation.’22 He developed his ideas in a speech to the

PCI CC on 1 April, which quickly gained influence inside the PCI leadership. In early

March 1955, Molotov, who was still Soviet foreign minister, had put forward in the

theoretical journal of the Soviet party a theory which completely contradicted the one

propounded by Malenkov a year earlier; he claimed that an atomic war would not

mean the end of civilisation, but that of the ‘putrescent capitalist system’. Although he

did not quote the Soviet leader, Togliatti’s response was very clear:

It is indeed true that a war in which atomic weapons were used would conclude in the end of

the capitalist system in the world. This, however, is not a prospect we can view with

complacency. […] we do not wish for the end of capitalism in this way […] we want

capitalism to end because it is the ruin of the human race, but we want […] it to be defeated

by peaceful competition with the socialist countries.23

On the ground of domestic politics, the organisational conference in January had

stressed the topic of ‘structural reforms’, understood as objectives of ‘democratic

transformation’ on the road to socialism. In many respects, however, this outline

remained linked to the leitmotiv of all communist economic analysis from the

Liberation onwards, which considered monopoly to have only a negative and

‘degenerative’ function, and either ignored or was incapable of grasping the particular

room for dynamic manoeuvre that the very backwardness of Italian capitalism allowed.

These were errors of judgement, which contributed to the crushing defeat of the

CGIL in the elections for internal commissions at FIAT in March 1955. However

much it owed to the systematic repression and black-listing carried out by the

management over at least two years, it was also the result of an undeniable delay in

developing a trade union policy capable of dealing with the effects of technological

change on the conditions of the workers. Although concerned, Togliatti did not seem

to completely grasp the reasons for the defeat, which he attributed entirely to

‘intimidatory, illegal, and scandalous pressure’.24 He had not shown much awareness of

the signs of CGIL isolation, or of its increasing difficulties in finding concrete

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 231

objectives and organisational structures adequate to deal with a rapidly changing

industrial situation. Although, by as early as 1954, the union had very cautiously tried

to determine what should be the role of union branches within the company, they had

received a very wary response from the PCI. Togliatti thought that company-level

bargaining by the union might deprive it of its class roots. His greatest fear seemed to

be that of isolation. At a leadership meeting on 30 March, he warned: ‘Let us take care

not to restrict ourselves to workers’ struggles and forget alliances […] in Turin we must

immediately make a great effort for peace’. Nevertheless, it must be recognised that he

hindered neither the process of self-criticism of the CGIL, which Di Vittorio led, with

considerable courage, nor the lively debate on the new aspects of the economic and

industrial situation, which had been set in motion in Turin itself.

‘Lively, strong, full of energy, robust and also resourceful, rich in political,

intellectual, and moral prestige, with the mass support of millions, entirely sure of itself

and of its cause, which cannot fail to triumph’: this was how Togliatti described the

PCI as he opened the fourth organisational conference. In reality, however, this display

of confidence concealed a void of political initiative, and this at a time when the

political situation in Italy was beginning to gather momentum.

The PSI held its thirty-first congress in Turin at the end of March. At this, Nenni

relaunched, with greater enthusiasm than before, the proposal of a dialogue with the

Catholic masses, and let it be understood that this could only happen by means of a

new relationship with the DC. This was another sign of the socialists’ restlessness, and

of their ever-increasing determination to find an autonomous position. Togliatti

reaffirmed his confidence in the importance of the unity of action pact between the

PCI and PSI, but reading between the lines a certain anxiety can be detected on his

part concerning the developments taking place. One month later, the election of the

president of the Republic produced a great surprise: the official government candidate,

Cesare Merzagora, president of the senate, failed to gain the necessary majority,

because a section of the DC refused to vote for him. Giovanni Gronchi, president of

the Chamber and acknowledged advocate of overtures to the socialists, was elected

instead, with the support of communists and socialists proving decisive. The tone of

Gronchi’s first speech to parliament and to the country was new, and public opinion

was struck by his social openness and by his call for détente and for full implementation

of the constitution.25 Togliatti welcomed this, but it cannot be said that the PCI

showed sufficient capacity for participating in the political game that was now

recommencing. Togliatti himself in this period was feeling the strain of intense,

stressful activity; on 1 May, during a rally in Trieste, he suffered a fainting fit as a result

of sunstroke. Doctors prescribed a few days of complete rest, and it was decided to

reduce the secretary’s workload. He was absent from the meetings of the Direzione

until September, and also reduced his parliamentary activity for a while.

Meanwhile, Scelba’s government resigned at the end of June. Togliatti welcomed

this as ‘a stroke of luck for Italian democracy’, but he was under no illusions as to the

possibility of profound change.26 In effect, this was the beginning of a long phase which

should have been a transition towards ‘an opening to the left’, but was in reality one of

stalemate; the new prime minister, the Christian Democrat Antonio Segni, at the head

232 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

of a quadripartite coalition, was provisionally welcomed by Togliatti with polite

scepticism.27

On the whole, however, the political climate of the country was less tense than in

the previous year. Togliatti used the tenth anniversary of the Liberation to stress in all

his speeches the democratic and unitary nature of the anti-fascist struggle and the

validity of the choices made by the PCI, and also to take up again the conceptual

framework that had been abruptly cut short in 1947: he stressed ‘that there cannot be

one system that works for all countries, but that in each country development must

have its own original forms, dictated by the economic situation, by the balance of

power, etc.’ 28

The return to the subject of an ‘Italian road to socialism’ – although not explicitly

mentioned – was evidently placed within the framework of a rapidly evolving

international situation. In April 1955, a conference of 29 Afro-Asian ‘non-aligned’

states took place at Bandung and, in May, the Soviets agreed to uncouple the signing

of the peace treaty with Austria from the German question, making it conditional

solely on a declaration of neutrality from Vienna. Also in May, Khrushchev’s visit to

Belgrade set the seal on the spectacular reconciliation between the Soviet Union and

Yugoslavia. Finally, the first summit meeting of the heads of government of the four

‘great powers’ for more than ten years took place in July. The reasons for disagreement

between the two blocs were substantially confirmed, however the ‘spirit of Geneva’,

which people were starting to talk about as a synonym for a desire for lasting peace,

was more than a mere catchphrase adopted by the press.

Togliatti undoubtedly appreciated the significance of this new situation.

Nevertheless, his speech to the CC on 28 November 1955 still presented Italian

domestic politics as being dominated by ‘confusion degenerating into disorder’, with

dangers looming for democracy. The political perspectives for the imminent local

elections had nothing new to offer; the ‘conquest of the Catholic masses’, together with

unity with the PSI, in which he had total confidence, remained the objective and the

condition of the PCI’s programme of renewal. His attitude with regard to Fanfani’s

DC remained one of condemnation without appeal, and he gave no greater credence to

those of the Working Class Catholic Association (Associazione Cristiana dei Lavoratori

Italiani; ACLI) who ‘often went to great lengths to denounce specific situations, but do

not carry out any effective actions to resolve them’.29

The rigidity of this position was probably determined by the belief that the tactic

adopted by the PCI from 7 June 1953 onwards – a flexible, defensive tactic, which

relied on wearing down the opponent – was paying off. In his Saluto di Capodanno

(new year’s message) for 1956, Togliatti wrote that ‘the reactionary attack has been

contained; today the democratic forces are on the offensive.’30 The coming year was to

put this unusual optimism to a harsh test.

THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS AND TOGLIATTI’S CIRCUMSPECTION

In the first week of February 1956, Togliatti left for Moscow at the head of a

delegation which was to take part in the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of

the Soviet Union (CPSU). He was sure that it would not be a routine congress. In

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 233

Warsaw, during a stop on the long train journey, he met the leaders of the United

Workers’ Party, and he was probably informed – if he did not already know – of the

imminent rehabilitation of the Polish Communist Party. The resolution would in fact

be signed by the CCs of five parties, including the PCI, the same parties whose

representatives in the ECCI had ordered the winding-up of the party in 1938.31 In any

case, the leaders of the PCI had known that the insistence on ‘collective leadership’

implied the beginning of critical reflections on Stalin’s last years in power, and an

experienced politician like Togliatti would certainly have realised that a harsh political

power struggle was going on within the Soviet party.

Khrushchev’s introductory speech to the congress, delivered on 14 February, did

indeed present some noteworthy changes. Although he did not once mention Stalin by

name (even this, after all, was remarkable), Khrushchev spoke of the necessity of

developing Soviet democracy and strengthening ‘socialist legality’, and confirmed the

critique of the ‘personality cult’. But it was, above all, in the analysis of the

international situation that major new elements emerged. The image of a world

divided into two unshakeably hostile ‘camps’ was quietly dropped, and ‘peaceful co-

existence’ between the two systems, socialist and capitalist, was indicated as the only

possible alternative to ‘the most devastating war in history’. Moreover, Khrushchev

revived the theory of different ‘roads to socialism’, which had been abandoned in 1947.

He recognised that they had existed in the past, as demonstrated by the Chinese and

Yugoslav examples, and predicted that they might differ even more in the future;

indeed, he did not rule out the possibility that the transition to socialism could take

place peacefully, by parliamentary means.

The secretary of the PCI could not fail to welcome this whole section of the speech

with relief, as in many ways it constituted complete and formal legitimisation of a

complex of ideas that he had never renounced. And, indeed, Togliatti immediately

seized the opportunity. In his greetings to the congress, he emphasised that ‘the road

you have followed to gain power and to construct a socialist society is not compulsory

in all respects for other countries,’ adding at once, ‘it is our duty to develop an Italian

way.’ He specified that this was a way that was ‘to develop within the framework of

democracy’, even if this was ‘not a fixed point once and for all, but is in itself

determined by our struggle’.32

Within this almost idyllic framework, the ‘secret speech’ delivered by Khrushchev

on 25 February to a closed meeting of Soviet delegates complicated matters. The first

secretary of the CPSU emphatically condemned Stalin’s post-1934 methods of

government, revealing the extent of repression within the country and against the

party; he was harshly critical of Stalin’s war-time leadership, and he exposed the

methods by which the dictator had concentrated all power in his own hands and

fostered his own personality cult.33

In common with other leaders of foreign delegations, Togliatti received a copy in

Russian at his hotel that night; he read it but did not discuss it with the other

comrades, and he did not deviate from this stance of complete reserve for more than

three months. After his return to Italy, when he opened the proceedings of the CC of

the PCI on 13 March, he referred exclusively to Khrushchev’s public speech. He dwelt

234 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

at length on the ‘possibility of different routes of development in the march towards

socialism’, maintaining that ‘the search for our own, Italian route’ had been a ‘constant

concern’ of the PCI, and dated it back to Gramsci’s formulation. He recalled that,

from the beginning, Italian communists had rejected ‘the route of law-breaking’ and

taken instead that of utilisation of parliament; he reiterated that the Soviet experience,

though it ‘remained an example for all those who wish to progress towards socialism’

was, nevertheless, not ‘the only experience’.

On Khrushchev’s criticism, which had criticised ‘the personality cult’ as ‘contrary

to our principles and damaging to our mission’, and on how to judge ‘the actions of

Comrade Stalin’, Togliatti was very circumspect:

The question is serious and difficult: we must examine it with a very deep sense of

responsibility, not merely because of what Stalin represented in the international workers’ and

socialist movement and the fact that the criticism touches on feelings that are still vivid, but

also because it is in nobody’s interest for these criticisms to become the rallying-cry for the

usual champions of anti-communism.

All the evidence points to the fact that this was Togliatti’s major concern. He did

not hesitate to claim for Stalin the role of ‘great Marxist thinker’, and to defend the

line he took ‘in the struggle against the Trotskyists, the right, and the bourgeois

nationalists’. He affirmed that ‘the party line was correct before the war, during the

war, and after the war.’ Certainly, Stalin had committed many errors, some of them

serious: on the theoretical side, he had maintained the ‘exaggerated, false’ thesis of the

continued worsening of the class struggle and the inevitable increase of the enemies of

the socialist state, giving rise to ‘unjust, repressive measures’ and violations of socialist

legality. The impression that this section of Togliatti’s speech gives is that he regarded

Stalin’s errors, however serious, as secondary and not so serious as to undermine the

correctness of the basic party line.34

This adroit mixture of innovative approaches and intransigent defence of the past

did not protect Togliatti from demands for further clarification, especially from

Terracini. Outside the PCI, Nenni, who had started to publish a series of critical

reflections on the twentieth congress, commented favourably on Togliatti’s speech of

13 March, but observed that it ‘gives us the titles of the chapters yet to be written’.35

The aim of the PCI leader was, above, all to make use of Khrushchev’s statement on

the possibility of different roads to socialism to confer legitimacy on the politics of the

Italian communists; the rest constituted an annoying hindrance. At the national

council on 3 April, at which the order of the day was the imminent local elections,

Togliatti’s long opening speech was devoted almost exclusively to the situation in Italy;

he did not mention the twentieth congress, except to observe that it had become a

pretext for ‘a foolish campaign to announce our decline’.36

The delegates, however, were perplexed and ill-at-ease. The leaders of the younger

generation expressed this anxiety; in a speech which was heartily applauded by the

audience, Giorgio Amendola spoke of a PCI finally ‘free of outside commitments’. The

PCI leader changed course in his conclusion and no longer side-stepped the discussion

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 235

of the ‘errors and defects which had arisen at a certain point in the development of

socialist society’; but his argument was still dominated by the concern to minimise all

the negative aspects and by the tendency to praise the Soviet experience

unconditionally. This was not a view shared by all the leaders. Giancarlo Pajetta’s

testimony is very significant:

In order to correct what he may have thought of as excessive exaggeration in the speeches by

Amendola and myself, he wished to commemorate Stalin in such a way as to elicit unanimous

applause, almost an ovation, from the National Council […] Amendola and I […] without

even looking at each other – we weren’t sitting together – we stretched out our hands so as to

make it clear that we were not participating in the applause. This gesture was the clear

conclusion of our speech, a renewed declaration that there could be no going back.37

THE WEAKENING DOGMA OF THE GUIDING PARTY

What should we make of Togliatti’s caution, which bordered on reticence? On the one

hand, he was concerned not to ‘pollute’ the forthcoming general election campaign

with the arguments of the DC and its allies about communism’s weakness. On the

other hand, it is possible that he thought that Khrushchev had not fully consolidated

his position at the head of the CPSU and considered a return to power of the Stalinist

old guard possible. In any case, his hope was that ‘the time has come for the

international communist movement to lead the process of renewal in a more positive

way, moderate in form and words, but advanced in essence.’38

The meeting with Tito in Belgrade on 1 May seemed to confirm this. The meeting

took place at the invitation of the League of Yugoslav Communists and sealed the

reconciliation between the two parties after years of tension. The discussions between

the two leaders ranged over several topics, and revealed a joint wish to prevent relations

between communist parties being controlled by an international centre. With reference

to the twentieth congress, Tito expressed his dissatisfaction because it had not drawn

‘all the conclusions from the criticisms of Comrade Stalin’s errors’: ‘it is not the

personality cult [...] that created a bad system, but the reverse.’ Significantly, Togliatti’s

response was circumspect:

I told the Yugoslav comrades that I too had reached the conclusion that the twentieth congress

had not completely clarified (not on a personal level, but on the level of politics and principle)

how Stalin’s serious errors could have been possible […] My opinion is that we must explain

the condition which caused, at a certain moment, restriction and other aspects of deterioration

of Soviet democracy that had been founded by Lenin. I believe that this must be done in a

way that maintains the prestige and authority of the Soviet Union intact among the working

masses. In short, I believe that, with this aim in mind, criticism of Stalin should concentrate

on important political questions and that it was not in anybody’s interest to morally destroy

his image or ignore the positive side of his achievements.39

Togliatti’s visit to Yugoslavia was the most important element of the PCI’s wider

initiative in the field of international relations, where the party’s positions were

palpably changing. When the winding-up of the Cominform was officially announced

236 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

on 17 April, Togliatti published an interview in L’Unità that did not lack for new

ideas, such as the claim ‘to the democratic right, here in the Western world, to have

contacts […] with the workers’, socialist, and communist movements, to which we are

linked by ideas in common and by political affinity’, and the hope of ‘more rapid

progress towards the re-establishment of unity within the workers’ and socialist

movement’.40 A few weeks later, on 30 April, on the eve of his meeting with Tito, he

again raised the subject of national roads to socialism in an interview with the Yugoslav

communists’ daily paper, Borba. He replied in a very telling manner to a journalist who

asked him about the necessity or otherwise of a revolutionary ‘leap’, stating:

In a country like Italy, there is a tradition of democratic life. There is a parliamentary

tradition. The different parties often have their roots deep in the same social strata. All this

cannot be destroyed, and must be taken into account [..] It is impossible to decide, with the

violent action of a minority vanguard, to cut the knot of current political positions and

organisations of a highly diverse nature, which constitute the structure of society and of the

state.

Meanwhile, the local elections were due. The PSI, which had used Khrushchev’s

speech as the starting-point for a fundamental critique of the errors of Soviet socialism,

showed increasing signs of reconsidering its own relationship of close unity of action

with the PCI. The results of 27 and 28 May certainly did not indicate the communist

collapse that some had expected, but they did pose difficult problems for the formation

of local councils. Togliatti showed caution in the face of the tendency of the socialists

to form coalitions with the DC in many cities and provinces; in the PCI leadership on

1 June, he said, ‘in view of international developments, the advance of the socialists

towards power is not to our disadvantage. The same could be said of the movement to

the left of the social democrats.’

This discussion had hardly begun when, on 4 June, the New York Times published

an almost complete version of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. The unease within the PCI

was palpable; on 20 June, Togliatti declared at a leadership meeting: ‘we’ve found

ourselves in an embarrassing situation; we have kept to the guidelines, which they have

now altered.’ Terracini was harsher: ‘we should be very dissatisfied with the way in

which the Soviet comrades have acted.’ This time, Togliatti appears to have realised

that it was necessary to take a less circumspect position. The opportunity was soon

provided by nine questions presented to him and other important figures in Italian

cultural and political life by Nuovi Argomenti, a left-wing cultural periodical edited by

Alberto Carocci and Alberto Moravia, The leadership was not informed of the content

of the interview, although the text was sent in advance to the members of the

secretariat, with the warning that it would in any case be published as it stood. It

seemed almost as though Togliatti was reasserting his authority, which had been

somewhat diminished after the national council of 3 April, and wanted to decide

himself on the parameters within which the position of the PCI was to be defined.

The PCI leader responded to the nine questions with a wide-ranging and articulate

argument. He acknowledged that what had happened in the Soviet Union was ‘the

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 237

increasing imposition of personal power on collective endeavours which were

democratic in origin and by nature’ and, as a consequence of this, ‘the accumulation of

the phenomena of bureaucratisation, violation of law, stagnation, and also to some

extent degeneration in various aspects of social organisation’. Togliatti thus openly

challenged Khrushchev’s explanation as too simplistic, as it hinged upon denunciation

of Stalin’s abuses and the damage caused by the ‘personality cult’, and turned attention

to the social and institutional mechanisms. Nevertheless, he resolutely denied that

these errors were the cause of ‘the destruction of those fundamental features of Soviet

society from which it derives its socialist and democratic character’. Furthermore, when

asked whether criticisms of Stalin should lead to institutional changes within the Soviet

Union, he replied with a decisive affirmation of the superiority of ‘Soviet democracy’

over ‘Western democracy’.

All the same, having drawn this basic distinction, Togliatti emphasised – and this

was the most important political conclusion – that ‘the Soviet model is no longer

obligatory, and cannot be’, and that the ‘complex of systems must be polycentric;

within the communist system, one can no longer speak of a single leader, but of a

progression achieved following paths that are often very different’, to the stage at which

‘there are countries where the achievement of socialism is desired without the

communists being the party in charge.’41

In order to appreciate the significance of this interview, it needs to be seen within

the framework of the communist movement of the period, still dominated by

monolithic tendencies and ideological conformity; reticence or the minimisation of

facts denounced by Khrushchev remained the rule for the great majority of communist

parties, to the extent that the PCF continued for a long time to refer to ‘the alleged

“secret speech”’. Togliatti made no attempt to conceal what was blatantly obvious:

Khrushchev’s speech existed and denounced real deviations. But it could, perhaps, be

criticised for not getting to the root of those problems.

On 20 June, a week after the publication of the interview, there was a meeting of

the Direzione. The party leaders discussed in great depth the problems posed by the

‘secret speech’ and, in some cases, even went beyond what Togliatti had said. Di

Vittorio stated, ‘[It] is necessary to give the workers’ movement a guarantee that the

triumph of socialism does not always presuppose violence and massacres, that socialism

wishes to free humanity once and for all from every arbitrary power, to take the

opportunity to free our party from a sort of legend of cynicism, to show ourselves as we

are.’ Terracini raised an even greater question: he regretted the ‘purely formal

acceptance of the party’s political line’ and claimed that the ‘Italian road to socialism

[was] considered by many to be something in which they could not believe, as there

was no political discussion.’ The entire speech by the ex-president of the Constituent

Assembly was very critical, and the fact that no one openly challenged his arguments

speaks volumes for the way the political climate had changed since 1947.

In his speech at the next CC meeting on 24 June, Togliatti made some new and

highly important assertions. On the one hand, he hoped for the overcoming, once and

for all, of ‘a certain atmosphere of duplicity’, denouncing those who considered the

affirmation of the democratic nature of the struggle for the transformation of Italian

238 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

society as ‘a sort of trick, something we’ve been using to deceive the enemy or to get

over difficulties, in order not to expose ourselves to certain accusations […] rather than

a genuine and heart-felt policy’. On the other hand, he acknowledged that ‘in a society

where socialism is being constructed, there can be different parties, of which some

collaborate on the construction.’

The CC of June 1956 undoubtedly represented the high point of awareness on the

part of the PCI, and of Togliatti himself, of new problems on the horizon. But

meanwhile incidents were following one after another. The interview in Nuovi

Argomenti had not gone unnoticed in Moscow: Khrushchev himself wrote to the CC

on 30 June, regretting that the interview with Togliatti, although ‘on the whole very

interesting and full of content’, contained ‘certain claims with which we cannot agree’,

especially the ‘unfortunate formulation’ about bureaucratic degeneration in Soviet

society, which was criticised because ‘it undermines the confidence of the workers in

the superiority of the socialist system in general, and […] has always been actively

exploited by the enemies of our party.’42

A certain tension was beginning to be felt between the two parties. On 18 July,

Togliatti’s reply showed that he was firm in the positions he took:

The objection by the Soviet comrades is superficial, and refers only to the external aspect of

the word ‘degeneration’ […] something disappeared over a long period which should not have

disappeared […] The regime had lost some of its characteristics; the guarantee of the liberty of

the worker. This problem is important to us. I do not think, therefore, that I should make a

retraction, because this would devalue the whole action we have to take with regard to groups

not yet socialist, or with regard to those already won over.

THE ENEMY DOES EXIST

Meanwhile, another moment of crisis provided evidence of just how insecure the PCI’s

path to effective autonomy was. On 28 June, at Poznan in Poland, violent

demonstrations by workers against the government broke out. The Soviet CC

resolution condemned them severely as a product of imperialist provocation. The PCI

seemed ill-at-ease; the Poland correspondent of L’Unità let it be understood that the

disturbances were caused by mistaken choices made by the government. On 2 July,

L’Unità published an editorial by Di Vittorio that went even further, claiming that ‘if

there had not been widespread and profound dissatisfaction among the working

masses, the agitators would easily have been isolated.’ Togliatti’s response was not long

in coming:

The enemy does exist. He is strong, active, without pity. He is still powerful outside our

circles, and is not lacking in strength and pretexts even within our own ranks. Take care not

to forget it. The events in Poznan are a reminder, a particularly forceful reminder.43

Although, in an interview given to Nuovi Argomenti, Togliatti’s attitude may have

seemed to be one of ‘finally escaping from a straitjacket, pointing towards a growing

autonomy, indicating to the whole communist movement the need for renewal, to

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 239

rediscover – or discover – a democratic dimension’,44 there is no doubt that the signals

being given out by the PCI secretary were very different. He acidly rebutted an article

in which a member of the CC, Fabrizio Onofri, criticised the abandonment of the

‘struggle to open an Italian (democratic) path to socialism’ in 1947. Onofri bemoaned

the party’s ‘distance from reality’, its ‘bureaucratisation’, and expressed considerable

scepticism as to the PCI leaders’ desire to ‘change their position and to carry out a

serious self-criticism’.

In reply, Togliatti often indulged in the vices of distorting his opponent’s views in

order to ridicule them and evading their substance. This caused not a few qualms in

the university milieus of the party in Rome.45 In fact, though the working-class rank-

and-file of the party generally rallied round the leading group, the unease in intellectual

circles was growing; the increasingly critical position adopted by the PSI after the

publication of the ‘secret speech’ seemed to be making headway.

The question of the relationship with the socialists continued to be a priority for

Togliatti, who acted with great caution. At the end of August, there was a meeting in

Pralognan, Savoy, between Nenni and Saragat, at which the prospect of the unification

of the PSI and PSDI was discussed. The PCI secretary said that he was pleased at this

course of action, but warned of the danger that ‘another split may be lurking under the

guise of healing this split; that either a split in the current unified trade union

movement may be in store, or the destruction of the unity of action which has been

created among the basic forces of the working class.’46

On 5 October, the leaders of the PCI and PSI agreed a ‘consultation pact’, which

replaced the much more binding pact of unity of action signed in 1946. The two

parties agreed upon reciprocal consultation ‘for the examination of problems of

fundamental concern to the working class and for joint action in common for all the

workers’. It was a very vague formulation, but enough to annoy Saragat, who

demanded the repudiation tout court of the pact of unity of action. Tactically, the PCI

allowed a point in his favour; but this did not prevent relations between the PCI and

the socialists from becoming more difficult. A lengthy correspondence between the

secretaries of the two parties took place, in which the real problems on the agenda were

very frankly discussed. In a letter dated 17 October, Togliatti expressed to Nenni,

without the ‘diplomatic’ precautions that had characterised the position he adopted

publicly and even within party meetings, his concerns about the implications that

socialist unification might entail:

The social democrat leaders and their press have not budged an inch from their McCarthyism,

but which of you has raised his voice in stern criticism, has said that this can never be your

position? Not one […] you, who are the stronger party, who obtained the better election

result, now appear to be following in the wake of the social democrats, lacking the ability to

defend your policies, and even threatened with an internal split.47

Nenni’s reply sought to reassure Togliatti that if unification were to take place it

would be ‘on a platform […] of a counter-offensive against capitalist institutions, and

would involve the socialists in a daily struggle to obtain a morsel of power’. However,

240 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

he stated that ‘the situation imposes a political strategy on the PSI, which must be

autonomous in order to be effective, and which needs the co-operation of the social

democrats in order to reach certain social strata and groups.’ In short, it was clear that

‘the PSI’s policy was to stand on its own two feet, even if this provoked serious internal

dissent.’48

In the face of this prospect, the PCI for its part had no intention of yielding an iota

on its general principles. In a speech in Livorno on 15 September, Togliatti rejected

the tendency to consider that ‘there is nothing true, nothing certain about our

doctrine’, and exclaimed, almost with a burst of pride, that:

Our doctrine is one that so far has enabled us to understand the world very well … We are

not a lost individual looking for a path in the desert. We are a great army, planning new

advances from positions we have already captured and are firmly defending, valuing the

experience gained and renewing what needs to be renewed.49

In spite of fairly significant instances of unease and dissent, the party seemed to be

substantially behind him in support of this line. But new storm clouds were gathering

on the horizon.

‘OUR SIDE RIGHT OR WRONG’

The last ten days of October and the beginning of November saw a succession of

events of historic importance on the international stage. In Poland, the crisis which

had been narrowly averted in the summer was contained with the return to power of

Gomulka – the leader who seemed to embody the rejection of the ‘Stalinist’ past and

the search for a ‘national path’ – and with a series of economic and institutional

reforms. Togliatti’s comment in a letter of 23 October to the secretary of the CPSU

was cautiously favourable (‘if the CC had not taken the decisions it has taken, the party

would have lost control of the situation or would have had to try to rule by force,

which could have led to catastrophe’), although he did show ‘some doubts about the

way in which the thing occurred’ (‘this gives the impression of a profound

disagreement, not only between you and the Polish comrades, but also among

yourselves, and also implies that you have been obliged to accept decisions which you

did not approve’).50

On the other hand, the changing of the guard in the upper echelons of the party in

Hungary was not enough to stop the popular unrest. On 23 October, the situation

came to a head. In Budapest, a demonstration of solidarity with the Polish workers and

of support for Gomulka was transformed into an armed insurrection against

communist power. The most trustworthy historical reconstructions agree on

identifying the participants, at least at this first stage, as workers and students, and in

characterising the uprising not as a negation of the achievements of the revolution, but

as a demand for greater democracy within the framework of a socialist regime, to the

extent that one of the demands of the rebels was the return as head of government of

Imre Nagy, the communist who, as prime minister in 1953, had already tried to

launch a programme of reform. The government and the party, however, caught

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 241

unawares, gave credence to the idea of provocation by ‘fascist and reactionary elements’

attempting to restore capitalism, and requested the intervention of Soviet troops, who

restored order on the night of 23–24 October.

From the outset, the PCI endorsed the official line and laid blame on ‘young

people from the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie’, assisted by ‘low-life elements and

the displaced lumpen-proletariat’. An unsigned editorial appeared in L’Unità on 25

October, written by Pietro Ingrao (the editor) but expressing a view agreed by the

secretariat: ‘When the weapons of the counter-revolutionaries are rattling, you take one

side of the barricades or another. There is no third way […] Tomorrow we can hold

discussions and even hold different opinions […] today we are defending the socialist

revolution.’

This position did become somewhat toned down over the ensuing days, as the

party and the government seemed little by little to regain control of the situation.

Togliatti’s comment in Rinascita denounced the ‘incomprehensible delay’ of the

Hungarian leaders in correcting ‘substantial errors’; he admitted that ‘non-counter-

revolutionary workers had also taken part in the uprising’, acknowledged that ‘the

request for assistance from Soviet troops was a sign of weakness on the part of the

Hungarian leaders and had complicated matters’, and that ‘all this could have been

avoided.’ But he continued firm in his contention that ‘an armed insurrection … can

only be countered by force of arms’, the more so since the success of the revolt would

undoubtedly have led to ‘a restoration of reactionary forces’. He gave vent to a polemic

against the ‘rash and grotesque evaluations by which the socialist regimes are seen as

something similar to fascism and the Soviet Union as an imperialist power’.51

On the whole, it seemed a well-constructed assessment; and in a few private

expressions of his thoughts, Togliatti’s reservations and doubts would seem to have

been confirmed.52 Within the Italian left, however, there were others who went beyond

Togliatti’s cautious statement. Both the PSI leadership and the CGIL secretariat saw in

the Budapest events ‘the historic and definitive condemnation of anti-democratic

methods of government and of political direction’, and deplored the ‘intervention of

foreign troops in Hungary’ as ‘an interference by one state in the internal affairs of

another’. Giuseppe Di Vittorio had agreed to sign this document, not merely in order

not to disrupt CGIL unity, but out of inner conviction.53

The echoes of this standpoint were still strong when the communist leaders met on

30 October. Togliatti’s basic argument was still the same:

How can we show solidarity with people who are shooting at us while trying to create a great

surge of reaction? I was motivated by the same concerns when I wrote about the events in

Poznan. I will not hesitate to criticise Khrushchev in the correct manner, but when the right

of insurrection is claimed by the People’s Democracies, I oppose it … You stand by your own

side even if they are mistaken.

The debate was tense, as the leadership discussed in depth the reasons for what had

happened. But Togliatti’s position was accepted without apparent reservations; even

the leaders who over the previous months had distanced themselves from the secretary’s

242 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

caution and reticence (Terracini, Pajetta and Amendola) showed no lack of

decisiveness. Only Di Vittorio, who was censured (‘the declaration was not agreed with

us and has increased the disorientation within the party,’ Togliatti reproached him),

did not abandon the defence of his own position: a profound democratisation was the

prerequisite for saving socialist systems; the limits of development should be agreed

with the working class. Togliatti replied without raising the polemical tone, but with

determination: ‘[It] is not true that freedom has to be placed above economic reforms.

We know that to construct socialism there must be sacrifices and restrictions which

must be understood and accepted by the masses.’

The picture would not be complete, however, without mentioning the letter Togliatti

wrote to the secretary of the CPSU on 30 October, apparently during a break in the

meeting. The passage considered the most striking is that in which he expresses the

opinion that ‘the Hungarian government – whether or not it remains under the

direction of Imre Nagy – will move irreversibly in a reactionary direction.’ He asked:

I would like to know if you are of the same opinion or are more optimistic. I would like to

add that there are concerns within our party that the Polish and Hungarian events could

damage the unity of the collective leadership of your party as defined by the XX congress.54

It would probably be exaggerated to interpret this as direct pressure for a military

intervention,55 though it is possible that Togliatti’s letter helped the ‘Stalinist’ current

of Molotov and Kaganovich to overcome Khrushchev’s hesitation. Khrushchev took

the decision to intervene the day after, under the direct influence of the development

of the Suez situation (see below), it would be claimed. The more urgent message that

Togliatti needed to communicate to the Soviets, however, was probably a different one

– that is, that his own position within the PCI had become difficult:

There are groups who are accusing the leaders of our party of not having taken a stand in

defence of the revolt, and who claim that it should be fully supported. These groups are

demanding that the entire leadership of our party be replaced and that Di Vittorio should

become the new leader.

Here it seems evident that Togliatti was attempting to exploit the Hungarian

situation in order to consolidate his own position, using Di Vittorio’s role to depict

him as a dangerous alternative to his own leadership, thus ensuring that the Soviets

would continue to see Togliatti himself as their main contact. And, indeed, apart from

the ritual summons to ‘fight on all fronts’, Togliatti’s major concern seemed to be the

‘outbreak of reformism’ taking place within the PCI. Signs of dissent and uneasiness

were increasing in the cultural sphere during this turbulent week; on 29 October, the

signatures of 101 communist intellectuals had been collected in a letter to the CC

which, while expressing the hope that the communist parties would place themselves at

the head of the process of democratisation sparked off by the twentieth congress,

criticised the PCI both for ‘not having as yet formulated an open and consistent

condemnation of Stalinism’ and for having described the Budapest uprising as a

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 243

counter-revolutionary putsch; the letter also deplored the Soviet intervention as ‘a

violation of the principle of autonomy of the socialist states’.56

In response to these expressions of opinion, Togliatti – once he had secured his

position with Moscow – was quite moderate. He upheld the view that it was necessary

to ‘go to meetings, discuss, hold different opinions’, and he himself did not hesitate to

conduct a dialogue, polemical but calm, with the signatories of the letter. At the end of

the proceedings on 30 October, the Direzione issued a statement which recognised that

it was ‘legitimate and unsurprising for there to be some comrades in the party who

expressed their critical opinions and their concerns’, but it was specified that the

discussion ‘must not degenerate into actions, which discredit the party itself’.57

At this point, on the same day, the Soviet government had issued a conciliatory

statement declaring itself prepared to withdraw its troops from Hungary. But the

conflicts in Budapest and in the rest of the country continued, and there were many

acts of summary justice against communist leaders. The situation was very confused

and there were certainly elements of open reaction infiltrating the popular uprising.

The government was powerless; finally, in an attempt to comply with increasing anti-

communist pressure, it first of all organised an internal reshuffle, then announced

Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, appealing to the Western powers to

guarantee Hungarian neutrality. At this point, the CPSU – divided among itself as well

– finally lost confidence in a ‘painless’ solution (‘Poland-style’) to the Hungarian crisis.

Furthermore, in the space of a few weeks, the tense international situation had

reached boiling point. The British and French considered their interests threatened by

Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. On 30 October, their airforces bombed

Egyptian airports in support of the Israeli army, which had launched an attack from

Sinai. The United States, which had supported its allies while the conflict with Egypt

was limited to political and economic pressure, abandoned them when it took the form

of open aggression. Taking advantage of the favourable conditions represented by a

divided Western alliance and a public opinion shocked by the imperialist attack on an

independent country, the Soviet Union decided to restore order in its own zone of

influence. On the night of 3–4 October, the tanks went in to Hungary a second time,

crushing the popular revolt. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands injured;

Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy and was replaced as head of government by

Kádár.

This time, the reaction of the PCI was even more clear-cut and unhesitating;

Togliatti’s commentary in L’Unità of 6 November was eloquent. What – he enquired

– was the situation created in Hungary in the space of a few days, after the

announcement of negotiations for the withdrawal of Soviet troops? There could be no

doubt:

Anarchy and White terror, a government which changed its composition three times in two

days, each time moving further towards reaction, refusing to act against armed terrorists,

indeed inciting them, with incredible announcements by the prime minister himself;

furthermore, armed bands of obvious fascists forming within the country, and flooding in

244 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

from outside, with old symbols, with the old black banner, and with leaders waiting in the

wings in the expectation that they would shortly become dictators.58

Having reached this point, he continued, ‘it is my opinion that there would have had

to be a protest against the Soviet Union […] if it had not intervened this time with all

its strength, to bar the path to White terror and to crush fascism again.’

The whole article is dominated by a sense of the inevitability of class struggle and

the existence of opposing camps, although Togliatti’s position was also determined by

the reflexive reaction of the enemy. In Italy a political lynching was in progress with

respect to the PCI, with fascist aggression against party premises and local offices of

L’Unità, accompanied by a press campaign by the most conservative newspapers, even

asking whether Scelba’s law against the re-forming of the Fascist Party could be made

to apply to the PCI.59 This polarisation obscured the PCI’s arrival at a clearer

understanding of the Hungarian events. In his private correspondence, for example in a

letter to Antonello Trombadori of 5 November, Togliatti engaged in a rather less

Manichean analysis. He clearly had these concerns in mind.

With reference to an opinion on the People’s Democracies, I think the necessity today is

above all not to let myself be dragged into the uproar that is easily let loose now[…].What

counts above all is that we must all be guided by a vigilant sense of class and party.60

How did the party respond? The most notable reaction was that of the group of

intellectuals associated with Il Contemporaneo, who even now did not completely

follow the party line. Many of these were to leave the PCI, which would lose at least

200,000 members over the following year. The toughness of Togliatti’s approach,

however, was in line with the feelings of the majority of the rank-and-file, and

encouraged them to stand four-square behind him; internal unity was not substantially

damaged. As Ingrao recalled, ‘by the time of the eighth congress, the most difficult trial

had been overcome.’61

SOCIALISM WITHIN DEMOCRACY AND RELATIONS WITH THE INTELLECTUALS

The party came to this meeting after a debate that saw a more intense and less

ritualistic than usual participation by the rank-and-file. Amendola later observed that

‘the national congress was not an accurate representation of the dramatic nature of the

provincial congresses; it had already developed to a more controlled level, and did not

express the ferment of passions which were shown openly in meetings of cells, local

parties and federations.’62 Doubtless, it should be added, because the delegates to the

congress had passed through the local filter, there had already been a ‘clipping of

wings’ – that is, of more critical tendencies with respect to the leadership.

The eighth congress opened in Rome, on 8 December 1956, with a wide-ranging

speech by Togliatti. He acknowledged the moment of difficulty for the communist

movement; he referred to the events in Poland and Hungary, admitting that the

‘mechanical transposition’ or, indeed, the ‘servile imitation’ of the Soviet model in

those countries had given rise to ‘unnecessary, harsh difficulties and serious

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 245

imbalances’, which the leaders of those countries had mistakenly tried to resolve by

repression. Nevertheless, he insisted on the part played by imperialist provocation in

unleashing popular discontent in parts of Eastern Europe. He also confirmed the

‘historic merit’ of the USSR in having achieved the first socialist revolution and the

superiority of its social system. He showed no doubt that such a system would ‘emerge

victorious’, even from this recent ordeal: ‘the Soviet comrades had the courage to make

denunciations; they will have the courage and the capacity to make corrections.’

The problem of the twentieth congress thus avoided, or at least made peripheral,

Togliatti resumed the discussion from where he had been obliged to interrupt it by the

‘secret speech’. He forcefully repeated that ‘there is no leading state and no leading

party’, and that the need for a specific ‘national road to socialism’ remained ‘a matter

of principle’ for the Italian communists; he demanded ‘autonomy of research and

decision-making’. Alerted probably by the poor result of the attempt to construct a

Franco-Italian axis (relations with the PCF, as we shall see, were deteriorating),

Togliatti ceased to insist on the idea of ‘polycentrism’, deciding that the method of

bilateral links between communist parties was preferable, without excluding dialogue

with other political groups, especially the social democrats.

