Introduction for The Rise and Fall of the Italian Communist Party

Introduction

In April 1951, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA assembled a dossier of Italian Communist Party documents that dated back to 1923 and had been seized by the Fascist police.¹ The curators of these papers presented them as a rare source of information about communist organizations and their illegal conspiratorial activities, useful in general terms for gaining insight into their procedures and practices after World War II. For the CIA, the crucial aspect was the vast scale of communist networks documented; it was thought that they might provide suggestions about the investigative methodologies needed to combat the challenge of these “professional revolutionaries” during the Cold War. Shortly after founding their party, the Italian Communists had created bases and connections in Paris, Berlin, and Switzerland. The addresses possessed by a leader of the caliber of Umberto Terracini, and found in the documentation, pointed to a much wider “foreign organization” which, alongside Moscow, Vienna, Prague, and other European capitals, included cities such as New York, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Cairo, and Alexandria. In actual fact, the American intelligence officials had attributed contacts belonging to Comintern, already in the early Twenties a global organization, to the Italian Communists. Their conclusions, though vitiated by their obvious Cold War psychosis regarding the threat posed by international communism’s tentacular ramifications, unintentionally identified an essential historical element. Rather than being a valid tool for analyzing a communist “conspiracy,” usable in political warfare, these documents, produced in the early Twenties by a small, persecuted communist party, revealed the outlines of a global project.

This book aims to reassess from an international perspective the visions, connections, protagonists, and salient moments of the history of Italian communism. In other words, I analyze Italian communism as a case study in the global history of communism. This perspective is increasingly being adopted and discussed. Historians have, for example, examined the ambitions and ramifications of the “party of world revolution” between the two world wars, the relations between communism and anticolonial liberation movements, and the Soviet and Chinese strategies in the global Cold War and in the Third World.² In a similar innovative framework, there remained in the shadows the history of those communists who were not in power, though they too were an essential component of a worldwide presence, combining the roles of national and transnational nongovernmental actors. In particular, situating Western communism within the global history of communism implies reconstructing a multiplicity of relational and temporal contexts, ranging from the conceptions and practices of internationalism to the imaginaries and training of militants and leaders, and to the networks established not only in Europe but in the colonial and postcolonial world. It has been said that, given the very nature of their subject, historians of communism have practiced transnational history without realizing it. This is probably true in some cases. Yet it is a fact that for the most part—and until recently—they have approached this history without having really adopted such a perspective.³

The book reconstructs a well-delimited aspect among the possible approaches to the multidimensionality of global relations: the political culture expressed by personalities and leading groups via their visions of European and world order, their ways of making sense of the nexus between national identities and international connections, and their approach to the problems of peace and war. In this profile, a focus on political elites seems inevitable. Not only were questions of international policy the preserve of restricted groups in the last century (as they still are today), but any awareness of the global dimension only emerged with discontinuity, mainly in the context of elites who, for a variety of economic, cultural or political reasons, were themselves internationalized. At the same time, the communist movement constantly cultivated a pedagogical vocation, attempting an osmosis between the political discourse of its leading groups and the cultural development of its militants. In this light, contraposing the sentiments of militants and the strategies of their leaders, as has sometimes been done in studies, seems inadequate. The Soviet mythologies of world revolution, of actual socialism and of “peaceful power”—essential components of the internationalist culture of the communists—became widespread in very similar forms, albeit in different levels of awareness, among leaders, intellectuals, and simple militants.

