Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (Communist Lives)

PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Aldo Agosti is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin 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 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Series Foreword by Matthew Worley Foreword by Donald Sassoon Preface by Aldo Agosti

vii ix xi 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 Endnotes Index

265 297 331

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 AngloSaxon 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 multivolume 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

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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-anda-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

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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

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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

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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-

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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 Englishspeaking 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.

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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

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‘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

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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

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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 anticlericals, 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 antiprotectionist 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 noncommunists’ 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

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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

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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

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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-inchief 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:

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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

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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

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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

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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 ecclesiasticalreligious 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,

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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‘ 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 pseudoidealism’ 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

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(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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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, allin 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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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 bourgeoisdemocratic 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

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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

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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-classpeasant 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.

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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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‘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 ‘hyperindustrialising’ 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

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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

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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-

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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

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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.

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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

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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 ‘Tascaisms’ 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

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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 selfcriticism 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

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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 politicalorganisational 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

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(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:

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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 doubledealing 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

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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 selfstyled ‘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,

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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

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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 antifascist activity of the GL ceased after the publication, at the end of January 1932, of

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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.

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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

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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 nonprogrammatic 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

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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

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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 longterm 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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‘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

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‘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

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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

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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)

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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 democraticbourgeois 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

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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

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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’.

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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

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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

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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.

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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 nationalsocialism’. 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

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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

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‘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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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 selfcriticism: 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.

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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 ‘counterrevolutionary 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

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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

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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 HumbertDroz 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

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‘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 deStalinisation 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

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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

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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 antifascist 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 ‘nonintervention’ 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

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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 bourgeoisdemocratic 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

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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

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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’.

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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:

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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 – of the 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

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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-inchief. 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

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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 FrancoSpanish 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,

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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?

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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 counteroffensive 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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 reinterpreted 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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:

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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

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[…], 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 antidemocratic 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

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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 politicalinstitutional 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 rankand-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’

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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 tworoom 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

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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

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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

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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 society 95), 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 exsecretary 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

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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

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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’

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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 subcommission 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

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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

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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 ‘preinsurrectional’ 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,

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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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 anticommunist 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 expartisans. 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

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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

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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

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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 ‘bipartisan’ 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

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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

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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

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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 Catgoddess, 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

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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 ‘anticommunism’, 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

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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.

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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 sevenyear-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

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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

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‘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’.

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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

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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

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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-Svermova 66 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

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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 welleducated 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 headon 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

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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 ‘nonMarxist–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

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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

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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-andfile. 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

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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’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 coexistence’ 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 rankand-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,

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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

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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-counterrevolutionary 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

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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

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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 anticommunist 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

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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

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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

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‘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 wideranging’ 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

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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 excommunist 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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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 oneand-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.

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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

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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

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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’.

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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

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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 centreleft 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

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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

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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 neofascists 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’.

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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 anticommunist 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 centreleft 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.

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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 anticommunist 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 centreleft’. ‘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

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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

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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 coexistence 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

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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

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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 wideranging. 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 […] selfcriticism 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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-andsee’ 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:

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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, vicesecretary 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

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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 nonpeaceful struggle, when necessary, should be condemned as an adventure’, was dangerous and simplistic.

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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 overambitious 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

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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

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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 SinoSoviet 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

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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

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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

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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

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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’

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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,

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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 APC APT (CS) APT (CFA) RCCHIDNI RGASPI

Archivio centrale dello Stato, Rome Archivio del PCI, Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Rome Archivio Palmiro Togliatti. Carte scrivania, Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Rome Archivio Palmiro Togliatti. Documentations collected by Ferri and Amadesi Rossiskij Centr Chranenija i Izucenija Noveisceij Istorii, Mosca Rossiiskii gosudarstyennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii OEUVRES AND NEWSPAPERS

AF APS CCT DP O PT R SPCI TAC TISD U

Annali dell’istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Archivio Pietro Secchia 1945–73 (Milan, 1979) M. and M. Ferrara, Conversando con Togliatti (Rome, 1953) P. Togliatti, Discorsi parlamentari, 2 volumes (Rome, 1984) P. Togliatti, Opere, 6 volumes (Rome, 1967–84) E. Ragionieri, Palmiro Togliatti. Per una biografia politica e intellettuale (Rome, 1976) La Rinascita, later Rinascita (1944–89) P. Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista italiano, 5 vols (Turin, 1967–75) Togliatti negli anni del Comintern (1926–43), A. Agosti (ed.), Annali 1998 (Rome, 2000) A. Agosti, La Terza Internazionale. Storia documentaria, 3 vols (Rome, 1974–79) L’Unità (1924 – 95)

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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 Communism (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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 2. 3.

RGASPI, 495/184/4/ 21. E.H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1984), pp. 48–52. O, IV, 1, p. 255.

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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 HumbertDroz (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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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 codetermination, 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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 indepth 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.

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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

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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 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

333

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 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

335

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 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

337

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 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

339 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