Togliatti’s speech contained nothing particularly new about the concrete form of

the ‘Italian road to socialism’. The ‘general programme of radical renewal’ presented by

the party concentrated on a few ‘essential, urgent’ points: defence of freedom in the

factories, defence of employment levels, the ‘introduction’ of a general agrarian reform,

the nationalisation of electricity, the implementation of the regional system, and the

introduction of a system of social insurance. Togliatti once again emphasised that this

political programme of structural transformation, although it was a stage on the way

towards socialism, could be achieved within the democratic and parliamentary

framework envisaged by the republican constitution, although it must never be

forgotten that ‘the ruling classes have a tendency to halt this process, having recourse to

the most diverse means’.63

In this context, the most important innovations emerged in the ‘general policy

statement’, drawn up for the most part by Togliatti, which was approved at the end of

the congress. It not only affirmed that parliament ‘can and must exercise an active

function’ in the democratic transformation of Italian society, followed by its

transformation into a new socialist society, but also that ‘there was no principle of

excluding the multiplicity of parties in Italy from power during the construction of a

socialist society, or of [preventing] the freedom of discussion between different

ideologies.’ The belief in political democracy, not instrumentally or as a tactic, but as a

basic principle, could not have been expressed more clearly, and represents a clean

break with communist tradition, describing the ‘Italian road to socialism’ in original

terms. A profound contradiction remained, however; the acclaimed superiority of the

democratic and socialist model achieved in the Soviet Union could not fail to throw a

shadow over this choice in favour of democratic politics in the West.

It was a knot that the Italian communists would only succeed in untying many

years later; but some were already aware of this at the eighth congress. Antonio Giolitti

in particular said in his speech that he found it absurd to continue to maintain that

246 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

‘the errors and crimes denounced by the twentieth congress have not permanently

damaged the democratic nature of socialist power’ and that ‘a government such as the

one against which the people of Budapest rebelled on 23 October’ should be defined as

‘legitimate, democratic, and socialist’.64

Togliatti had a particular regard for Giolitti, and only engaged in indirect polemic

against him. Nevertheless, the emphasis in his peroration is revealing. Referring to the

heated debates of the previous months, he stressed the merits of a ‘free and wide-

ranging’ discussion, ‘which has not been evident in any party’, and concluded with a

brusque call to arms: ‘We are not a party of discussants, we are a revolutionary party,

created for action, for combat.’

It must be said, however, that the struggle against ‘opportunism’ – which had

recourse to expulsion only in the most extreme cases, the method of persuasion or at

most neutralising and isolating the dissidents being preferred – became above all a way

of covering up action that was less striking, but equally decisive, against so-called

‘sectarianism’. Secchia noted significantly in his diary:

There is a fight with words against revisionism; the fact is that, in reality, there is a struggle

against those who have been defined as conservatives merely because they want the communist

party to retain the nature of a communist party.65

It was a harsh and perhaps exaggerated judgement, but when one looks at the

ruling organs that resulted from the eighth congress, it is evident that it contained

more than a grain of truth. Next to the exclusion of ‘revisionists’ like Giolitti and

Onofri, the marginalisation – soon to become permanent – of many cadres of the ‘old

guard’ (including Secchia and D’Onofrio) stands out. There were at least 62 new

members on the CC, equivalent to 54 per cent of the total. The unity of a renewed

leading group centred on Togliatti, whose prestige survived the tempest of 1956 more

or less intact, was reinforced. This group also included the more combative elements of

the ‘middle generation’, such as Amendola and Pajetta, who realigned themselves with

the Secretary, apparently without reserve.

Though it is true that, on the whole, the PCI overcame the consequences of

Hungary without too many traumatic shocks, there is no doubt that a wound had

opened up within the organisation that was never to be completely healed. The special

relationship with the most vital section of Italian cultural life that the party had

established after the Liberation was facing a crisis. Togliatti was the first to realise how

important it was to heal this split.

His response was more complex and well-argued than may appear at first sight,

involving him in an effort of drafting and research which from then on would not be

interrupted until his death. On the primary level of discourse, that of the most

immediate political polemic, his position was very clear; he seemed to want to link the

phenomenon of the distancing of the intellectuals from the party with a crisis due

above all to their inability to relate to the harsh reality of class struggle. For example,

Togliatti meted out very harsh treatment to the writer Italo Calvino, who left the party

on 1 August 1957, with a letter of resignation that was – exceptionally – published in

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 247

L’Unità. Togliatti accused Calvino of ‘throwing mud, on the orders of the bourgeois

press, at the party and its leaders, in order to increase confusion, mistrust and

defeatism’.66

In other cases, such as that of Giolitti’s dissent, the tendency was to put a calmer

dialogue in the place of anathema without appeal. The deputy from Cuneo, after

expressing his critical views frankly during the eighth congress, summed up his

arguments in a memorandum to the party, which received no reply. He therefore

published it as a pamphlet for Einaudi, which had been one of the centres of

communist dissent in 1956. Togliatti devoted a long article in Rinascita to Giolitti’s

‘errors in method and substance’; granted that the discussion was legitimate and

necessary, he reminded Giolitti that it ‘must never in any way slide into agitation

hostile to the party’, and accused him of having entered upon precisely this path.67

Nevertheless, Giolitti was allowed the ‘right of reply’ – an ‘innovation without

precedent’, as he himself acknowledged many years later – which he made full use of in

Rinascita. Togliatti even wrote a personal letter to Giolitti on 13 July 1957, in which,

saying that he considered the press reports of Giolitti’s intention to resign from the

PCI to be ‘nonsense’, he asked for the ‘favour’ of a personal meeting, ‘to see whether,

and how, it would be possible to reach a better contact and a better understanding with

you’. The letter was lost in the post and never reached Giolitti, but the episode was

significant.68

However, the different gradations of tone used towards the dissidents did not affect

the basic opinion that Togliatti stressed; anyone who thought that the Communist

movement was entering on a crisis was confusing the reality with their own wishes;

‘indeed a process which is to make us – is already making us – even stronger than

before has started and is continuing.’69 At another level, that of developing a cultural

politics in line with the ‘Italian road to socialism’, Togliatti conducted a wide-ranging

operation. Most of all he stressed the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s thought.

Togliatti had been referring back to Gramsci in his speeches and writing since the

twentieth congress had reopened fundamental questions about communism. Overt the

next two years he developed his own ideas about the ‘essential’ Gramsci.70

Togliatti’s writings on Gramsci for 1957–58 are strongly marked by the need to

find answers to these questions. The path the PCI leader chose in order to emphasise

Gramsci’s topicality was not a straightforward one; at the point at which he tried to

give Gramsci back the dignity of a great leader and political thinker of the international

workers’ movement, he actually stressed above all the links with ‘Leninism’. It was a

reading at least partly strained and simplistic, aimed at blunting not only the attempts

at a ‘social democratic’ reading of Gramsci proposed, for example, by Giolitti, but also

the ‘spontaneista’ and ‘consiliarista’71 reading which found a considerable echo in the ex-

communist diaspora and on the socialist left. However, he also praised those aspects of

Gramsci’s thought that developed originally and creatively from Leninism; for

example, a conception of the party that ‘is directly grafted onto Lenin’s concept, but

has its own original form’, or, on the other hand, a vision in which economic structure

‘is never considered as that mysterious hidden force from which the entire development

of the situation is supposed to gush forth’, but is rather a sphere in which ‘human

248 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

forces are also active, and on which the superstructures have an effect’, and

analogously, the view that ‘political and ideal superstructures are not blocks, but are

differentiated by varying degrees of reciprocal autonomy, just as different moments in

the structure are distinguished.’72

Togliatti’s wide-ranging and long-term project had no immediate effect. Within

Italian politics, the isolation of the communists was certainly greater than a year

previously, as the PCI found itself on the defensive. Its leader, in particular, seemed to

oscillate between taking to the extreme the important innovations of the eighth

congress and the fear that in so doing the latent internal conflict between the various

wings of the party would be deepened, and that dissent mainly confined to the

intelligentsia would extend to the cadres and to the militant rank-and-file.

BETWEEN THE SEARCH FOR AUTONOMY AND REALIGNMENT

Meanwhile, developments within the Cold War meant prolonged periods of

improvement alternating with moments of acute crisis in international relations, while

the field of confrontation between the two superpowers was continually expanding,

until it finally involved the entire planet. In this context, a new order of relationship

was brought into play within the communist ‘camp’, and Togliatti was well aware of

how important this was for the PCI. The repercussions of the eighth congress and its

innovative developments had passed beyond the boundaries of Italy, precisely at the

moment in which, having survived the shock of the Hungarian crisis, the international

communist movement was shaken anew by the unexpected worsening of relations

between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The concept of the diversity of roads to

socialism sanctioned by the twentieth congress was greatly watered down and reduced.

Already, on 31 December, Khrushchev had stated that ‘placing the emphasis on these

“individual roads” is highly detrimental to the cause of building socialism’. There were

more direct criticisms of the PCI from the ‘fraternal’ French communists, who in June

had reacted very differently to the publication of the ‘secret speech’. The philosopher

Roger Garaudy, leading ideologue of the PCF, debated the line of the PCI’s eighth

congress in Cahiers du Communisme, calling Togliatti personally to account. He called

into question, among other things, the idea that the internal dialectic of a socialist

society could allow for a plurality of parties and the illusion that reforms obtained by

parliamentary means were anything other than ‘a temporary concession by the ruling

class, wrested from it by pressure from the masses, which enables it to maintain the

basis of its dictatorship’.

Togliatti published the entire text of the French philosopher’s attack in Rinascita,

following it with a sarcastic response. The crux of his response is interesting:

It seems to us that the gravest risk a communist party can run is that of being tied to certain

affirmations of principle, more or less well understood, and of not having any political

programme. That is, of not confronting the reality of the current situation with initiatives and

proposals, or with movements that tend to modify it in a direction favourable to the

workers.73

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 249

The contrast that emerged from this polemic was undoubtedly quite profound. But

Togliatti probably realised that, however concerned the PCF might be about the

influence that Italian ‘revisionism’ could have on its own members, it would not have

taken up the cudgels against the ‘Italian road’ with such self-confidence if it had not

believed that it had Moscow’s support. In fact, the French initiative should be seen

within the framework of a wider ‘anti-revisionist’ campaign inspired by the Soviets,

which was indeed directed primarily against the Yugoslav and Polish parties, but was

also intended to warn the PCI of the insuperable limits to the autonomy of every

‘national path’.74

The first acid test of these limits occurred in March, on the occasion of the

founding treaties of the European Common Market and EURATOM, signed in Rome

in March 1957. During the final months of 1956, the PCI’s attitude to these

institutions had appeared more flexible than before. It had stopped seeing them as

‘intrinsically hostile, to be denounced, possibly destroyed and, in any case, ignored’,75

but instead as institutions within which to campaign for a change of direction in the

interests of the workers and of international détente.76

The Suez crisis and the Soviet intervention in Hungary had put the brakes even on

this cautious development. When it came to the signing of the Treaties of Rome, the

document issued by the PCI leadership, which was now anticipating a vote against

ratification, expressed a very negative view. The treaties were seen as instruments

towards the the further division of Europe, of aggravating international tensions, and

towards the subordination of the European economy to American imperialism. The

PCI felt that the interests of Italian agriculture and less developed industries,

considered capable of transforming the Italian economy, had been sacrificed in order to

‘make an exception for some big monopoly sectors, […] in a large depressed area’. It is

probable that in taking this stance the PCI was also concerned not to create a further

element of tension within the socialist ‘camp’. The shift in relations between

communist parties and their respective countries, sanctioned by the twentieth congress,

was anything but consolidated. Khrushchev’s solemn promise of support for the

development of ‘national roads to socialism’ had met with fierce opposition from the

Soviet leadership. About mid-June 1957, Khrushchev found himself in a minority

within the presidium, and only managed to reverse the situation by appealing to the

CC. On 22 June, accused of having formed an ‘anti-party group’ aimed at modifying

the decisions of the twentieth congress, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Šepilov

were removed from all leadership offices.

According to the minutes of the PCI Direzione of 10 July, Togliatti had been

informed of this decision several days beforehand and had approved of it, while

expressing some ‘doubts about the method’. In his comment in L’Unità on 7 July, a

fairly lengthy section of which awkwardly described these events as the umpteenth

proof of the efficient functioning of Soviet democracy, he took a clear stance: it was

right to make every effort not to break the unity of the old leading group, but this

‘could only be sustained on condition that the political line sanctioned by the

twentieth congress would not be continually undermined, argued over and

endangered’. This position was reaffirmed several times in the summer of 1957. At the

250 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Direzione meeting of 12 September, it found expression in a list of profound

reservations about Khrushchev’s leadership. Togliatti referred to an ‘ideological brake’

that made ‘contact with the leading Soviet group difficult’, to a ‘development not

consonant with the current reality of social and historical research’, and to an

‘examination of the current forms of the contradictions of imperialism which is not

adequate to the task’. He also condemned ‘a certain distance from the social problems

posed in the capitalist countries’, and the ‘unilateral way’ in which ‘problems of

culture’ were seen in the Soviet Union.

These were chickens that would come home to roost at the conference of 64

communist parties held in Moscow in November. Two distinct meetings developed

within this conference, in accordance with the requests of some of the delegations,

including the Italian, evidently suspicious of anything resembling the resumption of

the Cominform. The first of these was reserved for the twelve communist parties in

power, while the representatives of all 64 communist parties present participated in the

second. This second assembly unanimously approved an appeal for peace, which was

also signed by the Yugoslav League of Communists, who, however, let it be known

that they would not sign the declaration submitted to the first meeting.77

The document was circulated in advance and was open to amendments even from

non-signatory parties. The PCI leaders discussed it on 29 October and a number of

complications arose. Togliatti expressed his criticisms in Moscow, where he had a series

of meetings with the most important leaders of the international communist

movement, including Gomulka, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong.78 On his return to

Italy, he attended the meeting of the Direzione held on 26 November, declaring that

‘[our] position was not easy. It would have been a mistake to criticise everything, as it

would have been to tone down our opinions. We had to emphasise the need for unity,

for internationalism, and the role of the Soviet Union, but at the same time explain the

position we took at the eighth congress.’ The PCI delegation proposed a series of

amendments, most of which were accepted, and which related primarily to the

improvement of ‘certain formulations about the situation in the capitalist world’. But

it also subscribed to the Polish amendment, which stated that it was ‘the duty of every

party to decide, in the appropriate situation, who is the principal enemy to be

opposed’, and proposed clearly that ‘sectarianism’ was the obstacle which, in many

capitalist countries, had impeded the transformation of the communist party into a

mass party.

It is clear that the PCI was trying to prevent the proclamation of a rigid ideological

orthodoxy. To this end, Togliatti also spoke at the second meeting, at which, leaving

to one side all the ‘celebratory elements’, he proposed to set out clearly the ‘profile of

the political standpoints of the PCI’.79 This speech not only provoked open criticism

from the PCF – their delegate Duclos was the mouthpiece – but Khrushchev

ostentatiously left the hall before the Italian leader began to speak, claiming prior

commitments. The Italian delegation requested an explanation and received broad but

vague reassurances. But it was a serious insult, and the Italian leader had difficulty in

swallowing it. Many years later, Pietro Ingrao remembered Togliatti’s ‘rage’: ‘It was

one of the few times I heard him say anything vulgar.’80

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 251

The Moscow conference resulted in a rather unsatisfactory outcome for the PCI.

On an entire series of questions, standpoints had emerged which could not fail to give

concern; not only was ‘revisionism or, in other words, right-wing opportunism’,

declared to be the ‘principal danger’, but the declaration, although it affirmed the

necessity of taking distinctive national characteristics into account and avoiding

‘mechanical imitations’ of a model, nevertheless confirmed that ‘the processes of

revolution and of building socialism are based on a series of fundamental laws,

appropriate to all countries setting out on the road to socialism.’

The PCI’s ideas on the form of coordination between communist parties did not

gain much success either. It is true that, after the 1957 conference, ‘the era of the single

arbiter, manipulating general principles in order to suit its own exclusive needs, had

given way to an era in which all parties, at least all the ruling parties, had an actual or

potential voice.’81 But the major concern that inspired Togliatti’s subsequent actions

was ‘not in any way to give even the impression of a separate standpoint’.82 Indeed,

officially he demonstrated unconditional support for the text of the ‘Declaration of the

Twelve’. In the CC on 9 December, for instance, he seemed to embrace without

reserve the doctrine of the ‘fundamental laws’ (‘the basic enemy and the goals to strive

for are common to the whole movement, and the principles according to which we act

are common’).

Nevertheless, this was an area in which the PCI’s standpoint was not the same as

that of the majority of its sister parties. Its attitude towards the so-called ‘revisionism’

of Belgrade, which was once again to be the target of an incessant attack by the

international communist press in 1958, remained very cautious; Togliatti explained to

the CC in December 1957, ‘the fact that the Yugoslavs did not sign the declaration

does not mean any kind of breakaway that even remotely resembles what happened in

1948–49 […]; even the way that this time there has been discussion and co-operation

with the Yugoslav comrades is proof of great progress in internal relations within our

movement […] above and beyond partial divergences.’83 The PCI’s participation in the

anti-Yugoslav offensive of 1950–60 would also be very cautious, and Togliatti would

never be personally involved. However, recognition of Soviet leadership was never

really called into question. In fact, however much the PCI defended its own limits of

autonomy and manoeuvre, cautiously but tenaciously, it remained firm in its

conviction that the prospect of communist success in the West depended on overall

international equilibrium, and above all on the military and political power of the

Soviet Union.

THE THREAT OF ‘TOTALITARIAN CLERICALISM’ AND THE ‘BALANCE OF TERROR’

There were few significant developments in the internal politics of Italy during 1957

and 1958. The crisis of centrism burned itself out with exhausting slowness. The

events of 1956 had given a new lease of life to the visceral anti-communism of a large

section of the Italian ruling class, of which Fanfani’s DC was just as enthusiastic a

proponent as that of De Gasperi. The thin thread of the ‘consultation pact’ between

communists and socialists soon broke, and a phase of increasing divergence began,

252 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

punctuated at times by very bitter polemics, although still in the context of

declarations of loyalty and mutual esteem.

The PSI held its congress in Venice in February. The victory of the ‘autonomist

thesis’, although counter-balanced by the election of leading bodies in which the

influence of the left wing made Nenni’s politics difficult, drew some cautious

comments from Togliatti during the meetings of the Direzione on 14 and 21 March.

He stressed that ‘we cannot take the position that there is nothing further to be done

[with the PSI], that it is just a betrayal’, and specified that ‘we do not emphasise the

break-up of the PSI but joint action with it.’ After the fall of Segni’s government, the

PCI tried to set the conditions for a possible opening to the left, however unlikely this

might seem in view of the resistance of the DC right and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

However, the one-party government headed by Adone Zoli, a Christian Democrat

but a lightweight within his own party, won a vote of confidence in the Chamber

thanks to the decisive votes of the monarchists and the neo-Fascists, which Zoli

accepted after some hesitation. At the CC on 11 July Togliatti declared: ‘the formation

of a majority with the contribution of the right wing is upsetting the parliamentary

situation and is provoking deep repugnance in a section of public opinion.’ He also

added that the real danger lay in the ‘declared intentions’ of the DC to impose a

clerical regime based on ‘the intimidatory and corrupting pressure’ of the bureaucratic

apparatus, the leading economic groups in the country, and the ecclesiastical authority.

It was a harsh judgement, but contained a large measure of truth; in particular,

with the DC paralysed by internal divisions, clerical interference in Italian civic life was

beginning to show aspects of a worrying arrogance during the last months of the third

legislature. Togliatti certainly did not mince his words when denouncing ‘the threat of

a new clerical totalitarianism’. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to reassert the validity

of the choice made by the PCI in 1947. When the Italian bishops entered the fray on

the eve of the elections with a renewed call to vote for the DC, Togliatti commented in

L’Unità of 11 May 1958 that, whether intentionally or not, the concordat cited in

article 7 of the constitution presented a clear obstacle to the ‘Vatican ambitions’ of the

total subjugation of the state.84

The other recurring theme of the communist opposition to the government was

that of Italian foreign policy. Togliatti looked upon the international situation with

great concern. The failure of the Suez campaign and the national resurgence of the

peoples of North Africa and the Middle East had dealt a severe blow to British and

French colonialism; the US responded with the so-called ‘Eisenhower doctrine’,

committing themselves to fight all ‘communist aggression’, direct or indirect, which

might occur in the region. Together with the severe repression by the French of the

liberation movement in Algeria, this contributed to making the Mediterranean one of

the areas of greatest tension in the international arena. Between the beginning of 1956

and the first months of 1957 there had appeared to be an unofficial Italian foreign

policy that was more dynamic and autonomous. Examples included the agreement

between ENI85 and Iran for the exploitation of the latter’s oil resources, or, prior to

that, Gronchi’s speech during his visit to the USA, with its condemnation of the ‘tragic

extravagance’ of the arms race.

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 253

Togliatti showed that he did not believe that the balance of terror could avert war

indefinitely. He accused the United States and the Western bloc of using Soviet

technical and scientific superiority in some fields – demonstrated by the launch of an

artificial satellite in the autumn of 1957 – as a pretext for sabotaging any serious

disarmament negotiations. In fact, the USA continued to respond to the Soviet

Union’s ‘peace offensives’ with an international policy whose only criterion was

ideological opposition to communism. The American rejection of the plan by the

Polish foreign minister Adam Rapacki for the de-nuclearisation of Central Europe

caused surprise within the Western bloc as well, especially in Great Britain and even in

the German Federal Republic, where the SPD, which had been defeated in the

elections of September 1957, advocated détente and disarmament in contrast to the

politics of Chancellor Adenauer. There is no doubt that Togliatti had clearly

understood the weakness of Italian foreign policy, and effectively denounced its

consequences. Nevertheless, he seemed incapable of offering a contrasting proposal

which could present itself as a possible meeting-point between the Soviet and Western

blocs. It was difficult to transform the effort to find a more autonomous position

within the communist movement into a PCI initiative in the field of international

politics.

On the other hand, it would be matters of domestic policy that would assume

central importance for the PCI as the elections approached. There was no lack of

reasons for the PCI to be concerned, especially in view of the fact that, for the first

time since the Liberation, the PSI was not presenting itself as a loyal ally but as a

competitor, if not as a potential opponent. On the very eve of the elections, the final

crisis of the Fourth Republic in France, which had reached the brink of civil war,

seemed to provide Togliatti with valid arguments for insisting on his basic thesis. In

L’Unità, of 18 May, he wrote:

France has been brought to this current extremity because Socialists, Christian Democrats,

and other parties have tried for years and years to rule with weak ‘centrist governments’, rather

than accepting the reality. And the reality was and is that the Communists are the largest party

in France and the only one to offer a programme of reasonable solutions to the Algerian

problem, based on recognition of the rights of the Algerians.

The election results of 25 May 1958 lend themselves to various interpretations.

The Christian Democrats were far from achieving an absolute majority, but showed a

definite recovery from 1953. Altogether, the four parties of the old centrist coalition

could count on 19 more deputies in the Chamber. The PSI had had a reasonable

success, gaining nine seats. The PCI’s position was stable; its share of the vote had

increased from 22.6 per cent in 1953 to 22.7 per cent, but it lost three seats in the

Chamber. The importance of the right was substantially reduced. However, they did

have 49 seats compared to the 45 of the PSDI, PRI and PLI, thus offering the DC the

possibility of an alternative majority reliant on the right.

On the whole, the PCI felt a sense of satisfaction; the party had passed unscathed

through the crisis of 1956, regaining the losses sustained then, and had achieved

254 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

electoral success in many of the large industrial centres of the North. But Togliatti was

well aware that the election result had left, and even consolidated, ‘a significant bloc’

around the majority party. Although predicting that the DC ‘will not be able to do as

it pleases’, the PCI secretary emphasised the danger that ‘the process of transformation

of democracy into a clerical regime could be increased, culminating in the liquidation

of a party, or of democracy itself.’86

In effect, the political situation in Italy was no less ambiguous and intricate after 25

May than before, and it was certainly not the role of the major opposition party to

make the first move to disentangle it.87

A ‘PARADIGM FOR THE BOURGEOIS CLASSES’

The years 1958–63 coincided in Italy with a rapid and tumultuous process of

economic and social transformation which changed the face of the country. More than

900,000 people relocated from the South to other regions of Italy. Italy ceased to be a

primarily peasant economy and became one of the most industrialised nations of the

West. The average rate of annual growth over these five years reached a level that had

never previously occurred in the history of Italy as a unified state: 6.3 per cent.

Industrial production was more than doubled and workers’ productivity increased one-

and-a-half times, although salaries remained static.

It cannot be said that the PCI leadership was unaware of this change. Togliatti

mentioned it in his speech to the CC on 15 October 1958, and emphasised:

Whether the nature of the country has changed or not, we have to ensure that the imprint of

our movement is as deep on the new features of tomorrow as before, the impetus towards a

socialist transformation of society must be as strong as before, or even stronger.88

Good intentions notwithstanding, the PCI would only be partially successful in

adapting its own structure and policies in the light of the changes that were taking

place. Indeed, with the massive wave of internal migration, some of its traditional

instruments of organisation and struggle were in danger, starting with the alliance of

farm-workers and sharecroppers. Furthermore, the nature of the working class in large

factories was changing: the importance of the cadres formed during the Resistance or

in the post-war struggles had diminished (to a large extent they had already been

expelled or marginalised thanks to discrimination by employers since the early 1950s),

and new workers, coming from the rural areas and the South, were taking their place;

these were generally lacking in trade union experience.

There was a certain delay on the part of the PCI in appreciating the nature of the

transformation, which was to have repercussions in the form of a decline in its

organisational strength, a slight but constant drop from 1955 onwards. Immediately

following the elections of 1958, the party’s attention was concentrated on different

scenarios. The international situation was still explosive. Khrushchev’s diplomatic

activities during these months included moments of utter recklessness on his part,

while relations with Yugoslavia had again greatly deteriorated, and the first breaches in

the alliance between Moscow and Beijing had occurred.

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 255

Within this somewhat grim framework, the PCI looked towards the Soviet Union

with renewed confidence, praising its economic progress and unfailingly supporting all

its international initiatives. At the 21st congress of the CPSU (January 1959), Togliatti

delivered a speech in which he praised the successes of Soviet development, adding

only at the conclusion a reference to the necessity for the PCI to ‘work, act, and

struggle autonomously for the inauguration of a socialist society’ in Italy.89

But his greatest concern in this period was directed towards events in France,

where the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic was taking place. In

common with most Italian political observers, not excluding many conservatives,

Togliatti believed that things were moving in an authoritarian direction. In the

Direzione on 3 July, he stated that ‘France could end up being under socially fascist

domination, without going through the phases that would allow for our victory in

open combat. Fascism is advancing under De Gaulle. The danger is that this could

occur without the masses being aware of it.’ There was no lack of fairly severe criticism

of the French communists, bringing comprehensively to light the PCF’s ‘incapacity at

this time to continue its great political policy of 1934’.

But the most striking feature of Togliatti’s judgement of the situation in France

was the re-emergence of a very pessimistic view of the democratic credentials of the

ruling classes ‘in the Western world’. In the September issue of Rinascita, he rejected

the ‘revisionist’ theory, according to which ‘democracy had become something

ingrained within capitalism, an organic transformation brought about once and for all,

and irreversible.’ The PCI secretary saw the origin of the Fifth French Republic as

‘almost a paradigm for the bourgeois classes of Western Europe’.90

In this context, Togliatti did not neglect the opportunity to emphasise the possible

analogies between the situation in France and that in Italy. His view of the government

formed in June by Fanfani (a two-party DC–PSDI government, with external support

from the Republicans) was very negative; from the beginning, he dismissed Fanfani’s

professed ‘social’ aspirations as simple manoeuvres to safeguard his own power,

supported by the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie.

The danger of ‘a profound reactionary degeneration of political and civic order’

was considered to be much more serious, to the extent that it assumed a new and

revised form of intrusive ‘bureaucratic-administrative activism’. The DC government

did not limit its interventions to the economic sector, but increased them by means

either of state-controlled organisation or via an ever-widening network of semi-public

associations, controlled by staff devoted to the dominant party. ‘Politics and economics

are interwoven, giving rise to a typical regime of a corporate nature.’ Undoubtedly,

Togliatti analysed the nature of the DC power system with forensic accuracy.

Nevertheless, he underestimated the growing conflict that was emerging between

Fanfani’s energetic pursuit of his own path and the Catholic hierarchy. However,

forecasting how this system might evolve was more risky. In the Chamber on 6

December, Togliatti declared: ‘[We] are facing the danger of a transition from a [DC]

political monopoly […] to an introduction, on this basis, of an authoritarian regime of

a personal nature’.91

256 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

It is difficult to say whether the PCI leader was really convinced that a potential de

Gaulle was lurking within Fanfani. Certainly, the fact that Fanfani now held

simultaneously the offices of party secretary, prime minister and foreign minister

indicated such a tendency, which was regarded with concern above all by other DC

leaders. Probably, however, Togliatti’s complaint came primarily in response to the

need to stress the analogy between the situation in France and that in Italy, which

seemed useful in the presentation of the PCI as the mainstay of the defence of the

constitution.

The hard-line opposition to the two-party DC–PSDI government was also a way

of involving the PSI, which had assumed a markedly anti-imperialist position with

regard to the heightening of international tension. The route Togliatti chose to

encourage a change of direction within the PCI – probably not the most effective – was

that of a serious ideological offensive. Given that ‘the Leninist doctrine of the state

[was] the basis of our entire quest for routes to progress towards socialism’, Togliatti

seemed to greatly minimise his own critical attitude to Stalin’s errors. Indeed, he even

went so far as to maintain that the criticisms of the twentieth congress ‘referred above

all to negligence and errors of economic policy’, and that the most important

correction did not consist so much in the ‘restoration of Soviet democratic legality, as

in the introduction of some economic reforms which gave greater impetus to industrial

and agricultural development’.92

Behind this doctrinaire hard-line posture, there lay the intention of reinforcing the

PCI’s ideological hegemony within the Italian workers’ movement, especially at a time

when conditions were ripe for the entry of the PSI into government. By the autumn of

1958, Fanfani’s government was showing increasing signs of instability. On 26 January

1959, the prime minister tendered the resignation of his cabinet to President Gronchi,

and sensationally resigned as leader of the DC just five days later.

INTERNATIONAL DÉTENTE AND ITALIAN BLIND ALLEY

Togliatti received the news of Fanfani’s resignation while he was in Moscow attending

the twenty-first congress of the CPSU. The PCI Direzione met at least twice during his

absence, on 27 January and 4 February, to discuss the political situation. Togliatti

evidently saw the minutes of these meetings as soon as he returned to Italy, and the

notes that he wrote in the margins are instructive. The discussion had not been

routine. For Terracini, the DC could no longer be ‘the pre-arranged candidate to lead

the government’, and the communist group in parliament ought to state, in its

consultation with Gronchi, that this function should pass to the PSI. For Sereni, on

the other hand, this proposal was ‘of value merely in unmasking a Nennian position’

and, even then, ‘any demand for a democratic government of the left is a hindrance to

us today.’ ‘Quite,’ commented Togliatti, who made the same remark about an

observation of Ingrao’s (‘seeking to introduce a weak government, susceptible to

pressure from the left’).

If this was the chosen tactic of the PCI, it was not entirely satisfactory; the new

government was certainly weak, but was hardly open to pressure from the Left. It was a

DC one-party government, headed by Antonio Segni, who enjoyed the support of the

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 257

liberals, two monarchist parties, and the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI),

the latter not being formally decisive. At the Direzione of 18 February, Togliatti did

not conceal his concern over the possible ‘consolidation of a right-wing bloc from

which the danger of an authoritarian regime might rise again’.

Meanwhile, the sphere in which the PCI sought to undermine the foundations of

the right-wing bloc was that of the campaign for peace. The party conducted a

relentless campaign against the agreement signed by Segni and his foreign minister

Pella, which allowed the installation of Jupiter medium-range atomic missiles. And

when Pella let slip an unguarded remark to the effect that nuclear annihilation was a

realistic alternative to the triumph of communism, Togliatti was almost pleased that

‘this exhibition of brutality’ showed that not only ‘the banner of democracy and

independence of nations’ had passed to the PCI, ‘but also the much more universal

cause of human life itself’.93

It was an idea that recalled the appeal of 1954, and which similarly sought to

appeal to the pacifist leanings of the Catholic movement. But the PCI secretary was

also seeking to widen the range of his strategic proposal beyond the Italian dimension,

and beyond the campaign against the danger of war. Furthermore, in the wake of a

‘summit’ between Nenni, Bevan and Mendès-France that found an echo in public

opinion, Togliatti wished to specify that ‘a European left only has a future if it has the

courage to confront the question of a profound reform of the economic structures of

Western Europe.’ The condition under which it could enter along this path, moreover,

was ‘the abandonment of anti-Communism, whether in virulent form or in weak and

timorous form’.94

The discourse remained within the framework of hard-line opposition to the EEC,

of which the PCI even demanded the ‘suspension’, in view of what it saw as its

devastating effects on the Italian economy. It is significant, however, that Togliatti

perceived the necessity, as he himself said, of ‘taking the large view’. That is, to ask

both his interlocutors and himself what were the tasks of a ‘democratic and socialist

left’ in Europe.

Meanwhile, the international situation underwent frequent and unexpected

changes during this period. In the summer of 1959, new hopes for an effective détente

seemed to be on the horizon. In order to facilitate the negotiations over Berlin,

Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to make an official visit to Washington; this took place

in September and was the first official visit to the USA by a secretary of the CPSU and

head of the Soviet government.

Togliatti, who was well aware how closely the fortunes of the PCI’s political

strategy were linked to the prospect of détente, welcomed the turn-around; but in the

Direzione of 18 September 1959, he warned against underestimating the resistance of

the ‘forces which have grown up during the Cold War’. By this he meant not only the

Catholic hierarchy (‘The Vatican is sulking and the cardinals are agitating and

protesting’), but the entire Catholic movement, whose rank-and-file, as he

acknowledged bitterly in the October issue of Rinascita, ‘had not issued a single

initiative or active contribution to make the process of détente more swift and secure’.

258 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Togliatti’s polemic against the DC government was particularly harsh. Togliatti

confirmed to the CC on 20 July that the situation was characterised by ‘a slow sinking

into a situation of increasing distance from democratic and constitutional principles,

by means of the predominance of intolerably arbitrary government actions, of

corruption, intimidation, and political and moral degeneration’. The most obvious

political sign of this reactionary regression was the support given to Segni’s government

by right-wing monarchists and fascists, while the conflict between the currents within

the DC was becoming harsher in the face of a political choice which could no longer

be delayed. However, at the DC congress in Florence in October, the forces urging a

dialogue with the PSI were in a minority, held back by a heterogeneous coalition of the

centre (the ‘dorotei’) and the centre-right (Andreotti and Scelba).

Togliatti, at the CC of 5 November, underlined that the congress had confirmed

that ‘at present [the DC] is incapable of solving this problem without incurring grave

danger of internal rupture, or indeed the beginning of a political crisis with much more

serious prospects than merely those of a change of prime minister.’ These were words

which would soon prove prophetic; the PCI secretary was concerned to prevent the PSI

yielding to the temptations of the DC at any cost. To this end, therefore, it is

significant that he did not seek to appeal so much to the most consistent force of the

left of the PSI as to the ‘fundamental convergence [of the two parties] in the search for

a struggle for the modification of the economic structures of the country’.

The main subject of the ninth party congress, which met in Rome between 30

January and 4 February 1960, was that of an alternative model of economic and social

development. Togliatti’s speech expressed both an understandable satisfaction with the

progress made in spite of the widespread prophecies of crisis three years previously, and

a cautious hope for the future.95 The speech opened, as ever, with a broad sketch of the

international situation, which both demonstrated a strong sense of continuity and

contained a significant innovation. The continuity consisted of renewed, indeed

heightened, praise for the ‘proved superiority of the socialist system over capitalism’,

followed by a particularly warm tribute to the Soviet Union and a solemn reaffirmation

of the ‘ties of international proletarian solidarity’. The innovation was the unusually

wide scope the speech devoted to the function of a European organisation in the

process of détente; including, ‘apart from reciprocal observation to bring about

complete disarmament, collaboration between economic systems, even if their

structures are different, and between cultures, even if based upon different ideals’.

But the core of the speech was the democratic renewal of Italian society. According

to Togliatti, it was true that some improvement in salaries and an increase in

consumption had been noted in the capitalist world, but the discrepancy between the

level of efficiency, productivity and profit, and that of remuneration, remained huge.

Indeed, it was even ‘showing a tendency to become even greater’. And if the state did

intervene in a more wide-ranging manner in economic life, it was to serve the interests

of national and international monopoly capitalism; ‘thus, throughout the West the

economic system is assuming the character of a monopolistic state capitalism.’ This was

also the case in Italy, where in fact the contradictions were sharper than elsewhere and,

in spite of the accumulation of capital and wealth, ‘the process of large-scale

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 259

industrialisation, without which economic backwardness cannot be overcome, and

without which there can be no general increase in employment and standards of living,

[had] still not occurred.’

What tasks confronted the PCI in this situation? Togliatti’s speech did not say

anything particularly new. His prescriptions were very abstract and also vague, without

establishing a scale of priorities, and the pre-eminence accorded to the struggle against

monopolies indicates the rigidity of a theoretical formulation incapable of

understanding the line of development of Italian capitalism, characterised by a strong

structural interdependence of ‘monopoly’ and ‘competition’.96 With regard to the

eighth congress, however, it should be said that Togliatti did enumerate a more concise

list of structural reforms. He also clarified the relationship between the different social

groups which favoured the progressive renewal of society. ‘It is not a case of an alliance

of convenience, in which one section is an instrument of the other, […] but of

preparing and prefiguring that unity of people and nation on which a socialist regime

can be based.’ This guaranteed the dedication of the communists to the democratic

path: ‘We must make everyone realise that the face of arrogance and intolerance is not

ours, but that of our enemies. We must make it clear that we have no desire to remove

any aspects of democracy, rather we want to expand it in many ways.’

With regard to immediate political concerns, the proposal which emerged from

Togliatti’s speech was for the formation of a ‘new majority’ in government, with a

‘clear and incisive programme of few but effective democratic demands’;

implementation of the regional system, nationalisation of energy resources, a balanced

plan of economic development and of control of monopolies and credit, revision of

fiscal quotas to protect consumption and to limit large profits, reform of the social

security system, and agrarian reform, transferring the land to those who worked on it.

The PCI considered itself to be a fully integral part of this new majority. ‘Isolating our

forces, to the extent to which it is possible, is a game which can only condemn the

democratic movement to being unable to achieve its objectives.’ No discrimination,

therefore: the point was non-negotiable. As to the possibility of being part of a

government which would take on the proposed programme as its own, Togliatti was

well aware that the question had not yet arisen. But the readiness to support a centre-

left experiment which offered a guarantee of putting it into practice, ‘even if only the

PSI were to participate and not the PCI’, was explicitly stated in the final political

resolution.

The debate at the Congress concentrated above all on the topics of the ‘new

majority’ and of alliances. The debate was low-key, far from the drama of earlier

debates; ‘a great congress, yes, but without passion’, was the verdict of Arrigo

Benedetti, editor of L’Espresso. There was broad agreement, not only on a formal level,

on the political proposal outlined. Togliatti was re-elected general secretary, and his

authority appeared more secure than ever.

The congress had a wide reverberation in the Italian political world and press

comments were more objective. In general, the realism and reasonableness of the PCI’s

proposals were emphasised. Indeed, the socialists appeared to be both satisfied and

concerned; as Avanti! stated, they were satisfied with the ‘serious commitment by all

260 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

the communists to the loosening up of the political situation in Italy, currently

stagnating on the threshold of clerico-fascism’, concerned because, as Nenni noted in

his journal for 6 February: ‘The communist congress has pushed us towards the right

(or has tried to).’97

‘A SERIOUS CRISIS FOR THE CONSTITUTION AND THE REGIME’

The possibility of constructing a ‘new majority’ presented itself rather sooner than

anticipated. In February, the Liberals decided to withdraw their support from Segni’s

government and the umpteenth crisis, threatening to be long and difficult, began. At

first, the DC seemed prepared to launch a centre-left government with the PSDI and

the PRI and to accept the external support of the PSI. Its parliamentary groups,

however, selected Segni, who was notoriously hostile to any alliance with the socialists,

as prime minister.

After Segni’s resignation, in which the intervention of the clerical hierarchy played

a decisive role, President Gronchi tried to force the issue by appointing Tambroni,

with whom he had personal ties and who was considered to be a man of the left. He

was to lead a one-party DC ‘pro tempore’ government so that the Chamber could

approve the budgets before 31 October, and to represent a bridge to the centre-left.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a pre-established majority, he could ‘swing’ between the

monarchists and the Socialists. Togliatti at once considered this ‘the worst solution’

and, when Tambroni’s government presented itself to the Chamber on 7 April, he gave

what may be considered to be one of his most wide-ranging parliamentary speeches.

His starting point was the observation that they were not faced ‘merely with a

government crisis, because the elements of a serious crisis for the constitution and for

the regime [were] emerging’, which showed more than one parallel with the ‘shake-up’

which had led to the collapse of the Fourth French Republic. He passionately defended

the party system as the bedrock of republican democracy, and underlined that it was

imperilled by ‘two great leading forces’ in Italian society, the industrial and agrarian

bourgeoisie and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, neither of which saw ‘beyond

the one-party system’. He also showed some concern about the definitive intervention

by the president of the Republic in the day-to-day activities of parliament, of

government, and of the parties. This, he pointed out, was ‘a deviation towards a

presidential regime foreign to our constitution’. It also explicitly distanced him from

Gronchi, who had until then been exempted from criticism by the PCI.