Like many other leaders and militants, Italian communists saw in internationalism an essential part of their raison d’être. They had been formed between the two world wars, frequenting the milieus of the Comintern, mainly in Moscow and to a lesser extent in other European capitals. Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, Umberto Terracini, Angelo Tasca, Amadeo Bordiga, Ruggero Grieco, Mauro Scoccimarro, Camilla Ravera, Teresa Noce, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Luigi Longo, Pietro Secchia, and Giuseppe Berti all spent more or less decisive parts of their political apprenticeships in the Moscow of the 1920s. They established contacts and relations with Bolshevik leaders and Comintern representatives, who formed part of a dense transnational network. For the Italians, the experience of exile started very early, in Paris and Moscow, where their leaders were joined by a conspicuous number of self-exiled militants. Togliatti became a leading member of the Comintern and its plenipotentiary in the Spanish Civil War, which was a crucial episode for many “professional revolutionaries” such as Longo, Vittorio Vidali, Velio Spano, Antonio Roasio and many others, including rank-and-file militants. After World War II, under Togliatti’s leadership the internationalist generation of the Twenties became integrated with those emerging from antifascist militancy, and later from militancy in the Resistance movement. Among others, these leaders included Giorgio Amendola, Giancarlo Pajetta, Emilio Sereni, Celeste Negarville, Eugenio Reale, Pietro Ingrao, Paolo Bufalini, Mario Alicata, Armando Cossutta, Enrico Berlinguer, Giorgio Napolitano, and Alessandro Natta. Communist internationalism enjoyed continuity thanks to privileged relations with the socialist and anti-imperialist world, which was in expansion thanks to the transformations that war had wrought. The history of these relations and interconnections has often been reduced to a secondary issue, or merely to evidence of a constitutional “duplicity,” with both views using the nation as the sole parameter for judgment. In actual fact, this history was part of a global project that gave rise to a source of identity, a connective tissue, and the guiding star of a vision of the world centered on the idea of politics as a demiurgic force.⁴

Unlike the French communists, with whom they were in close contact during the years of exile, the Italians did not participate in this project through the means of a European great power and an imperial metropolis.⁵ They had experienced semilegality, clandestinity, emigration, and imprisonment in a country that had fallen to a Fascist dictatorship during the tumultuous years of the century’s first postwar period. Between the wars, their profile in the Comintern was minor and peripheral, though the fact that they had lived through and analyzed the experience of fascism in Italy provided them with significant political credit. The original leading group dissolved as a result of both Fascist repression and the Stalinization of the Comintern. In this sense, Italian communists underwent a more lacerating destiny than did others, with the difference that their recognized leader, Togliatti, had been a member of the original group. The disintegration and uprooting peaked during the years of the Great Purge and the Pact between Stalin and Hitler, though the very conditions of marginalization that Italian leaders had been experiencing for some time spared them (but not their emigrant community in the Soviet Union) the more devastating consequences that afflicted other parties. Italian communism’s international role assumed importance only after the war, thanks to the mass influence it had acquired in a European country that was of strategic importance in the bipolar world. It was then that the Italian communists carved out an important position for themselves within the global communist project, becoming the main communist party in the West.

For the Italians—as for many others—being communists meant adhering to a political project and at the same time making an existential choice, based on a radical critique of the existing societies. Their bonds with the Soviet Union were a fundamental component of that identity. Faith in the Soviet model of civilization as the embodiment of a just society, together with the consequent principle of loyalty to the socialist state, fueled from the outset a sectarian character. An element of strength during World War II, and a powerful vector of influence and of failures during the Cold War, the Soviet link would become the classic Achilles’ heel. Nevertheless, Italian communists did not always mimic the ideological and political arsenal forged by the general staffs of international communism, its Marxist-Leninist axioms and its alternative project to Western globalization. On various occasions they acted as the critical conscience of an “imagined community” on a global scale. Their main particularity was the striking intellectual vocation of many of their leaders, which was extremely strong in the beginning and persisted despite generational turnover. This characteristic was recognized and appreciated not only by Lenin, Trotsky, and Gorbachev but also by figures such as Willy Brandt, Leopold Senghor, and Deng Xiaoping, and additionally by many Western and Third World intellectuals. In this way they achieved recognition as an independent voice in being national and antifascist, which increased their authority. But they were also capable of building networks of relation beyond the confines of that community, and this brought them to interact with a range of internationalist ideas and cultures. The coordinates of their political culture endured contradictions, mutilations, conflicts, and discontinuities, despite what their own narratives may describe. Such dynamics were inextricably interwoven with the rise and fall of international communism, but no less with events in Italy, culminating in the terminal metamorphosis of 1989.