At the end of his speech, Togliatti sent a last message to that section of the DC that

had seemed to be prepared to reach an agreement with the centre-left. He said, in

conclusion, ‘we know that this idea has been conceived primarily to realise the bizarre

and obsessive dream of the DC leaders of the isolation of our party’, and to relegate the

socialists to a subordinate position. Nevertheless, a shift to the left of the axis of

government would have been something positive, because it was linked to ‘precise

demands, with which we are in large measure in agreement’.98

It seemed possible that the speech could have a result a few days later. Tambroni

gained the confidence of the Chamber with the casting vote of the MSI, provoking the

immediate resignation of three ministers who belonged to the DC left, The prime

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 261

minister also reluctantly resigned, and Gronchi entrusted an exploratory mandate to

Fanfani, again with the prospect of forming a centre-left government. For some days

there seemed a good chance that the situation would be resolved. On 21 April, the PCI

Direzione concretely evaluated what line to take with regard to Fanfani’s appointment.

Togliatti posed the question: ‘In the probable case that a centre-left government is

constituted, with a necessarily limited programme and with the abstention of the

Socialists, should we abstain or vote against it?’ His answer was that ‘the conditions for

making a decision do not yet exist.’

But Fanfani’s bid was also doomed to failure. The extreme pressures from the

ecclesiastical hierarchy and Confindustria had their effect once again, and the executive

of the DC, represented by Moro, felt unable to guarantee the loyalty of their

parliamentary groups to Fanfani. At this point, Gronchi, taking a decision probably

unexceptionable in constitutional terms, but very risky politically, refused to accept

Tambroni’s resignation, so Tambroni presented himself to the senate on 26 April and

was accepted. In fact, his government could only survive with the support of the neo-

fascists and, as will soon become apparent, they intended to make him pay a high price

for this.

The epilogue to this long crisis seemed to lead to a certain dissatisfaction among

the rank-and-file with the way the party had behaved. The discussion among the

Direzione on 4 May was very lively. There were those, like Roasio and Macaluso, who

asked ‘why there was no strong mobilisation of the party and the masses during the

crisis’; some, like Berlinguer, who acknowledged that ‘a section of the party had not

understood that a certain shift to the left was very important’, or, like Cossutta,

thought that the rank-and-file were ‘not disappointed but satisfied with Fanfani’s

failure’. Amendola and Longo were the most determined to defend the ‘wise and

prudent’ conduct of the PCI during the crisis and to re-propose as an immediate

possibility the idea of support for ‘a government of the centre-left with new policies’.

Togliatti seemed to acknowledge, with some caution, that Fanfani’s attempt had

been ‘serious’ and deserved support. With regard to immediate prospects, he summed

up:

All that has happened makes the danger from the right (support by the fascists, possibility of a

right-wing government) and the danger of a police state, more worrying … there are now

problems of political struggle, above all an anti-fascist struggle … this calls for wide-ranging

mass political actions of a unified nature, including the left of the Christian Democrats.

Experience shows that contacts at the top do not produce results without the development of

the struggle of the masses.

Meanwhile, something else occurred to make the situation more tense; on 1 May,

Soviet anti-aircraft weapons shot down an American U2 spy-plane over the Urals. The

incident brought about the failure of the summit of the ‘four powers’ scheduled for 16

May in Paris, which had been seen as a decisive stage in the process of détente. Togliatti

did not mince his words in condemnation of the incident, referring in the CC on 11

May to ‘the scandalous act of brigandage committed by the American imperialists’.

262 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

In reality, he feared that the incident could prejudice the hopes for détente and was

concerned about the repercussions on internal politics. On 25 May, he explained to the

Direzione that ‘a shift to the left will not be possible if there is a return to the Cold

War, which would see capitalist groups and more reactionary politicians gaining the

upper hand.’ By now, however, he was probably aware that détente was opposed not

only by ‘imperialist circles’ but also by the second-largest communist power, the

People’s Republic of China.

Indeed, on 1 June, during the meeting of the general council of the World

Federation of Trade Unions held in Pechino, the Chinese made serious criticisms of

the entire theory of peaceful co-existence between different social systems and called

into question the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism. The contrast at once

seemed very serious, so that towards the middle of June Togliatti did not hesitate to

leave an Italy full of extreme tensions to go to Moscow to confer with the top Soviet

leaders. At this stage, the PCI secretary seemed to embrace completely the Soviet

position. But he probably also thought that the margin of autonomy within the

international communist movement won by the PCI could be damaged by an

ideological conflict which, he sensed, would be even more serious than that with

Yugoslavia. The consequence, he feared, could well be the imposition of a new

orthodoxy binding on everyone.

Introducing the defence of national autonomy in an article supporting the Soviet

viewpoint against that of the Chinese, Togliatti accepted a share of the responsibility of

a ‘common task’, but let it be understood that the Italian party would not be in

agreement were the Chinese or any other party to be censured for having developed

their own individual road to socialism.99

When Togliatti returned to Italy in early July, the situation was seriously

exacerbated. Tambroni’s government, supported largely by industrial and financial

groups, exploited the new level of international tension to re-launch an aggressive anti-

communist line, accompanied by a series of demagogic measures designed to increase

its own base of consensus. For its part, the MSI – seeking to exploit its role as the key

prop of the government – tried to legitimise itself as a constitutional political force and

convened its own national congress in Genoa, a Gold Medal town of the Resistance.

The widespread nature of the response took everyone rather by surprise; the unified

tissue of anti-fascism, even after so many years, showed itself to be much more durable

than might have been supposed. Associations of ex-partisans, overcoming political

differences, developed a decisive role in mobilising the masses, encouraged by the

widespread discontent of a new generation which only the most superficial analysis

could have believed de-politicised, lacking ideals and completely integrated into the

distorted development of ‘Italy’s miracle’. For reasons of public order, the government

persuaded the neo-fascists to postpone their congress, but meanwhile severely repressed

anti-fascist demonstrations, which were linked to demonstrations about social

demands, especially in the more depressed areas of the South. In Reggio Emilia, five

demonstrators were killed by police fire; other deaths took place in Sicily. In Rome, a

cortège in which numerous parliamentary deputies took part was dispersed by cavalry

charges.100

YEARS OF DÉTENTE AND THE CRISIS OF CENTRISM 263

There was great indignation throughout the country; even the DC appeared

reluctant to follow Tambroni in his venture. On 7 July, Togliatti issued a declaration

of deep concern:

We feel that it is necessary to abandon the path of repeated conflicts, of clashes, of massacres.

We feel that a period of relaxation of tension is necessary. But the first condition for this is

that the country be liberated from the government’s shameful partnership with Fascism and

from the shame of the government based on this partnership.

On 8 July, Merzagora proposed an immediate 15-day truce, during which the

armed forces and the police would be confined to barracks and strikes and

demonstrations of whatever nature would be suspended. The PCI, meeting at the same

time, more or less accepted the proposal. Togliatti declared: ‘Our objective must be a

change in the direction of government. We must maintain contact with the socialists,

but without letting our decisions be dependent on theirs.’

The situation remained very tense for several days, since Tambroni appeared

disinclined to resign, laying the responsibility for the serious occurrences on an

international communist plot. On 12 July, Togliatti rebutted this charge in the

Chamber in very harsh terms – ‘For shame, prime minister, this is a mind which

already lives in the atmosphere of civil war; this is the mind of a criminal and a

coward!’ – and praised instead the characteristics of a movement that had never shared

the ‘traditional movements of plebeian anger against the public authorities’, but had

distinguished itself by ‘discipline, combativeness and unity’, and above all had

unequivocally expressed ‘the bond of the great majority of Italians with the ideals of

the anti-Fascist struggle’.101

The events of July 1960 are covered with a veil of obscurity, which historical

research has not yet succeeded in lifting. The theory of an action ‘deliberately

orchestrated’ by the PCI ‘against Christian Democracy and the institutions it

represented, with the aim of breaking down moral resistance and using the

disagreements occurring within Italy in order to re-enter the game of majorities’ seems

scarcely credible.102 Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the PCI capitalised on its

reputation as the most consistent exponent of anti-fascism. Nor that its organisational

strength and broad social base constituted the platform from which the expansion of a

genuine popular movement mobilised by the perceived threat of fascist resurgence

could proceed. After all, it was Togliatti himself who supplied an outline of the role of

the communists which was not far from the truth. In the Chamber on 5 August, he

declared:

We played the same part in the popular movement of the last weeks that we had in the great

struggle in the anti-fascist Resistance. We have taken part in a great movement, we have

played a substantial part in it, we have been the supporters of the widest and most solid unity,

and we have inspired the popular masses who look to us with particular confidence and

without whom the movement would probably not have had the breadth and would not have

had the results it had.103

10

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION

A NEW SEASON IN THE ‘BATTLE OF IDEAS’

The period between the 1950s and the 1960s was not only a watershed between two

different eras in the history of Republican Italy, but was also an important moment in

Togliatti’s intellectual development. Togliatti was very aware that Italian society had

come to a crossroads, which called for an appropriate analysis of the new problems

arising.

This consciousness was partially evident in Togliatti’s economic and social analysis

of Italian society and the wider capitalist world. The PCI as a whole was slower in

adjusting in this respect. However, at a more general level, the PCI leader’s analysis

showed a new intellectual curiosity and a genuine, deeply-felt anxiety.1 He had to

acknowledge first of all that a new generation had made its debut on the political stage,

a recognition confirmed unequivocally by the role played by the younger generation in

the anti-fascist demonstration against the Tambroni government. Togliatti took a keen

interest in this development, and reflected on it at length:

The experience gained by one generation does not necessarily have the same value for the

next, which wants, and rightly so, to gain its own experience. It is always best, therefore, to

have within one’s self some destructive force which will help to overcome the burden of

memories and idols from the past and to be able to welcome what is new even when it comes

in a fashion that at first may be beyond one’s own comprehension and may even seem hostile.2

‘The battle of ideas’, therefore, had to be defined in new terms. During a speech

delivered at the CC of 7–9 June 1961, Togliatti wondered about the best way to give

the new generation ‘an organic view’, a ‘general idea about the world’. He conjured up

once again the spectre of early 1900, stressing that the lack of a ‘Marxist culture’ at the

time of the ‘Masonic-positivist ideology’ crisis had opened the door to the ‘spreading,

like wildfire, of the most odd forms of avant-gardism’ and to a climate which had

facilitated ‘nationalistic and reactionary currents, culminating eventually in fascism’.3

Togliatti believed that a similar risk had reappeared in the current historical phase.

Trends were emerging which promoted ‘a uniform self-serving attitude in people, who

had become concerned only with enjoying what little comfort the economic situation

could grant’. There was a ‘conformism’ that had nothing to do with the ‘aspiration of

the collective’ and ‘the debate on social issues’ then taking hold.4 For Togliatti, this

‘conformism’ was the product of the penetration into Italy of an ‘American ideology’

that ‘isolated man in the search for a solution of his own individual problems’ and

266 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

therefore caused the individual to relinquish his role as a citizen, someone who

struggled to create a new society.5

Hence, a fundamental element of democracy was disappearing. It was replaced by

‘something reckless’; that is to say, by ‘pressure groups’ that could easily turn into

‘power groups’ and of which ‘it is difficult to say what they really are, what they

support and how they connect with other forces in society’.6 At the end of 1963, and

significantly just after Kennedy’s assassination, Togliatti began to develop this

particular issue, which became a constant theme in the articles he wrote during the last

four years of his life. He believed that political parties, as the bedrock of democracy

and participation, the ‘great, essential connective link between the large masses of

people and their representative institutions’, were losing importance and effectiveness.

‘Mass and organised political opinion’ was now unable to make itself heard at crucial

times.7

In the speech to the CC in June 1961, his conclusion that ‘American ideology’ was

the ‘true enemy to defeat’ went hand-in-hand with a reassertion of the importance ‘of

an analysis and the dissemination of our overall general idea about the world’.

According to Togliatti, the fundamental and defining element of this vital activity of

cultural ‘conquest’ would be an accurate dissemination of ‘historical knowledge’.

From the beginning of the 1960s until his death, his preoccupation with this

terrain was especially significant. Already, in the summer of 1959, he had outlined in

Rinascita an account of the history of the Comintern which, whilst staying within the

‘official’ panorama of the communist parties’ history, expressed some rather daring

opinions.8 The following year he published the 1923–24 correspondence between

Gramsci and other Italian communist leaders. In the introduction, Bordiga’s and

Tasca’s roles were viewed from a more objective, although still critical, perspective.9 In

the same summer, Togliatti also endeavoured to recover the party’s archive for the

years between 1917 and 1940, obtaining a copy from Moscow to deposit in the Istituto

Gramsci in Rome. He therefore laid the foundations for removing the PCI’s history

from the suffocating ‘official’ protection that was still weighing on communist

historiography in the rest of the world.

However, Togliatti’s commitment on the front of historical analysis did not end

with the history of the PCI. Between 1960 and 1961, the commemorations for the

centenary of the unification of Italy gave him the opportunity to challenge the

conventional analysis of the Risorgimento. He openly distanced himself from the official

anodyne celebrations, especially because the heirs of the Catholic political movement

were claiming ‘the roles of protagonists’ for themselves ‘when they rather deserved the

role of profiteers’. In spite of everything, however, he wrote that the achievement of

unification had been ‘a huge revolutionary act’.10 In a compelling lecture given in

1962, Togliatti outlined a comprehensive interpretation of the process involved in the

formation of a unified state. He contested the theories of Rosario Romeo, who had

criticised the Italian Marxist historical analyses of Risorgimento as ‘a missed agrarian

revolution’, an idea which in Romeo’s view came directly from Gramsci’s prison

notebooks. In Togliatti’s opinion, Romeo’s analysis was misinterpreting Gramsci’s

thought, at whose core was instead the idea of a ‘passive revolution’ – that is to say, a

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 267

political revolution without a social or economic revolution, lacking the fundamental

and continuous contribution of mass movements which never impeded, indeed which

led, to great change.11

In 1963, Togliatti also returned to the first period of post-war crisis, another

crucial point in the history of the twentieth century. He insisted that the post-war crisis

had been a crisis of method, at whose core had been the issue of power and within

which the formation of a new revolutionary party, with the subsequent split in the

socialist party, had been unavoidable.12 On the other hand, he admitted that it was

‘necessary to study in more depth what the fascist regime had really represented at a

national level’, widening the field of study to those ‘vast areas of middle-class life,

schools, and other forms of collective life, of family life’, which had previously been

neglected.13

Altogether, it seems that towards the end of his life the balance that Togliatti kept

between ‘continuity’ and ‘innovation’ was tipping towards the latter.14 Two of his

commentaries, very different in tone and substance from each other, confirm this. The

first in July 1962 was in reply to a young Rinascita reader who expressed his

dissatisfaction with a political militancy unable to satisfy the demands of ‘a moral and

intellectual life’. Togliatti’s comment in this instance was very far from the call to

‘Leninist orthodoxy’ with which he had closed his speech in June 1961. He conceded

that ‘the collective life’ of the party ‘unfolds […] within terms of organisation, trade

unionism, political, or mere practical work which […] appear distant, arid, obscure to

those who have not been especially trained to understand them’.15

The second was a speech he delivered in Bergamo on 20 March 1963. It was,

perhaps, the most fruitful and enduring intuition of the later Togliatti. Starting once

again with the painful observation that the development of nuclear weapons meant war

‘can potentially become the global suicide of all human beings and their civilisation’,

Togliatti found original ways of talking about what he saw as ‘man’s destiny’ in a

developed capitalist society ‘where the uniformity of methods creates an artificial

uniformity in men’s lives […]. It degrades them, makes them unrecognisable to

themselves, curtails and kills their initiative, their freedom to choose and develop’.

To counteract ‘the loneliness of modern man, who even with all the wealth in the

world at his disposal cannot communicate with other men, and feels trapped in a

prison he cannot escape’, he offered the remedy of a socialist society. And here was the

major innovation. The image of this society for once did not have the features, even by

allusion or obliquely, of the Soviet Union during the building of communism. Instead,

Togliatti’s new vision exhibited the vague but unmistakeable features of a utopia. It

was a society conceived by Mounier rather than Lenin, where ‘man is not alone any

more and humanity becomes in real terms a living unity, through the development of

every man’s personality and their continual organic participation in joint labour’.

Togliatti believed that the Catholic world could not be indifferent to this new

dimension of global issues: ‘the yearning for a socialist society,’ he said, ‘will not only

be felt by men with a religious faith, but […] also will be spurred on by the religious

consciousness itself, when confronted by the tragic problems of the modern world.’16

This new socialism would be: ‘A society that calls on men to work together, […]; that

268 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

calls on them to contribute with their labour to decide the destiny of the whole of

humanity.’

NEW CHALLENGES FOR THE LEFT

Tambroni’s resignation on 19 July 1960 opened a new phase in the political life of

Italy. For large and influential sectors of the DC, Tambroni’s venture had crudely

highlighted that the centre-left alliance was essential, both for a reform policy and for

the crucial matter of preserving Christian Democratic power. Correspondingly, for the

socialists, and especially for Nenni, what had become strikingly obvious was that the

participation of the PSI in government was fundamental to guaranteeing the survival of

the democratic system.

Togliatti was no doubt aware of the novelty of the post-Tambroni situation, which

threatened that questioned the ‘political monopoly’ of the DC. However, for the time

being, the PCI was denied the opportunity to exercise its political and electoral weight.

Significant, if genuine, was the reluctant admission, tinged with ‘slight regret’, that the

communist leader made to Nenni on 12 July, when Tambroni’s fate had been sealed:

‘You do politics, we still do only campaigning and propaganda.’17

In fact, by abstaining in a vote of confidence, the PSI was going to back up a

single-party DC government, headed by Amintore Fanfani and supported in

parliament by the PSDI, PRI and PLI. Togliatti welcomed it in parliament on 5

August as ‘the obvious legitimisation of the great anti-fascist popular movement of the

past weeks’.18 Fanfani, however, once in office as head of government, hinted that

democracy had been in danger under the pull of both ‘opposing extremisms’, i.e.,

owing as much to the activities of the PCI as to the neo-fascists. Thus, it became

difficult to say whether this was a government of transition toward a reforming centre-

left coalition or an exhumation of centrism strengthened by a weak, subordinate

socialist party.

At the outset, the PCI seemed to favour collaboration. On 2 August 1960, the

party Direzione met. Unusually, Togliatti did not deliver an opening speech but asked

for the comrades’ opinions. Some (Terracini, Sereni, Gullo, Colombi) were negative;

others thought that ‘the party should not be misled into believing that the present

government is only one of the many governments of the last fifteen years’ (Alicata).

Furthermore, ‘looking at the programme’, one could even ‘have considered abstention’

(Ingrao). Togliatti admitted that in Fanfani’s programme there were some ‘positive

elements’, but he nevertheless regarded voting against it as ‘well justified’, both because

the government objective was ‘to reconfirm and restore the total political monopoly’ of

the DC and also because of its ‘completely passive role’ in foreign policy. Therefore,

even if the communists acknowledged ‘the positive elements’ in Fanfani’s programme

and meant to ‘spur the government on’, they should still oppose it. In fact, this was the

only practical option, in view of the rigid anti-communist discrimination of the

majority coalition stressed by Fanfani on every conceivable occasion. However, the PCI

line was also motivated by the desire to benefit, in the local council and local elections

scheduled for 6–7 November, from the support that the party had gained in the battle

against Tambroni.

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 269

The local elections of 1960 introduced television for the first time to the electoral

contest. It is claimed that fifteen million people viewed Togliatti’s press conference.

Togliatti did not underestimate the positive effect of the new medium:

It is a fact that for the first time, although for just a few minutes, millions of citizens have

been able to see the face and hear the voice of our party as we really are, not as the phoney and

grotesque image presented in vestries, in parochial periodicals, in the comments of the anti-

communist press and sometimes in the broadcasts by the RAI-TV. It is likely that many of

those who have seen and heard me for the first time continue to believe in my alleged dark

and grim diabolic character […]19

The results of 6–7 November were positive for the PCI, which gained one million

votes more than in 1956. They were less so for the PSI. Togliatti recognised, when he

commented on the results at the Direzione on 16 November, that the votes gained by

the PCI ‘came mainly from those lost by the PSI’ and that the overall shift to the left

‘did not entirely reflect the deep crisis experienced by the DC and the right during the

first half of the year’. It is clear that he was still faithful to the idea of a united strategy

of the workers’ parties, even in their different roles with regard to the government. But

in fact the relationship with the PSI continued to worsen. Although the PSI refused the

DC’s request to leave those left-wing local governments which were already tried and

tested by experience and re-elected by popular vote, they did start negotiations to

achieve centre-left alliances in several of the more important councils, e.g. in Milan,

Genoa and Florence, where the numbers of PCI representatives would have enabled if

not PCI–PSI majorities, at least workable broad left-wing alliances.

Yet, Togliatti’s attitude showed that he believed the PCI still had ample room for

manoeuvre. ‘I don’t think,’ he claimed on February 1961 at the Direzione, ‘that the big

bourgeoisie agrees with the centre-left, it rather embraces the positions of the Liberals

and the right of the DC. Thus, there are disagreements in the ruling class.’ The

shortcomings of the PSI were that it wanted to influence the ruling class disagreements

‘in the wrong fashion’. It would be a serious mistake if the PCI ‘ignored the centre-

left’. ‘We must get involved too and criticise the socialists, but above all we must act

positively, concentrating on what is common to both our parties and connecting to

what the socialists have said and still say on the aims of the centre-left.’

A line of action was thus taking form and developing in two directions. On the one

hand, harsher and stronger criticism was being directed at the Fanfani government for

its failure to fulfil its programme. On the other hand, a stubborn ideological polemic

developed with the socialists about the relationship between socialism and democracy.

With regard to the first, the PCI’s reservations about the possibility of a centre-left

government grew as trade union militancy intensified. In a climate in which social

conflicts were becoming more radical, expressing worker dissatisfaction about the

unequal rewards in the distribution of the ‘economic boom’, the differences between

the trade union confederations became fewer and new unifying relations developed.

The second conference of communist factory workers, which met in Milan on 5–7

May 1961, looked upon the renewal of workers’ militancy with approval, but also

some uneasiness.20

270 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

A new phenomenon, still in its embryonic stage, was emerging: protests from small

but combative groups of youths, students and workers to the left of the PCI but with

some support in the trade unions. The phenomenon also affected the FGCI and its

newspaper Nuova Generazione, which was criticised several times at meetings of the

Direzione. Togliatti had a keen interest in these ferments, and maintained a generally

open attitude towards them. He commented in the Direzione of 15 March:

We don’t reject valid criticism […] If there is a trend in the younger generations to reject

forthwith the worst elements of contemporary democratic life, this must be welcomed. We

must not avoid debate, or reject criticisms tout-court.

The attempt of the PCI to analyse and also control these calls for renewal in Italian

society went hand in hand with a firm defence of its identity as a democratic party.

This subject, clearly not a new one, recurred in Togliatti’s writings and speeches during

the first half of 1961, and engaged him in debate – calm in tone but harsh in content –

with Nenni and the autonomist faction of the PSI. Togliatti insisted that it was

ridiculous that in the workers’ movement ‘a sort of guilt complex [was spreading]

towards the issue of democracy, as if the classes whom we are fighting to divest of their

power were by their nature and vocation “democratic”, as if it was our duty […] to

prove that socialism and democracy can also be reconciled’. Togliatti had the upper

hand when he reminded Nenni that the existence and development of democracy had

been, for more than a century, linked to the existence and development of an organised

and popular working-class movement. Less convincing, however, was his unreserved

defence of socialist countries. Whilst he affirmed that the PCI was committed to look

for ‘a democratic and peaceful transformation’ that would avoid ‘painful mistakes’ and

minimised ‘the sufferings of the whole society’, he reiterated that in countries where

communist parties were in power, ‘the positive moments are definitely dominant and

partly mitigate the doubtful, negative moments’. Furthermore, he accused Nenni, who

was distancing himself from the people’s democracies in eastern Europe, of breaking

the class front and playing into the hands of reactionary propaganda.21

This revealed the stultifying role that the ‘iron link’ with the Soviet Union still

played in Togliatti’s political strategy, even in the Italian context. The wholly

reasonable call for the need to establish an accord amongst the parties that fought most

consistently for an actual social transformation in Italy was subordinate to a

hypothetical, practically meaningless choice between two systems of ‘civilisation’. The

significant moments of convergence between the two parties of the left were badly

affected by their increasingly divergent international alliances.

‘At the moment we regard the developments in international relations as a decisive

element, which puts in everything else in the background,’ Togliatti declared at the

PCI’s CC of 5–7 October 1961, explicitly invoking a long-standing method of

analysis. The détente process following the U-2 incident was slow, and although

Kennedy’s victory in November 1960 had extracted a positive comment from Togliatti

(‘in my view […] this victory resembles the first victory of President Roosevelt, many

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 271

years ago’22), the direction of the new American administration on foreign policy

looked more polarised than Eisenhower’s.

But his major concern was about the risk of a split in the international communist

movement. The Sino-Soviet rift had not subsided, but rather threatened to emerge in

all its magnitude at the communist parties’ conference convened in Moscow between

10 November and 3 December 1961. Togliatti was in total agreement with the Soviet

theses, especially with regard to the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war. He was,

however, open to dialogue and avoided any sort of indictment without appeal, an

attitude which prompted Pravda to edit out a passage from his speech to the Italian

CC of 18 July on account of its being considered too appeasing.

Togliatti did not attend the Moscow conference, and Luigi Longo headed the

Italian delegation. It is likely that Togliatti wanted to avoid being embroiled in a

controversy which could become public and sensational, and that he was hoping to use

his influence to dissipate its fallout a later date. Even if the likelihood of a split had

been averted by a final resolution confirming the political line of peaceful co-existence,

the final document did not wholly satisfy the Italian communists. Longo expressed his

reservations over the very harsh attack on Yugoslav revisionism, which could only lead

to a permanent fracture with Tito and also undermine the anticipated rapprochement

with European social democracy. Togliatti claimed some years later that the Italian

delegates had expressed ‘clear misgivings about some passages of the resolution that had

been approved, in which unfair concessions had been made to the Chinese position’.23

Indeed, the commentary that Togliatti wrote in Rinascita provided a testy polemic

against the ‘twisted interpretations’ of the press (including the socialist press), while

interpretations aimed at presenting the Chinese viewpoint as hostile to peaceful co-

existence were rejected with contempt. His main concern was the unity of the

communist movement and he trusted, in spite of his experiences to the contrary, in the

ability of Marxism to act as a ‘melting pot’ for ‘different civilisations, different cultures

and ideas about life, different traditions and social structures’.

Towards the end of his life, Togliatti had reason to question this trust and this

caused him real anguish. Meanwhile, he believed that the unity of the communist

movement was the only way to prevent the further deterioration of an already tense

international situation. In April 1961, the Kennedy administration had disappointed

the expectations of those who were hoping for a real change in American foreign policy

with its botched intervention in Cuba. Later, the summit between Kennedy and

Khrushchev gave new hopes for détente, but the situation worsened again in August,

when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built a wall that split Berlin.

Surprisingly, Togliatti underestimated the symbolism of the wall, which conferred

concrete evidence of the division in Europe. Division, he had always claimed, was

precisely what he wanted to avoid. Also surprising was that Togliatti, seconding the

Soviet political line, presented the weakness shown by the GDR, which was

immediately exploited by Western propaganda, to prove the tyrannical character of

communist regimes, merely as the legitimate response of a sovereign state which had

been denied the right to protect itself.24 This position did not assist the PCI’s attempt

to find a meeting ground with the trend – which Togliatti could see ‘struggling to

272 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

emerge’ within a sector of the DC – ‘of searching for a more considerate foreign policy,

less opposed to Italian interests and to the aims of international détente and peace’.

TOGLIATTI’S DIFFICULTIES ON THE ISSUE OF STALINISM

In the autumn of 1961, the issue of the PCI’s relationship with the Soviet Union took

centre stage again inside the party. The occasion was the twenty-second congress of the

CPSU, held on 17–31 October. Togliatti made a very lacklustre contribution.

Conversely, the opening speech by Khrushchev was everything but. He did not merely

announce that by 1980 the Soviet Union would have ‘the concrete base for

communism’. He also renewed his attack on Stalin and Stalinism. These new criticisms

were not very different from his ‘secret speech’. They still comprised a denunciation of

personal crimes, but did not provide an in-depth analysis of what had been at the root

of the evil. However, the congress was accompanied by some symbolic decisions of

great significance: Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum in Red Square

and the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

Togliatti was annoyed by Khrushchev’s speech. On his return to Italy on 3

November, he answered the journalists’ questions with marked restraint. On 10

November, he read a long report to the CC.25 For those present, certain aspects of the

report must have sounded like a playback of the one he presented at the national

council of April 1956. More than two-thirds of his speech was, in fact, dedicated to the

socio-economic progress of Soviet society and the initiatives undertaken by Moscow to

facilitate international détente. Only in the conclusion did he address Khrushchev’s

criticism.

Togliatti did not deny the need to criticise Stalin and Stalinism. But he was

frustrated by criticism which merely ‘reduces the argument to no more than the

personal negative qualities of Stalin himself’. He wondered whether it was really

necessary to reopen the chapter on ‘exposures’ and ‘aim the fire at a group of old

collaborators of Stalin who had been expelled by the CC in 1957’. The simple fact that

he raised these questions and, almost despite himself, gave an answer (‘it may be that

for us [author’s emphasis] these exposures are not necessary any more’) revealed that he

would gladly have avoided touching the wound reopened by the twentieth congress.

However, he did admit that faced by the ‘terrible tragedy’ of ‘the violation of legality’

and the crimes carried out under Stalin’s regime, exposures were essential ‘in order to

build an insurmountable barrier against a past which, if not forgotten, must be buried

for ever’. He approved the removal of Stalin’s body from its pride of place at the

Kremlin tomb. But he was not persuaded about the need to re-christen Stalingrad, ‘not

so much out of respect for Stalin’ but rather because of the symbolic character that the

name had acquired for millions of people in the wake of the Second World War.

Concluding his report, Togliatti said the PCI had a ‘specific and unique quality’ within

the communist global movement because it refused any temptation ‘to lock itself in an

ivory tower’ and would ‘face every new issue without bias’.

His report was not very well received by the comrades. Many participating in the

debate did not share his cool detachment towards the new exposures of Stalin’s crimes.

They thought that the PCI could not call ‘time out’ in a critical analysis of the Soviet

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 273

system, which would inevitably spill over into self-criticism about the PCI’s

responsibilities. Mario Alicata reminded Togliatti that he had himself told the party

about a fundamental ‘historical canon’: ‘it is not true that in a specific historical

context a leadership that urges an historical process towards one direction has only one

line ahead: […] there are political choices.’ Pietro Ingrao and, rather unclearly, Gian

Carlo Pajetta, criticised the degenerations of Soviet monolithism. Aldo Natoli, in a

very short but explosive speech called for an extraordinary congress to discuss again the

party’s political line in depth .

The speech by Giorgio Amendola was, without doubt, the boldest and most wide-

ranging. Amendola opened his speech, and it was immediately clear that he disagreed

with Togliatti, by defending the ‘passionate’ denunciation made by Khrushchev. ‘[A]

certain iconoclastic fury indeed, but it destroys the myths and icons of Stalinism, it is a

liberating fury, it is a moralising fury.’ He claimed that ‘before criticism […] self-

criticism is needed for the tentativeness, caution, timidity and reticence which have

slowed down our march.’

We must admit that unanimity is a Stalinist formula [and that] it is something different from

unity. I believe that we should get rid of this fictitious unanimity which hinders the

development of democracy, the exchange of ideas, the liveliness of debate. Democracy

demands transparent, responsible and courageous debate, and the need to admit to differences

on fundamental issues […] which can take the form of majority and minority.26

Togliatti’s comments at the conclusion of this heated debate were never published.

Many comrades did not feel comfortable with the decision not to publish his second

speech. The recordings of his speech, found in 2000, revealed that he was overall very

conservative.27 The speech urged not to forget that beyond ‘shortcomings and partial

mistakes’ the Soviet Union was ‘really the base of the transformation not only for

Soviet society, but the whole world, towards socialism and communism’. It appealed to

the Western communist parties – clearly having problems in answering the challenge

‘of the big capitalist and imperialist monopolies’ in their own countries – not to stand

in judgement against an ‘experience of socialist democratic institutionalisation’.

Togliatti reproached Amendola for letting himself ‘be carried away in the heat of the

moment […] towards conclusions which the party could not approve and could not

utilise because they do not accord with what our movement is today’. He rejected the

suggestion of an extraordinary congress because, in his view, there was not ‘a

substantial problem that demanded analysis and the restructuring of the entire political

line’. The resolution, presented as coming from ‘the [CC] and the central control

commission’ and allegedly written by Togliatti, was judged by many observers, for

instance Vittorio Gorresio, as ‘exceptionally circumspect’.28 The fact remains that for

the first time in many years, and more clearly than in 1956, Togliatti was in the

minority in the CC.29

Tensions ran high inside the party, and the existence of inner-party conflict was

perceived outside it. Allegations about the PCI’s internal disagreements and the alleged

weakening of the secretary’s authority increased. On 17 November, the debate was

274 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

resumed in the Direzione. Togliatti was not prepared to perform any self-criticism. He

deplored ‘the emotional excesses and also the anti-Soviet, masochistic and iconoclastic

references’ that had been expressed in the CC debate. He urged members ‘to avoid

being caught in a year-zero atmosphere’. With regard to Amendola’s claims, he did not

sympathise with ‘the bitter and intolerant way’ he had presented the issue.’ His

introduction was suffused with irritation, embarrassment and defensiveness. During

the debate, only the representatives of the old guard, Scoccimaro, Colombi and Roasio,

seemed to agree completely with him. Amendola deplored ‘the danger of stifling the

debate’, of ‘a cold shower leading us to ignore the problems that have arisen and which

will cause a silent haemorrhage of men and cadres, and further weaken the acquisition

of new strength’. Many cadres of the ‘mid-generation’ seemed to agree with him, albeit

cautiously.

Obviously, Togliatti was aware that he could not force the direction taken by the

majority of the Direzione. ‘As a good realpolitiker, with a manoeuvre meant to surprise

the rival, he did not oppose the thrusts of those wanting “renewal” but once again he

took charge of correcting the course.’30 The secretariat therefore decided to publish a

new resolution. Berlinguer and Bufalini were asked to write it. With Togliatti’s

imprimatur, the document was given to the press on 27 November. Undoubtedly, it

represented an improvement on previous PCI analysis and the interview given to

Nuovi Argomenti in June 1956, and it caused a certain amount of surprise in the Italian

press. The resolution stated that the transition to communism could not take place

without ‘an appropriate change in the methods of leadership and work of the party, the

trade unions, the soviets and all the organisations of Soviet society’. It said that

rigorous historical research should be undertaken to provide convincing explanations

on the origins of the ‘mistakes and distortions’ that had occurred in building socialism.

In addition, the PCI had also been responsible ‘in accepting, without criticism, Stalin’s

erroneous theory about the inevitable and progressive worsening of the class battle

because the building of socialism was winning and advancing’; and for having failed to

stop ‘forms of rhetorical and misleading propaganda about socialist reality’. Finally, it

asserted that opposing opinions and open disagreements had full legitimacy in the PCI.

Never before had an ‘orthodox’ communist party expressed so clearly its criticism of

the Soviet Union.31

The CPSU reacted quickly. After a journey to Moscow with Napolitano, Longo

reported back to the Direzione on 8 December that ‘Suslov has said that our discussion

at the CC has filled them with incredulity because of its anti-Soviet stance and for the

criticisms directed at other parties, which not even the CPSU or Stalin himself would

have dared to make […] Many Italian comrades have stirred a lot of shit inside the

CC.’ Complaints were also made about an article in Nuova Generazione, the FGCI

review, which had proposed a reassessment of Trotsky’s role in Soviet history. Faced by

such serious, although confidential, reprimands, the PCI was compelled to take stock.

As a result, Togliatti’s more cautious line was vindicated. At the meeting on 8

December, he commented:

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 275

The way things have developed is causing great damage for us in the international movement

… Our status has been due to our patient labour, our method of retreating now must also not

upset our sibling parties.

It was decided to write a letter of clarification to the CPSU secretariat. Longo and

Togliatti were deputed to draft it. The text was a skilful balance between self-criticism

and reassertion of the party’s own position.32 It was a well-tried method, but which

eventually outlived its usefulness. Resorting to it repeatedly became paralysing, setting

a pattern of veering between renewal and immobility which continued after Togliatti’s

death.

A ‘SPECIAL’ KIND OF OPPOSITION

In the autumn of 1961, the strains within the Fanfani government became more

apparent. The PSI was not prepared to continue its support for a majority bogged

down by the inability to act. Even the DC seemed to be aware that the centre-left

experiment could not be postponed indefinitely. Thus, the DC’s San Pellegrino

conference in September 1961 welcomed the idea of planned development of the

economy to correct imbalances. In the meantime, the Vatican’s veto of the left ended

(moreover, John XXII’s Encyclical Mater et Magistra reformed the Catholics’ social

doctrine well beyond the cautious positions taken by the DC leaders). In the USA, the

state department thought that the new experiment could improve the internal stability

and accountability of Italy at international level.

Togliatti’s attitude alternated between deep scepticism and cautious expectation. In

fact, the party leadership was divided on the meaning and future development of a

centre-left government. In the report to the CC of 5–7 October 1961, Togliatti

warned the party about the risk of adopting a ‘merely derisory or preconceived

rejection’ of the centre-left.’ Declaring complete support, in principle, for a dialogue

between the DC and the PSI, he made a significant comment:

A party jealousy would be […] out of place on our side, especially because we know that the

more intelligent men of the Catholic movement will inevitably look to the communist

movement, and what it represents in the world, for mutual understanding and collaboration.33

There was no doubt that he was in favour of a new formula of government

alliances. At the Direzione on 10 January 1962, he suggested that there was a need ‘to

concentrate our fire against […] the attempt by the Christian Democratic leadership to

evade the issue of the centre-left and drag on until the end of the year waiting for the

elections’. Togliatti proposed to offer ‘some positive comments’ on the socialists’ stance

and intervene to correct ‘those [points in their argument] that are not satisfactory’. Less

than a month later, the DC approved the formation of a DC–PSDI–PRI government.

This, Togliatti told the Direzione on 2 February, was a government ‘to which could be

granted, in view of its programmatic content, the direct or indirect support of the PSI’.

He added that ‘the new government will be different from a government regulated by

monopolies.’ He also made a significant comment on Ingrao’s speech. Ingrao had

276 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

argued that Moro’s policy was a mere attempt ‘to correct, rationalise and facilitate

capitalist development’ and, therefore, had to be defeated. Togliatti pointed out that ‘it

is the method by which we defeat it that is important because we must also hang on to

some aspects of it.’

This was, in essence, the political line presented to the CC on 12 February.

Togliatti did not deny that the turn ahead could have some features of trasformismo

(‘transformism’)34, but he also made an important clarification:

A transformist operation is still an operation that presupposes action, internal contradictions

for the ruling classes, the acknowledgement of certain achievements by the workers and of

concessions that cannot be postponed in a framework of overall preservation of the system

[…] The working class and popular movement must take up the challenge; it cannot and

must not refuse to fight on the new terrain that has been proposed.35

Togliatti criticised the attitude – in both the PCI and the left of the PSI – ‘of those

who see in current events only a freezing and strengthening on a new basis, of the

current political and economic system’. Others who were more sophistical saw in those

events ‘a machination, a plan prearranged by monopoly capital or at least one of its

sectors’. In fact, Togliatti’s criticisms against ‘maximalist nihilism’ were

counterbalanced by the many doubts on whether the reforming intentions of the

future government were genuine. The first statements made by Fanfani when in office

did not help to dispel the PCI’s suspicions. He emphasised the need to contain the

majority on the left and reject in advance any collaboration with the communists.

Given these circumstances, the PCI could only behave as an opposition party. Yet, that

was not an obvious choice, as the long debate within the 22 February Direzione

proved. The debate centred on the concern that a no-confidence vote against the

Government should carry a legitimate explanation. It should not appear to be a

reflection, taken on an a priori basis, and should not put further strain on the

relationship with the PSI. Perhaps Togliatti revealed the real reason behind the PCI

decision to remain in opposition when, during an interview, he recalled the ‘exchange

of witticisms’ between himself and Fanfani in 1960 ‘when we told each other that if we

wanted to cause a government crisis we only had to vote for it’.36

In the speech he delivered to parliament on 5 March 1962, Togliatti acknowledged

the positive innovations in the government’s political programme: the commitment to

put in place a national economic programme, to modernise public administration, to

implement the regional system, to nationalise the electricity industry, to abolish

sharecropping, and to reform the educational system. He explained the PCI

representatives’ vote of no confidence as mainly due to the government’s lack of a clear

commitment to détente in foreign policy and ‘the lack of explicitly stated general

directions for a democratic renewal’. The generality of these criticisms revealed that for

the first time since 1947, he was prepared to give the government some credit. The

opposition that the government was going to face from the PCI was ‘of a particular

kind’. It would be an opposition that was going to make sure that ‘the alleged wish to

renew the direction of the country’s political life’ was translated into ‘consistent

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 277

implementation’. The communists would even cast a vote of confidence ‘every time

that following an actual assessment we will believe it opportune and right, even if it

does not go far enough in its renewal and take the full turn that we demand’.37

TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CENTRE-LEFT

Togliatti’s speech showed that the party was still entertaining some doubts about the

centre-left. He commented, ‘are we really in the presence of an economic renewal or

are we instead looking at no more than a limited, indeed very limited, attempt to

correct certain shortcomings and imbalances in the economy?’38 The question reflected

a different of analysis that had developed in communist culture. It emerged in the

conference titled ‘Tendenze del capitalismo italiano’, promoted by the Istituto Gramsci

in March 1961. Some of the contributions put forward the idea that Italian capitalism

was in fact capable of ‘controlling’ its own contradictions and overcoming the

traditional imbalances in the Italian economy. Therefore, the workers’ movement, by

continuing to support reforms with a ‘democratic’ content, was running the risk of

facilitating – instead of hindering – the plans of productive and political

‘rationalisation’ of capital. This point of view contrasted with another, which found its

expression in Giorgio Amendola’s thesis. He insisted that the ruling classes had little

room for economic and political manoeuvring and that Italian capitalism was in fact

backward.39

These two views entailed two contrasting evaluations of the centre-left. Rossana

Rossanda, in June, engaged in an argument, unusually explicit for the PCI, with

Amendola. This is how she summarised the terms of the arguments: if the Italian

bourgeoisie was denied ‘the ability to change and reorganise’, then:

[The] centre-left will be seen as a sign of instability instead of as an attempt at stabilisation.

First we will forecast, as has already happened, that it is not feasible and difficult to realise,

and then that it will have pitfalls. We will over-dramatise both the swings to the right […] and

the innovative elements […]; the first will be viewed as a return to its nature and the second

will be described not only as a positive force but also as a force foreign to the Italian ruling

class.40

By this time, the centre-left had already experienced the ‘swing’ to the right

discussed by Rossanda. On 6 May, the Christian Democrat Antonio Segni was elected

President of the Republic with the support of the monarchists and neo-fascists. The

PCI, together with the PSI, PSDI and PRI, had supported Saragat. Saragat’s defeat

marked a serious setback for the reform drive of the centre-left. However, that drive

was still alive. The government persevered in its objective of an organic planning of the

economy and passed a law, which had been opposed by the private sector, to

nationalise the electricity industry.

Togliatti acknowledged that the nationalisation had ‘delivered a serious blow to the

monopolistic power system’. However, he also stressed that ‘the Christian Democratic

rulers’ had approved it ‘against their will’ and had taken ‘the trouble to frame its

essence (that is the expropriation of the means of production) with a series of ancillary

278 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

measures in favour of the electricity tycoons’.41 But altogether, his main concern was to

prevent the party from taking a sterile position. He had already made this clear in the

PCI Direzione of 19 April, with the warning that:

If we cannot make constructive proposals we will gradually be sidelined … The majority of

the party cadres do not understand the value of the positive politics we are following and take

refuge in an opposition of principle. […] The Italian road to socialism also proceeds through

the battles that take place within other parties.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in July the PCI secretary supported Amendola’s

theses:

If I keep to the habitual assertion, which dismisses reforms as being in any case what

‘monopoly’ and ‘neo-capitalism’ want in order to be able to stabilise, nationalise, make order,

overcome situations that have become static and so on, then I lose the precise starting point

for an effective struggle.42

During the summer of 1962, Togliatti made an effort to define in strategic and

theoretical terms the PCI’s position within a political context that had changed

dramatically when compared with both post-war periods. In a series of articles

published in Rinascita between July and September 1962, he discussed again the value

of reforms in an advanced capitalist society and the connection between democracy

and socialism. He did not reject the idea that ‘the road to reformism’ was viable,

‘where there are democratic organisations, as in Italy, which are sustained by the

existence and fighting spirit of a strong popular democratic, revolutionary movement’.

However, he repeated that the ‘road to reformism’ could only be viable under two

conditions: first, that the reforms undertaken had to ‘affect to some extent the very

structure of capitalism’; second, that ‘the workers must never lose awareness of the

relation between partial reforms and the more profound aims of the workers’ and

socialist movement’.43

He continued his effort to redefine the PCI’s position on the centre-left. In

September, replying to the objections raised by a Rinascita reader who wondered

whether the nationalisation of electricity, if it proceeded according to plan, would

affect ‘the structure itself of capitalism’, he defended with utmost conviction the vote

of confidence cast by the communists in parliament. He argued that ‘we must

recognise all positive achievements, no matter how big or small, and act to move the

situation further along with criticisms, proposals and suitable initiatives.’44 At the same

time, however, he entered into a debate with Franco Rodano, one of his closest

collaborators. Rodano had argued that the DC’s centre-left turn had closed ‘forever the

period in which democracy was an objective to achieve’. Togliatti reminded him that

the centre-left was based ‘on the discrimination against the larger party of the working

classes’. The only positive feature of the centre-left was that it had precipitated a split

in the bloc composed of the DC and its right-wing and centre allies, ‘and therefore the

situation was in flux again’.45

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 279

In those weeks, it became increasingly clear that the reforming dynamism of the

Fanfani government was losing momentum. Within the DC, there was a clamour for

‘clarification’ of PSI foreign policy as well as its relationship with the PCI during the

local elections. It was clear that ‘the PSI was under scrutiny, under probation, and

subject to approval in the democratic arena’, that it had not yet proved its maturity.46

The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 gave the advocates of ‘Atlantic

extremism’ a new excuse to revive the issue of anti-communism. On the other hand,

even the most benevolent observer could not deny the PCI’s total alignment with

Soviet policy. Togliatti’s comment on the issue was fully in agreement with

Khrushchev:

The Soviet Union has unfailingly fulfilled its role as a great socialist power. It has defended

the independence of a small population that America imperialism wished to subjugate […] At

the same time it has acted with utmost realism and responsibility, never losing sight of the

most serious problem today: how to avoid a war.47

It is difficult to say whether Togliatti had personal reservations about the risky

method employed by the Soviet leader first to provoke and then to contain the missile

crisis. No doubt this renewed assertion of solidarity with the Soviet Union can also be

explained by the fact that the Sino-Soviet split had reappeared, partly as a result of

Moscow’s decision to effect a full reconciliation with Yugoslavia, which meant that the

PCI’s more conciliatory positions had been vindicated. But the emergence of a border

dispute between China and India also placed the Soviet Union, for years the favoured

interlocutor with New Delhi, in an increasingly difficult position.

THE INNOVATIONS OF THE TENTH CONGRESS

These new international developments were the focus of the speech with which

Togliatti opened the tenth PCI congress on 2 December 1962. Starting with the

serious threat posed to world peace by the Cuban missile crisis, and despite making

renewed denunciations of American imperialism, Togliatti took the opportunity to

reject the hypothesis of the inevitability of war and to reassert the need for peaceful

coexistence. By so doing, he became the first leader in the international communist

movement to open a dialogue with China. Although professing great respect for the

Chinese comrades, the PCI secretary believed that it was unacceptable to say that

‘imperialism was a paper tiger’ and ‘absurd to accuse those who supported peaceful

coexistence between socialism and capitalism of betraying the Marxist doctrine and the

revolutionary cause.’ Although coexistence had to be understood as a compromise, it

could not be reduced to the ‘mere acknowledgement and preservation of the status

quo’, as the Chinese maintained. Instead, it should be seen as ‘a different arrangement

in the relations between states, based on mutual understanding’, which would enable

nations and peoples to live in complete freedom and independence.48

The Chinese delegate’s reply was very harsh, and marked the beginning of an

argument which escalated in the following months. On 31 December 1962, the CCP

newspaper published a long article entitled ‘The Difference of Opinion between us and

280 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Comrade Togliatti’, which caricatured the PCI’s position on peaceful coexistence and

the Italian road to socialism. Togliatti’s reply was diplomatic, but firm in substance.

After reiterating the stance expressed in his congress speech, he raised doubts about the

Chinese proposal to organise a conference of communist parties in order to resolve

disagreements within the movement. Such a conference would only be an opportunity

to ‘denounce and excommunicate’. ‘Neither the Chinese comrades, nor any other party

in our movement’, had the right to take on this function he added as a significant

clarification.49

In the report prepared for the tenth congress, Togliatti had been as critical as ever

of Italian foreign policy, although he acknowledged the expansion of commercial and

cultural relations between Italy and the socialist countries. He demanded again,

although merely rhetorically, that Italy should not ‘be a member of any military bloc’

and insisted, more forcibly, that ‘within NATO’ Italy ‘should free itself of the most

cumbersome weight, that is of nuclear bases on our national territory’. He criticised the

Common Market again for being ‘the place where the big capitalist monopolies

consolidate their power’, and denounced the trend to ‘curtail and liquidate democratic

freedoms and the move towards authoritarian regimes’ taking place not only in

Southern Europe but also in Germany, where ‘there was a de facto barely disguised

police state’. Similarly, in France, ‘a new kind of Caesarism existed, which masked the

untrammelled power of monopoly capital’.50

In contrast to his bleak depiction of the international situation, relieved only by the

‘hope that in the competition between capitalism and socialism there were clear signs

of the latter’s victory’, Togliatti’s analysis of the Italian situation was less abstract. The

economic expansion and the profound social changes that the country had undergone

were acknowledged more clearly than in the past, and followed by the usual refrain

that ongoing imbalances could only be corrected by ‘government economic

intervention’. Clearly, none of the objectives for ‘democratic planning’ could be

achieved without damaging ‘the interests of privileged economic groups and big

monopoly capital’. It was ‘unacceptable and absurd’ to curtail the autonomy and

bargaining power of the trade unions. The state should not regard the unions’ demands

as an obstacle, but as an incentive to economic growth.51

There is no doubt that this vision was impaired by a flaw in communist economic

analysis evident from at least the early 1930s, which identified monopolies as parasitic

outgrowths of capitalism. As such, the communist movement had enjoined its parties

to build a system of broad alliances against the monopolies, often based on rather

generic objectives. In the 1930s, the search for wider alliances had been seen essentially

as a concentration of forces in preparation for the final battle, In 1962, Togliatti

advanced the hypothesis of a transition from democracy to socialism as ‘a gradual

development where the moment of actual improvement in quality would be difficult to

recognise in real terms’. The crux of the improvement would be the expansion of

democracy ‘into more articulate, complex but also more efficient forms’, which did not

preclude ‘proposals for new bottom up and direct forms of democracy’.52

But these broader theoretical considerations were connected to a more concrete

evaluation of the existing political situation in Italy. Togliatti stated that in the

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 281

beginning the PCI had regarded the centre-left as a ‘more advanced ground of action’.

Negative factors had gradually taken over, however. What now prevailed was ‘the

[government’s] will to interrupt any attempt at agreement among the democratic forces

and to break down the unity of the working class and popular movement’.53 This

conclusion showed that the PCI’s provisional phase of ‘benevolent moratorium’

towards the centre-left had come to an end.

It is difficult to say whether the congress’s resolution on the ‘gradual depletion of

any innovative content in centre-left policies’ conceded more to those who felt the new

political experiment had been a manoeuvre of integration and stabilisation or to those

who had regarded the experiment as proof of a rupture in Italian capitalism. The latter

had believed their thesis was proved by the barrage of opposition to the reforming

programme coming from the economic establishment. The party’s final judgement was

left in abeyance; although the fact that Amendola – after eight years – was deprived of

responsibility for party organisation (a position second only in power to the secretary)

could be interpreted as a setback for the faction which assigned greater credence to the

centre-left. Moreover, Togliatti’s role of impartial referee and mediator had been

reaffirmed when he was re-elected party secretary. His charisma was apparently

undiminished and, for a party questioning its future choices, he represented the best

chance of maintaining unity.

At the close of the tenth congress, parliamentary elections were in the air. The PCI

group cast a no-confidence vote in the government, which Togliatti justified in

parliament on 18 January 1963.54 The no-confidence vote was the result of an

initiative by the PSI CC, which had announced a few days earlier that it regarded one

phase of the centre-left as closed and had therefore decided to dissociate itself from the

government. Togliatti was under no illusions about bringing down the Fanfani

government. He probably also recognised that there was no chance of realignment,

even temporarily, between the two parties of the left against the government. However,

he believed that the PCI should go into the coming elections as the opposition party

most consistently opposed to the practice of ‘bargaining and compromising with those

who won’t leave the old path’.

DEMANDS ‘OF A NEW KIND, WITH NEW TRAITS AND NEW CONTENT’

Togliatti turned 70 on 26 March 1963. There were no special celebrations by the party

to mark the event. The years of the cult of personality, even in the more subdued

Italian version, were definitely over. He was profoundly respected and admired within

the PCI leadership; the party rank-and-file had a genuine affection for him. Even his

opponents beyond the PCI paid tribute to his political acumen. Whilst the political

establishment and the press not obviously of the right were slowly abandoning the

clichés about ‘Moscow’s man’, they were still impressed by Togliatti’s tactical ability at

the head of an ever-growing political force that was well-organised, proud of its distinct

identity, and not afraid of being isolated in Italian society. For his part, Togliatti

projected a benevolent, almost humble self-image. From the answers to a questionnaire

from the women’s glossy Grazia in 1963, a self-portrait emerged that depicted the

virtues and habits of an old middle-class professor. He lived ‘in a house not very big

282 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

but right for his working needs, surrounded by a few trees, which makes it welcoming

and pleasant’. He loved ‘big rooms, uncluttered by furniture, with lots of light’, and

the walls had to accommodate his books (‘a few thousand’) and a few ‘masterpieces’

which had been given to him as presents (‘some Guttuso, one Mafai, one Capogrossi’).

He had some hobbies (gardening, photography, crosswords), but ‘he did not have

enough time for them’. History books were amongst his favourite reading. ‘I don’t

think I have ever had an active social life.’ If he had not been a politician, he revealed

unexpectedly, he would have liked to have been a gardener (‘but I believe that even

that would have led me [eventually] to politics’).55

Many people observed that in the last year of his life Togliatti seemed less distant

and more in need of friendship and human warmth. He was physically weakened as a

result of his very intense working life, now accompanied by a number of ailments. His

beliefs were unshaken; but he was questioning, more than previously, the meaning of

the path he had taken half-a-century before. Moreover, he had doubts about the future

of communism in Italy, the great hope that had made his life meaningful, and also

about the PCI, the party he had created, within a society undergoing profound change.

An echo of his more thoughtful attitude was evident in his contribution to the

election campaign of March–April 1963. Togliatti’s arguments were composed, his

reasoning wide-ranging. The stakes were high. If the PCI was unsuccessful, it might

disappear from the horizon in Italian political life, always a risk for the radical left in an

open political system.

Togliatti’s logic was clear and simple. A vote for the PCI was not, as its opponents

claimed, ‘useless’, because the communists had and would continue to play a unique

role in spurring on and ensuring a reform programme for which they could claim, at

least in part, paternity. The target of this barb was not so much the DC, but rather the

autonomist faction of the PSI. On the whole, his main concern about the post-election

situation was not so much an alliance between the DC and the centre-right parties, or

even a return to centrism. Rather, he was concerned that the new government, under

the banner of centre-left, would opt for a conservative solution, to continue the DC’s

‘political monopoly’ with the parties to its left, the PSI included, being assigned a

‘subaltern position of support and subjection’.56

But Togliatti was already looking beyond parliamentary balances and government

alchemies. This can be seen in his speech of 20 March in Bergamo, which preceded by

a few days Pope John XXIII’s friendly reception of the Soviet journalist Adzubej,

Khrushchev’s son-in-law and the editor of Izvestija. This speech also preceded the

publication of Pacem in terris, a most innovative encyclical by Pope John XXIII. In

making a distinction between ‘doctrines’ and ‘movements’, Pacem in terris conceded

that the latter ‘inasmuch as they comply with the dictates of reason and express the just

aspiration of the human being, contain positive elements and should gain approval’.

Togliatti had never completely severed the contact he had established in 1944 with the

Vatican through Franco Rodano and Don Giuseppe De Luca. In November 1961, for

instance, he had convinced Khrushchev to send a message to the Vatican to mark the

Pope’s 80th birthday.57 It is possible that he might have had previous knowledge of the

encyclical’s content. His own speech was delivered in the capital of the Pope’s birth

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 283

region, which was itself the centre of a very specific kind of social Catholicism. It may

well, therefore, have been designed to send a signal to the illustrious interlocutor.

Possibly in the same vein were the comments made during a speech to the CC of 25–

27 February. Togliatti had remarked that he sensed ‘new traits and [a] new content’ at

the heart of the demands being made in the intense collective mobilisation of a country

which was in turmoil. These were the claims of a society which wished to be guided ‘in

a organic, systematic, orderly way [...] according to specific choices and not abandoned

to the anarchy of capitalist production ruled only by profit’.58 Although the theme of

an orderly and harmonious society was deeply rooted in Togliatti’s political ethos,59 it

was significant that it re-emerged a few weeks before the Pope’s important appeal to

the Catholic world. Togliatti’s speech appeared at the dawning of a political season full

of uncertainty for the PCI. Forced to reconsider the party’s political alliances, Togliatti

was once again attempting to build a bridge to the Catholic world, always a special

object of his attention.

In reality, this ‘beginning of a dialogue, or more concisely “this reciprocal

acknowledgement of value” occurred at the peak of an electoral campaign in which the

DC placed great value on the anti-communist card’.60 Supported by the explicit

consent of the bishops, the DC was impervious to the appeals of Pope John XXIII and

the Vatican, and even tried to exorcise them. The elections of 28 April showed that the

DC’s anti-communist tactics had been counter-productive. The DC’s share of the vote

went down from 42.4 per cent to 38.3 per cent; the PSI registered a smaller decrease,

declining from 14.2 per cent to 13.8 per cent. According to all observers, however, the

most significant result in the elections was the unexpected success by the PCI, which

saw an increase in its share from 22.7 per cent to 25.3 per cent, and gained over a

million votes.

‘A NEW CHAPTER IN THE LONG HISTORY OF NATIONAL POLITICAL TRANSFORMISM’

In the weeks after the election, that followed the electoral results, Togliatti’s analysis

avoided triumphal tones and focused instead on the future. In interviews published on

5 May in L’Unità and 17 May in the Daily Express and New Statesman, he interpreted

the shift to the left in the vote of 28 April as the effect ‘of the rapid process of

economic and social transformation’ that Italy was experiencing. This process had

broken the ties which fastened ‘hundreds of thousands of men and women’ to ‘the old

economic and social order’. It had also increased ‘the imbalances, the contrasts, the

blatant injustices that were affecting the working masses’. But he went on to argue that

the electorate’s negative judgement was not directed at the ‘centre-left, but was instead

a verdict on the break up of its renewal’.61

Potential support for the new government, direct or indirect, would be offered by

the PCI, but on condition. An essential pre-requisite was ‘a peace policy’ which had to

insist ‘on the refusal of atomic weapons in Italy, on an agreement to de-nuclearise a

vast area in Europe, and on the proposal of a non-aggression pact between NATO and

the Warsaw bloc’. With regard to home policy, Togliatti simply stressed that ‘overall

the economic and social demands we and the socialists make will follow the same

284 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

direction and often coincide’, evidence that he would be satisfied by the

implementation of the programme of the previous government of the centre-left.

However, it soon became apparent that the DC, shocked by the election result, was

aiming at a very different kind of government. Clear signs of this were the isolation of

Fanfani, who was considered guilty of having made too many concessions to the

socialists, and the choice of Aldo Moro as the leader of the new government, regarded

by the centre faction (dorotea)62 of the DC as more reliable. He made it immediately

clear that his programme rested on ‘Atlantic faithfulness’ and ‘the challenge to

communism’, stressing that his government would resign if, for whatever reason, the

PCI vote should be required to pass any of his government’s measures.

Togliatti warned that Moro’s programme meant, ‘in real terms, isolating not us,

but the socialist party’, placing it ‘on the margins of the struggle for the radical renewal

of Italian society’.63 Indeed, a section of the PSI’s autonomist faction, led by Riccardo

Lombardi, seemed to be sensitive to this danger and vetoed participation in the

government, forcing Moro to revise his intentions. The result was a single-party DC

government led by Giovanni Leone and destined to last until just after the summer

break. Made confident by the April election results and sure of its monopoly over the

social opposition, the PCI adopted a lie in wait position, albeit tinged by a vein of

pessimism about the government’s ability to solve the social and economic problems of

the country.

Togliatti devoted the majority of a speech, delivered to the party’s CC on 24–26

July, to a meticulous polemic against the PSI. The impetus was given by a document

from the autonomist faction backing Moro’s aim of excluding the communists from

the government’s majority and questioning the communists’ persistent ambivalence

about issues of democracy and freedom. This touched a raw nerve in Togliatti, who

replied that only the PCI had ever carried out ‘systematic research’ on the topic of the

relation between democracy and socialism. At the same time, he attempted to define

the ‘watershed’ between ‘socialist’ and ‘reformist’ politics. Not only did the PCI leader

stress the basic difference between ‘structural reforms’, understood as the starting point

of the transformation of society’s economic structure, and reforms that were merely

corrective of some imbalances in a capitalist society, but he also insisted on the need to

identify ‘imperialism’ as the main enemy and the duty to show solidarity with regimes

which were ‘no longer capitalist’. His speech showed that there was still an unresolved

contradiction, a continuing partisan loyalty, confirming, at least in part, the

reservations of the PSI about co-operation with the PCI.64

The socialists, for their part, continued to subject the PCI to a democratic maturity

‘exam’, apparently an ideological precondition, and disconnected from the actual

situation in Italy. This resulted in the PSI’s failure to implement a genuine policy, not

only of structured, but even corrective, reforms. They gave themselves up defenceless to

the moderate centre-left embrace the DC had wished for. The politics of the Italian left

entangled itself in a contradiction that was never resolved. The awareness of this

impasse affected Togliatti, as an anguished torment, during the last months of his life.

In the last week of October, the 35th congress of the PSI marked the healing of the

fracture in the autonomist majority. Their motion in favour of the party’s entry into

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 285

government won 57.4 per cent of the votes, as opposed to the 39.3 per cent won by

the left. Togliatti’s criticisms were moderate. Despite everything, the congress had

highlighted that in the PSI ‘there are forces that understand what the real problems in

Italy are’ and ‘do not make the gross mistake of thinking that they are all due to

participating in government’.65 However, following the resignation of the Leone

administration and the formation of a government under Moro, the PCI’s ‘wait-and-

see’ attitude gave way to an increasingly negative judgement on what appeared to be ‘a

new chapter in the long history of national political transformism’.66 In fact, the forces

of the government majority were divided, especially on foreign economic policy; that is

to say, on relations between short-term and structural measures. The programme of the

future government was ‘pulled and dissected from every quarter’.67

Kennedy’s assassination on 22 December 1963 cast a threatening shadow over the

international situation. According to Togliatti, the assassination ‘had been planned

with the intention to change the fundamental course of current American policy’,

especially foreign policy.68 This increased his scepticism about the opportunities in

Italy for a genuine experiment in reformist government. If we compare the speech of

13 December 1963, in which Togliatti explained the reasons for the PCI vote against

the first Moro government, with the speech he had delivered on 5 March 1962 on the

inauguration of the Fanfani government, many substantial differences can be detected.

There was a more critical evaluation of the Moro government, which was criticised as

‘weak and undermined by serious internal contradictions’. Even more critical was the

evaluation of foreign policy: the mechanistic confirmation of the Atlantic alliance

could translate dangerously into supporting a project for the creation of a multilateral

atomic force, which could ‘bring to a halt the current process of détente in international

relations, and a return to the worst moments of the Cold War’. Faced with the

prospect of such a government, therefore, Togliatti no longer promised ‘a special kind

of opposition’, but only the pledge of not lapsing ‘into a priori and maximalist

opposition’. What troubled Togliatti above all was ‘the direct involvement [in

government] of a section of the socialist party’, whom he accused of having an

‘instrumental and subordinate’ role in an overall conservative design.69

Despite these reservations, Togliatti warned against the danger of taking for

granted the process of ‘social-democratisation’ of the PSI. He was totally opposed to a

split precipitated by the secession of the left of the party. He considered this would be

‘a calamity for the movement as a whole’.70 He only revised his evaluation, and then

only in part, after the 25 deputies of the socialist minority cast a vote of no-confidence

in Moro and, by so doing, caused a split and the formation of a new party.

At the fifth PCI organisational conference held in Naples on 12–15 March 1964,

Togliatti discussed the topic, which he considered increasingly fundamental, of the

‘democratic advance towards socialism’. After reiterating the indivisibility of the

‘ultimate goal’ and the ‘current struggle’, he also claimed that Italian communists had

had the intelligence and foresight to ‘disengage’ the ultimate objective from ‘the actual

models of other countries and other historical conditions’, and from the ‘errors and

horrors’ that had characterised them. Once again, he stressed the importance of a

dialogue with the Catholics:

286 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Our idea of socialism has its foundations […] also in the recognition of certain values: the

value of peace among peoples, of solidarity and fraternity among men, which means that men

do not exploit each other, do not kill each other, don’t try to cut each other’s throat […]

Now, we must admit that in the Christian view of the world there are values comparable to

these […] felt and hard-fought for earnestly by a sector of the Catholic world, which

understands the need to organise society on a different basis, in which these values are

acknowledged as the foundations necessary for a collective life.71

The urgent need to meet these new challenges, which he believed would be decisive

for the future of the idea he had worked for all his life, even made Togliatti forego his

meticulous organisational work. Shortly after the Naples conference, he wrote to

Longo asking to be relieved of ‘the working commitments which involved being a

member of the secretariat’. However, he added that it would have been a ‘mistake, even

a serious one’, for him to stop being editor of Rinascita, ‘since it is in that direction

(studying, writing and so on) that my commitment can continue and even increase’.

Togliatti claimed that the reasons for his request were his age (‘senectus ipsa morbus’)

and declining health, but he also hinted, without giving any detail, at ‘other reasons’,

which would justify his departure from the secretariat. No current records offer any

explanation for these reasons.72 It is recorded, however, in an unpublished statement,

which informed the CC that the ‘Direzione had considered valid and had approved the

request [and] had decided to assign, for the time being, to comrade Luigi Longo, vice-

secretary of the party, the working responsibilities of the secretariat.’

UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Togliatti’s departure from the secretariat enabled him to become more active in the

party’s international policy. Indeed, one of the reasons he had asked to be relieved from

this appointment may have been his wish to dedicate more time to this arena. In

August 1963, he wrote four articles for Rinascita. He was observing with increasing

concern the polemical exchange between the Soviets and the Chinese, which had

resumed in the spring of 1963. He undoubtedly sided with the CPSU position in

favour of peaceful co-existence in international relations. He categorically opposed the

CCP’s forceful condemnation of the nuclear test-ban treaty. He firmly defended the

Soviet decision to withhold nuclear know-how from China, because the Chinese

Republic, ‘where economic conditions and the life conditions of the masses are far

from being abundant’, could not afford ‘the enormous effort’ necessary to produce

nuclear weapons.73

Nevertheless, it was evident that the nature of the relationship between the Italian

and the Soviet party was changing. The response by the Italian communist press to the

excessive intrusion by the CPSU into Soviet cultural and religious matters, which

emerged in these months, was evidence that it was no longer taboo to criticise Moscow.

Even the PCI’s disagreement with the ‘dogmatic and sectarian’ stance of the Chinese

never slipped into abuse, but was instead accompanied by hopes of a debate ‘conducted

in a way that would strengthen, rather than break, and make more efficient the unity

of our whole movement’. However, Togliatti did not believe that a large communist

international meeting aimed at throwing all questions into the ring ‘and for all

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 287

questions find an adequate solution’, could be effective. ‘This form of unity,’ he

commented, ‘is no longer suitable in the current circumstances.’ Even more

‘unrealistic’, he warned, would have been the decision to delegate ‘to a single party the

task of mapping out the path for all other parties and control how they moved along

it’. ‘In fact, we have reached a stage marked by the autonomy of each party, which

excludes having a leading “guide” and clearly defines everybody’s particular

responsibilities.’74

These were clear warnings to the Soviet leadership. On 26 October, a resolution by

the PCI CC repeated that an international conference, whenever it was held, would

probably have a negative outcome for the communist movement: either a worsening of

the existing differences, with a possible split, or a formal, but substantially

unsatisfactory, compromise.75 The PCI, however, did volunteer to try to bridge the

divide between the Soviet and Chinese positions.

In January 1964, Togliatti added a further thread to the web of ‘diplomatic’

relations he was patiently weaving. He went to Belgrade, where he had a friendly

meeting with Tito. The two men agreed that at last the wrongs inflicted on the

Yugoslav communists in 1948 should be ‘corrected’, by recognising without

reservation the uniqueness of the Yugoslav socialist model.76 This journey to Belgrade

gained added significance when viewed in the light of the renewed attacks made by the

Chinese against ‘revisionism’. The Chinese ideological offensive had as its target not

only the Yugoslav League, but also (and by now openly) the Soviet party leadership. In

addition, some of their criticism had already been directed at the PCI. When

responding, Togliatti proved resolute in his analysis of the Chinese position, but

equally resolute in his refusal to countenance a conference of the communist parties.

He wanted to ‘avoid a summary excommunication method’. He suggested instead the

notion of a ‘challenge’ to move on ‘to overcome and eliminate ingrained and

dangerous mistakes, sectarian conclusions and dull dogmatisms’. He offered an

unapologetic reiteration of his own ‘revisionism’:

We must have the courage to tell the Chinese leaders that if revisionism means the

development of our doctrine under conditions radically different from the past, and thus the

reapplication of method to a new form and content, neither of which could have been

foreseen, fifty, or twenty, or even ten years ago, we not only do not condemn this

development and are not afraid of it, but we also wish for it, and consider it our main duty.77

By claiming a creative aspect to Marxism, Togliatti had gone much further than

merely legitimising the PCI strategy. He suggested the need for a more general renewal

of the aims of the international communist movement, acknowledging that ‘the

workers’ movement of the West has not yet completely and satisfactorily fulfilled its

duty towards the great colonial liberation movement.’ He also admitted that the idea

‘that peaceful struggle should be viewed as stagnation or relinquishment and the non-

peaceful struggle, when necessary, should be condemned as an adventure’, was

dangerous and simplistic.

288 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

These comments revealed a difference of opinion with Moscow, which had a

tendency to overestimate its own role and those of the socialist countries as the main

engine of the international revolutionary movement. This difference of opinion

translated, between 1963 and 1964, into an increasingly active ‘foreign policy’ of the

PCI, characterised by trips of important delegations to Cuba, Algeria, Egypt and

Vietnam.78 In effect the method of ‘polycentrism’ was again employed, although the

term was not in use any more.

Although the Soviets did not attack the PCI position overtly, they regarded it with

suspicion. The CPSU had no intention of abandoning its call for an international

conference, and nearly a month passed before Pravda published an account of

Togliatti’s speech to the CC of 22–24 April 1964, in which the PCI’s reservations were

made explicit. At the end of May, Togliatti’s decision to republish his correspondence

with Gramsci from October 1926 may have added to this covert skirmish. Gramsci’s

warning about avoiding ‘imposing a humiliating victory’ on the opposition, which

Togliatti had sent to the Bolshevik leadership, acquired a 1964 patina, even though

Togliatti had in 1926 decided to align with the majority position of Stalin and

Bukharin.79

THE OFFENSIVE BY THE ‘FOURTH PARTY’

In the summer of 1964, communist criticism of the Moro government became more

severe. Togliatti had already begun the critique in February when he invoked De

Gasperi’s famous expression by stating that ‘“the fourth party”, the party of big

monopoly capital, assumes it can assert its supremacy unchallenged’. It, Togliatti

continued, was ‘prepared to tolerate at the highest levels of government a political

organisation with optimistic ideas of renewal, but only on condition that this over-

ambitious idea never translates into willpower and that economic power is firmly

retained in its own grasp’.80 In fact, the clash inside the government between two

opposing political–economic positions was becoming sharper as each tried to confront

the worsening economic situation, characterised among other things by rising inflation.

On 27 May, the DC conservative wing took the initiative and caused a break-up. The

Roman daily Il Messaggero published the text of a private letter from the chancellor of

the exchequer, Emilio Colombo, addressed to Moro. The letter talked of ‘the mortal

danger facing not only the economy but also democracy’, and denounced the socialists’

insistence ‘on a dogmatic politics of structural reform which no one else understands’.

On 30 May, Carli, the governor of the Bank of Italy, declared that in order to contain

inflation and encourage a recovery in industrial production, it was necessary to

facilitate investment, increase profits, and cap wages and salaries. This was the ‘incomes

policy’, with which the entire conservative wing of the majority group in the DC –

supported by the world of finance and most of industry – proposed to overcome the

crisis.

Togliatti took a firm stand against this policy. He proposed instead a ‘democratic

planning’ model which, ‘with measures to control and intervene in the sphere of

economic decisions, was not intended so much to stop the action with which the forces

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 289

of the working class were trying to contest the laws of capitalist profit, but rather to

support this action in checking the supremacy of these laws’.81

The government crisis that began at the end of June was undoubtedly caused by

the disagreement over economic policy. Even so, the resignation of the Moro

government was officially precipitated by the abstention of the majority non-Catholic

parties on the public education budget, which had allocated an increase in funds for

private schools. Togliatti believed that the DC had wanted the crisis ‘as an unavoidable

and desirable outcome’. His evaluation of socialist participation in government was

deeply negative: ‘letting themselves go, day-by-day, to the empiricism of the

governmental activity, the socialists have lost sight of the bigger picture’. The PCI

leader acknowledged that ‘the number of mistakes made by the socialists raised serious

problems’.82 He asked himself a fundamental question: ‘in what measure were the elites

in the Italian high, agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie, prepared to tolerate even a few

moderate interventions by bourgeois reformism?’ The answer, in essence, could only be

negative: ‘the only effective structural reform has been the increase in wages which the

trade union movement managed to win.’83 In assessing what was the de facto defeat of

the centre-left, he found a new element emerging with serious implications for the

chances of a ‘peaceful and democratic progress towards socialism’. Togliatti

commented, ‘this is the problem at the root of the current Italian crisis. However, it

will certainly come to light, in the coming years, in the whole of the European West.’84

A month later, in one of the most remarkable passages of the Yalta memorandum (see

below), Togliatti would indicate that ‘the central issue in political battles nowadays in

countries where the communist movement has become strong such as in Italy (and in

France)’, was whether the struggle for ‘a progressive change from within’ a state ‘which

has not changed its bourgeois state structure’ was possible.

Undoubtedly, the socialists’ pliability in the face of the conditions laid down by the

DC for the continuation of the centre-left experiment, which involved sacrificing or

postponing indefinitely proposed reforms, was the principal reason for the negative

assessment Togliatti gave in parliament on 4 August on the second Moro government’s

programme. He was not prepared to justify PSI weakness because of the ‘state of

necessity’, which Nenni referred to in Avanti! on 26 July, where he had argued that the

only alternative to the centre-left would have been a right-wing ‘emergency’

government ‘with a fascist-agrarian-industrial content, against which the memory of

July 1960 would have been but a pale comparison’. It is not clear what either Togliatti

or Nenni actually knew about the subversive plot, the so-called ‘Piano Solo’, which the

Carabinieri commander, General Di Lorenzo, had been planning for some months.

The effect and magnitude of Di Lorenzo’s stratagem only came to light years later. At

the time, Togliatti was not persuaded by the ‘appalling hypothesis of an authoritarian

military coup’, and he thought it was ‘pure nonsense to compare the situation of

1921–22 with the current one’. ‘To raise the spectre of an authoritarian military coup

by the right in order to impose the acceptance of a wrong policy, precisely the policy

which the right is applauding […] is therefore a serious mistake.’85

290 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

THE YALTA MEMORANDUM

Five days after what turned out to be his last intervention in parliament, on 9 August,

Togliatti left for the Soviet Union in the company of Nilde Iotti and their daughter

Marisa. Two days previously, the president of the republic, Antonio Segni, had

suffered a brain haemorrhage, adding further uncertainty to the already complicated

Italian political life. Togliatti was tired and would have preferred to spend his holiday

on the peaceful mountains of Val d’Aosta that he loved. But he felt he had a

responsibility from being a senior member of the international communist movement

currently experiencing a serious crisis. The CPSU had already decided to call a

preliminary meeting of the world conference of the communist parties in December.

The invitation had reached Rome a few days before Togliatti’s departure. Recent

documentation shows that Togliatti had actually resigned himself to the idea of the

conference and, overcoming some resistance within the PCI leadership, had defended

the need to participate in the preliminary meeting and to make this decision public at

the right moment. However, despite the reassurances issued by the CPSU, he was still

concerned that the conference would inaugurate the formal appearance of the Sino-

Soviet split, and he wanted to confront Khrushchev in person about it.86 Perhaps he

also wanted to gauge Khrushchev’s personal position, which it was whispered was

becoming less secure within the CPSU leadership, at the moment when the

international situation was becoming more strained following the first US

bombardment of North Vietnam.

Togliatti arrived in Moscow on 11 August. He was welcomed by a CPSU

delegation led by Brezhnev and informed that his meeting with Khrushchev had been

postponed by a few days because the Soviet leader was visiting the Virgin Islands.

Togliatti did not hide his disappointment. However, he was compelled to follow his

hosts’ advice to wait for Khrushchev in Yalta on the Black Sea where the climate was

mild.87 In the few hours before his departure for the Crimea, Togliatti wrote an aide

memoire on the major international issues he wanted to discuss in the meeting with

Khrushchev. The text was probably meant to be circulated to a small circle in the

CPSU leadership.

Even though the document, which is normally described as ‘the Yalta

memorandum’, contained many of the ideas that Togliatti had been working on for

the past two years, its content was a qualitative leap ahead of his previous reflections.88

It went well beyond his desire to avoid a split in the international communist

movement to include a redefinition of a number of crucial political and theoretical

issues.

The memorandum opened with a rather explicit criticism of the method employed

to fight ‘the secessionist activity of the Chinese communists’, i.e., replying to their

attack ‘with an overall ideological and propagandist polemic’ instead of an effective

political initiative. As an example of how the Chinese could be ‘defeated not only with

words but with facts’, Togliatti indicated the importance of ‘a meeting at international

level, called for by some communist parties in the West, with the wide participation of

representatives from democratic countries of the “Third World” and their progressive

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 291

movements, in order to implement an actual system of co-operation and support for

these movements’. Once again, the option of an international conference of

communist parties alone was regarded with apprehension. It would have been merely

an occasion to increase divisions at a time when the worsening international situation

was making ‘the unity of all socialist forces […] against the reactionary groups of

imperialism [...] an unavoidable necessity’. Togliatti continued unambiguously: ‘It is

unthinkable to exclude from this unity China and the Chinese communists.’

The analysis he presented of the international situation was pervaded by

considerable pessimism. He was concerned by an American foreign policy shift to the

right on the eve of the US presidential elections. With a candidate such as Goldwater

standing, and with the acceleration of the process of monopolistic concentration in

Europe, ‘the foundations of a concrete reactionary politics’ were being strengthened.

Because the Yalta memorandum was off the record, he was able to express his opinions

with unusual frankness:

It is not right to talk about socialist countries (the Soviet Union included) as if in those

countries everything was always fine […] In fact there are difficulties, contradictions and new

problems which emerge and need to be presented as they actually are.

The most serious problem, Togliatti insisted, was ‘overcoming the regime of

limitation and suppression of the democratic and personal freedoms that Stalin had

put in place’. Clearing this hurdle had been marked by a ‘slowness and resistance’,

which was difficult to explain, given that ‘the political and economical isolation caused

by capitalism did not exist any more and socialist economic development had achieved

huge successes’.

It is not possible to know what Khrushchev’s reaction would have been to these

criticisms, nor is it possible to gauge, once they were made public, how they

contributed to weaken his position within the Soviet leadership. The frequency with

which the memorandum made positive reference to the ‘positions of the twentieth

congress’, which Khrushchev continued to jealously defend, indicated that his

intention had been to support rather than undermine Khrushchev’s authority as has

been alleged.89 This, indeed, was probably Longo’s intention when he decided to

publish the document soon after Togliatti’s death, even though he had first asserted

that the PCI wanted to continue along the path of autonomy and of ‘unity in diversity’

on which it had embarked.

THE LAST DAYS, THE DEATH, THE TRIBUTES

On the evening of 13 August, while he was visiting an international camp of young

communist pioneers in Artek, Togliatti suffered a serious brain haemorrhage. His

condition was too serious for him to be moved to nearby Yalta or Simferopol. A small

pavilion was mounted in the Artek camp where he was given treatment. News of the

illness reached Italy during the night. The PCI deputy secretary, Luigi Longo, and

Togliatti’s personal doctor, Mario Spallone, both flew to the Crimea the next morning.

Over the following days, other PCI leaders joined them.90

292 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Togliatti’s condition was very serious, although there was a slight improvement

between 16–17 August, when he regained consciousness intermittently. On 20 August,

the most eminent Soviet neurosurgeon, Arutionov, carried out an explorative drilling

of the patient’s skull in the hope of locating the haemorrhage. He failed, however,

because the bleeding was too deep. Togliatti died at 13.20 on 21 August 1964,.