To an empathetic and involved observer like Eric Hobsbawm, who assiduously frequented Italy and the milieu of the Italian left from the Fifties onward, communists and antifascists seemed the protagonists of a reaction to a sense of the country’s cultural and political marginality, which Fascism had aggravated.⁶ The socialist transformation of Italy was to remain a dream. Rightly or wrongly, however, the leading groups of Italian communism believed they had inherited a cosmopolitan tradition that was part of Italy’s long history and which they had to adapt to the ideological and global conditions of the twentieth century. More or less consciously, they embraced an idea subject to a comment by Gramsci in prison:

Italian cosmopolitanism has to become a type of internationalism . . . not the citizen of the world inasmuch as a civis romanus or a Catholic, but as a worker and a producer of civilization. One can therefore say that the Italian tradition is carried on dialectically in the working people and their intellectuals, not in the traditional citizen and the traditional intellectual. The Italian people is that people which “nationally” is more interested in internationalism. . . . Nationalism . . . is an anachronistic excrescence in Italian history, typical of those who turn their heads to look back, like the damned in Dante.⁷

The relation that Gramsci established between cosmopolitanism and internationalism could only circulate posthumously, after publication of the Prison Notebooks, when in the full flood of the Cold War and Stalinism the meanings of both concepts had undergone impoverishment. Yet the communists, more than any other Italian political culture, remained committed to a project that had its global influence, dimensions, and connections. The consequences were highly controversial. The heritage of communist internationalism left its mark on the original characteristics of the Italian Republic, forcing political adversaries to seek competitive international relations and designs that were integrated in the emergent Western world. The country’s internationalization shaped and crystallized deep, lasting fractures within the nation, imposing the persistence of antagonistic social and political blocs, and requiring constant self-containment of leaders and leading groups on both sides. However, Togliatti and his successors inserted themselves into a furrow of a specific Italian interest for internationalism with no adjectives, which became the other side of the role of integrating the masses into society and the state. Protagonists of a “war of position” in the West, over time they also offered to act as interpreters and mediators between their own country and the socialist and anti-imperialist parts of the world. They forged links with the revolutionary constellations of the twentieth-century universe, they catalyzed critiques of Western models of development and consumption, and they performed liaison functions across fault lines in Europe and the Mediterranean. For several decades they created a community that included political elites, intellectuals, and the people, based on visions of the world variously conditioned by mythologies, but which also indicated an awareness of greater, superordinating realities into which national identity and its mutations should be inserted.

At the end of World War II, Italian antifascism contributed to eliminating the poisons of nationalism and to imagining a country inserted into relations of global interdependence more than it had been in the past. The communists feared the birth of international blocs, which Togliatti rightly saw as an unfavorable scenario for their hegemonic ambitions. It was the Catholic leader Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democracy party who made the fundamental choices regarding Italy’s international position by adopting the Marshall Plan, joining the Atlantic Alliance, and participating in the European Community. This passage established the hegemony of the pro-Western forces. Togliatti’s fundamental contribution was that of preventing an Italian civil war, thus leaving space for a scenario with a communist presence within a legal and parliamentary context. At the same time, the Italian example of a mass party presented implications and lessons for the communist movement, especially after Stalin’s death. The communists’ condition of being a minority on the Italian political scene turned out to be long-lasting. Nevertheless, their visions of the worldwide impact of decolonization and of the emergence of new actors outside the binary patterns of the Cold War exerted significant influence on a number of occasions. In particular, they contributed significantly to defining Italy’s orientation toward international détente and the postcolonial Mediterranean, and to creating links with the protagonists of the nonaligned movement and various Third World liberation movements.