In Italy, reports of his suffering had been followed with great interest and emotion,

not only by thousands of communists but also by men and women from every walk of

life and political belief. On 15 August, Don Giuseppe Dossetti, who had worked

alongside him in the preparations for the Constituent Assembly, wrote a touching

personal letter to Togliatti.91 Even Pope Paul VI, from the balcony of Castel Gandolfo,

offered a prayer for the Angelus on 15 August, without mentioning his name, to the

Madonna ‘mother of mercy’, on his behalf.

On the afternoon of 21 August, the first people to see Togliatti’s body and to pay

their respects were Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. They made up the first

guard of honour standing by the coffin, followed by the pioneers who had listened to

his last speech. On 22 August, Pravda was edged in black. The front page-and-a-half

were devoted to his biography. The solemn tributes from a country that Togliatti had

regarded until the end of his life as ‘the motherland of socialism’ were clear testimony

of a profound reciprocal relationship. His attachment had survived the Soviet Union’s

victories and tragedies; he had unhesitatingly identified with both. However, the

tributes at the funeral that took place in Rome on 25 August 1964, attended by

hundreds of thousands of people, were also impressive evidence of the close relation

that Togliatti’s party had been able to establish with Italian society.

‘A show of strength rather than emotion,’ commented Pietro Nenni in his diary.

‘In this respect […] Togliatti-like funerals, or in other words an event dominated by

the idea of strength, as everything was in the activity of Stalin’s communist

generation’.92 Nenni’s comment captured only part of the truth, however. A moving

passage by Carlo Levi captured the rest:

Clearly the numerous crowds were not there to show organisational strength, nor because of

an irrational and sentimental impulse for someone who had become a mythical figure […]

They were there representing the real Italy, everyone … driven by a shared and conscious

desire to bear witness […] to say something together; to affirm what Togliatti had

represented, the profound symbolism of his name was in Italy a poignant expression. Their

collective presence declared: ‘We are here, we are involved and we are not turning back, in the

shadow of civic non-existence’.93

Beyond the formal expressions of condolences, it was evident that respect for

Togliatti was widespread. The tributes paid to the communist leader were combined

with the first attempts at analysis and review of his life. In this respect, the balanced

comment in Voce Repubblicana stood out: ‘Togliatti had the merit of having made the

PCI a large and accountable party, with a place in the dialectic of political forces and

power issues in the state, of having gathered the masses into an organisation which did

not distance itself from, but rather participated, at all levels, in the life of national

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 293

institutions.’94 The comment by Eugenio Scalfari, editor of L’Espresso, was more critical

but also more wide-ranging:

[Togliatti] has been able […] to preserve the unity of his party by adapting as necessary to

reality and by making subtle changes of direction. This strategy enabled the PCI to avoid

crises which would have been fatal for the working class, for the left, and for the country.

There is another side to the coin, however. Togliatti’s realism ultimately absorbed all the

elements of opposition and novelty that emerged within the PCI, preventing those thorough

ideological and political revisions that are a necessary complement to a complete democratic

involvement of the masses clustered around the PCI.95

We should also note the comments of three prominent intellectuals. Elio Vittorini,

although recalling moments of disagreement with Togliatti, expressed a clear

judgement that is still valid over 40 years later: ‘[If] there is democracy in Italy, much

of the credit is due to the PCI; and if the PCI contributed significantly to Italian

democracy, then the credit is principally Togliatti’s.’96 Italo Calvino summed up the

meaning of a generational path: ‘When we were 20, the very idea of revolution became

connected to his style of arguing, his wisdom, his balanced strength, his belonging to a

vast and ancient cultural tradition.’97 Lastly, Jean Paul Sartre captured better than

anyone else one of the most significant aspects of Togliatti’s personality:

He was pig-headed, he did not like self-criticism: his first reaction towards an opponent was to

attack. Later, once the conversation had come to an end, he would continue it within himself,

he would carefully gauge the pros and cons and – a rare attitude in a leader – at times he was

not afraid to say he was wrong.98

The most genuine emotional comment about Togliatti’s human experience was

made in the commemorative speech delivered by Pietro Ingrao, on 2 September, in

parliament. After recalling Togliatti’s ‘eventful life’, he said:

Amongst the trials, the hard and bitter struggles, he stood erect, with such a strength that it

looked as if he did not need help and as if there was no personal anguish; and it was not true,

it could not have been true. What, rather, is true is that he always looked up at the horizon

beyond his individual experience, and there he could find a troubled peace, serenity and quiet.

This is the reason why labourers, factory workers and peasants thought of him as their

safeguard.99

A MAN BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The temptation to read and analyse the history of what Hobsbawm has called ‘the

short twentieth century’, according to a synoptic analysis of communism and fascism

has enticed many scholars recently, from Nolte to Furet. It is an analysis, however, that

should be approached with reservations. There is no doubt that in Togliatti’s mental

make-up and, no less, in his personal and political life his intimate involvement in

communism and protracted encounters with fascism left an indelible mark. He was

undoubtedly one of the strongest personalities in international communism, whilst his

294 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

political experience as an Italian political leader was indissolubly connected with the

struggle between fascism and anti-fascism. From this point of view, he was one of the

leading figures of the ‘European civil war’ which was the principal concern of all

Europeans in the interwar period, but which also continued under different,

nevertheless pervasive, guises until 1989 and the emblematic fall of the Berlin wall.

The incubation process, the birth and first stages of development of Italian fascism

were the horizons of Togliatti’s cultural and political development, and marked him

more deeply than the October Revolution. The fertile ground from which Mussolini’s

movement emerged, dominated by irrational influences, by the extreme cult of

personality, by the idea of purification through violence and war, represented the

negative terms of reference against which Togliatti (and Gramsci) developed – not

without inner turmoil – a militant political commitment. Togliatti’s antipathy to

fascism was, in the beginning, dictated by a moral revulsion and a profound opposition

to the historical defects of the Italian state which had allowed fascism to take root as

much as by Marxist analysis.

After the tragic defeat of the Italian working-class movement, he was determined to

thoroughly understand the nature of the opponent. His quest formed the basis for

constant research into what fascism meant in Italian history and how it was affecting

the rest of Europe. Although sometimes contained by ideological schemes and tactical

acrobatics that diminished its validity, his research – too little known and very often

underestimated, especially outside Italy – raised Togliatti, both as a political leader and

also as an intellectual, to being a key participant in the history of the twentieth century.

On the other hand, along his personal route, the scheme suggested by Nolte –of

fascism as an answer to Bolshevism – was completely reversed. Togliatti’s attachment

to pre-war socialism was tepid and skin-deep. His support for the Russian Revolution

was initially based on only distant and indirect knowledge. Even his passionate

participation in the councils’ period seemed more the product of a specific Turin

reality than the conscious translation of the Bolshevik model, which was already

leaving the experience of the first soviet institutions behind. It was rather the defeat

suffered by the Italian workers’ movement, not only during the ‘red years’, but also in

the crucial phase when Mussolini’s regime was constituted and became stable, that tied

Togliatti indissolubly to a project of global revolution in which the initial Italian

defeats were merely episodes, lost battles, in a war that would ultimately be won. To be

part of a grand project for the redemption of humanity, whose guide and engine was

Soviet Russia, provided an indestructible anchorage to an ideal in the struggle against

fascism. Croce’s historicism, which formed Togliatti’s cultural background, gave this

choice, which came to maturation between 1924 and 1926, a strength and conviction

which no subsequent development was able to shake. For him, only the ‘world party of

the revolution’ as a collective organisation, voice and instrument of the rationality of

history, could interpret its purposes.

It was his commitment to this leading idea, together with a consummate political

ability, which enabled Togliatti to accept and share, even whilst paying a very high

moral price, the most tragic moments of Stalinism without being totally crushed. He

never really appreciated the searing contradiction between ‘accomplished communism’

THE LAST YEARS, THE LAST QUESTION 295

and the vast, collective hopes of emancipation that the October events had raised all

over the world, because he regarded the errors and horrors of Stalinism as incidental

accidents on the way towards the achievement of a grand historical design. At the same

time, his political and intellectual talents always found ample scope to act creatively

during those crucial moments when the vice of ‘historical’ necessity loosened and the

opportunity to act not according to moral precept, but by decisive political action,

became concrete. His personal imprint on events can be clearly seen during the popular

front period, in the Spanish war, and when, after 1941, the war acquired an

unequivocally anti-fascist cast.

The watershed of 1944 brought to an end an experience that had been marked by

an underlying thread of continuity. Returning to Italy in a leading role offered

Togliatti new room for initiative. The awareness about the determining role of the

international situation, which he had developed during his years in the Comintern,

never left him and, in many ways, became the compass for his political activity in Italy.

In this respect, his perspective was fundamentally different from those of any other

political figures in the country. But from that moment, despite the continuity of his

organic, deep connection with the international communist movement, the centre of

Togliatti’s analysis and activity definitively shifted. His own attempt was protracted.

After the beginning of the Cold War, he rejected the idea of dividing the world in two

opposing camps. Later, his strategy of supporting and exploiting any opening in that

division showed that the wish to develop a different path for the PCI from that

followed by the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe was deep seated and

passionate. The central aim of his project became the invention of a new role for a

communist party in an environment of Western political democracy and, in practical

terms, to fully integrate the PCI in a republican democratic system.

It is likely that, perhaps until the eve of his death, Togliatti either did not

appreciate or refused to recognise the contradiction between this ‘nationalisation’ of

the PCI and its affiliation to an international communist movement, of which the

Soviet Union was the inescapable centre. Nor did he see a contradiction between the

PCI’s role as the uncompromising guardian of the democratic system in Italy and the

self-evident supremacy for all communists of the Soviet ‘socialist democracy’ model. In

Togliatti’s view, at least until 1962, the Soviet model was the target to achieve, albeit in

a distinctive way.

The fact remains that under Togliatti’s leadership, and due mainly to his impetus

(he had constantly to overcome a covert, but very strong, internal opposition), the PCI

changed into the most convinced guarantor of the republican Constitution.

Consequently, the PCI definitively contributed to ensure the preservation and

development of parliamentary democracy in Italy. Its militants accordingly developed

within a democratic system that experienced much civil growth, transforming millions

of ‘subjects’ or ‘rebels’ into ‘citizens’. It was Togliatti, using caution and trying to make

the operation as painless as possible, who led his party away from Stalinism. Even the

PCI’s formal adherence to Leninism gradually faded away. The model of society it

proposed increasingly acquired the features of an advanced parliamentary democracy,

296 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

although the lack of understanding of certain underlying traits in the development of

Italian capitalism weakened the strength of its strategy for structural reform.

Over forty years after his death, when the historical experience of communism in

Europe can be said to have finished, Togliatti’s place within history is inevitably clearer

than in the past. From within the limits of his world and personal experience as a

communist who grew up in the school of the Third International, Togliatti more than

anyone else of his generation and similar experience questioned the reasons, values and

perspectives of the ‘other world’. More than anybody else, he maintained an open

channel with its lay and Catholic culture and especially in the last few years of his life,

he recognised the existence of a border between these two worlds, but also the

possibility of crossing it.

ENDNOTES

Contributions by Togliatti and other members of the PCI executive, secretariat and central committee

from 1944 to 1964, for which dates are given, are – unless stated – from the minutes of each of these

meetings. These are preserved in the Archivio del PCI (APC), Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, and classified

in chronological order. Togliatti’s reports to the central committees were also published in L’Unità, in

many cases reproducing faithfully the text preserved in the archive. These are referenced in the notes.

Most of the documents quoted that are preserved in the Russian State Archive of Social and

Political History (RGASPI) are not in Italian but French, German, Russian and Spanish. Translations

are by the author. The minutes of the PCI executive between 1946 and 1948 were published in R.

Martinelli and M. L. Righi (eds), La politica del Partito comunista italiano nel periodo costituente. I

verbali della Direzione tra il V e il VI Congresso (Rome, 1992). Throughout the text, the acronym PCI

(Partito Comunista Italiano) is used. However, for the period from 1921 to a date not clearly defined

between 1943 and 1944, the official name was Partito Comunista d’Italia.

ARCHIVE MATERIAL

ACS Archivio centrale dello Stato, Rome

APC Archivio del PCI, Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Rome

APT (CS) Archivio Palmiro Togliatti. Carte scrivania, Fondazione Istituto Gramsci,

Rome

APT (CFA) Archivio Palmiro Togliatti. Documentations collected by Ferri and Amadesi

RCCHIDNI Rossiskij Centr Chranenija i Izucenija Noveisceij Istorii, Mosca

RGASPI Rossiiskii gosudarstyennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii

OEUVRES AND NEWSPAPERS

AF Annali dell’istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

APS Archivio Pietro Secchia 1945–73 (Milan, 1979)

CCT M. and M. Ferrara, Conversando con Togliatti (Rome, 1953)

DP P. Togliatti, Discorsi parlamentari, 2 volumes (Rome, 1984)

O P. Togliatti, Opere, 6 volumes (Rome, 1967–84)PT E. Ragionieri, Palmiro Togliatti. Per una biografia politica e intellettuale

(Rome, 1976)

R La Rinascita, later Rinascita (1944–89)

SPCI P. Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista italiano, 5 vols (Turin, 1967–75)

TAC Togliatti negli anni del Comintern (1926–43), A. Agosti (ed.), Annali 1998

(Rome, 2000)

TISD A. Agosti, La Terza Internazionale. Storia documentaria, 3 vols (Rome,

1974–79)

U L’Unità (1924–95)

298 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Preface

1. Especially in J. M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism

(Stanford, 1967), and G. Williams, Proletarian Order. Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the

Origins of Communism in Italy 1911–21 (London 1975).

2. E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Revolution, particularly Socialism in One Country, vol. III

(London 1964) and Foundations of Planned Economy, vol. III, part II (London 1976); E. H. Carr, The

Twilight of Comintern 1930–35 (London 1982); J. Degras, The Communist International: Documents, 3

vols. (London, 1956–65). In his last book Carr thoroughly investigated the role played by Togliatti in

the Spanish civil war, also publishing some excerpts of his reports to Moscow: E. H. Carr, The

Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (London, 1984).

3. P. Togliatti, On Gramsci and Other Writings (London, 1979), p. 16.

4. K. McDermott and J. Agnew, The Comintern. A History of International Communism from

Lenin to Stalin (London 1996); and also, very recently, R. Service, Comrades! A History of World Com-

munism (Cambridge, 2007). The best overall account in English of the PCI’s history from the 1920s to

the death of Enrico Berlinguer is J. B. Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti

to Berlinguer (London 1986).

5. D. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity. Italian Communism and the Communist World

(Cambridge, 1968).

6. D. Sassoon, The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party (London, 1981, first published in

Italian in 1980 with the title of Togliatti e la via italiana alsocialismo); G. Amyot, The Italian

Communist Party: The Crisis of the Popular Front Strategy (London, 1981).

7. P. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–88 (London, 1991,

first published in Italian in 1989). P. McCarthy, The Crisis of Italian State. From the Origins of the Cold

War to the Fall of Berlusconi and Beyond (London 1997).

8. S. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow, The Italian Challenge and the Italian of Mass

Culture 1943–91 (Durham, 2000, first published in Italian in 1995); a recent and very original –

though questionable – interpretation of Italian Communism is G. Vatalaro, Politics and Ideology: A

Reassessment of the Nature of the PCI’s Communist Identity (Ph.D Dissertation, Swansea 2005).

9. R. Gualtieri (ed.), Il PCI nell’Italia repubblicana 1943–91 (Rome, 2001).

10. R. Gualtieri, Il PCI , la DC e il “vincolo esterno”. Una proposta di periodizzazione, in Il PCI

nell’Italia repubblicana, p. 60.

11. Among these are especially distinguished British historians: above all the pages

dedicated to the PCI in D. Sassoon, One Hundred Years Socialism: The West European Left in

the Twentieth Century (London, 1996), and in G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the

Left in Europe 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002).

Chapter One

1. APT, CFA, 1962

2. Togliatti provided Marcella and Maurizio Ferrara, two communist journalists he was very

close to, with a detailed recollection of his childhood and adolescence in CCT. Also, S. Belligni, Vita di

Palmiro Togliatti. Gli anni giovanili 1893–1921 (dissertation, University of Turin, 1967–68); G.

Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti (Bari, 1973), pp. 3–10.3. See 1961 interview with Licia Perelli in Noi Donne, 20 August 1964; U, 1 September 1964.

4. It is worth noting that the name Palmiro was given to Togliatti for his having been born on

Palm Sunday, while the names of at least two of his siblings, Eugenio and Maria Cristina, recurred in

the history of the Sabaudan dynasty.

5. Belligni, Vita di Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 9–22.6. The episode is recalled in ibid., p. 16.

7. The letter to Nilde Iotti was published, in part, in U, 26 March 1993. For the link with the

mountains, see the interview with Togliatti in U, 27 August 1952.

ENDNOTES 299

8. CCT, pp. 5–6.9. See note 3.

10. It would seem that Antonio Togliatti was transferred to Sassari as a punishment, a cash

shortage having been verified in the bookkeeping of the Convitto di Sondrio. If this is true, it is another

surprising if partial analogy with the biography of Gramsci, whose childhood was profoundly marked

by the incarceration of his father under the accusation of peculation.

11. On the years of the lyceum, see above all the meticulous research of G. M. Cherchi,

Togliatti a Sassari 1908–11. Una provincia sarda nell’età giolittiana (Rome, 1972).

12. P. Spriano, Storia di Torino operaia e socialista. Da De Amicis a Gramsci (Turin, 1972), p.

237.

13. See Terracini’s testimony in his preface to G. Carbone and L. Lombardo Radice, Vita di A.

Gramsci (Rome, 1952).

14. CCT, p. 18.

15. G. C. Bergami, Cinquant’anni di cultura militante a Torino. Da Graf a Gobetti 1876–1925

(Turin, 1979); G. Bravo, L’ideologia del movimento operaio, in Storia di Torino, vol. 7, Da capitale

politica a capitale industriale 1869–1915 (Turin, 2001), pp. 146–50.

16. ‘Pensatore e uomo d’azione’, in P. Togliatti, Gramsci (Rome, 1967), p. 66. This is the

speech on Gramsci that Togliatti gave in the Aula Magna at Turin University on 23 April 1949, which

is not only a testimony but a stimulating historical analysis.

17. See La Stampa, 10 December 2004, in which Angelo D’Orsi writes on Togliatti’s thesis.

18. CCT, p. 22.

19. Ibid., p. 21.

20. ‘Pensatore e uomo d’azione’, p. 64.

21. CCT, p. 29.

22. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 17.

23. S. F. Romano, Gramsci (Turin, 1965), p. 108.

24. ‘Il presidente Wilson’, O, I, p. 55.

25. Both articles are in ibid., pp. 3–9.

26. A. Leonetti, Da Andria contadina a Torino operaia (Urbino, 1974), p. 233.

27. U. Terracini, ‘Con Gramsci e Togliatti all “Ordine Nuovo”’, U, 22 August 1965.

28. M. Montagnana, ‘Cultura e propaganda socialista’, L’Ordine Nuovo, 16 August 1919.

29. L. Nieddu, Antonio Gramsci. Storia e mito (Venezia, 2004), pp. 77–9, has hypothesised that

the Soviet commercial delegation to Rome may have contributed to the financing of L’Ordine Nuovo

through Aron Wizner, a Polish communist then resident in Turin; but Nieddu provides no relevant

documentary evidence.

30. ‘Il programma dell’ “Ordine Nuovo”’, published in the magazine on 14 August 1920, and

now in A. Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–20 (Turin, 1987).

31. Terracini, ‘Con Gramsci e Togliatti’.

32. ‘Parole oneste sulla Russia’, O, I, p. 24.

33. Ibid., pp. 40 and 20.

34. ‘Dopo Caporetto’ by Giuseppe Prezzolini, in ibid., p. 72.

35. ‘Parassiti della cultura’, O, I, pp. 28–9.

36. P. Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale’, in P. Spriano (ed.), Scritti

politici (Turin, 1960), p. 285.

37. ‘Che cos’è il liberalismo?’, O, I, pp. 63 and 67–8.

38. On the ‘editorial coup d'état’, see Gramsci, ‘Il programma’ and Togliatti in CCT, p. 52.

39. ‘Lo Stato del lavoro’, O, I, p. 108.

40. G. A., Williams. Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of

Communism in Italy, 1911–21 (New York, 1975).

41. The intense propaganda activity undertaken by Togliatti at the end of 1919 is documented

in police sources. See, for example, the telegrams of the prefect of Turin on 2 and 31 October 1919 in

ACS, PS 1919, folder 126.

300 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

42. The term Direzione was later used from 1944 in relation to the communist party. In the

earlier period, the leading organs were the ‘ufficio politico’, ‘segreteria’, ‘esecutivo’ and, of course, the

‘comitato centrale’. We have retained the Italian word Direzione throughout the text.

43. So wrote Gramsci in a letter to Serrati on 21 February 1920, in A. Gramsci, Lettere 1908–

26 (Turin, 1992), pp. 98–9.

44. S. Noiret, Massimalismo e crisi dello Stato liberale. Nicola Bombacci 1879–1924 (Milan,

1992), pp. 346–51; O, I, pp. 141–7.

45. L. Paggi, Antonio Gramsci e il moderno Principe (Rome, 1970), p. 308.

46. Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo, pp. 510–17.

47. ‘Guerra di classe’, O, I, p. 162.

48. The Camere del Lavoro (Chambers of Labour), born in the late nineteenth century, were

trade union structures organised on a territorial basis, aiming to protect the workers of all branches of

industry, including the unemployed. They generally became more radical than the craft unions, and

were one of the main targets of fascist violence in 1920–22.

49. For differentiation in the Ordinenuovo-ite fraction, starting from the report by Tasca to the

Camera del Lavoro, see L’Ordine Nuovo, 5, 12, 19 June and 3 July 1920. Also F. Ferri, La situazione

interna della sezione socialista torinese nell'estate 1920 (Rome, 1958), pp. 259–65. The motions of the

fractions were published by Avanti!, 13 August 1920 (Piedmontese edition).

50. ‘Pensatore e uomo d’azione’, pp. 70–1.

51. Ragionieri, PT, p. 54.

52. On the occupation of the factories, the most comprehensive study remains P. Spriano,

L'occupazione delle fabbriche. Settembre 1920 (Turin, 1964).

53. ‘La situazione politica italiana a un anno dall'occupazione’, O, I, p. 273.

54. The minutes of the meetings between the PSI and the CGIL are published in. Bosio, La

grande paura. Settembre 1920: l'occupazione delle fabbriche nei verbali inediti degli Stati generali del

movimento operaio (Roma, 1970). For the interventions cited by Togliatti, see pp. 102–4.

55. Avanti! (Piedmontese edition), 19 September 1920. This and the December 1920 edition

cited in the text are both in O, I, pp. 189–6.

56. L’Ordine Nuovo, 10 October 1920.

57. Ibid., 26 November 1920.

58. ‘La forza delle frazioni’, O, I, pp. 189–92.

59. ‘Socialismo e libertà’, ibid., pp. 193–6.

Chapter Two

1. ‘Che avverrà’, O, I, pp. 199–200.

2. ‘Primo congresso regionale ligure del Partito comunista a Savona’, in A. Gramsci, Per la

verità. Scritti 1913–26 (Rome, 1974), p. 361.

3. ‘Elogio del cinico’, O, I, pp. 201–2. The brief portrait of Togliatti traced by Gobetti little

more than a year later captures well the spirit of the article: ‘one finds in him an uneasiness, sometimes

even a restlessness that seems to be cynicism and is indecision’, ‘Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da

un liberale’, p. 284.

4. ‘Episodi della guerra civile in Toscana’, O, I, p. 230.

5. See, for example, ‘Ozi parlamentari: il sorriso di Nitti e l’ombra di Giolitti, del 13 settembre

1921’, Ibid., pp. 279–83.

6. ‘L’esempio di Firenze’, Ibid., p. 233.

7. ‘La fine dello sciopero generale’, Ibid., p. 297.

8. ‘Punto di partenza’, Ibid., p. 303. On Togliatti in Rome, CCT, p. 99ff. On the structure

and distribution of the paper, see P. Salvetti, La stampa comunista da Gramsci a Togliatti (Parma,

1975), pp. 219–35.

9. G. Giardina, ‘Ricordi dell’ “Ordine Nuovo”’, Il Ponte, October 1965.

10. ‘Due date’, O, I, p. 402.

11. ‘Baronie rosse’, Ibid., p. 243; ‘Dalle Baronie rosse al fascismo’, ibid., p. 361.

ENDNOTES 301

12. ‘Conclave politico’, Ibid., p. 325.

13. ‘Come si presenta il partito di Don Sturzo’, Ibid., pp. 291–2.

14. P .G. Zunino, La questione cattolica nella sinistra italiana 1919–39 (Bologna, 1975), p. 98.

15. ‘Russia dei Soviet e Vaticano’, O, I, p. 339.

16. ‘Come siamo venuti allo sciopero e che cosa esso insegna’, Ibid., pp. 403–6; ‘Il tradimento e

la beffa’, L’Ordine Nuovo, 21 August 1922; ‘Insegnamenti’, L’Ordine Nuovo, 26 August 1922.

17. C. Natoli, La Terza Internazionale e il fascismo 1919–23. Proletariato di fabbrica e reazione

industriale nel primo dopoguerra (Rome, 1982), pp. 269–70.

18. Spriano, SPCI, I, p. 213.

19. In October 1922, the left of the PSI, led by Serrati and Maffi, confirmed its adhesion to the

Comintern and decided to take the provision that it had refused in Livorno: the expulsion of the

reformist wing of Turati and Treves. This was reconstituted as the Partito socialista unitario (PSU),

with Giacomo Matteotti as secretary.

20. ‘Dopo la scissione’, O, I, p. 419.

21. See the CC minutes, 12 October 1922, APC 104/39–41.

22. O, I, pp. 423–45; A. Agosti, ‘L’analisi del fascismo al IV Congresso dell'Internazionale

comunista’, Problemi del socialismo, 2 (1972), 797–822.

23. CCT, pp. 108–9.

24. Spriano, SPCI, I, pp. 233–4.

25. M. Montagnana, Ricordi di un operaio torinese, vol. I (Rome, 1949), pp. 225–6; T. Noce,

Rivoluzionaria professionale (Milan, 1974), pp. 53–4.

26. ‘Disfatta della rivoluzione?’, O, I, pp. 446–9.

27. R. De Felice, ‘I fatti di Torino’, Studi Storici, 1 (1963); G.C. Carcano, Strage a Torino. Una

storia italiana dal 1922 al 1971 (Milan, 1973).

28. Terracini’s two letters and Togliatti’s note are in APC, 1923, 191/1–3. For more on this,

see Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 76–81.

29. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 75 and 79. There is also a novelised version of the event (and

the only fictional work to feature Togliatti as a protagonist), J. O’Faolain, Ercoli e il guardiano notturno

(Rome, 1999).

30. For the polemic between Viglongo and Togliatti in 1923, see the sources exhaustively cited

by Ragionieri, PT, p. 93.

31. ‘Elogio del fascismo’, O, I, pp. 453–5.

32. C. Ravera, Diario di trent’anni 1913–43 (Rome, 1973), p. 146.

33. The criticism of the manifesto of the Turinese trade union communist committee is in a

circular to the inter-regional secretaries, published by Spriano in R, 20 August 1966. See also ‘Motivi di

credere’, O, I, pp. 504–5.

34. ‘Il tesoro dell'esperienza’, O, I, pp. 463–6.

35. ‘Sviluppi inesorabili’, Ibid., p. 468.

36. For reports to the Comintern on the Italian situation (1923–25), see Ibid., pp. 739–904.

37. Ibid., p. 742.

38. APC, 1923, 160/47–48.

39. The letter to Gramsci of 1 May 1923 is published in P. Togliatti, La formazione del gruppo

dirigente del Partito comunista italiano nel 1923–24 (Rome, 1962). Unless otherwise specified, all letters

referred to are published in the cited volume.

40. Gramsci’s letter is published in R, 22 January 1966.

41. Letter of 16 July 1923.

42. G. Somai, ‘La formazione del gruppo dirigente di “centro” e il ruolo di Bordiga: Carteggio

1923’, in Storia contemporanea, 4–5 (1980), 681–3. This includes the coded letters of Bordiga sent

from prison to Togliatti and other comrades on the executive.

43. Montagnana, Ricordi, pp. 247–50.

44. ACS, PS, 1923, folder 109.

45. Togliatti, La formazione, p. 140.

302 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

46. Togliatti’s letter to Matteotti (secretary of the PSU) on the formation of a ‘block of

proletarian unity’, is published in R, 19 January 1963. For Matteotti’s refusal, see R, 26 January 1963.

47. APC, 1924, 241/11–12.

48. Spriano, SPCI, I, p. 331.

49. This was the name of the ‘Third Internationalist’ current within the PSI, led by Serrati.

50. The electoral manifesto for the Alliance for Oroletarian Unity was published in R, 2

February 1963.

51. Mémoires de Jules Humbert-Droz. De Lenine à Staline. Dix ans au service de l'Internationale

Communiste 1921–31 (Neuchatel, 1971), p. 214.

52. Ragionieri, PT, p. 133.

53. ‘Prime constatazioni’, O, I, p. 546.

54. S. Merli, ‘Nuova documentazione sulla ‘svolta’ nella direzione del Partito comunista d'Italia

nel 1923–24’, Rivista storica del socialismo (1963), 527–36; ‘Le origini della direzione centrista nel

Partito comunista d'Italia’, 605–25.

55. ‘Il problema del reclutamento’, O, I, p. 553.

56. Spriano, SPCI, I, pp. 342–61; Ragionieri, PT, 139–45. For Gramsci’s role, see L. Paggi, Le

strategie del potere in Gramsci (Rome, 1984), pp. 204–9.

57. See G. Berti, ‘Appunti e ricordi 1919–26’, AF (1966), pp. 186–240.

58. Lo Stato Operaio, 29 May 1924.

59. Spriano, SPCI, I, p. 357.

60. ‘Replica conclusiva’, O, I, p. 727.

61. As emerges from his letter to Gramsci of 23 February, in Togliatti, La formazione, p. 208.

62. The postcard is in the private archives of the Montagnana family.

63. J. Degras, The Communist International, 1919–43: Documents, vol. II, 1923–28 (Oxford,

1960), p. 160.

64. It appears that the pseudonym originates from the nickname he was given by the comrades

in the editorial office of Il Comunista in Rome in 1922, who made fun of Togliatti for his delicate

build. Togliatti began to use it regularly from the eve of the Comintern’s fifth congress. Ercole is the

Italian name for Hercules; since most Italian family names end in ‘i’, Togliatti was known as Ercoli.

65. O, I, pp. 729–36. It should be noted, however, that he would accentuate the ‘leftist’

interpretation in his articles on the fifth congress for L’Unità. See O, I, pp. 577–90.

66. The letters to Gramsci and Scoccimarro are in Ibid., pp. 907–35.

67. The minutes of the Italian commission to the fifth congress have been published in their

entirety, with ample introduction by E. Ragionieri and T. Detti, in Critica marxista, 2 (1971), 40–120.

68. The socialist Giacomo Matteotti, who denounced the violence and the frauds in the

elections of 1924, was kidnapped and assassinated in Rome on 10 June 1924, on the order of men very

close to Mussolini. His corpse was found two months later.

69. The tumultuous exit, in which all groups of the opposition participated, became known as

the Aventine Secession, invoking the Roman plebeians’ retreat in 494 BC to the Aventine hill, to give

life to their own representatives and institutions, in contrast to the patrician representatives.

70. ‘A Marco e Masci’, O, I, p. 930.

71. ‘Un dilemma per i socialisti’, Ibid., p. 575.

72. Gramsci’s report of 13–14 August to the CC is in A. Gramsci, La costruzione del partito

comunista (Turin, 1971), pp. 28–39.

73. R, 8 September 1962.

74. Ragionieri, PT, p. 168. Ragionieri rightly suggests that by the second half of 1924, ‘a kind

of division of labour’ existed between the two men, split between tasks of general political direction and

internal party concerns.

75. Spriano, SPCI, I, p. 407.

76. J. Humbert-Droz, Il contrasto tra l’Internazionale e il PCI, 1922–28 (Milan, 1969), p. 210.

77. O, I, pp. 839–45.

78. APC, 236/56–72.

ENDNOTES 303

79. ‘Il bilancio di un anno’, pp. 615–22.

80. On 3 January 1925, Mussolini ended the political crisis that followed Matteotti’s death by

accepting ‘all political and moral responsibility’ for it in parliament. His speech was followed by a series

of restrictive measures towards freedom of the press and the activity of the opposition.

81. The letter, addressed to Scoccimarro (Morelli), is in O, I, pp. 869–73.

82. For the report to the 1925 plenum on the organisation of the PCI, see APC, 294/1–20.

83. ‘Partito e frazione’, O, I, p. 633.

84. On the arrest, detention and subsequent release of Togliatti, see CCT, pp. 145–51.

85. On Rita and the Montagnana family, see G. Arian Levi and M. Montagnana, I

Montagnana: una famiglia ebraica piemontese e il movimento operaio 1914–48 (Firenze, 2000).

86. Spriano, SPCI, I, pp. 477ff; R. Martinelli, Il Partito comunista d’Italia. Politica e

organizzazione 1921–26 (Rome, 1977), pp. 228ff; La liquidazione della sinistra del P.C. d’Italia (1925)

(Milano, 1991).

87. ‘La nostra ideologia’, O, I, 647–53.

88. Spriano, SPCI, I, p. 463.

89. U, 29 December 1925.

90. Togliatti later recounted that the text was discussed for two days between himself and

Gramsci, and that he himself wrote the thesis ‘in full’ (that is, the final draft). See CCT, pp. 152ff.

91. The ‘political thesis’, approved by the congress with the title ‘La situazione italiana e i

compiti del PCI’, is in A. Gramsci, La costruzione del Partito comunista, pp. 488–522.

92. CCT, p. 159.

Chapter Three

1. From this point, he had no more contact with his immediate family. He had already, in

1922, severed any relationship with his younger brother Enrico, who had shown nationalist sympathies.

Now, Eugenio and Cristina disappeared from his horizon. He even stopped corresponding with his

mother, a very important figure in his life. He knew of her death in 1932 only indirectly.

2. On Togliatti in Moscow, see Memoirs de Jules Humbert-Droz, pp. 267–68; Bocca, Palmiro

Togliatti, pp. 119–22; G. Corbi, Togliatti a Mosca. Storia di un ‘legame di ferro’ (Milan, 1991).

3. E. H. Carr, Il socialismo in un solo paese, I. La politica interna 1924–26 (Turin, 1968).

4. RGASPI, 513/1/365, ff. 7–23.

5. O, II, pp. 3–18.

6. C. Daniele (ed.), Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca, Il carteggio del 1926 (Turin, 1999),

esp. pp. 342–5.

7. This difference is well documented in ibid., pp. 203–99.

8. O, II, pp. 55–62.

9. ‘I fondamenti idealistici del bordighismo’, O, II, pp. 18–27.

10. RGASPI, 495/2.

11. Ibid., 513/365/16.

12. G. Somai, ‘La mancata venuta di Bordiga a Mosca. Il preludio della “questione russa”

dell’ottobre 1926’, Storia contemporanea, 2 (1979), 323–56.

13. APC, 1926, 419/65

14. O, II, pp. 47–54.

15. The letter of 14 October, Gramsci’s note, Togliatti’s letters to the political bureau and to

Gramsci, Gramsci’s reply of 26 October, and the communication to Ercoli by Ravera are in Gramsci a

Roma, pp. 402–38.

16. Ibid., pp. 120–40.

17. G. Amendola, Storia del Partito comunista italiano (Rome, 1978), p. 117.

18. See ‘Direttiva per lo studio delle questioni russe’ (April 1927), O, II, pp. 172–89.

19. On 5 November 1926, the government approved a number of extraordinary legislative

measures that stipulated the dissolution of all anti-fascist parties, the definite suppression of any press

hostile to the regime, the introduction of internment for political dissidents, the reinstatement of the

304 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

death penalty, and the introduction of a special tribunal for the defence of the state. On 9 November,

the mandate of all oppositional MPs was ended and so their parliamentary immunity was withdrawn.

20. The minutes of the meeting on 1–3 November 1926 are published, in part, in Studi Storici,

1 (1990), pp. 293–316.

21. O, II, pp. 4–13.

22. Ibid., pp. 99–103.

23. Ibid., pp. 114–17; TISD, II, p. 509.

24. ‘Le basi sociali del fascismo’, O, II, pp. 28–38.

25. Ibid., pp. 82–92.

26. Ibid., pp. 142–7.

27. Letter by Garlandi (Grieco) to the Comintern secretariat, 30 March 1928, in APC, 653/55.

28. Ravera also mentions the letter in her Diario di trent’anni (Rome, 1973), p. 280.

29. The discussions of the Italian commission of January 1927 are in APC, 547/1/1–59; the

resolution of the external leadership are in ibid., 560/9–10.

30. Ravera, Diario, pp. 383–4

31. ‘Il Settimo Esecutivo allargato’, O, II, pp. 161–2.

32. RGASPI, 495/166/68 and 495/166/85; TAC, pp. 57–9.

33. APC, 659/10.

34. A. Di Biagio, Coesistenza e isolazionismo. Mosca, il Komintern e l’Europa di Versailles 1918–

28 (Rome, 2004), p. 268.

35. The Comintern had already, in spring 1927, imposed a correction to the political line of

the PCF. See Mémoires de Jules Humbert-Droz, pp. 277–83. For Togliatti’s criticisms, see his letters to

Humbert-Droz in Il contrasto, p. 249; and his letter to Maggi (E. Gennari), 13 October 1927, APC,

555/23.

36. For example, in a May 1927 article, he maintained that social democracy was ‘marching

towards reaction’, but did not make reference to the ‘dangers’ of its left wing. See ‘Dove va la

socialdemocrazia?’, O, II, p. 217.

37. RGASPI, 495/166/48; Ibid., pp. 235–48.

38. We must bear in mind that from the beginning of Autumn 1919 and until 1930, Ignazio

Silone (Secondino Tranquilli) passed on information to the police about the political organisations he

was involved with, first the PSI and then the PCI, although his actions do not seem to have led to

repressive action from the police. See D. Biocca and M. Canali, Silone. La doppia vita di un italiano

(Milan, 2005). For a different view, see G. Tamburrano, G. Granati and M. Isinelli, Processo a

Silone.Le disavventure di un povero cristiano (Manduria, 2001).

39. Silone’s evidence was published for the first time in Comunità, 5 (1949). Togliatti was very

polemical towards it (U, 6 January 1950). Effectively, he maintained that Stalin had in 1927 been more

far-sighted than he himself had been, but he did not deny the veracity of Silone’s account. I have been

unable to find the minutes of the meeting, which would confirm or deny Silone’s evidence, but his

view is corroborated in Mémoires de Jules Humbert-Droz, p. 283.

40. TAC, pp. 55–6.

41. O, II, p. 211.

42. APC, 377/77–8.

43. APC, 659/10.

44. ‘Rottura necessaria’, O, II, p. 281.

45. Ibid., pp. 329–37.

46. For Togliatti’s suspension between the Comintern and the PCI, see Ragionieri, PT, pp.

311–16.

47. APC 672/1/2–3

48. Humbert-Droz, Il contrasto, pp. 250–2.

49. The Presidium’s resolution of 28 January is in Lo Stato Operaio, March 1927, pp. 91–102.

The main architect of the resolution was Jules Humbert-Droz, whose relationship with the PCI and

ENDNOTES 305

Togliatti is well documented in C. Natoli, ‘Jules Humbert-Droz e i comunisti italiani’, Dimensioni e

problemi della ricerca storica, 1 (1993), pp. 111–33.

50. O, II, pp. 137–41; TAC, pp. 50–4.

51. ‘Osservazioni sulla politica del nostro partito’, O, II, pp. 404–5.

52. Ragionieri, PT, p. 284; Spriano, Storia, II, p. 106.

53. ‘Lo Stato operaio’, O, II, p. 151; ‘Interpretazioni di una crisi’, pp. 228–34.

54. ‘Osservazioni sulla politica del nostro partito’, p. 398.

55. Ravera, Diario, p. 335.

56. APC, 560, 41–87.

57. Reply to Longo’s letter, in AF (1966), p. 382.

58. ‘Osservazioni sulla politica del nostro partito’, p. 410.

59. For the history of the relationship between the party centre and those arrested in November

1926, see P. Spriano, Gramsci in carcere e il partito (Rome, 1977).

60. See below, chapter four.

61. See, for different nuances, G. Fiori, Gramsci, Togliatti, Stalin (Bari–Rome, 1991); A. Lepre,

Il prigioniero. Vita di Antonio Gramsci (Rome–Bari, 1998); G. Vacca, Appuntamenti con Gramsci

(Rome, 1999), pp. 71–8.

62. I was the first to find a copy of this document in Togliatti’s ‘personal file’, RGASPI,

495/221/1, pp. 258–61. See also S. Pons, ‘L’affare Gramsci–Togliatti a Mosca 1938–41’, Studi Storici,

1 (2004).