Later, under Berlinguer’s leadership, the Communists were inspired by the humanist socialism of the “Prague Spring,” reversing their opposition to European integration and indeed embracing the idea of Europe as a new subject in world politics. Thus, they gradually abandoned the old internationalism, opening a conflict with a large section of the political area to which they belonged, and reformulated it in a vision of a global role for Europe and relations between the North and South of the world as the horizons of meaning and political agendas in the context of a declining bipolar world order. This evolution was an essential component of the Communists’ national consensus in the Italy of the 1970s. After the failure of their plan to accede to the governmental sphere and to create a Western communist alliance, they defended their acquisitions in terms of political culture. Italian reform communism chimed with Gorbachev’s project and was one of his main interlocutors until the end. The national legacy of that political culture, especially as regards Europeanism, was to be anything but unimportant, even after the end of the Cold War and of communism.

In this light, the characteristics, contributions, and paradoxes of Italian communism become clearly visible. In their history, many of the communists in Europe and the world strove in their different ways, to translate their internationalism nationally. In this, the Italian experience was one of the most successful, even globally. The Italian communists maintained a permanent tension between their project of an alternative to liberal internationalism and their legitimization within the political nation, seen as a necessary integration of that project. From another perspective, an equally strong tension arose between their belonging to the socialist world, which exhibited a plurality of forms in reaction to the birth of the postcolonial world, and the idea of an Italian exceptionalism, bound up above all with Catholic and communist identities that were present in the life of the country. As Soviet socialism declined, this tension developed into one between the idea of Europeanization, based on the prospect of a political Europe and a new democratic hierarchy of values, and a claim to an identitarian diversity vis-à-vis the reformist and social-democratic political cultures of the continent, all with the aim of keeping alive the prospect of a radical transformation of society.

The Italian communists thus shadowed the changes of the century and entered into close contact with other languages and cultures, especially when they had to face up to the premature decline of the global communist project. They maintained a class-based vision of the world, imagining its unification under the banners of socialism and Marxism, yet they were capable of perceiving autonomous dynamics, interdependencies, and destinies common to humanity. Originally enemies of liberal democracy and proponents of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” they cooperated in writing the Italian Republican constitution. They conceived a mass democracy, and then became the defenders of the democratic state. They were adversaries of the United States and of Americanism, but reluctantly adapted to the consumer society. They constructed mythologies around Soviet socialism, but contributed to the subsequent delegitimization of that model; they ferociously criticized reformism, but themselves became reformers in their experience in government. Their ability to change themselves was perhaps their most significant trait. This ability did not go beyond the confines of their communist identity until the Berlin Wall tumbled; it never emancipated them completely from their existential bond with Soviet socialism, and was always hindered by their cultural difficulty in understanding the motives and driving forces of the “American century.” Nevertheless, the Italian communists played an active role in redefining the original internationalist mission, and thus contributed to the final metamorphosis of the main revolutionary tradition of the last century.

The approach this book proposes takes into consideration various historiographies that do not always engage in dialogue with studies on communism. In particular, it considers those tendencies that reinterpret the history of internationalism and cosmopolitanism by analyzing visions of sovereignty, community, and identity that have emerged in multiple intellectual, political, and national contexts.⁸ At the same time, it also takes account of the tendencies that reinterpret Italy’s history, and does so with the aim of attributing accurate values to international factors and aspects, placing Italian history in global, transnational, and interdependent contexts that have been inadequately explored and considered in the past.⁹

The history of communism has often been reduced to an anomaly, in global history as well as in Italian history. In reality, the global agendas of communism interacted at length with the main changes, conflicts, and options of the last century, though they ended up succumbing to a hodgepodge of contradictions and antinomies. The exhaustion of the revolutionary project that had come into existence in 1917 and the failure of its predominantly statist dimension contributed decisively to liquidating the faith in politics that had animated the minds and hearts of millions of people. Communism was its most extreme manifestation: a source of awesome transformations and tragedies, of struggles for emancipation and repression of liberties, of hopes for the future and profound disillusionment. Thus in the end—involuntarily, and as a negative model—it fed the radical transformation of relations between the collectivity and the individual that took place at the close of the last century.

Today, however, we can see how the end of communist internationalism was not an isolated episode. It was also the prelude to a profound crisis of all forms of internationalism, a crisis that emerged in the new century and dissolved the illusion of a straightforward expansion of Western conceptions after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our times have witnessed the unprecedented development of subjects, phenomena, and transnational networks that challenge the role of states. The proliferation of international institutions has, however, reproduced the intertwining and century-old tensions with national sovereignty, without offering effective responses to the main global challenges. In a world without a hegemonic order, prone to shocks and fractures of diverse types and stalked by neonationalist and fundamentalist tendencies, we seem to be seeing the waning of an essential element of political modernity: a vision of politics as the sphere of autonomous and transformative action, destined to unfold in the interaction between, and the compenetration of, national spaces and the international dimension. While we do not know whether the different versions of internationalism of the last century should be considered extinct, the transnational world is struggling to emerge. However, the cultural legacy of the older internationalism should not be written off too quickly. Perhaps it may still represent a lesson to be learned at a time when many heads are turned back toward the past, “like the damned in Dante.”

This book is the fruit of work accumulated over time but finalized during the pandemic emergency that struck Italy and the world in 2020. The particularly difficult working conditions increased even further my indebtedness to numerous people, though it is clear that responsibility for the book’s content rests exclusively with me. First of all, I am indebted to Giovanna Bosman, Dario Massimi, and Cristiana Pipitone for their permanent assistance in the Archive and Library of the Gramsci Foundation. I owe a special thank-you to Gregorio Sorgonà for his competent support and constantly available help. Francesco Giasi assisted me scrupulously and lucidly at various times and up to completion. I benefited greatly from the comments, advice, and suggestions of Leonardo Pompeo D’Alessandro, Michele Di Donato, Gianluca Fiocco, Bruno Settis, and Molly Tambor. I received useful and precise suggestions from Paolo Capuzzo, Alessio Gagliardi, Giovanni Gozzini, Nicola Labanca, and Sante Lesti. I am grateful to Michele Ciliberto and Giuseppe Vacca for their critical reflections. My gratitude must be extended also to many other scholars and friends who in more or less recent years have stimulated, enriched, and favored my experiences. Among them I would like to mention David Bidussa, Victoria de Grazia, Mario Del Pero, Juliane Fürst, Andrea Graziosi, Francesca Gori, Jonathan Haslam, Mark Mazower, Norman Naimark, Sophie Quinn-Judge, Federico Romero, Mark Selden, Stephen A. Smith, Andrei Sorokin, Antonio Varsori, Arne Westad, and Vladislav Zubok. Lastly, this book would not have been possible without the presence of Chiara.

Notes

1. Documents and Conspiratorial Addresses from the Archives of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), Nara (National Archives Records Administration), Crest (CIA Records Search Tool), April 1951.

2. B. Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); S. Dullin and B. Studer, “Communism+Transnational: The Rediscovered Equation of Internationalism in the Comintern Years,” Twentieth Century Communism 2017, no. 14, pp. 66–95; J. Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); T. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

3. For recent examples of the new approaches to the history of communism from a global perspective, see S. Pons, general ed., The Cambridge History of Communism, 3 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

4. S. Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

5. R. Doucoulombier and J. Vigreux, eds., Le PCF, un parti global (1919–1989): Approches transnationales et comparées (Dijon, France: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2019).

6. E. J. Hobsbawm, Anni interessanti: Autobiografia di uno storico (Milan: Rizzoli, 2002), pp. 388–89; originally published as Interesting Times (London: Allen Lane, 2002), pp. 347–48.

7. A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 1190.

8. M. Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); G. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); A. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); S. Conrad and D. Sachsenmaier, eds., Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements 1880s–1930s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); T. C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism. European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

9. A. Giardina, ed., Storia mondiale dell’Italia (Bari and Rome: Laterza, 2018); S. Patriarca and L. Ryall, eds., The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth Century Italy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); R. Forlenza and B. Thomassen, Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): F. Romero and A. Varsori, eds., Nazione, interdipendenza, integrazione: Le relazioni internazionali dell’Italia (1917–1989), 2 vols. (Rome: Carocci, 2005); G. Formigoni, Storia d’Italia nella guerra fredda (1943–1978) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016).