63. Spriano, Gramsci in carcere, pp. 141–3.

64. P. Sraffa, Lettere a Tania per Gramsci (Rome, 1991).

65. ‘Antonio Gramsci, un capo della classe operaia’, O, II, pp. 261–4.

66. See the material published in L’ultima ricerca di Paolo Spriano (Rome, 1988).

67. TISD, II, 2, pp. 880; K. McDermott and J. Agnew, A History of the Communist

International from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 75–7.

68. Quoted in Degras, The Communist International, vol. II, p. 453.

69. O, II, pp. 420–42; Lo Stato Operaio, July 1928. The more ‘sensitive’ sentences of Togliatti’s

speech were omitted, or partly mitigated, in the Russian edition, Sestoj Kongress Kominterna.

Stenograficeskij Otcet (Moscow, 1929).

70. ‘A proposito del fascismo’, O, II, pp. 542–59.

71. Ibid., p. 431.

72. ‘Osservazioni al progetto di programma’, Ibid., pp. 443–71 and 542–59.

73. To Humbert-Droz, he expressed doubts that it might not be possible ‘to discuss or say

something serious without a long, very long preparation’, and feared ‘that the matter had been taken

too lightly’. See Humbert-Droz, Il contrasto, p. 256.

74. O, II, pp. 472–505.

75. Ibid., pp. 506–30.

76. Ibid., p. 528.

77. Ibid., pp. 531–41.

78. APC, 653/237–240.

79. On the crisis of the KPD, M. Hajek, Storia dell'Internazionale comunista 1921–35. La

politica di fronte unico (Rome, 1969), pp. 170–88; H. Weber, La trasformazione del comunismo tedesco.

La stalinizzazione della KPD nella Repubblica di Weimar (Milan, 1979).

80. APC, 653/240.

81. AF (1966), p. 515.

82. Ibid., pp. 588–93.

83. Ibid., pp. 589–90.

84. Ibid., p. 610.

85. APC, 653, 219–220.

86. Tasca’s report is in AF (1966), pp. 596–607. Stalin’s address was published in volume

eleven of his Opere (Rome, 1974), pp. 202–11.

306 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

87. AF (1966), p. 617

88. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 178–81.

89. ‘Trotskiana’, O, II, pp. 665–8.

90. The CC minutes of February–March 1929 are in APC, 732 and 733. For Tasca’s report,

with examples of other speeches, see AF (1966), pp. 671–802.

91. APC, 757/1.

92. APC, 757/50.

93. APC, 887/37.

94. ‘Rapporto sulle questioni internazionali’, O, II, p. 698.

95. Ibid., p. 679.

96. O, III, 1, p. 28.

97. The Lateran Pacts (which took their name from the palace in which they were signed) included

a treaty and an agreement between the Italian state and the church. By bringing to an end one of the

most serious problems left unresolved by the Risorgimento, they represented a prestigious achievement

for fascism. It was in the wake of this success that Mussolini on 24 March put to a general vote a list of

parliamentary candidates approved by his Gran Consiglio.

98. ‘Fine della “questione Romana”’, O, II, pp. 654–64.

99. APC 757/21.

100. F. De Felice, Fascismo, democrazia, fronte popolare. Il movimento comunista alla svolta del VII

Congresso dell’Internazionale (Bari, 1973), p. 15. For the tenth plenum, see TISD, III, 1, pp. 24–42.

101. O, II, pp. 726–47.

102. Ibid., pp. 748–59.

103. Ibid., pp. 760–3.

104. Excerpts from the minutes of the Italian commission are published in E. Ragionieri

‘Togliatti, Grieco e Di Vittorio alla commissione italiana del X Plenum dell’Internazionale comunista’,

Studi Storici, 1 (1971), pp. 108–70.

105. Ibid., p. 149.

106. Ibid., p. 151.

107. The confidential comment was related by Tasca to the exiled anti-fascist press on 18

November 1929. See AF (1966), p. 982.

108. Ravera, Diario, p. 449.

109. APC, 745/203, cited in Ragionieri, PT, p. 415.

110. M. L. Salvadori, Tenere la sinistra. La crisi italiana e i nodi del riformismo (Venezia, 1992),

p. 107.

Chapter Four

1. Togliatti’s report of 28–29 August is in APC, 745/112–25, 161–2 , 203–11 and 238–42.

2. The speech and the report of 3–5 September are in O, III, 1, pp. 9–77.

3. Amendola, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, p. 160.

4. ‘A tutte le organizzazioni di partito, a tutti i compagni’, in Lo Stato Operaio, September–

October (1929).

5. It is the title of an unsigned article in Lo Stato Operaio, now in O, III, 1, pp. 113–20.

6. Gallo’s ‘project’ and Blasco’s ‘counter-project’ are in M. Salerno (ed.), L’opposizione nel PCI

alla svolta del 1930 (Milan, 1966), pp. 129–32 and 76–81 respectively.

7. APC, 757/160–62.

8. Ibid., 851/3–4.

9. ‘Necessità di una svolta’, O, III, 1, pp. 129–43.

10. APC, 887/35–42.

11. The harshest attacks were made by the opposition in the political bureau of 23 January. See

APC, 837/22–25. Also, for the secretariats of 17 and 25 January, APC, 840/4–14.

12. Togliatti’s contribution, report and closing speech are in O, III, 1, pp. 148–93.

13. APC, 851/28–32.

ENDNOTES 307

14. The minutes of the PCI CC in Liège, largely incomplete, are in APC, 827/1–279. For

opposing contributions, see Salerno (ed.), L’opposizione.

15. Ravera, Diario, p. 488.

16. ‘Appunti per una critica del bordighismo’, O, III, 1, pp. 220–7.

17. ‘Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale’, in Gramsci, La costruzione del Partito comunista,

pp. 137–58.

18. Spriano, SPCI, II, pp. 257ff; F. Ormea, Le origini dello stalinismo nel PCI. Storia della

‘svolta’ comunista negli anni Trenta (Milan, 1978), pp. 230–58. La Verité was a Trotskyist journal.

19. In reply to Secchia, who was reluctant to apologise, Togliatti told him in a private

conversation: ‘Please don’t make such a fuss; we have just come out of a fight against the right, we

cannot afford now to start fighting against each other because of some schemer in Moscow. The

criticism is aimed at you but in fact the blow is, once again, aimed at me.’ See P. Secchia, L’azione

svolta dal Partito comunista in Italia (Milan, 1970), pp. 339–40.

20. The CC minutes of 9 June 1930 are in APC, 830/1–22.

21. F. Vander, ‘Silone, Togliatti e il “socialfascismo”’, Italia contemporanea, 235 (2004), 239–

56.

22. Togliatti had a high regard for Silone’s intellectual stature and valued his analysis of fascism.

It is also possible that he knew about ‘Pasquini’s’ relationship with the police. If so, Togliatti may have

‘covered up’ for Silone because he viewed Silone’s role as infiltrator as useful to the party and because

the PCI would not have benefited if the truth was uncovered.

23. I. Silone, Uscita di sicurezza (Florence, 1965), p. 108.

24. Togliatti’s report of 19 July 1930 to the Italian Commission is in O, III, 1, pp. 248–80.

Manuilsky’s contribution is largely reproduced in Secchia, L'azione svolta dal Partito comunista in Italia,

pp. 320–6.

25. U. Terracini, Sulla svolta. Carteggio clandestino dal carcere 1930–31–32 (Milan, 1975), pp.

26–36.

26. Ibid., pp. 45–51.

27. APC, 852,1/5.

28. On Gramsci’s position whilst in jail, see Spriano, Gramsci in carcere e il partito, pp. 48

onnwards; Fiori, Gramsci, pp. 37–48.

29. Terracini, Sulla svolta, pp. 71–3.

30. RGASPI, 495.221/1, pp. 262–9. Giorgio Amendola, referring to the second half of 1931,

recalled that he was instructed by Togliatti to go to see Piero Sraffa in Cambridge, from whom he

received a package. ‘As I arrived in Paris’, said Amendola, ‘I went looking for Togliatti and gave him

the package. I can still see him, turning pale and trying to undo the knot with shaky hands. He

suddenly couldn’t handle it any more and, still calm and accurate, used the scissors. In the package

were sheets of papers from letters, written in clear and steady handwriting. Forgetting that I was there

he hastily started to read them. Suddenly he looked at me and said in a trembling voice: “They are

letters from Gramsci.” Then regretting this disclosure he ordered me to keep this a secret.’ See G.

Amendola, Un’isola (Milan, 1980), p. 34.

31. The collapse of Primo Di Rivera’s regime in Spain by no means changed this belief and

even in April 1931, after the electoral victory of the Republic in Spain, he denied that this represented a

revolution, pointing out that the structure of capitalist’s power was still intact. See ‘Italia e Spagna’ and

‘La repubblica nella Spagna’, O, III, 1, pp. 194–201 and 328–40.

32. On 11 August, in his speech at the meeting of the secretariat, Togliatti sounded as if he

wanted to soften the approach that had informed ‘Gallo’s project’. See APC, 840/75–7.

33. APC, Fondo Ercoli, B 65, 1–6.

34. APC, 937/9.

35. APC, 852/41–52.

36. For Togliatti’s report to the fourth congress, see O, III, 1, pp. 346–53.

37. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 216–8.

308 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

38. ‘La politica del Partito comunista tedesco’, O, III, 1, pp. 404–9; also letter to Dozza, APC,

946/91–2.

39. Both in O, III, 2, pp. 104–34.

40. For Kuusinen’s report, see Internationale Presse Korrespondenz, 18 November 1932, pp.

3087–97.

41. O, III, 2, pp. 111–12.

42. For Trotsky’s position on Germany, see L. Trotsky, Scritti 1929–36 (Turin, 1962), pp.

272–443.

43. O, III, 2, p. 112.

44. Ibid., p. 110–11.

45. ‘La politica dell’Internazionale nel momento presente’, ibid., p. 140.

46. ‘Alcuni problemi di storia dell'Internazionale comunista’, ibid., VI, p. 396.

47. ‘Note sulla questione delle prospettive della situazione italiana’, ibid., III, 2, pp. 77–85.

48. E. Ragionieri, ‘Il partito della svolta e la politica di massa’, in TISD, p. 314.

49. The report of August 1931 was published by G. Santomassimo in Studi Storici, 3 (1985).

50. See ‘Sindacato e attività sindacale in condizioni di illegalità’, and ‘Ancora del lavoro

sindacale in condizioni di illegalità’, O, III, 1, pp. 436–47, and 2, pp. 23–34.

51. On the argument with ‘Nicoletti’ (Di Vittorio), APC 1023/ 80–94.

52. The Azione Cattolica was established in 1924 as a non-political lay organisation under the

direct control of bishops. The organisation was forbidden by the Vatican to participate in politics, and

thus not opposed to the fascist regime (unlike the Partito Popolare), so it was acknowledged by the

1929 concordat between the Vatican and the Italian government. Attempts by the regime to restrict its

activity led to a crisis with the Catholic Church, before a compromise was achieved later in the year.

53. Togliatti’s notes for the meeting of the secretariat on 4 June are in O, III, 1, pp. 354–8.

Togliatti accepted, without making reference to it, Tasca’s interpretation of the Lateran Pacts.

54. APC, 948/11–15.

55. Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), was an anti-fascist movement founded in 1929

by Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu and Alberto Tarchiani. Initially, the movement was a meeting place for

representatives of different political traditions (liberal, republican and socialist) who agreed to

collaborate towards a united objective, the toppling of Mussolini’s dictatorship.

56. See, for example, G. Amendola, ‘Con il proletariato o contro il proletariato. Discorrendo

con gli intellettuali della mia generazione’, Lo Stato Operaio, June 1931.

57. ‘Sul movimento di Giustizia e Libertà’, O, III, 1, pp. 410–22.

58. With the pseudonym of ‘Fortunato’, Amendola was in Italy between November and

December 1931 to make contact with the dissident GL groups of Turin and Milan. A clandestine

paper, which was the result of collaboration between GL-ites and communist intellectuals, was

published in Milan for a short while.

59. APC 1023/1–2.

60. The quote is from his 26 December 1933 speech to the Italian commission, TAC, p. 106.

61. For the report on the Italian situation, see ibid., p. 100.

62. The Carbonari (‘charcoal burners’) were groups of secret revolutionary societies in early

nineteenth-century Italy. They were closely organised, with a ritual, symbolic language, and a strict

hierarchy. Their goals were patriotic and liberal, and they played an important role in the Risorgimento.

63. ‘Le memorie di un barbiere’, O, III, 1, p. 325.

64. ‘Turatiana’, O, III, 2, pp. 52–8.

65. ‘Amico dei lavoratori’, pp. 214–6.

66. G. Santomassimo ‘Togliatti e la storia d’Italia’, in A. Agosti (ed.), Togliatti e la fondazione

dello Stato democratico (Milan, 1986), pp. 109–26.

67. ‘Sul movimento di Giustizia e Libertà’, p. 419.

68. Quoted in Ragionieri, PT, p. 565.

69. For Togliatti on Hitler coming to power, see ‘Sulla situazione tedesca’, O, III, pp. 176–84.

70. The text of the appeal in TISD, III, 1, pp. 471–4.

ENDNOTES 309

71. The two socialist parties merged in 1930 as the Partito socialista italiano (PSI), but a small

left group remained outside the Partito socialista massimalista, the Maximalist Socialist Party.

72. The Concentrazione antifascista had been formed in France in 1927, as a broad alliance of

the two socialist parties, the republican party, the exiled CGIL, and other minor groups.

73. APC, 1123/ 46, 72, 90.

74. Ibid., 72.

75. ‘Le tendenze nel partito riformista italiano’, O, III, 2, p. 207.

76. ‘Per comprendere la politica estera del fascismo’, ibid., pp. 199–207.

77. See, for example, ‘Nenni e Gorgulov’, ibid., pp. 251–4.

78. For Kuusinen at the thirteenth plenum, see Faschismus, Kriegsgefahr und die Aufgaben der

Kommuni stischen Parteien (Moscow, 1934). For the new definition of fascism, ‘Tesi sul fascismo, il

pericolo di guerra e i compiti dei partiti comunisti’, TISD, III, 1, p. 504.

79. For Togliatti’s speech to the thirteenth plenum on 30 November, O, III, 2, pp. 281–312.

80. Ibid., p. 288.

81. Ibid., p. 297.

82. Ibid., p. 312.

83. Ibid., pp. 321–2.

Chapter Five

1. For a recent and well-balanced analysis of the change of line in 1934, see McDermott and

Agnew, The Comintern, pp. 121–30; and M. Worley, ‘Courting Disaster? The Comintern and the

Third Period’, in M. Worley (ed.) In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third

Period (I.B. Tauris), pp. 1–17.

2. ‘Austria, Francia, Italia’, O, III, 2, pp. 355–62.

3. ‘La marcia del fascismo in Francia’, ibid., pp. 363–73.

4. E. H. Carr, The Twilight of Comintern, 1930–35 (Basingstoke, 1982), p. 127.

5. APC, 1204/557a.

6. Togliatti, La formazione, pp. 34–5.

7. E. Ragionieri, ‘Il giudizio sul fascismo. La lotta contro il fascismo. I rapporti con

l’Internazionale’, in Problemi di storia del PCI (Rome, 1971), p. 49.

8. A. Dallin and F. I. Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–43: Letters from the Soviet

Archives (New Haven, 2000), pp. 13–4.

9. PC, 1194/101.

10. F. De Felice, Fascismo , pp. 286–92.

11. APC, 1204/93.

12. ‘L’Internazionale comunista e il fronte unico’, O, III, 2, pp. 446–9.

13. ‘L’unità d’azione in Francia’, ibid., pp. 413–7.

14. As described in a letter to Giuseppe Dozza of 19 September, APC (1934), 1204/72.

15. ‘Georgi Dimitrov’, not signed, in R, 6 (1957), pp. 267–9.

16. On the Comintern’s apparatus during the mid-30s, see P. Huber, ‘The Cadre Department,

the OMS and the “Dimitrov” and “Manuilsky” Secretariats during the Phase of the Terror’, in M.

Narinsky and J. Rojahn (eds), Centre and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light of New

Documents (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 122–52; A.Vaksberg, Hotel Lux (Paris, 1993).

17. Ragionieri, PT, p. 622.

18. G. Corbi, Togliatti a Mosca, pp. 152–5.

19. TAC, pp. 107–11.

20. RGASPI, 495/4/312/24–28.

21. APC, 1210/ 20–24.

22. ‘La guerra civile in Spagna e i compiti del proletariato internazionale’ and ‘L’esperienza

spagnuola’, in O, III, 2, pp. 489–97 and 502–11.

310 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

23. Author’s emphasis. See ‘La guerra civile in Spagna’, ibid., p. 495. For an interesting analysis

of Togliatti’s thought on the united front in Spain, see A. Elorza, ‘Storia di un manifesto, “Ercoli” e la

definizione del fronte popolare in Spagna’, Studi storici, 2 (1995).

24. G. Cerreti, Con Togliatti e con Thorez. Quarant’anni di lotte politiche (Milan, 1973), pp.

171–2.

25. The letter to Manuilsky appears almost verbatim in Ragionieri, PT, pp. 589–91.

26. RGASPI, 495/ 1Oa/376, 16–21.

27. TAC, p. 121. De man (1885–1953) was one of the leading socialist theoreticians of the

interwar period. His revision of Marxism and his promotion of ‘planisme’, or planning, was widely

influential in the 1930s. With the onset of the great depression, the Belgian Socialist Party adovocated

a programme of economic planning based on his ideas. He collaborated with Nazi Germany during

World War Two.

28. Ibid.

29. O, III, 2, pp. 672–83.

30. ‘Considerazioni sul 30 giugno’, ibid., pp. 404–12.

31. ‘Intervento nella Commissione politica preparatoria’, ibid., p. 695.

32. The letter was published in R, 22 January 1966.

33. G. Procacci, Il socialismo internazionale e la guerra di Etiopia (Rome, 1978), p. 29.

34. ‘Intervento nella Commissione politica preparatoria’, O, III, 2, pp. 689–90.

35. ‘Problemi del fronte unico’, ibid., pp. 717–26.

36. J. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39

(London, 1984).

37. R, 21 August 1965, pp. 13–15.

38. See G. Procacci, ‘Aspetti e problemi della politica estera sovietica 1930–56’, in Momenti e

problemi della storia dell’URSS (Rome, 1978), pp. 36–8; idem., ‘La lotta per la pace nel socialismo

internazionale alla vigilia della seconda guerra mondiale’, Storia del marxismo, 3, 2, (Torino, 1981), pp.

572–88.

39. D. Sassoon, ‘Italian Communism and the Popular Front’, in H. Graham and P. Preston

(eds), The Popular Front in Europe (London, 1987), p. 139.

40. The letter was published by F. Ferri under the title ‘Il nemico principale nel 1935. Lettera

inedita di Togliatti sul riarmo della Germania nazista’, R, 21 August 1965, p. 13.

41. Ibid. Compared to these criticisms, his attitude during the presidium of 27 May 1935 was

very different. Here, he deemed the PCF’s decision to carry on the fight and refuse to vote for national

defence credits as ‘right’, and even expressed satisfaction at the fact that ‘the PCF has been able to make

the right decision on its own initiative, before receiving instructions and directions from us.’ See TAC,

pp. 130–1. The comment came just days after Stalin’s famous declaration on 16 May 1935, that ‘[the

Soviet Union] understands and fully approves the national defence policy pursued by France in order

to keep its armed forces to a level in keeping with its security,’ a declaration that caused the PCF

notable embarrassment.

42. ‘Dov’è la forza del fascismo italiano’, O, III, 2, pp. 468–88.

43. The nine lectures on fascism were published in 1970. The third volume of Opere di

Togliatti (1973) included the eleven lectures of the Corso sugli avversari. In 2005, F. M. Biscione

published two lectures that were found later. See P. Togliatti, ‘Corso sugli avversari. Due lezioni inedite

sulla socialdemocrazia’, Studi storici, 3 (2005). In English, see Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism

(London, 1976).

44. P. G. Zunino, Interpretazione e memoria del fascismo. Gli anni del regime (Rome–Bari,

1991), p. 94.

45. ‘Corso sugli avversari’, O, III, 2, pp. 534–6.

46. ‘Dov’è la forza del fascismo italiano’, p. 476.

47. A. De Bernardi, Operai e nazione. Sindacati, operai e Stato nell'Italia fascista (Milan, 1993),

p. 19.

ENDNOTES 311

48. Giuseppe Berti had the idea of ‘a course of organic lectures on fascism’ and of having

Togliatti as a course leader. The proposal was accepted by Manuilsky, bypassing Kirsanova (who was

head of the school). Togliatti agreed. See G. Berti, ‘Le lezioni di Togliatti’, U, 14 February 1970.

49. ‘Corso sugli avversari’, p. 587.

50. F. Sbarberi, I comunisti italiani e lo Stato, 1929–45 (Milan, 1980), p. 141.

51. Historically, Italian corporativismo refers to a political or economic system in which the

representation of economic interests is formally given to corpororazioni, civic assemblies that represent

economic, industrial, agrarian and professional groups. This should not be confused with a

government’s attempt to reach consensus on the economy by mediating between the main trade unions

and employers’ associations.

52. ‘Corso sugli avversari’, pp. 607–21.

53. Ibid., p. 629.

54. Ibid., p. 631.

55. Ibid., p. 556.

56. Correspondance Internationale, 3 August 1935, p. 871.

57. Interview with Tito in Politika, published in U, 23 August 1970.

58. The plenary session report and concluding speech are in O, III, 2, pp. 730–805.

59. Ragionieri, PT, p. 620.

60. From G. Procacci, Il socialismo internazionale, p. 99.

61. P. Spriano, Il compagno Ercoli: Togliatti segretario dell'Internazionale (Rome, 1980), p. 29.

62. O, III, 2, pp. 806–14.

63. RGASPI, Auszug aus dem Protokoll nr. 2 der Sitzung des Sekretariats des EKKI vom 7,

September 1935.

64. RGASPI, Letter to Dimitrov, 5 June 1936, 495/12/152/10.

65. O, IV, 1, pp. 3–22.

66. TAC, p. 151.

67. RGASPI, 495/2/207, 100–136.

68. Report to the Presidium of 26 September 1935, in TAC, pp. 134–5.

69. ‘I compiti del fronte unico e la lotta contro la guerra imperialista’, O, IV, 1, pp. 58–72.

70. Procacci, Il socialismo internazionale, pp. 85–106; C. Natoli, ‘Analisi del fascismo e lotta

contro la guerra in Georgi Dimitrov 1923–1939’, Storia contemporanea, 2 (1985), 267–75; S. Pons,

Stalin e la guerra inevitabile 1935–41 (Turin, 1995), pp. 19–73.

71. TAC, pp. 172–4.

72. O, IV, 1, p. 118.

73. TAC, pp. 175–96.

74. Ibid., pp. 197–8.

75. Amendola, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, p. 256.

76. Lo Stato Operaio, October 1935, p. 630.

77. O, IV, 1, pp. 23–8.

78. Ibid., pp. 29–32.

79. Letter to the PCI Secretariat, October 1935, O, IV, 1, p. 28.

80. O, IV, 1, pp. 95–96.

81. Lo Stato Operaio, August 1936, pp. 513–4.

82. Amendola, Storia del partito comunista italiano, p. 260.

83. U. Massola, ‘Parigi, agosto 1939’, in R, 3 December 1966.

84. Berti’s evidence is reproduced in N. Amiconi, Il comunista e il capomanipolo (Milan, 1977),

pp. 293–4. S. Bertelli, Il gruppo: La formazione del gruppo dirigente del PCI 1936–48 (Milan, 1980).

85. RGASPI, 495/ 74/ 249.

86. Spriano, SPCI, III, pp. 95ff.

87. The document in which Ciufoli reports Togliatti’s criticisms is in APC, 1358/230–231.

88. For the information reported by Bibolotti, see ibid., 1432/2/19–39.

89. Ibid., 19–20.

312 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

90. Ibid., 33–4.

91. Ibid., 20.

92. See Lo Stato Operaio, July–August 1937, pp. 400–2. It is very likely that Togliatti himself

took part in some of these discussions when he arrived in France in June 1937.

93. ‘Antonio Gramsci, capo della classe operaia’, O, IV, 1, p. 231.

94. Letter to Piero Sraffa, O, IV, I, p. 233.

95. ‘Antonio Gramsci, capo della classe operaia italiana’, p. 229.

96. The letter is in G. Vacca, Togliatti sconosciuto (Rome 1994), p. 63.

97. ‘Antonio Gramsci, capo della classe operaia italiana’, p. 203.

98. Cited in Vacca, Togliatti sconosciuto, p. 133.

99. ‘Antonio Gramsci, capo della classe operaia italiana’, pp. 203–22.

100. Ibid., p. 228.

101. Ibid., p. 231.

102. On the consequences of publishing the 1926 letter, see Spriano, Gramsci in carcere e il

partito, p. 121.

103. Ibid.

104. ‘Gli insegnamenti del processo di Mosca’, O, IV, 1, pp. 155–78, A report to the Presidium

on the same subject, dated 17 September 1936, is in RCCHIDNI, 495/2/234, pp. 4–66.

105. E. Fischer, Ricordi e riflessioni (Rome 1973), p. 451.

106. Nuovi Argomenti, May–June 1956; O, VI, pp. 125–47.

107. G. Boffa (ed.), Per conoscere Stalin (Milan, 1970), p. 314.

108. W. J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates: The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–39

(New Haven, 2001); Broué, Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste, pp. 707–33; K. McDermott,

‘Stalinist Terror in the Comintern: New Perspectives’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995),

111–30.

109. Fischer, Ricordi e riflessioni, pp. 21–2.

110. F. Firsov, ‘Stalin i Komintern’, Voprosy Istorii, September 1989.

111. H. Wehner, Erinnerungen (Bonn, 1957), p. 150.

112. M. Buber-Neumann, Da Potsdam a Mosca (Milan, 1957), p. 458.

113. J. Humbert-Droz, Mémoirs, vol. III, Dix ans de lutte antifasciste 1931–41 (Neuchatel,

1972), p. 349.

114. E. Dundovich, Tra esilio e castigo. Il Komintern, il PCI e la repressione degli antifascisti

italiani in URSS 1936–38 (Rome, 1998), pp. 183–4.

115. E. Fischer, Ricordi e riflessioni, p. 440.

116. F. Firsov, ‘Rasskažut Archivy Kominterna’, Problemy Mira i Socializma, 1 (1989), 57.

117. Krimov’s evidence, given in an interview, is in L. Canfora, Togliatti e i dilemmi della politica

(Laterza, 1989), p. 30.

118. Lajolo’s evidence is in Bocca, Palmiro Togliattti, p. 261. Lajolo himself confirmed it,

though less emphatically, in Finestre aperte a Botteghe oscure (Milan, 1975), p. 16.

119. P. Robotti, La prova (Bari, 1965), p. 234.

120. The ‘character note’ is in an unclassified file, RCCHIDNI, ff. 96–97.

121. Spriano, Il compagno Ercoli, p. 107.

122. The resolutions ‘on the insufficient actions of the struggle against Trotskyism’ presented to

the secretariat in December 1935 are in TAC, pp. 156–60.

123. APC, 1432/36 and 1440/2/20.

124. Bertelli, Il gruppo, pp. 41ff; Spriano, SPCI, III, pp. 246ff; Dundovich, Tra esilio e castigo,

pp. 75–83.

Chapter Six

1. RGASPI, 495/184/4/ 21.

2. E.H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1984), pp. 48–52.

3. O, IV, 1, p. 255.

ENDNOTES 313

4. Aldo Togliatti’s letters are kept in the private archive of the Montagnana family.

5. Dallin and Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, p. 50.

6. ‘Note sul carattere del fascismo spagnolo’, O, III, 2, pp. 699–712.

7. ‘La lotta del popolo spagnolo contro i ribelli fascisti’, ibid., p. 136.

8. Dimitrov’s speech is in ‘Georgi Dimitroff uber die Einheits-und Volksfrontpolitik (1935–

37), in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Abeiterbewegung, 3 (1972).

9. ‘Sulle particolarità della rivoluzione spagnola’, O, IV, 1, pp. 139–54.

10. See especially Stalin’s letter to Largo Caballero of 21 December 1936, in Guerra y

revolucion en Espana, vol. II (Moscow, 1966), pp. 101–2.

11. The exact date of his arrival is given in the report that reached Moscow via Thorez dated 20

July, which began with the words ‘Arrivé mercredi matin 14 juillet l’aéroport de Valence’, RGASPI

495/74/212/19–24.

12. O, IV, 1, op. cit., p274.

13. We have his handwritten notes, from which it is impossible to reconstruct the tone of his

interventions. They are preserved in Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome.

14. S. Carrillo, La Spagna domani (Bari, 1975), p. 84.

15. However, he later reminded his biographers that he dedicated part of his work to the

organisation of the International Brigades, and that he had spared no effort to overcome ‘the untenable

political and military situation’ whereby ‘every group of communist volunteers had the tendency to

withdraw into itself, to adopt a separate discipline, to feel obligations only towards its own party and its

leadership’. See CCT, pp. 269–70.

16. The reports from Spain are (if not otherwise indicated) almost all in O, IV, 1. The coded

telegrams are in RGASPI, 495/184/5 (1937) and 495/184/4 (1939).

17. G. Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia: La guerra civile spagnola e le sue origini 1931–39

(Turin, 2004), p. 579.

18. RGASPI, 495/74/219, pp. 4–6.

19. Ibid., p. 5.

20. The first quote is from the report of 15 September, the second from 25 November1937.

21. Report of 28 January1938.

22. G. Dimitrov, Diario: Gli anni di Mosca 1934–45 (Turin, 2002), p. 138.

23. A. Elorza-M. Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España 1919–

39 (Barcelona, 1999), pp. 409–10.

24. RGASPI, 495/74/216, p 3.

25. Quoted in Elorza-Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, pp. 422–3.

26. Ibid., pp. 430–1.

27. RGASPI, 495/10a/242.

28. CCT, p. 279.

29. Elorza-Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, pp. 434–5.

30. CCT, p. 281.

31. It is very unlikely that the ECCI meeting was called only, as suggested by Jules Humbert-

Droz (in his Dix ans de lutte antifasciste, p. 346), because the Comintern was discussing the problems of

the Swiss Communist Party, which was under the remit of his secretariat. Dimitrov’s diary records

almost daily interventions by Ercoli with regard to Spanish affairs, but does not mention the Polish

events at all. See Diario, pp. 90–5.

32. R. Mieli, Togliatti 1937 (Milan, 1988), pp. 225–30, for the account of the Finnish

Presidium representative, Aarvo Tuominen.

33. F. Firsov and I. Iazborovskaja, Komintern i Kommunisticeskaja Partija Pol’sci, ‘Voprosy Istorii

KPSS’, 12 (1988). See also the important documents in Chase, Enemy within the Gates, pp. 268–76.

34. CCT, p. 249.

35. M. K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland (Cambridge, 1976), p. 154.

36. N. S. Lebedeva and M. M. Narinskij (eds), Komintern i vtoraja mirovoja vojna (Moscow,

1994), pp. 69–70 for the secretariat’s resolution of 22 August 1939, which states that a potential pact

314 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Germany would not have excluded ‘the possibility

and need’ of an agreement with Great Britain and France.

37. RGASPI, 495/184/3, pp. 100–1.

38. APC, 1494/2/ 125.

39. Ibid., p. 123.

40. Ibid., pp. 129–30.

41. Pons, ‘L’affare’, pp. 92–5. In addition, in a letter to Stalin of 25 May 1938, Manuilsky

complained that the PCI archive had fallen into the hands of foreign secret services and that although

Ercoli knew about it, he did not inform anybody. He urged, therefore, that an inquiry should be set

up. See RGASPI, 495/10a/ 409a/ 49–50.

42. Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas, pp. 438–9.

43. RGASPI, 495/74/251/31–33.

44. Ibid., pp. 44–9.

45. See Giuseppe Berti’s account in his introduction to Amiconi, Il comunista e il capomanipolo,

pp. 9–11.

46. F. Firsov, ‘Stalin i Komintern’, Voprosy Istorij, 9 (1989), p. 16.

47. RGASPI, 495/184/4, p. 32.

48. La Correspondance Internationale, 26 April 1939, p. 457.

49. RGASPI, 495/184/4, p. 32.

50. U. Massola, Memorie 1939–41 (Rome, 1972), p. 17.

51. See Spriano, SPCI, III, pp. 306–7; Amendola, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, pp.

398–401.

52. The conversation is recorded in Negarville’s unpublished diary and quoted by Spriano,

SPCI, III, p. 315.

53. La Voce degli Italiani, 25 August 1939.

54. The letter is quoted in P. Spriano, Il compagno Ercoli, p. 175. As the Dichiarazione, it can

be attributed to Togliatti on the basis of what is reported in the document of June 1940, APC,

1523/14.

55. Togliatti reflected on this later when in conversation with his biographers: CCT, p. 288.

56. A. Kriegel, ‘Arrestation, détention et libération de Palmiro Togliatti’, Communisme, 40–41

(1994), pp. 69–83; A. Kriegel, S. Courtois and E. Fried, Le grand secret du PCF (Paris, 1997), p. 346.

57. Cerreti, Con Togliatti e con Thorez, p. 210, and a more detailed letter by the author to P.

Spriano, quoted by the latter in Il compagno Ercoli, op. cit., p. 184.

58. B. Di Vittorio Berti, Giuseppe Di Vittorio (Napoli, 1994), pp. xxii–xxiv.

59. RGASPI, 495/184/3 (1940), p. 42. Soon after Ercoli’s arrest, Maurice Tréand asked

Dimitrov if ‘an exchange is possible’.

60. RGASPI, 495/184/9 (1940), pp. 57–8.

61. J. Degras, The Communist International, 1919–43: Documents, vol. III, 1929–43 (London,

1971), pp. 448–58.

62. ‘Chi è Spartaco’, O, IV, 2, p. 14.

63. ‘Tentennamenti ed errori opportunisti all’inizio e nel primo periodo di guerra’, ibid., p. 29.

64. For the party’s reorganisation, see Massola’s memories mentioned above, and Amendola,

Storia del partito comunista italiano, pp. 452–3.

65. RGASPI, 495/184/9 (1940), pp. 110–11.

66. See above, note 62 chapter four.

67. RGASPI, 495/2/275, pp. 141–6.

68. APC, Fondo Ercoli.

69. ‘La Dichiarazione’, in G. Amendola (ed.), Il comunismo italiano nella seconda guerra

mondiale (Rome, 1963), pp. 127–33.

70. The Presidium’s report of 7 March 1941, compiled by Vincenzo Bianco, is in G.

Amendola, ‘Analisi e prospettive politiche in un documento del 1941 riveduto da Togliatti’, Critica

Marxista, 1 (1968), 82–102. Togliatti on Bianco’s report is in RGASPI, 495/18/1331, pp. 60–2.

ENDNOTES 315

71. RGASPI, 495/184/5 (1941), p. 3.

72. ‘Per metter fine alla guerra! Per salvare l'Italia da una catastrofe!’, in Il comunismo italiano

nella seconda guerra mondiale, pp. 133–40.

73. Fischer, Ricordi e riflessioni, p. 511.

74. Dimitrov, Diario, p. 321.

75. Ibid., pp. 330–3.

76. See the essay by S. Bertelli in La Segretaria di Togliatti: Memorie di N. Bocenina, (Firenze,

1993), pp. 20–3.

77. Dimitrov, Diario, p. 375.

78. See Spriano, Il compagno Ercoli, pp. 199ff; L. Polano and E. D’Onofrio, in C. Pillon, I

comunisti nella storia d'Italia, vol. II (Rome, 1967), pp. 700–1.

79. The radio broadcasts are in M. Correnti, Discorsi agli italiani (Rome, 1945); and P.

Togliatti, Da Radio Milano Libertà (Rome, 1974). Also, see O, IV, 2.

80. The correspondence between Bianco and Togliatti is in RGASPI, 527/1. Togliatti’s letter,

discussed here, is on pp. 18–25. On the Italian prisoners’ condition, see M. T. Giusti, I prigionieri

italiani in Russia (Bologna, 2003).

81. APC, 1432/2, 36.

82. In a Moscow lecture to Italian communist cadres in October 1942, Togliatti stated that ‘it

is a mistake to consider the present alliance with the western democratic forces [...] as provisional and

short-term’, and reiterated that ‘it is not a trick, it matches the deepest needs of the working class.’ See

A. Galiussi, I figli del partito (Firenze, 1966), pp. 152–3.

83. ‘I motivi per cui la Germania non vincerà la guerra’, O, IV, 2, p. 131. Vesper is the name

given to a rebellion in Sicily in 1282 against the rule of the Angevin king Charles I of Naples, who had

taken control of the island with Papal support in 1266. The event is named because the insurrection

began at the start of the service of vespers on Easter Monday at the Church of the Holy Spirit just

outside Palermo. It was the beginning of the eponymous War of the Sicilian Vespers. During the

Risorgimento, and especially through the musical opera of Giuseppe Verdi, it became a symbol of

patriotic insurgency against foreign oppression.

84. ‘Con la pace sorgerà un’Italia nuova’, ibid., p. 170.

85. ‘Non è vero che con le generazioni educate dal fascismo non ci sia nulla da fare’, ibid., p.

270.

86. ‘Sulla situazione italiana’, ibid., 2, pp. 292–3.

87. TISD, III, 2, pp. 1217–8.

88. Dimitrov, Diario, p. 302.

89. V. Vlahovic, ‘A Mosca nel 1943. Prima formulazione del policentrismo’, in R, 28 August

1965.

90. ‘Sullo scioglimento dell’Internazionale comunista’, O, IV, 2, p. 455.

91. Cerreti, Con Togliatti e con Thorez, p. 282.

92. ‘La rivolta del popolo ha rovesciato Mussolini’, O, IV, 2, p. 462.

93. ‘Alla lotta, alle armi per la formazione di un governo nazionale di pace’, in Togliatti, Da

Radio Milano Libertà, p. 351.

94. ‘Gli avvenimenti in Italia’, O, IV, 2, p. 322.

95. RGASPI, 495/74/256/ 39–40.

96. ‘Appello agli italiani della stazione di Radio Milano Libertà’, O, IV, 2, p. 482.

97. RGASPI, 495/74/256/ 45–7.

98. ‘Per la vittoria occorre un governo veramente democratico e antifascista’, O, IV, 2, p. 492.

99. R. Battaglia, Storia della Resistenza italiana (Turin, 1964), p. 133. The National Liberation

Committee (CLN) was founded in Rome the day after the armistice was declared between Italy and the

Allied Forces, on 9 September 1943. It was joined by all the anti-fascist parties, including the

communists.

100. Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], vol. I (Washington, 1963), pp. 759–760.

316 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

101. About the PCI executive’s position and reaction to Togliatti’s speech of 16 October, see

Spriano, SPCI, V, pp. 110–37; L. Longo, I centri dirigenti del PCI nella Resistenza (Rome, 1973), pp.

105–38; G. Amendola, Lettere a Milano (Rome, 1973), p. 215.

102. ‘Il problema della monarchia’, O, IV, 2, p. 498.

103. ‘L’Italia e la guerra contro la Germania hitleriana’, ibid., IV, 2, pp. 356–95.

104. ‘Il nostro punto di vista sul problema dinastico’, ibid., p. 545.

105. See footnote 69 in Chapter 2.

106. ‘Il dovere del blocco democratico’, in Togliatti, Da Radio Milano Libertà, p. 429.

107. RGASPI, 495/74/259, pp. 3-4.

108. S. Pons, ‘L’Italia e il PCI nella politica estera dell’URSS (1943–45)’, in Dagli archivi di

Mosca: L’URSS, il Cominform e il PCI 1943–51 (Rome, 1998), pp. 31–4.

109. RGASPI, 495/74/258, pp. 18–22.

110. Ibid., pp. 37–44.

111. Ibid., pp. 44a–44z.

112. Dimitov, Diario, p. 693.

113. ‘Le lettere a Dimitrov e Manuilsky’, RGASPI, 495/74/256, pp. 52–5.

114. On Togliatti’s ‘repatriation’ file, see Spriano, Il compagno Ercoli, pp. 224–5.

Chapter Seven

1. Togliatti insisted repeatedly that he had not been told beforehand that the Soviet Union

was going to recognise the Badoglio government. See especially a letter to Calamandrei published in Il

Ponte, 1951, p. 660. He was not believed. Nevertheless, the documents in the ex-Soviet archives prove

that the negotiations began after the Italian leader had left Moscow, although this does not exclude the

possibility that he was informed during the journey. Pons, ‘L’Italia’, pp. 34–6.

2. L. Cortesi, ‘La “svolta di Salerno”, Palmiro Togliatti, l’eredità gramsciana e la geopolitica di

Stalin’, in Nascita di una democrazia. Guerra fascismo, resistenza e oltre (Rome 2004), pp. 264–5.

3. APT (CS), 1944, p. 7.

4. CCT, pp. 312–3.

5. S. Cacciapuoti, Storia di un operaio napoletano (Rome, 1972), p. 130.

6. Togliatti’s statements to the press, published by the Neapolitan newspaper Risorgimento,

were published by L. Cortesi, Belfagor, 1 (1975), pp. 17–20. On the meeting of the national council,

see M. Valenzi, C’è Togliatti. Napoli 1944; I primi mesi di Togliatti in Italia (Palermo 1995), pp. 71–7.

7. Large passages from Gromyko’s memorandum and from the Izvestija article are cited in

Spriano, SPCI, V, pp. 292–4.

8. B. Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici (Bari, 1963), p. 289.

9. P. Nenni, Tempo di guerra fredda. Diari 1943–56 (Milan, 1981), p. 64.

10. Cortesi, ‘La “svolta di Salerno”’, p. 279.

11. This is the interpretation argued by E. Aga Rossi and V. Zaslavsky in their Togliatti and

Stalin, Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca (Bologna, 1997), pp. 58ff.

12. P. Togliatti, ‘Il governo di Salerno’, in F. Antonicelli (ed.), Trent’anni di storia italiana,

1915–45 (Turin, 1961), p. 370.

13. E. Ragionieri, ‘La storia politica e sociale’, in Storia d’Italia, vol. IV, 3 (Torino, 1976), p.

2374.

14. Nenni, Tempo di guerra fredda, p. 64.

15. G. Quazza, Resistenza e storia d'Italia. Problemi e ipotesi di ricerca (Milan, 1976), p. 166.

16. On the PCI internal debate, see Spriano, SPCI, V, pp. 314ff; and the collection of

documents by L. Longo, I centri dirigenti del PCI nella resistenza (Rome, 1973), pp. 399ff; P. Secchia,

Il Partito comunista italiano e la guerra di Liberazione 1943–45 (Milan, 1973), pp. 389ff; G. Amendola,

Lettere a Milano. Ricordi e documenti 1939–45 (Rome, 1973), pp. 300ff.

17. I. Bonomi, Diario di un anno (Milan, 1947), p. 181.

18. CCT, p. 331.

ENDNOTES 317

19. The letter is published by Ragionieri, in U, 21 January 1973, with the heading ‘Ritorno

dall’esilio’.

20. CCT, pp. 332.

21. Ibid., p. 339.

22. C. Pavone, La continuità dello Stato. Istituzioni e uomini, in Italia 1945–48. Le origini della

repubblica (Turin, 1974), pp. 228ff. On this issue, see M. Flores, ‘L’epurazione’, in L’Italia dalla

Liberazione alla repubblica (Milan, 1977), pp. 413ff. For a more recent account, see H. Woller, I conti

con il fascismo. L’epurazione in Italia 1943–48 (Bologna, 1997).

23. Important, amongst others, was the speech at the Teatro La Pergola in Florence, on 3

October 1944, ‘Chi siamo, che cosa vogliamo’, republished in ‘Togliatti nella storia d’Italia’, Critica

Marxista, July–October 1984. On the debate about CLN and Togliatti’s opinion about it, see Spriano,

SPCI, V, p. 391.

24. ‘Per la libertà d’Italia, per la creazione di un vero regime democratico’, in O, V, pp. 55–78.

25. Quazza, Resistenza e storia d’Italia, p. 188.

26. ‘I compiti del partito nella situazione attuale’, O, V, p. 86.

27. ‘La democrazia ha bisogno della donna, la donna ha bisogna della democrazia’, U, 5 June

1945.

28. See M. Casalini, Le donne della sinistra (1944–48) (Rome, 2005), pp. 125–50.

29. ‘Norme provvisorie d’organizzazione’, now in Critica marxista, 3–4 (1988).

30. The letter to Scoccimarro, in CCT (1944), was published in R, 6 September 1974.

31. On the PCI publication, which from January 1945 became Rinascita, dropping the definite

article, see P. Spriano, ‘Sfogliando “La Rinascita” di trent’anni fa’, in R, 5 July 1974. Both the

programme and the editorial ‘Ai giovani’ are now in O, V, pp. 43–5 and 52–4.

32. Cited in N. Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI 1994–58 (Rome-Bari, 1979), p. 37.

33. On this aspect, see Spriano, SPCI, V, pp. 405–8; Cortesi, ‘La “svolta di Salerno”’.

34. The letter to Mario Mafai, in CCT, is published in P. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio

1946–56 (Milan, 1986), pp. 59–60.

35. Partito socialista di unità proletaria (PSIUP) was the name under which the Socialist Party

reformed after the toppling of Mussolini in August 1943. This name was kept until the split of 1947,

when the party led by Pietro Nenni took the name Partito socialista italiano (PSI).

36. ‘Per la libertà d’Italia, per la creazione di un vero regime democratico’, O, V, p. 73.

37. ‘De Gasperi scrive’, in M. R. Catti (ed.), De Gasperi (Brescia, 1974), p. 207.

38. Longo, I centri dirigenti, p. 455.

39. ‘Rapporto del compagno Togliatti tenuto il 5 febbraio 1945 ai congressisti toscani’, in

Secchia, Il Partito comunista italiano, p. 857.

40. The party of the Christian left, originating from the Movimento cattolici comunisti (Catholic

communist movement), had a significant presence in the Resistance, especially in Rome, Milan and

Turin. In December 1945, it disbanded. This, in part, was as a consequence of the explicit

condemnation by the Vatican hierarchy. Many of its members joined the PCI.

41. The account of the conversation between Reale and Montini is in APT (CS), 0310, and

was published by G. Vacca and R. Gualtieri in U, 26 March 1993.

42. ACS, Carte Nenni, b. 125, f. 2459. Also in ACS is the answer given the day after by Nenni,

who expressed ‘profound turmoil concern with the possibility of a split within the working class’, and

came to the conclusion that ‘anyhow you from within and I from without will co-ordinate our

activities’.

43. Minutes of the PCI executive committee of November 1944, largely republished in Critica

marxista, 3–4 (1988).

44. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 376–82.

45. ‘La fine di Giovanni Gentile’, U (Naples edition), 23 April 1944.

46. ‘Istruzioni per l’insurrezione di tutto il popolo, del 6 giugno 1944’, in O, V, pp. 41–2.

47. S. Pons, L’impossibile egemonia. L’URSS, il PCI e le origini della guerra fredda (Rome, 1999),

p. 36.

318 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

48. The report to the second national council, ‘Il partito comunista nella lotta contro il

fascismo e la democrazia’, is in O, V, pp. 111–43.

49. P. Cordone’s evidence of Togliatti’s ‘abduction’ is cited in R. Yedid Jodice,

‘L’organizzazione del “partito nuovo”. Il PCI torinese nel 1945–46’, in A. Agosti and G. M. Bravo

(eds), Storia del movimento operaio, del socialismo e delle lotte sociali in Piemonte (Bari, 1981), pp. 95–6.

50. Speech of 19 May in Milan, in Secchia, Il Partito comunista italiano, pp. 1054–60.

51. The most significant expressions of the reassessment of the CLN are contained in Togliatti’s

speech, delivered in Milan on 6 August 1945, at the CLN provincial congress. See U, 7 August 1946. A

lively discussion, with an agreed statement in favour of the CLN, developed in the PCI Direzione

between May and June. See Barbagallo, La formazione dell’Italia democratica, pp. 53–4.

52. ‘Togliatti 1945. La formazione del governo Parri in un discorso all’apparato centrale del

partito’, in Martinelli (ed.), Politica e società, October 1976.

53. CCT, 1945.

54. On the actions of the justice minister, see Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 451–73; and

especially G. Neppi Modona, ‘Togliatti guardasigilli’, in Togliatti e la fondazione dello Stato democratico,

pp. 285–321, from which I have extensively drawn, especially with regard to the circulars cited in the

text.

55. U, 29 June 1945.

56. Consiglio dei ministri (cabinet minutes), A. G. Ricci (ed.), Governo Parri, vol. V, 1 (Rome,

1992), p. 865.

57. ‘O il socialismo o la morte’, R, July–August 1945, p. 171.

58. ‘La pace per l’Italia’, ibid., p. 164.

59. The letter is published in Dagli archivi di Mosca, p. 226.

60. L. Gibiansky, ‘Mosca, il Pci e la questione di Trieste’, in Dagli archivi di Mosca, pp. 95–6.

61. Gualtieri, Togliatti e la politica estera italiana, p. 102. This theory would be repeated more

explicitly less than a year later in a letter of 21 April 1946 from Togliatti to Thorez, who seemed to be

siding with Tito. The letter was published by M. Galeazzi, ‘Trieste è italiana, voi e Belgrado sbagliate’,

U, 28 June 2000.

62. They are collected in the small volume, P. Togliatti, Linea d’una politica (Milan, 1948) pp.

53–71.

63. The acts of the economic congress of the PCI in August are published in the volume

Ricostruire (Rome, 1945). Togliatti’s speech is in O, V, pp. 163–73.

64. ‘Il decalogo liberale’, U, 7 December 1945.

65. ‘Il malcontento di De Gasperi’, ibid., 8 July 1946.

66. A. G. Ricci (ed.), Verbali del Consiglio dei Ministri, vol. VI, 2 (Rome, 1993), p. 282.

67. The article, ‘Tra Lussu e La Malfa’, appeared in U, 8 February 1946.

68. A detailed reconstruction of the discussion of the Direzione of 16–18 February is in P. Di

Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’. Il PCI tra democrazia e insurrezione 1944–49 (Bologna 1991), pp.

111ff.

69. Togliatti’s report to the prime minister on the amnesty is preserved in CPST, where there

are also several letters, coming from different sources, for and against the measure. For an accurate

analysis of the amnesty results, see Woller, I conti con il fascismo, pp. 553–9; for a more critical

assessment, see M.Franzinelli, L’amnistia Togliatti (Milan 2006).

70. There is still a lot of debate amongst Italian historians on the question of communist

‘duplicity’. Amongst the most significant contributions are B. Groppo and G. Riccamboni,

‘Introduzione’ a La sinistra e il ’56 in Italia e in Francia (Padova, 1987), pp. 21–30; L. Cafagna, C’era

una volta. Riflessioni sul comunismo italiano (Venezia, 1991); Di Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’; R.

Martinelli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano. Il “Partito nuovo” dalla Liberazione al 18 aprile (Torino,

1995), pp. 108–12.

71. Togliatti’s speech to the Direzione of Northern Italy, 5 August 1945, was published by R.

Martinelli in U, 10 September 1990.

72. M. Dondi, La lunga liberazione. Giustizia e violenza nel dopoguerra italiano (Rome, 1999).

ENDNOTES 319

73. P. Calamandrei, ‘I primi passi’, Il Ponte, July–August 1946, p. 588. Calamandrei, close to

the PdA, is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Italian constitution.

74. Togliatti’s report to the fifth congress is in O, V, pp. 174–223. References in the text are

drawn from there.

75. The debate on the statutes, on the basis of archive material, is analysed by Sechi in S. Merli

and S. Sechi, Dimenticare Livorno. Sul partito unico dei lavoratori 1944–47 (Milan, 1985), p. 79.

76. The circular of the Direzione of 15 April is in the APC, and is published in Martinelli and

Righi, La politica del Partito comunista italiano nel periodo costituente, pp. 232–6.

77. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio, p. 54.

78. V. Gorresio, I carissimi nemici (Milan, 1977 edition), pp. 117 and 127.

79. Ibid., pp. 54ff.

80. Information on Aldo Togliatti is in Bocca, Palmiro Togliattti, p. 589. Togliatti’s letters to

his son (from 1945–55) are in the private archive of the Montagnana family.

81. There is an amusing letter of 21 July 1954 to his niece Fernanda. In answer to the news

that she had safely reached Turin after visiting him in Rome, he wrote: ‘Don’t put on any airs. You

must know you were followed and guarded during your journey by two of my agents. Therefore I

know to the last detail what you did, the magazines you bought, the people you spoke to, what you had

in the trattoria, who you let flirt with you and all the rest. As you can see freedom is a relative thing

even for you. It is better if you think of it as an “awareness of necessity.”’ The letter is in Fernanda

Togliatti Grosso’s private archive.

82. On the meeting with Nilde Iotti, see the accurate and overall reliable reconstruction by G.

Corbi, Nilde (Milan, 1993), pp. 50ff.

83. M. Mafai, L’uomo che sognava la lotta armata. La storia di Pietro Secchia (Milan, 1984), p.

80.

84. Ibid., p. 81.

85. The passage in the letter to Nilde Iotti, not dated, is in U, 26 March 1993.

86. The letter to Eugenio Reale, a copy of which is in ACS, was published in Corriere della Sera,

22 July 1993.

87. Secchia’s contribution is in La politica del Partito comunista italiano nel periodo costituente,

pp. 568–79.

88. For his speech of 29 July 1947 on the peace treaty ratification, see DP, I, p. 153.

89. Ibid., pp. 4–26.

90. The report to the CC of 18 September 1946 was published by R. Martinelli in Studi storici,

2 (1991), pp. 487–527.

91. On Togliatti’s journey to Paris, see M. Caprara, L’attentato a Togliatti. 14 luglio 1948. Il

PCI tra insurrezione e programma democratico (Venezia, 1978), p. 123.

92. On the journey to Belgrade, see A. Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra. Dalla Liberazione al

potere DC (Rome-Bari 1988), pp. 319–20; M. Galeazzi, Togliatti e Tito. Tra identità nazionale e

internazionalismo (Rome 2005), pp. 78–9.

93. The Consigli di gestione were established to run factories during the last months of the war,

as the Resistance spread in Northern Italy. Recognised by all the anti-fascist parties in the Decree of 25

April 1945, they were (strongly politicised) plant-level worker representation organisations aimed at co-

determination, if not self-determination. The movement reached its high point when a national

congress was held in November 1947, and was briefly shifted to the left by a turn on the part of the

PCI. After this, it went into sharp decline.

94. ‘Nuovo corso’, O, V, pp. 232–5.

95. Reggio Emilia’s speech, ‘Ceti medi e Emilia rossa’, is in L. Arbizzani (ed.), Politica

nazionale e Emilia rossa (Rome, 1974)., For an analysis of the speech, see D. Sassoon, Togliatti e la via

italiana al socialismo. Il PCI dal 1944 al 1964 (Turin, 1979), pp. 56–60.

96. The movement centred on the weekly publication L’uomo qualunque. It was born out of

disenchantment with mainstream politics, and was characterised by a refusal to make a positive

ideological commitment. Its main exponent was the publication’s founder, playwright Guglielmo

320 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Giannini. The movement gained 36 deputies in the 1946 Constituent Assembly elections, but declined

soon after. See S. Setta, L’Uomo Qualunque 1944–48 (Bari, 1975), pp. 201–16.

97. ‘Aprire al popolo italiano la via che porta alla democrazia e al socialismo’, O, VI, pp. 837–

73.

98. Ibid., p. 866.

99. The Società affair is discussed by Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, pp. 66–72.

100. For Togliatti’s letter to Vittorini, dated 7 October 1945, see Spriano, Le passioni di un

decennio, pp. 56–7.

101. R, 10 (1946).

102. ‘Vittorini se n’è ghiuto, E soli ci ha lasciato!...’, ibid., 8–9 (1951), signed Roderigo di

Castiglia.

103. G. Vacca, ‘Alcuni temi della politica culturale di Togliatti’, in I corsivi di Roderigo (Bari,

1976), p. 112.

104. R. Rossanda, ‘Unità politica e scelte culturali’, R, 28 August 1965, pp. 21–2.

105. G. Turi, Casa Einaudi (Bologna, 1990), p. 196. On the role played by Einaudi publishers

in PCI cultural policy, see L. Mangoni, Pensare i libri. La casa editrice Einaudi dagli anni trenta agli

anni sessanta (Turin, 1999).

106. G. Vacca, ‘Appunti su Togliatti editore delle “Lettere” e dei “Quaderni”, Studi Storici, 3

(1991), p. 657.

107. Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, p. 105.

108. A. Vittoria, Togliatti e gli intellettuali. Storia dell'Istituto Gramsci negli anni Cinquanta e

Sessanta (Rome, 1992), pp. 20–1.

109. On 11 January 1947, under Giuseppe Saragat’s leadership, nearly half of the deputies and

75,000 members left the Socialist Party and formed the Partito socialista dei lavoratori italiani (PSLI),

which later became the Partito socialdemocratico italiano (PSDI).

110. On the January crisis and its consequences, see the comprehensive analysis by S. Galante,

La fine di un compromesso storico. PCI e DC nella crisi del 1947 (Milan, 1980), pp. 30–61.

111. Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra, p. 350.

112. De Gasperi’s note on the meeting of 26 May and Togliatti’s letter of the following day are

in Documenti Bartolotta, cited by Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra, pp. 391–4.

113. The message to Reale was reproduced in Ragionamenti, 198–9 (1990), pp. 20–1.

114. The letter is in La politica dei comunisti dal V al VI Congresso (Rome, undated), pp. 271–84.

115. DP, 1, pp. 144–69.

116. This is reconstructed in Martinelli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, pp. 300–1.

117. See especially A. Natta, ‘Introduzione’, DP, 1, p. xxv. For a balanced assessment, see also N.

Bobbio, ‘Togliatti e la Costituzione’, in Togliatti e la fondazione dello Stato democratico pp. 259–71.

118. DP, 1, p. 62.

119. Ibid., p. 66.

120. Ragionieri, La storia politica e sociale, p. 2483.

121. ‘Rapporto al VI Congresso del Partito comunista italiano’, O, V, p. 376.

Chapter Eight

1. E. Reale, Nascita del Cominform (Milan, 1958), p. 17.

2. The Cominform, ‘Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949’, in G. Procacci

(ed.), Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (Annali, 1994), pp. 303–5.

3. S. Galante, L’autonomia possibile. Il PCI del dopoguerra tra politica estera e politica interna

(Firenze, 1991), pp. 104–27; A. Agosti, ‘Longo e il Cominform’ in Luigi Longo, La politica e l’azione

(Rome, 1992).

4. On the subject of the meetings of the Direzione and the CC in October–November 1947,

see A. Agosti, ‘Il PCI e la svolta del 1947’, Studi storici, 1 (1990).

5. M. Brosio, Diario di Mosca (Bologna, 1986), p. 144.

ENDNOTES 321

6. On the ‘Terracini case’, see A. Agosti, ‘A Communist of a Special Mould. Umberto

Terracini’s Opposition to the Cominform turn’, in K. Morgan, G. Cohen, A. Flinn (eds), Agents of

Revolution: New Biographical Apoproaches to International Communism in the age of Lenin and Stalin

(Bern, 2005), pp. 159–70.

7. For the discussion within the PSI, see S. Fedele, Fronte popolare. La sinistra e le elezioni del

18 Aprile 1948 (Milan 1978), pp. 69ff; P. Mattera, Il partito inquieto. Organizzazione, passione e

politica dei socialisti italiani dalla Resistenza al miracolo economico (Rome, 2005), pp. 133ff.

8. Report to the sixth congress of the PCI, O, V, pp. 369–440.

9. ‘Promemoria autobiografico’, in APS, p. 212.

10. Ibid., pp. 426–7.

11. Dagli archivi di Mosca, pp. 292–3.

12. Ibid., p. 291–2.

13. On the electoral campaign of 1948, see Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra, pp. 480ff.

14. Kostylev’s report is quoted in Aga Rossi and Zaslavskij, Togliatti e Stalin, pp. 233–4.

15. FRUS, vol iii (1948), p. 849 and p. 750; Di Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’, p. 237ff and

Martinelli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, p. 338.

16. Quoted by Gambino, Storia del dopoguerra, p. 520.

17. Di Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’, p. 264.

18. On the Soviet–Yugoslav conflict, see especially S. Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union,

1937–73 (Oxford, 1975); L. Marcou, Il Kominform (Milan, 1979), pp. 221ff; L. A. Gibiansky, ‘The

Soviet–Yugoslav Conflict and the Soviet Bloc’, in F. Gori and S. Pons (eds), The Soviet Union and

Europe in the Cold War, 1945–54 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 222–45.

19. Cominform, ‘Minutes of the Three Conferences’, pp. 577–85.

20. Togliatti was to discuss the real reasons for the split between Stalin and Tito in his 1962

review of Gilas’ Conversations with Stalin in R, 14 July 1962. However, he did so without committing

himself unequivocally to their soundness. In February 1964, he was to admit frankly: ‘Communists

who knew the Yugoslav comrades in Spain and during the war [author’s note: including himself,

therefore] did not believe the absurd calumnies about a police state.’ See ibid., Viaggio in Jugoslavia, 1

February 1964.

21. This testimony is in Di Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’, pp. 284–5.

22. DP, I, p. 344.

23. Quoted in Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 511.

24. A large and well-known hospital in Rome.

25. On the assassination attempt and its possible background, and on Togliatti’s convalescence,

the most exhaustive reconstruction is that of Caprara, L’attentato a Togliatti. See also M. Spallone,

Vent’anni con Togliatti (Milan, 1976), pp. 29–52.

26. On the 14–16 July, apart from di Caprara’s book, see W. Tobagi, La rivoluzione impossibile

(Milan, 1978); G. C. Marino, Guerra fredda e conflitto sociale in Italia 1947–53 (Caltanissetta-Rome,

1991); R. Martinelli and G. Gozzini, Storia del partito comunista italiano. Dall’attentato a Togliatti

all’VIII Congresso (Turin, 1998), pp. 22–32.

27. There are no records of the meetings of the party leaders for 14–16 July or 6 August in the

PCI archives. But there is Caprara’s reconstruction of the latter in L’attentato a Togliatti, pp. 105ff.

Caprara had drafted the minutes at the time. The resolution on vigilance is in U, 17 August 1948.

28. For the festival of 26 September, apart from Caprara’s testimony quoted in the text, see P.

Ingrao, Le cose impossibili (Rome, 1990), p. 66. Carlo Lizzani’s film has been remastered on video

(together with other images) in conjunction with the book N. Tranfaglia (ed.), Il 1948 in Italia

(Florence, 1991).

29. S. Galante, Il partito comunista italiano e l’integrazione europea. Il decennio del rifiuto, 1947–

57 (Padua, 1988). For the polemic against a federal Europe, see the signed article Federalismo europeo in

R, 11 (1948), pp. 377–80.

30. DP, I, p. 474.

322 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

31. Quoted in C. Pinzani, ‘L’Italia repubblicana’, in Storia d’Italia, IV, 3, La storia politica e

sociale (Turin, 1976), p. 2566.

32. APC, Direzione, 29 March 1949.

33. Di Loreto, Togliatti e la ‘doppiezza’, p. 347, quotes many police documents reporting

presumed paramilitary preparations on the part of the PCI.

34. See the interview in U, 27 February 1949.

35. However, its commitment was considered inadequate since – at the Cominform meeting in

autumn 1950 devoted to problems of the party press – L’Unità was again criticised. It should be noted

that while the ‘hardliners’ of the party Direzione blamed as reticent Pietro Ingrao’s self-criticism –

Ingrao had defended his concept of a less ‘ideological’ newspaper, one more open to the problems of

the people – Togliatti had said to Ingrao (who recalled the ‘tranquil dryness of his words’), ‘[We’ll]

carry on as before.’ See Ingrao, Le cose impossibili, p. 71.

36. The article ‘I comunisti e la rivoluzione cinese’, was published in four instalments in R, in

the issues for May, June, October and November 1949.

37. For his few relevant comments on the show trials of 1949–50, see his polemical note against

‘Il Ponte’, in the rubric ‘A ciascuno il suo’, in R, 2 (1950), p. 92.

38. The Cominform, ‘Minutes of the Three Conferences’, pp. 783–803.

39. The so-called ‘centrist’ coalition formed by these parties ruled Italy uninterruptedly from

1948 to 1953, and with temporary defections of one or another party for a further seven years. This

period is currently named ‘centrismo’.

40. The secret instructions about excommunication by the Congregation of the Holy Office,

drawn up on 27 July 1949, quoted by Marino, Guerra fredda e conflitto sociale, p. 107.

41. The notes on the discussion with Stalin on 26 December 1949 are in APT, CS, 0451.

42. Report to the sixth congress of the PCI, in O, V, pp. 421–3.

43. On Sereni’s role in directing the PCI’s cultural policy, see Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, pp.

147–51; Vittoria, Togliatti e gli intellettuali, pp. xx–xxi and 15–16.

44. O, V, pp. 519–521.

45. Ibid., pp. 536–64.

46. Togliatti, I corsivi di Roderigo, with an introduction by G. Vacca. Togliatti himself sheds

light on the origin of this pseudonym, which corresponds to the name of a sixteenth century devil, in a

note, ‘Ma chi è questo Roderigo?’, in ‘Lettere al Direttore’, R, 10 (1951), p. 491.

47. See the acerbic note signed ‘r’ in R, 11 (1948), with the response by 14 painters in the

following edition, followed by Togliatti’s marginal note, also signed ‘r’.

48. For the entire polemic against Mila, see A. Agosti, ‘Uno strano ‘compagno di strada’;

Massimo Mila e i comunisti italiani’, in A. D’Orsi and P.G. Zunino (eds), Profilo di Massimo Mila

(Florence, 2000), pp. 81–95.

49. After the general strike that followed the attempt on Togliatti’s life, the pro-DC component

the CGIL split and, in 1950, formed the Confederazione italiana dei sindacati liberi (Italian

Confederation of Free Trade Unions; CISL). Social democrats and republicans split from the CGIL in

1949 and formed the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (Italian Union of Work; UIL).

50. See Colarizi, La seconda Guerra mondiale e la Repubblica, pp. 577–99; G. Mori,

‘L’economia italiana tra la fine della seconda Guerra mondiale e il ‘secondo miracolo economico’, in

Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, vol. 1, pp. 192–200; C. Daneo, La politica economica della ricostruzione,

1945–47 (Turin, 1975), pp. 245ff.

51. For an analysis of the contents and proposals of the ‘Plan of Work’, see especially G.

Pistillo, Giuseppe di Vittorio 1944–57 (Rome, 1977), pp. 175–259; Musella, I sindacati nel sistema

politico, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, vol. 1, pp. 887–91.

52. See for example APC, Direzione, 23 February 1950.

53. On the adoption of Marisa and its effect on Togliatti’s private life, see Corbi, Nilde, pp.

108ff.

ENDNOTES 323

54. S. Tarrow, Partito comunista e contadini del Mezzogiorno (Turin, 1972);, F. De Felice,

‘Togliatti e la costruzione del partito nuovo nel Mezzogiorno, in Togliatti e il Mezzogiorno (Rome,

1977), pp. 35–111); Martinelli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, pp. 96–106.

55. A Rossi-Doria, ‘Appunti sulla politica agraria del movimento operaio nel secondo

dopoguerra. Il dibattito sui coltivatori diretti’, Italia contemporanea, 123 (1976), 69–113.

56. DP, I, p. 508.

57. Ibid., p. 540.

58. ‘Salvare l’Italia!’, R, 8–9 (1950), pp. 385–7. It was the text of a resolution of the Direzione,

13 September.

59. There is a great deal of information about the accident, the operation and Togliatti’s

convalescence in Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 541–3; Spallone, Vent’anni con Togliatti, pp. 53–96;

Secchia, Promemoria autobiografico, pp. 227–9.

60. Togliatti’s letter to Stalin, 4 January 1951, has now been published in Dagli archivi di

Mosca, pp. 417–20.

61. Secchia, Promemoria autobiografico, pp. 229–32.

62. Quoted by M. Galeazzi, ‘Luigi Longo e la politica internationale. Gli anni della guerra

fredda’, Studi Storici, 1 (1990), p. 126.

63. Rumours of opposition between Togliatti and a possible ‘group of hardliners’ within the

party were circulating throughout the second half of 1950, and were collected in police records. See, for

example, the notes from the Romana Questor to the chief of police in ACS, PS 1950, b. 16, f.K1B.

International press reports were similar. For example, E. Stevens, ‘Secchia, not Togliatti, is Boss of

“Hard Core”’, Christian Science Monitor, 10–11 (1950).

64. The record of the discussion with Longo is in some undated typewritten notes, in APS,

Reg. 24, cart. 8. ‘Affare S.’.

65. Secchia, Promemoria autobiografico, p. 230.

66. Rudolf Slansky, former general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was

removed from his post in September 1951, accused of conspiracy and later executed. Marie Svermova,

deputy secretary to Slansky, had been arrested in February and her testimony would be used in the trial

against him.

67. Nilde Iotti’s reminiscences, quoted by Bocca, are in the article ‘Qualcosa di più d’una

amicizia’, in I comunisti, 1 (1970), p. 56.

68. On the Magnani case, see G. Galli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano (Milan, 1976), pp.

301–5. Also S. Bianchini, ‘Le PCF et le cas Magnani’, Communisme, 29–31 (1992).

69. Togliatti’s discourse to the congress of the Federation in Milan is published in U, 20 March

1951. On this, see Sassoon, Togliatti, p. 139.

70. O, V, pp. 576–609, while the conclusions are in R. Zangheri (ed.), Da Gramsci a

Berlinguer. La via italiano al socialismo attraverso i congresi del partito comunista italiano’, vol. II (Milan,

1985), pp. 462–70.

71. DP, I, p. 622.

72. Ibid., p. 644.

73. Ibid., p. 645.

74. On 8 October, the leftist Dossetti had resigned from the leadership of the DC. He left

political life immediately afterwards in order to enter a monastery.

75. Togliatti’s letter to Scoccimarro, 3 December 1950, in APT (CFA), 1950.

76. For a convincing analysis of the ‘material authoritarian’ constitution, see M. G. Rossi, ‘Una

democrazia a rischio’, in Storia dell'Italia repubblicana I, pp. 936ff. For an accurate reconstruction of

the PCI’s attitude to the ‘Swindle Law’, see P. Di Loreto, La difficile transizione. Dalle fine del centrismo

al centro-sinistra (Bologna, 1993), pp. 85ff.

77. Secchia, Promemoria autobiografico, p. 237.

78. Nenni, Tempo di guerra fredda, p. 562.

79. APS, p. 428.

80. ‘Per un governo di distensione, di pace e di riforme sociali’, O, V, pp. 730–69.

324 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

81. The list of gifts that Togliatti received for his sixtieth birthday is in APT (CS), 1953.

82. G. De Luna, ‘Partiti e società negli anni della ricostruzione’, in Storia dell'Italia

repubblicana, vol. 1, p. 759.

83. APT (CS), 1954.

84. Ibid., 1959.

85. The correspondence with the activists to which reference is made in the text can only be

consulted via Togliatti’s replies, which are in APT (CFA).

Chapter Nine

1. ‘The Italian Elections, II: A Talk with Togliatti’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 June

1953.

2. Nenni, Tempo di Guerra fredda, p. 583.

3. Togliatti did not fail to notice it in a declaration to U, 20 August 1953.

4. Togliatti’s positions were expressed in two speeches, on 2 and 9 October, DP, II, pp. 824

and 834; and two articles, ‘La proposta del plebiscito per Trieste’, R, 8–9 (1953), pp. 459–60, and

Trieste atalantica, 10 (1953), pp. 523–4.

5. ‘La corruzione come elemento del regime anticomunista’, R, 2 (1954), p. 92.

6. ‘Per un accordo fra comunisti e cattolici per salvare la civiltà umana’, O, V, pp. 832–46.

7. G. Amendola, ‘Il rinnovamento del PCI’, interview with Nicolai, Rome, 1978, p. 54.

8. ‘L’imbroglio di Napoli’, U, 4 July 1954.

9. APC, Direzione, 7 July 1954.

10. U, 20 August 1954. A year later, Togliatti attempted to draw up a balance sheet of De

Gasperi’s achievements in an essay of considerable length. It was a severe judgement, which connected

the limitations of his DC politics with his lack of understanding of the value, for a genuine politics of

renewal of Italian society, of the unity forged by the Resistance. The essay, ‘Per un giudizio equanime

sull’opera di Alcide De Gasperi’, appeared in three instalments in R between October 1955 and March

1956.

11. ‘Promemoria autobiografico’, in APS, pp. 239–40

12. Ibid., p. 240.

13. On Secchia’s ‘mission’ to Moscow and his report to the leadership on 17 July, see M. Lazar,

‘Les partis communistes italien et français et l’après Staline’, Vingtième siècle, 28 (1990), even though it

is not possible to agree with all the author’s conclusions.

14. R, 7 (1953), pp. 393–7.

15. The reconstruction of the Seniga affair is based primarily on the minutes of meetings of the

Direzione held on the relevant dates, and on documents in the APS.

16. Not until 1957 did an odd, semi-serious apology by Maurizio Ferrara, replying to Italo

Calvino in Rinascita, let it be understood that the dispute, though presented in a somewhat caricatured

form, had run through the entire history of the party since 1945. The story is well reconstructed in

Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 576–80.

17. For a thorough discussion of the entire episode, see Vittoria, Togliatti e gli intellettuali, pp.

46–73. (Togliatti’s letter to Donini of 11 December is published in full in the appendix, pp. 271–6.)

18. In fact, these signs were also contradictory. See Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, pp. 345–6.

19. The dialogue between Togliatti and Bobbio, with Togliatti’s articles in Rinascita and

Bobbio’s in Nuovi Argomenti, began in November 1954 and concluded a year later. Togliatti’s writings

have now been published in I corsivi di Roderigo, pp. 281ff and 310ff; Bobbio’s are in F. Sbarberi (ed.),

Politica e cultura (Turin, 2005).

20. Nenni, Tempo di guerra fredda, p. 637.

21. Ibid., p. 639.

22. O, V, pp. 873–910.

23. The speech to the CC on 14 April 1955, reproduced in its entirety in L’Unità the next day,

was published as a pamphlet with the title Il monopolio clericale e la democrazia in Italia (Rome, 1955).

24. U, 7 April 1955.

ENDNOTES 325

25. ‘L’elezione del presidente’, R, 5 (1955), pp. 335–7.

26. U, 23 June 1955.

27. Ibid., 14 July 1955.

28. Reply to a questionnaire of the periodical ‘il Dibattito Politico’, also in U, 12 August 1955.

29. The speech, also reprinted as a pamphlet entitled Per una vera distensione: fine della

discriminazione e lotta contro la miseria (Roma, 1956), was published in L’Unità the following day.

30. U, 1 January 1956. The Saluto di Capodanno was a forecast presented to the readers of

L’Unità at the beginning of every year.

31. Mieli, Togliatti 1937, pp. 39 and 187.

32. Extracts from Khrushchev’s ‘public’ speech were published in R, 1 (1956). The same

number published Togliatti’s speech at the congress under the title, ‘La via italiana verso il socialismo’

(pp. 70–2).

33. The ‘secret speech’ was published as an appendix in A. Guerra, Il giorno che Chruscev parlò.

Dal XX Congresso alla rivolta ungherese (Rome, 1986), which subjects it to a profound and detailed

analysis.

34. ‘Il XX Congresso del Partito comunista dell’Unione Sovietica’, O, VI, pp. 93–124.

35. ‘Luci e ombre del XX Congresso’, Avanti!, 25 March 1956.

36. The speech and concluding discourse at the fourth national council of the PCI can be

found in the booklet Una maggioranza democratica di sinistra nei comuni e nelle province (Rome, 1956).

37. G. C. Pajetta, Le crisi che ho vissuto. Budapest, Praga, Varsavia (Rome, 1982), pp. 61–2.

38. P. Ingrao, ‘L’indimenticabile 1956’, in his Masse e potere (Rome, 1977), p. 135.

39. Galeazzi, Togliatti tra Tito e Stalin, p. 122.

40. The interview was printed in U, 1 May 1956.

41. The interview in Nuovi Argomenti (June 1956), frequently republished, is in O, VI, pp.

125–47.

42. Khrushchev’s letter of 30 June is in G. Vacca, Togliatti sconosciuto, pp. 190ff. Togliatti

replied to the resolution of the Soviet CC (approved the same day) with a note in U, 4 July 1956, in

which he ‘confirmed that his own opinion was different’.

43. ‘La presenza del nemico’, U, 3 July 1956. The article was published in Pravda on 4 July.

44. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio, p. 201.

45. The article was given a title in pure Cominform style, ‘An Inadmissible Attack on the

Politics of the Italian Communist Party’. Togliatti’s response was titled: ‘The Actual Reality and Our

Actions Rebut All Charges of Irresponsible Defeatism’. Both Onofri’s article and Togliatti’s reply are in

R, 7 (1956).

46. ‘Per un congresso di rafforzamento e rinnovamento del Partito comunista’, in R, 8–9

(1956).

47. Togliatti’s letter to Nenni of 17 October and Nenni’s reply of 23 October are in ACS,

Carte Nenni, b. 125, f. 2459.

48. P. Di Loreto, La difficile transizione. Dalla fine del centrismo al centro-sinistra 1953–60

(Bologna 1993), pp. 190ff.

49. ‘Per un congresso di rafforzamento e rinnovamento’.

50. This letter, from the presidential archive of the Russian Federation, was published by G.

Chiesa in La Stampa, 11 September 1996.

51. ‘Sui fatti d’Ungheria’, R, 10 (1956).

52. See the letter to Giulio Einaudi, quoted in Pinzani, L’Italia repubblicana, p. 2591.

53. A. Guerra and B. Trentin, Di Vittorio e l’ombra di Stalin. L’Ungheria, il PCI e l’autonomia

del sindacato (Rome, 1997), pp. 138–44.

54. This letter was also published by G. Chiesa in La Stampa, 11 September 1996. See the in-

depth analysis by A. Guerra, Comunismi e comunisti. Dalle ‘svolte’ di Togliatti e Stalin del 1944 al crollo

del comunismo democratico (Bari, 2005), pp. 185ff.

55. See V. Zaslavskij, Lo stalinismo e la sinistra italiana. Da mito del URSS alla fine del

comunismo 1945–91 (Milan, 2004), pp. 190ff.

326 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

56. The ‘letter of 101’ was published in its entirety by Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, pp. 536–8. See

also the testimony of Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio, pp. 210ff, which also includes a letter from

Togliatti to Spriano dated 31 October.

57. The statement of 30 October was published in L’Unità the following day.

58. ‘Per difendere la civiltà e la pace’, U, 6 November 1956.

59. P. Di Loreto, Alle origini della crisi del PCI; Togliatti e il legame di ferro (Rome, 1988), pp.

123ff.

60. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio, pp. 217–9, contains lengthy extracts from the letter to

Trombadori.

61. Ingrao, ‘L’indimenticabile 1956’, p. 147.

62. Amendola, ‘Il rinnovamento del PCI’, p. 140.

63. Togliatti’s speech is in O, VI, pp. 184–239. Its conclusions, as well as the general policy

statement, can be found in Zangheri (ed.), Da Gramsci a Berlinguer, pp. 100ff and 127ff.

64. VIII Congresso del PCI. Atti e risoluzioni, (Rome, 1957), pp. 229–34.

65. APS, p. 340.

66. This attack was in his speech to the CC of 25–28 September 1957. See G. Amendola and

P. Togliatti, Mobilitazione del Partito nella campagna elettorale (Rome, 1957). The circumstances of

Calvino’s expulsion from the party are recalled in Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio, in which

Togliatti’s response to Calvino is published.

67. The critique of Giolitti’s pamphlet is in R, 5 (1957), pp. 246–9. See also F. Barbagallo, ‘Il

PCI dal Cominform al 1956’, Studi Storici, 1 (1990), pp. 113–5.

68. This was recalled by Giolitti in Lettera a Marta. Ricordi e riflessioni (Bologna, 1992), p. 105,

in which the text of Togliatti’s letter is also published (p. 107).

69. ‘Considerazioni su una crisi che non c’è e sulle crisi che ci sono’, R. 1 (1957).

70. G. Liguori, Gramsci conteso. Storio di un dibattito, 1922–96 (Rome, 1996), pp. 87–115.

71. ‘Spontaneista’ and ‘consiliarista’ are both, especially the first, current terms of Italian political

lexicon. The first refers to the tendency towards ‘unorganised forms of protest and struggle’; the second

refers to the factory councils modelled on the soviets.

72. Togliatti’s most important writings on Gramsci are Attualità del pensiero e dell’azione di

Gramsci, Il leninismo nel pensiero e nell’azione di A. Gramsci (Appunti) and Gramsci e il leninismo, all

now included in Togliatti, Gramsci, pp. 115–82. For a wide-ranging analysis of their significance, see

G. Vacca, ‘La “via italiana” e gli intellettuali (1956–64)’, Critica Marxista, 4–5 (1984).

73. Garaudy’s article was published almost in its entirely in R, 12 (1956), with the title

‘Osservazioni critiche ai dibattiti e alle posizioni del nostro Congresso’, and was followed by a ‘Postilla’

signed by Togliatti.

74. On the PCI–PCF polemic, see the detailed reconstruction by D. Blackmer, Unity in

Diversity: Italian Communism and the Communist World (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 126–30.

75. Galante, Il Partito comunista italiano, p. 132.

76. Togliatti’s speech to the Camera on 13 June 1956 had offered a few openings in this

direction, although it was far from identifying European unity as the proper institutional, political,

economic and social field for a socialist transformation in the West. See DP, II, pp. 923–46.

77. On the conference of the 64 communist parties, see L. Marcou, L’Internationale après

Staline (Paris, 1973), pp. 33–75. The texts of the ‘declaration’ and the ‘appeal for peace’ can be read in

Documenti politici e direttive del Partito comunista italiano dall’VIII al XI Congresso (Rome, 1960), pp.

178–200.

78. Togliatti also met the new head of the Hungarian Communist Party, János Kádár, and gave

his consent to the instigation of proceedings against Imre Nagy, who, together with many others who

had participated in the 1956 revolt, was executed in June 1958. It is difficult to determine whether

Togliatti’s agreement – whether or not he was aware of what would be the outcome of the trial – was

due to a belief that it was right to make an example in order to strengthen the power of the socialist

regime or to a concern not to expose himself too much as a dissident.

ENDNOTES 327

79. The speech was not published until two years later, under the title ‘Sugli orientamenti

politici del nostro partito’, in R, 11 (1959), pp. 757–62.

80. Ingrao, Le cose impossibili, p. 100.

81. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 140.

82. APT (CS), 0040.

83. ‘L’unità e la compattezza del movimento comunista’, O, VI, p. 275.

84. Togliatti, Mobilitazione del Partito per la campagna elettorale.

85. The ENI (National Hydrocarbon Organisation) was the driving force of Italian energy

policy. It was headed by Enrico Mattei, a DC ex-partisan, who favoured an opening to the left. During

the 1950s, the ENI defied the oligopoly of the ‘seven sisters’, carrying out a strategy of co-operation

with the producing countries and making agreements with Iran and the Soviet Union, among others.

86. APC, Direzione, 4 June 1958.

87. The most useful outline of the transformations of Italy at the end of the 1950s is in P.

Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Società e politica 1943–88 (Turin, 1989), pp. 286ff. See

also G. Crainz, Storia del miracolo economico italiano. Culture, indentità, trasformazioni fra anni

cinquanta e sessanta (Rome 1996).

88. Gli obiettivi della nostra lotta contro il regime clericale e per rinnovare l’Italia (Rome, 1958).

89. A summary of Togliatti’s speech to the twenty-first congress of the CPSU is in U, 29

January 1959. A much fuller ‘Nota sulla politica del PCI’ is available in a handwritten version on

CPST, 0043.

90. ‘Le “vie nazionali” del fascismo’ e ‘Francia e democrazia’, R, 7 and 9 (1958).

91. DP, II, p. 1060.

92. ‘Le decisioni del XX Congresso e il Partito socialista italiano’, R, 10 (1958).

93. ‘Alternativa atlantica; o il comunismo o la morte’, R, 4 (1959).

94. ‘Sinistra e comunisti’, ibid., 5 (1959), p. 228.

95. Togliatti’s speech to the ninth PCI congress was published in Da Gramsci a Berlinguer, pp.

196–264, under the title ‘Per il rinnovamento democratico della società italiana’.

96. On ‘structural reforms’, see the reasoned critical observations of Rossi, Una democrazia a

rischio, pp. 970–1; P. Ginsborg, ‘Le riforme di struttura degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta’, Studi storici,

2–3 (1992).

97. P. Nenni, Gli anni del centro-sinistra, Diari 1957–66 (Milan, 1982), p. 96.

98. DP, II, pp. 1112–35.

99. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 165.

100. The most complete reconstruction of the events of July 1960 is by P. Craveri, La repubblica

del 1958 al 1992 (Turin, 1996).

101. DP, II, p. 1140.

102. See E. D’Auria, ‘Gli anni della ‘difficile alternativa’, Storia dell politica italiana 1956–76

(1983), p. 88.

103. DP, II, p. 1153.

Chapter Ten

1. For an overview of the more general aspects of Togliatti’s analysis in the last four years of

his life, see Vacca, ‘La “via italiana” e gli intellettuali’; Spriano, ‘Dopo il 1956’; Ciliberto, ‘La “battaglia

delle idee” alla svolta degli anni Sessanta’, all of them in Critica Marxista, 4–5 (1984).

2. ‘I giovani vogliono libertà’, O, VI, p. 752.

3. G. C. Pajetta and P. Togliatti, Dare alle lotte dei giovani una prospettiva socialista (Rome,

1961).

4. ‘Possibilità e pericoli nella prospettiva del centro-sinistra’, in Togliatti e il centro-sinistra

(Florence 1975), p. 805.

5. Pajetta and Togliatti, Dare alle lotte dei giovani una prospettiva socialista.

6. ‘Per un’analisi marxista della società italiana’, in Togliatti e il centro-sinistra, p. 701.

7. ‘La concezione marxista del partito politico della classe operaia’, O, VI, pp. 734–9.

328 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

8. ‘Alcuni problemi della storia dell’Internazionale comunista’, ibid., p. 396.

9. Bertelli, Il gruppo, chapter 2, note 43.

10. ‘Il centenario dell’Unità’, U, 26 March 1961.

11. ‘Le classi popolari nel Risorgimento’, in Discorsi di Torino (Turin, 1974), pp. 412–36.

12. ‘Il diciannovismo’, R, 9 March 1963.

13. ‘Il lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo di Ruggero Zangrandi’, ibid., 26 May 1962.

14. Spriano, Dopo il 1956, p. 212.

15. ‘La lettera di un giovane’, R, 21 July 1962; O, VI, p. 630.

16. ‘Il destino dell’uomo’, O, VI, pp. 697–707. About this speech, see P. Pellegrini (ed.),

Togliatti e il destino dell’uomo (Rome 2003).

17. Nenni, Gli anni del centro-sinistra, p. 131.

18. DP, II, p. 1153.

19. Reply to a questionnaire from the RAI press office, in APT (CFA), 1960 (11 November).

20. Atti dell’Assemblea dei comunisti nelle fabbriche (Milan, 1960), pp. 68–71.

21. Democrazia e socialismo, a cura della Sezione stampa e propaganda del PCI (Rome, 1961).

The quotations are from ‘A proposito di socialismo e democrazia’, pp. 29 and 30, and from ‘Socialismo

e democrazia: risposta a Pietro Nenni’, pp. 52 and 58.

22. U, 10 November 1960.

23. The comment was made in the report to the CC of 21–23 April 1964, O, VI, p. 788.

24. See, for example, his speech to parliament of 27 September, DP, II, p. 1120.

25. ‘Avanti, verso il comunismo, liberandosi dalle scorie del passato’, O, VI, pp. 535–63.

26. Excerpts of the debate had already been published in U, 12 November 1961, and can now

be appreciated in all their intensity in the minutes preserved in Archivio della Direzione del PCI.

Amendola’s contribution has been published by R. Roscani, ‘Il PCI e la crisi del XX Congresso del

PCUS, Rivista calabrese di storia contemporanea, June 1998, pp. 89–117.

27. The text is in R. Martinelli, ‘Togliatti, lo stalinismo e il XXII Congresso del PCUS. Un

discorso ritrovato’, Italia Contemporanea, 219 (2000), 303–13.

28. La Stampa, 15 November 1961.

29. According to Armando Cossutta, Togliatti said: ‘Do you want to start an anti-soviet trend?

Then let me tell you that I will start a pro-soviet trend which I will personally lead,’ G. Fiori, Vita di

Enrico Berlinguer (Bari-Rome, 1989), p. 118.

30. Ibid., p. 121.

31. ‘Documento del PCI sul XXII Congresso’, U, 29 November 1961.

32. The letter, dated 7 December 1961, must have been written on 8 December following the

meeting of the party Direzione. It can be found in APT (CFA), 1961. An equally cautious approach

characterised the long article titled ‘Diversità e unità nel movimento operaio e comunista

internazionale’, R, 12 (1961). A comparatively more ‘courageous’ evaluation of Stalin and Stalinism

was formulated by Togliatti in the article ‘La verità, la rivoluzione e il partito’, U, 21 January 1962.

33. The report and the conclusions are published in the pamphlet Per salvaguardare la pace. Per

una svolta a sinistra (Roma 1961).

34. Trasformismo was a political system pioneered from 1876 by Agostino Depretis, who

became prime minister that year. It was a practice used by the leading politicians to transform their

alliances and even their policies in order to remain in power. In practical terms, this meant balancing a

cabinet by including a mix of politicians from both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

35. ‘Passare dai programmi all’azione per un’effettiva svolta a sinistra’, O, VI, pp. 598–622.

36. The comment was reported in inverted commas in U, 10 February 1962.

37. DP, II, p. 1253.

38. Ibid., p. 1249.

39. For the conference proceedings, see Tendenze del capitalismo italiano, 2 vols (Rome, 1963).

40. R. Rossanda ‘Valletta e il neo-capitalismo’, R, 30 June 1962. The article was written in

reply to Giorgio Amendola, ‘Annunziata e il neo-capitalismo’, R, 9 June 1962.

41. ‘Obtorto collo’, ibid., 30 June 1962.

ENDNOTES 329

42. ‘La crosta del neo-capitalismo’, ibid., 7 July 1962.

43. See the editorials in Rinascita, ‘Comunismo e riformismo’, ‘Discussioni con i socialisti’ and

‘Democrazia e socialismo’, of 28 July, 11 August and 25 August respectively.

44. ‘Il nostro voto per la nazionalizzazione’, R, 8 September 1962.

45. ‘Sulla “svolta del centro-sinistra”’, ibid.

46. G. Tamburrano, Storia e cronaca del centro-sinistra (Milan, 1971), p. 165.

47. ‘Potenza socialista, potenza di pace’, R, 3 November 1962.

48. O, VI, pp. 646–54.

49. ‘Riconduciamo la discussione ai suoi termini reali’, R, 12 January 1963.

50. Ibid., pp. 654–7.

51. Ibid., pp. 665–71.

52. Ibid., pp. 675–6.

53. Ibid., p. 677.

54. DP, II, pp. 1254–75.

55. The answers to the Grazia questionnaire are in APT (CS), 1347.

56. The editorials from Rinascita, which were published during the electoral campaign of 1963

(from which the quotes are taken) are ‘L’esperienza dei metallurgici’, 23 February, ‘La DC e gli altri’, 9

March, and ‘Voto inutile?’, 6 April.

57. See S. Magister, La politica vaticana e l’Italia 1943–78 (Rome, 1979), p. 272.

58. Un PCI più forte, una sinistra unita contro il prepotere della DC (Rome, 1964).

59. See C. Pavone’s comments in ‘Un Togliatti mal trattato’, L’Indice, 1 (1985), pp. 13–4, later

discussed by Flores and Gallerano, Sul Pci, pp. 119–20.

60. Magister, La politica vaticana e l’Italia, p. 292.

61. The two interviews given after the vote of 28–29 April – the second given to K. S. Karol –

were published in U, 5 and 24 May 1963 respectively.

62. The dorotea faction was dominant within the DC during the 1960s. It was founded in 1959

at a meeting in the Santa Dorotea convent on the initiative of Mariano Rumor, Emilio Colombo, Aldo

Moro and Paolo Emilio Taviani. They decided then to distance themselves from Amintore Fanfani and

replace him with Aldo Moro as secretary of the party.

63. ‘Discorrendo con i socialisti’, R, 18 May 1963.

64. As proof of the deep divisions between the PCI and PSI, it is worth mentioning the

(private) comment by Nenni about this speech: ‘closed to any political, ideological and organisational

renewal [...] We become stronger as far as we don’t change: this is T’s underlying idea, his Ptolemaic

idea of the PCI frozen at the centre of the political life’. ACS, Carte Nenni, f. 127, f. 2474.

65. ‘Il Congresso socialista’, R, 2 November 1963.

66. ‘Da cosa nasce cosa’, ibid., 16 November 1963.

67. Tamburrano, Storia e cronaca del centro-sinistra, p. 243.

68. ‘Un’ombra sul mondo’, R, 30 November 1963.

69. DP, II, pp. 1292–313.

70. Ibid., p. 1310.

71. The conclusions of the fifth organisational conference of the PCI are in O, VI, pp. 762–82.

72. Togliatti’s letter to Longo, 19 March 1964, and the subsequent documents of the

secretariat and executive, were published in R, 28 August 1965, accompanied by an anonymous

introduction (probably written by Longo), which explained the situation. However, it must be noted

that from the minutes it is clear that Togliatti attended the secretariat meetings at least until June 1964.

In a recent essay on the Yalta memorandum, Carlo Spagnolo argues that ‘it may be plausible’ that one

of the reasons for his resignation was ‘to prevent an attack guided by Moscow that could overturn his

unifying political line’. He also refers to some criticisms aimed at Togliatti during the Naples

conference in response to organisational measures introduced without consulting the CC: Sul

memoriale di Yalta. Togliatti e la crisi del movimento comunista internazionale 1956–64 (Rome, 2007),

pp. 33–5. The first supposition seems more consistent than the second.

73. ‘Sull’accordo pel divieto delle esplosioni atomiche’, R, 24 August 1963.

330 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

74. ‘L’unità e il dibattito’, ibid., 3 August 1963.

75. ‘Per una nuova avanzata’, U, 27 November 1963.

76. ‘Viaggio in Jugoslavia’, R, 1 February 1964.

77. ‘Una sfida che accettiamo’, ibid., 11 April 1964.

78. B. Schoch, Die internationale Politik der italienischen Kommunisten (Frankfurt, 1988), pp.

186ff; Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, pp. 354ff.

79. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, pp. 365–6, believes that not only the publication of Gramsci’s

letter of October 1926 (R, 30 May1964) but also the speech delivered by Togliatti to the sixth congress

of the Comintern (R, 11 July 1964) were perceived as ‘oblique’ messages directed at the CPSU

regarding the dangers of a split in the international communist movement.

80. ‘La scoperta dei comunisti’, R, 15 February 1964.

81. ‘Programmazione o politica dei redditi’, ibid., 13 June 1964.

82. ‘Al fondo della crisi attuale’, ibid., 4 July 1964.

83. ‘Capitalismo e riforme di struttura’, ibid., 11 July 1964.

84. ‘Al fondo della crisi attuale’, ibid.

85. DP, vol. II, pp. 1314–33.

86. A. Höbel, ‘Il Pci nella crisi del movimento comunista internazionale tra Pcus e Pcc (1960–

64)’, Studi storici, 2 (2005), p. 566.

87. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 675–7.

88. The memorandum, first published in R, 5 September 1964, is in O, VI, pp. 823–33.

89. The hypothesis that Togliatti had been involved in a conspiracy against Krushchev has been

advanced again by F. Argentieri, ‘E da Yalta partì l’attacco a Chruscev’, Reset, July–August 1994.

However, the arguments in support of this hypothesis are unsubstantial. Decisive is the evidence given

by Nilde Iotti to L. Madeo, in ‘Togliatti, ultime ore a Yalta’, La Stampa, 13 August 1994.

90. A meticulous account of Togliatti’s last days is given in Spallone, Vent’anni con Togliatti,

pp. 129ff. See also F. Prattico and O. Cecchi, Palmiro Togliatti. Cinquant’anni nella storia dell’Italia e

del mondo (Rome,1965). The pages in the volume are not numbered. Also, A. Natta, Le ore di Yalta,

Rome, 1970.

91. ‘Palmiro Togliatti. Cinquant’anni nella storia dell’Italia e del mondo’.

92. Gli anni del centro-sinistra, p. 388.

93. ‘Una folla sterminata, consapevole e civile’, U, 30 August 1964.

94. Cited in Prattico and Cecchi, Palmiro Togliatti.

95. ‘Il nemico Togliatti’, L’Espresso, 30 August 1964.

96. Prattico and Cecchi, Palmiro Togliatti.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid

99. Ibid.

INDEX

Acerbo law 217

ACLI [Working Class Catholic Association]

232

Alfredo [pseudonym for Togliatti] 121, 138

Alicata, Mario 180, 273

'Alliance for Proletarian Unity' 30

Amadesi, Luigi 210–11

Amendola, Giorgio 79, 106, 146, 227, 235,

244, 261, 277–8, 281

Khrushchev defended 273, 274

Amendola, Giovanni 217

'American ideology' 266

'Armir' tragedy 140–1

Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Council 43

anti-monarchy position 146

army democratisation 102

'article 7' of constitution 183

Asturian insurrection 91–2, 120

Austria

fascism 85

Italian intervention, struggle against 88

Italy–Germany disagreement 101

Avanti! 7, 9

'Aventine bloc' 147

Aventinian experience 38

'bad peace' better than war 106

Badoglio government 144–5, 151–5

Banchetti, Elda [PT fiancée] 25

Bandung conference 232

Battle of Ideas 265–8

Battle of the Ideas, The 10

Bauer, Otto 105

Belgium 93

Bell, Tom 49

Benedetti, Arrigo 259

Bergson 10

Berlinguer 261, 274

Berlinguer, Mario 3–4

Berti, Giuseppe 73, 74, 81, 108, 118, 131,

135, 136

Bianco, Vicenzo 140, 166

Bibolotti, Aladino 109, 110, 141

Blagoeva, Stella 132

Bobbio, Norberto 228–9

Bocca, Giorgio 25

Bocenina, Ninna 139

Boero, Giovanni 12, 13

Bombacci, Nicola 13

Bonomi 154–5

Bonomi government 160–1

Bordiga 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 33–4, 41–2

correspondence from prison 28

expulsion 71

Bordighism 43

Brandler 33

Brezhnev 290

Bufalini 274

Bukharin 47, 56–7, 60, 68

Calamandrei, Piero 170, 201

Calvino, Italo 247

capitalism in disarray 69

'capitalist stabilisation' 57

'Carbonarismo 79

Carli 288

Carocci, Alberto 236–7

Carrillo, Santiago 122

Catholic Action 215

Catholic movement 257–8

Cattaneo 80

Cerreti, Giulio 92, 135, 144

CGIL [Italian Confederation of Labour] 13, 38,

230–1

affiliation to the RILU 68

full employment 206

general strike against Swindle Law 218

'Labour Plan' 206

reconstitution 160

Checa, Pedro 129

China

dialogue opened by Togliatti 279

need for alliance with the left 50

peaceful co–existence criticised 262

response to overture 279–80

Sino-Soviet relations 271, 279

Wuhan government 50

Ciufoli, Domenico 109

332 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

'Class War' 13

Claudin, Fernando 129

'clerical obscurantism' 204

clerical totalitariansim 252

'clericalisation' 218–19

CLN [Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale] 145,

154

powers 155

role 163

CNT [Confederación Nacional del Trabajo]

125

Codovilla 122

Cold War 209

Collegio Carlo Alberto 4

Colombi, Arturo 228

Colombo, Emilio 288

Cominform

formation 189

wound–up 236

Comintern [Communist International]

4th congress 1922: 23, 24

5th congress 1924: 32

6th world congress 1928: 56–7

7th world congress 1934 preparations

87–8, 89, 90

7th world congress 1935: 99–103

8th Plenum 1927: 49

9th Plenum 1928: 52

10th Plenum 1929: 64–6

'advisors' in Spain 122

attacks on PCI 64–6

change in apparatus 89–90

'class against class' 85, 86

critical of PCI isolation 34–5

criticised by Togliatti 67–8

dissolution 143–4

distrust of Togliatti 139

importance of links with 28

'Italian question' 33

KPD (German Communist Party) 1923:

31

message to Stalin 100

non–political means to stop minority 50–1

PCI relations 79–80

popular front support 94

supremacy of the Russian party 60

turning point in communist movement

64–6

communist economic analysis flaws 280

communist international meeting 1963–1964:

286–7, 290

communist parties, adulation of leaders 220

communist parties conference 1957: 250–1

communist parties sustaining diversity 63–4

Como consultative conference 1923: 31

Comunista, Il 21, 23–4

Constitutional Court 187

Constituent Assembly 73, 110, 167–9, 171, 175

constitution drafting 187

Corbi, Gianni 90

Corbino 177

'corparativism' 99

Correnti, Mario [pseudonym for Togliatti] 140

Corso sugli Avversari 99

Cosmo, Umberto 5

Cossu, Nunzio 3

Cossutta 261

CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain] 43

CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]

20th congress 233

22nd congress 1961: 272

excessive intrusion criticised 286

Croce, Benedetto 6, 10, 19–20, 152, 158, 205

Crossman, Richard 223

Cuba and Kennedy 271

Cuban missile crisis 279

'Czech issue' 104

Czechoslovakia 103, 195

D'Onofrio 53

DC [Christian Democracy] 159, 191–2

anti–communist tactics 283

coup d'état possibility 194

power system 255–6

De Gasperi

death 226

De Gasperi government, first 167–9

De Gasperi government, second 176, 182–5

De Gasperi government, third 185

De Gasperi government, fifth 208

De Gasperi government, seventh 214

De Luca, Don Giuseppe 160, 282

De Sanctis, Francesco 3

détente 257–8

Di Castiglia, Roderigo [pseudonym for Togliatti]

205

Di Lorenzo, General 289

Di Vittorio, Baldina 78, 81, 131, 135

Di Vittorio, Giuseppe 237–8, 241–2

'differentiated analysis' 47, 76

Dimitrov, Georgi 86, 89, 91, 103

diplomacy of co-existence 225

'doctrine of the main enemy' 96–7

Donini, Ambrogio 228

INDEX 333

Dosetti, Don Giuseppe 292

Dozza 91, 131

DPF [Democratic Popular Front] 193–4, 195

Duclos 92

EC [Executive Committee of the PCI] 26

ECCI 35

6th Plenum 1926: 41

7th Plenum 1926: 47

12th Plenum 1932: 76

13th Plenum 1933: 82

decentralisation 42

Third Enlarged Plenum 1923: 28

Togliatti's speeches 47

Trotsky views' suppressed 51

'Economic Battle and War' 8

Einaudi 247

Einaudi publishers 181–2

Einaudi, Luigi 5, 197

'Eisenhower doctrine' 252

elections 1946: 175

elections 1958: 253–4

electoral reform 27

Ercoli [pseudonym for Togliatti] 33

Ethiopia, Italian aggression 104, 106, 107

excommunications 203–6

Facta government crisis 22

factory councils 11–12

Fanfani governments 224, 255–6, 261, 268–9,

275, 276

Fanfani, Amintore 251–2, 268

Farinelli, Arturo 5

fascism

analysed 110

analysis of fascist economic policy 60

analysis of working of power 97–9

anti-fascism strength 262–3

as a force of government 27

Austria 85

could not be reformed 109

danger of war 48

false analogies between Germany and Italy

76

focus on its ideology 83

foremost enemy of communism 82

German 97

lectures on 97–9

PCI ineffective opposition 72–3

Risorgimento 80

specific character of Italian 47

theoretical review 58

united front against 81

united front against in France 85

FGCI [Italian Federation of Communist Youth]

53, 270

youth protests 270

FIOM [Federation of Engineering Workers] 12

Firsov, Friedrich 116–17

Fischer, Ernst 115–16

Florence fascist attacks 20

Fortichiari 28

'fourth party' 288

France

De Gaulle 255

fascism 85–6

general strike 1934: 85

united action in 88

Fried, Eugen 138

'front for peace' initiative 201–2

Fund for the Development of Southern Italy 208

Furini [pseudonym for Giuseppe Dozza] 108

Gallo [pseudonym for Luigi Longo] 68

Garaudy, Roger 248–9

Garlandi [pseudonym for Ruggero Grieco] 62

Gedda, Luigi 215

general strike 1922: 22

Gentile, Giovanni 10, 161–2

Germanetto, Giovanni 62

Germany

Berlin Wall 271–2

Giannini, Guglielmo 178–9

Giardina, Giovanni 21

Giolitti 20, 205, 246, 247

Giolittian experiment 4

GL [Giustizia e Libertà] movement 78

Gobetti 10–11, 158

Gomulka 240

Gorresio, Vittorio 172–3, 273

Gramsci, Antonio 4, 5, 6, 9, 20, 35

attempts to obtain release 56

correspondence 1923–24: 266

death 110

'ill timed' letter 44–7

political inheritance 158

prison notebooks 99, 112, 266

publication of his work 181–2

Togliatti, writings on 247–8

trial 55

tributes to by Togliatti 111–12

Grido del Popolo, Il 7, 8

Grieco, Ruggero 53, 54–5, 62, 69, 106, 131,

136–7, 220

334 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Gronchi, Giovanni 231

Hernandez, Jesus 127

'How Stupid They Are!' 184

Humbert-Droz, Jules 29, 30, 34, 48, 50, 52,

79, 116

Hungary armed insurrection 240–3

Ibarruri, Dolores 139

idealist philosophers 10

idealist philosophy 5

ILS (International Lenin School] lectures 97–9

'In Praise of Fascism' 26

'In Praise of the Cynic' 19, 26

'incomes policy' 288–9

Ingrao, Pietro 251, 273, 275–6

International Brigade 109, 127

Iotti, Nilde [PT companion] 3, 173–5, 198,

207, 210, 212, 213, 290

'iron pact' 132

'Italian question' 33

'Italian Situation and the Bolshevisation of the

PCI, The' 38

Italy

Civil War possibility 194

'clericalisation' 218–19

coup d'état 1943: 143

democratic renewal of society 258–9

economic and social transformation

1958–1963: 254–6

foreign policy 252

history, 19th century 80

internal migration 254

international context 82

Italo-Soviet rapprochement 1933: 82

NATO membership 213–14

revolution, quality of 65–6

unification as a revolutionary act 266

vassal of Germany 138

workers' strikes 1943: 142

John XXIII, Pope 282–3

Kamenev 32, 41, 56

Kardeli 189–90

Kardelj 166

Kennan, George 194

Kennedy's assassination 285

Khrushchev

Belgrade visit 232

critique of 'personality cult' 233–4

peaceful co–existence 233

'secret speech' condemning Stalin 233–4

Stalin, attack on 272–3

Kirov 100, 115

KPD [German Communist Party] 59–60, 64, 104

1923: 31

criticised over Röhm murder 94

KPP [Polish Communist Party] 130–1, 233

Kuusinen, Otto 49, 76, 82

L'Ordine Nuovo 7–8, 9, 19, 24

division within group 13–14

factory councils 11, 12

L'Unità 30, 34

L'Uomo Qualunque party 178–9

La Voce 4

Labriola, Antonio 6

land occupation movement 207

Lateran pacts 63

Lavagnini, Spartaco 20

Lavoratore, Il 24

Lebedeva, Elena 90

'legal work' 78

'legalitarian strike' 22

'legge Acerbo' [electoral reform] 27

Lenin 11

Leone government 285

Leone, Giovanni 284

Leonetti, Alfonso 9, 54, 67, 72

Lessons of October 36

Lettere di Spartaco 136

Levi, Carlo 292

Libyan war 4

Loewell, Pierre 135

Lombardi, Riccardo 284

Longo, Luigi 53, 54, 68, 79, 106, 160, 164,

189–90, 198–9, 211, 261, 271, 286, 291

Lozovsky 43

Lyceum Azuni 3

Macaluso 261

Mafai, Mario 159

Maggioni, Davide 90

Magnani, Valdo 213

Malagoli, Marisa 207, 210, 290

Malenkov 225

Manuilsky 33, 43, 61, 65–6, 74–5, 76, 86, 89,

91, 93–4

March on Rome 23, 27

Marcucci, Cesare 134

Marshall Plan 185, 197–8

Marteaux, Albert 93

Marty, André 122

INDEX 335

Massarenti, Giuseppe 21

Massini, Cesare 134

Massola, Umberto 108, 133, 135

Matteotti 30, 33, 34, 112

'maximalist nihilism' 276

Mazzini 80

Merzagora, Cesare 231, 263

Mila, Massimo 205–6

Modena protestors killed 207, 208

Molotov 176–7

Montagnana, Elena 117

Montagnana, Mario 9, 32, 86, 88, 108–9,

131

Montagnana, Rita [PT wife] 90, 119, 173

marriage 37, 41

Montini, Giovanni Battista 160

Moravia, Alberto 236–7

Moro government 284, 285, 288

Moro, Aldo 261, 276, 284

Mounier 267

MPS [Maximalist Socialist Party] 81

MSI [Movimento Sociale Italiano] 257, 262

Munich negotiations 127

Münzenberg, Willi 116

Mussolini, Benito

impression on Togliatti 7

'special laws' 46–7, 48, 52–3, 59

see also fascism

Nagy, Imre 241

'national opposition' (German) 76

Natoli, Aldo 273

Nazi imperialism 105

Nazi seizure of power 80–3

Negarville, Celeste 134

Negrin, Juan 121–2, 126–8

Nenni, Pietro 81, 152, 153, 161, 171, 239–40,

252, 268, 292

Netherlands 103

Neumann, Heinz 64–5, 116

New Deal 83, 93

Niccolini, Mosé 2

Nin, André 125

'Nine questions' 236–7

Nitti 20

Nuovi Argomenti 236–7

obstructionism 200–1, 218

'On the Duties of the Communists' 148

Onofri, Fabrizio 158, 239, 246

Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro 98

'opportunism' 246

'opportunism' accusations 67

Ordine Nuovo 6

Pacem in terris 282

Pajetta, Giancarlo 227, 235, 273

Pallante, Antonio 198

parliamentary elections 21

Parri government 163–4

'particularism' 66

'partito nuovo' [new party] 157, 169, 170–1

Partito Popolare 215

Pasquini [pseudonym for Ignazio Silone] 75

Pastore, Ottavio 7

PCE [Spanish Communist Party] 119

isolation 124–5

PCF [French Communist Party] 50

criticised 94

distrust of its policies 93

popular front developments 92

PCI [Communist party of Italy]

10th congress 1962: 279–81

2.1 million members 179

3rd congress 1925: 37–9

4th congress 1931 75

6th congress 1948: 191–2

7th congress 1951: 213–14

8th congress 1956: 244–5

9th congress 1960: 258

activity within the law 78

archives 1917–1940: 266

Bolshevisation 36–7

CC disbanded 118

centre–left, doubts about 277

collaboration with PSI essential 91

collective leadership 226–7

Comintern criticism 131–3

Comintern relations 79–80

Como consultative conference 1923: 31

conditional support for new government

283–4

corruption condemned 225

criticied by Cominform 189–91

criticised by Togliatti 132–3

cultural policy 180–2, 204, 228

decisive clash within the PCI 70–1

dissolution 137

'duplicity' 169–70

détente 257–8

economic policy 177

election gains 1960: 269

European organisation innovation 258

exiled leadership 48, 54

336 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

first great 'turning point' 32

formation 15–16, 19

fundamental strategic choice 176

fusion with the PSI 26–7

Gallo project 69–70, 73

'Greek outcome' risk 162–3

Hungarian revolution 246

insurrection possibilities 198–9

intelligentsia, attitude towards 181

inter-party conflict 273–4

internal controversy 1927–1928: 53–4

isolation of the communists 248

land reform 208

'Magnani case 213

most consistent anti–fascist exponent 263

'national' party need 156

'new majority 259

obstructionism 200–1, 218

'opportunism' 246

organisational crisis 59–60

outbreak of reformism 242–3

party reorganisation 54

peace campaign 257

police repression 79

praise of Togliatti as leader 220–1

reaction to Togliatti assassination attempt

198–9

reorganisation 68–70

'revisionism' 251

Rome theses 32

'sectarianism' 246

special kind of opposition 276

Togliatti as post–war Secretary 169

trade union defence 38

Treaties of Rome 249

'united front' call 27

vitality 1931 74–5

withdrawal from parliament 34–5

youth protests 270

'youths' enthusiasm 72–3

PdA [Action Party] 153, 159, 168

peace treaty ratification 186

peaceful co-existence 229–32, 233

Péguy, Charles 6

Pella government 223–4

Peroni, Baldo 2

'Piano Solo' 289

Pieck, Wilhelm 87, 100

PLI [Italian Liberal Party] 159

Po delta flood 215

Po Valley peasant leagues 21

Politecnico, Il 180–1

positivism 5

POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista]

122, 125

'power groups' 266

PPI [Partito Pololare Italiano] 21–2

'pressure groups' 266

Prezzolini 10

'progressive democracy' 110, 155–7

progressive democracy, praise for 202–3

'proletarian front' disintegration 22–3

PSI [Italian Socialist Party]

31st congress 1955: 231

consultation pact 239–40

foreign policy 229

internal party battles 13

participation in government 268

PCI [Communist party of Italy] formation

15–16, 19

poor relationship with PCI 269

reformists expulsion 22–3

reservations about the PCI 284

Togliatti membership 7

PSIUP [socialist parties] 159, 171, 178

PSOE [Partido Socialista Obrero Español] 125

Radek, Karl 23, 33

Radical Party 2

Radio Milano Libertà 140, 144

Ragionieri, Ernesto 14, 90, 97

Rapacki, Adam 253

Ravazzoli 67, 72

Ravera, Camilla 26, 45, 48, 52, 66, 70–1, 73

Reale, Eugenio 147–8, 160, 174–5, 185, 189

'Reconciliation of the Italian people to save Italy'

107–9

reformism, road to 278

regional autonomy 187

'Report on Fascism' 23

Republican Assembly support withdrawn 68

Republican Party 81

'revisionism' 251

RILU [Red International of Labour Unions] 43

Rinascita, La 157–9, 205, 208, 209

Risorgimento

analysis 266

fascism comparison 80

tradition of 141

Roasio 261

Robotti, Paolo 117

Rodano, Franco 160, 195, 278, 282

Rolland, Romain 6

Romeo, Rosario 266

INDEX 337

Rossanda, Rossana 277

Ruffini, Francesco 5

Russian Revolution 10

Russo, Luigi 8

Ruthenberg 111

Salerno compromise 147

Salerno Turn 151–3

Salvadori, Massimo 66

Salvemini, Gaetano 7

Saragat 178, 239, 277

Sassari 3

Scelba 199

Scelba government 224–5, 232

'Scelba law' 215–16

Schubert, Hermann 116

Schucht, Eugenia 55, 132

Schucht, Tatania 110, 132

Scoccimarro, Mauro 28, 55, 146, 157

Secchia, Pietro 53, 54, 72, 75, 175, 179,

192–3, 198–9, 211, 217, 225, 226–8

'sectarianism' 246

Segni governments 232, 252, 257, 260

Segni, Antonio 277

Seniga, Giulio 227

Sereni, Emilio 204

'Serra' [pseudonym for Angelo Tasaca] 60

Serrati 12, 16, 23, 34

SFIO [Section française de l'Internationale

ouvrière] 85, 87, 88, 92

show trials

1936–37: 113–18

1949: 203

Bukharin 114

confessions 114–15

evidence against Togliatti 116–7

Kamenev 113

Radek 113

Togliatti interventions to save individuals

116

Zinoviev 113

Silone, Ignazio 51, 54, 72, 75

'social fascism' 87

socialism as true liberator 11

socialism under construction 69

Socialist International 91, 103, 104, 105, 119

socialists, relations with 239

Società 180

Sorel 10

Souvrarine, Boris 32

Soviet Union

attack by Germany 139

danger of a war of aggression against 49

defence of by containing Nazi Germany 97–8

foreign policy 225

'iron link' of Togliatti strategy 270

NEP (New Economic Policy) 41

non–aggression pact with Germany 133–4

'peace policy' 102

Salerno Turn 152–3

Yugoslavia relations 196–7, 232, 248, 279

Spaak, Paul-Henri 93

Spain

anarchists involvement in government 126

insurrection 91–2

political analysis 123–4

Spallone, Mario 291

SPD [German Social Democratic Party] 75–6

Spriano, Paolo 172

Sraffa, Piero 56, 110

Stalin

condemned by Khrushchev 'secret speech'

233–4

death 218

France alliance pursued 85

memory attacked by Khrushchev 272–3

offers Togliatti Cominform leadership

210–12

tribute by Togliatti 219–20

troika with Kamenev and Zinoviev 32

violation of legality 272

Stato Operaio, Lo 48, 71

structural reform 229–32

Sturzo, Don 22

Suez Canal invasion 243

svolta 67–9, 74

svolta within the svolta 77–8

'Swindle law' 216

Tambroni government 260–1, 262–3, 265, 268

Tasca, Angelo 6, 9, 13, 14, 28, 29, 53, 60–1, 63,

65, 68

television 269

Terracini, Umberto 9, 14, 24–5, 73, 190–1, 234,

236, 256

terror, balance of 253

Thalheimer 33

Thälmann, Ernst 59–60

Thorez 86, 92, 97

'three', the 75

'three, the' 70–1

Tito 100, 166, 196–7, 235–6, 287

'Titoism' 203

Togliatti 'cult' 200

338 PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Togliatti family history 1

Togliatti ritornato [film] 200

Togliatti, Aldo [PT son] 37, 41, 90, 119–20,

173, 175

Togliatti, Antonio [PT father] 1, 2, 3, 4

Togliatti, Enrico [PT brother] 1, 173

Togliatti, Eugenio Giuseppe [PT brother] 1,

173

Togliatti, Fernanda [PT niece] 173

Togliatti, Luciana [PT niece] 173

Togliatti, Maria Cristina [PT sister] 1, 2, 3,

25, 173

Togliatti, Palmiro

'A new life' 172–5

amnesty for fascist political crimes

168–9

arrested 1925: 36

arrested and released 1923: 29

arrested by French 1939: 134

assassination attempt 198

Bergamo speech 1963: 267–8

birth 1

CC of the Russian party 44

choice between men and political line

51–2

clandestine existence in Rome 1925: 37

confidence that Germany could not win

WWII 141–2

consideration of 'standing aside' 66

correspondence with activists 222

'cult' of personality 220–1

death 292

democratic advance towards socialism

285–6

dialogue with Catholics, importance

285–6

different roads to socialism 234

fascism as a political force 36

first political act of national importance

23

first speech to Comintern on non–Italian

issue 58

Gramsci relationship 45–6

historical knowledge and writings

266–7

interrupted contact with PCI 25–6

life threatened by fascist blackshirts

23–4

'majority secretary' of PCI 29

'maximalist nihilism' 276

message to Stalin at Comintern congress 100

Minister for Justice 164–5, 167–9

Minister without portfolio 154–5

moral stand seen as sterile 62

move away from 'left' trend in Comintern 50

moved to Paris 48–9

national unity priority 161

not writing to imprisoned party leaders 55–6

PCI leaders reservations 190

PCI leadership retention 73

PCI PB criticism 67–9

PCI secretariat resignation 286

polarisation logic 177

political alliances 168

political analysis constant 1930–1934 74

political journalist 19

positivism 5

praise as leader 220–1

prison charges 135

'professional revolutionary' 12

radio propaganda 139–44

reasons for taking the 'party line' 63

Red Cross volunteer 8

reformism, road to 278

released by French 1940: 135

representative to the ECCI 39

retrospective 293–6

return to Italy 1943: 149

return to Moscow 89–90

return to political life after assassination

attempt 200

school 2–5

self-criticism 94–6

seventieth birthday 281

sixtieth birthday 220–1

socialist meetings 9

Soviet model cannot be obligatory 237

Soviet union achievements 205–6

Spanish Civil War end 128–9

Spanish situation study 119–21

speech at Comintern congress cut short 57–8

Stalin meeting 148–9

'struggle for peace' slogan 49

style of work 26

trade union organisation views 65

trade union politics 43

transformist operation 276

tributes on 70th birthday 281–2

two nations concerns 201

university 4–6, 7–8

walking 2–3

WEB (Western European Bureau), 52

work ethic 67

INDEX 339

Togliatti, Palmiro – illnesses

brain haematosis 210

brain haemorrhage 291–2

car accident 210–12

fainting fit 231

myopia 8

pleurisy 8, 25

Stalin's concern 193

Togliatti, Palmiro – pseudonyms

Antonio Viale 203

Ercoli 33

Mario Correnti 140

Roderigo di Castiglia 205

Togliatti, Palmiro – tributes after death

Calvino, Italo 293

funeral 292

Ingrao, Pietro 293

Levi, Carlo 292

Nenni, Pietro 292

Pravda 292–3

Sartre, Jean Paul 293

Scalfari, Eugenio 293

Vittorini, Elio 293

Voce Repubblicana 292–3

Togliatti, Rita [PT wife] 70

Tosco [pseudonym for Giovanni Germanetto]

62

transformist operation 276

'transitional objectives' 93, 95

Treaties of Rome 249

Tresso 67, 72

Treves, Claudio 80

Trieste 165–6, 177, 197, 224, 229–30, 235–6

Trombadori, Antonello 244

Trotsky 32, 57, 62, 71, 76–7

Trotskyism 103, 114, 117–18

Turati, Filippo 21, 80

Turin

cultural atmosphere in University 5–6

factory occupation 14–15

fascist groups 20

industrial lock-out 13, 14

massacre 24

Togliatti residence 8–9

worker's movement 6

turn, the 67–9

U–2 spy plane incident 261–2

UDI [Italian Women's Union] 156–7

Ulbricht, Walter 64

united front against fascism 81

Uribe, Vicente 127

Varga 138

Vasiliev 65

Vatican City

Azione Cattolica 78

Lateran pacts 63

Soviet Union agreement 1921 22

support sought for democratic constitution

183–4

veto of the left ends 275

Venezia Giulia 166

Viale, Antonio [pseudonym for Togliatti] 203

Viale, Teresa [PT mother] 1, 2, 8–9

Viglongo, Andrea 7, 25

'Violation against the Constitution' 209

Vittorini, Elio 180–1

Vittorio Emanuele II, King 146, 152, 154

Vlahovic, Veliko 143

vociani 10

Voltaire 3, 204

Volturno, Battle of 8

Vota 28

Vujovic 51

Vyshinsky 147

Wehner, Herbert 116

Welles, Sumner 184

World Congress of Peace Partisans 210

Yalta conference 162

Yalta memorandum 289, 290–1

young intellectuals 157–8

Zhdanov 190

Zinoviev 32, 33, 41, 51, 56

Zoli government 252