Italy's New Ex-Communists

...Only 5 per cent of the addressees obeyed the Party's order not to accept the paper, and hundreds of letters to Reale have shown how deep the Party crisis is...

...The "bourgeoisified" Socialist party, which is more a party of petty officials than of workers, has little attraction for disillusioned revolutionaries...

...This atmosphere of ostracism and heresy-hunting among internees with different views of the Hitler-Stalin Pact set up barricades inside the camp that were higher than the barbed wire outside...

...How has Reale been able to complete the transition from Communism to democracy so rapidly, when other "renegades" have taken \cars or never made it at all...

...In the postwar Italian coalition regime, he served on the Constitutional Court and as Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs...

...He not only broke with the Party but emerged as its accuser, writing essays which were distinguished not only by intimate knowledge of the Party but by brilliant style...

...His act highlighted a vital difference between the severe crisis in Italian Communism and the milder crisis in French Communism: namely, the possibility of escape...

...This time, too, there were noted writers like Vasco Pratolini and Italo Calvino who took the fateful step, but there were also architects, painters and professors...

...At all events, a spell has been broken...

...Giolitti graduated into politics from the wartime Resistance movement, and...

...He had seen how Togliatti watched his closest associates hanged in Prague without uttering a word of protest, how lie let pleading letters go unanswered and justified each new blood purge in carefully considered, pedantic treatises...

...As usual in such cases, precisely those Party members who had been closest to Reale were forced to write the most violent denunciations of him...

...He now publishes a weekly, Corrispondenza Socialista, which he sends to thousands of Party members, since he has the mailing lists...

...the Communist party will never regain what it lost at Budapest in prestige, in hope, and in the power to instill fear...

...Reale had never really seen eye to eye with Italian Communist leader Pahniro Togliatti...

...Previously, there had been individual defections: the writer Elio Vittorini, later the Parliamentary Deputies Cucchi and Magnani...

...In Italy, a mass party must be a power, must be able to provide protection, advancement, jobs, references, and must ultimately get its nose in the governmental feed-bag, or else it suffers a crisis...

...like others bearing names celebrated in Italian political history, this grandson of a famous statesman war, advanced rapidly by the Party...

...Later, he was named Ambassador to Poland...

...As a shrewd old-time Communist, he is warning against the illusion still cherished by many Socialists that the CP can be "renewed" and improved...

...In the meantime, the defectors will turn their liberated energies to other parties, and the resultant impulses— fruitful and otherwise—will be felt in Italian politics...

...Yet, he was not given the customary treatment of formal retroactive expulsion as a traitor...

...In Italy, there is a working-class Socialist party (PSI), led by Nenni, which, while hitherto a faithful ally of Togliatti, has in the last two years shown signs of independence...

...He wants his own group to fight for a reconciliation of the various Socialist groups, from Nenni to Saragat, without tying itself yet to any of them...

...In France back in the summer of 1940, we had had adjoining bunks in the Vernet internment camp along the Spanish border and had watched through the barbed wire as Parisian buses, far off their normal route, rolled toward the frontier filled with refugees...

...In the latter capacity, he accompanied Premier Alcide de Gasperi to Paris for the Peace Treaty negotiations...

...Reale himself is holding back...

...Ignazio Silone...

...And—if I may inject a personal note—it is gratifying to rejoin Eugenio Reale after 17 years, this time not in an internment camp divided by the invisible barricades of political hatred, but in a camp without barbed wire—that of freedom...

...Luigi Longo and other present leaders of the Italian Communist party were also in the camp...

...The mass walkout of the intellectuals has robbed the Party of much of its prestige and weakened the personal position of Togliatti, who was famed for his ability to exploit them...

...Giolitti joined the Parliamentary group of Pietro Nenni's left-wing Socialists, though without joining the party itself...

...on trial in Rome when the Badoglio coup of September 1943 liberated him...

...For defectors who remain "left" and "class-conscious," the Nenni party provides a useful framework...

...No one knows more than Eugenio Reale about the Party's sources of money—it spends some $8 million annually—and this has made his defection especially painful...

...The crisis of Communism is a chance for Italian democracy...

...Fascist Italy obtained his extradition, but Reale was still Francois Bondy, veteran Swiss journalist, edits Preuves, Paris monthly of the Cultural Freedom Congress...

...Thus far, this process of disillusionment and defection has embraced tho intellectuals and the northern Italian industrial workers far more than the "subproletariat" of the South...

...In the years after Vernet, I often heard about Reale...

...himself the first great heretic of Italian Communism, points out how many intellectually and politically distinct tendencies are to be found in this mass party...

...Out of disgust with a politically incompetent upper class, out of anti-Fascism, out of a desire to join the ranks of the modern democracies as quickly as possible, many Italians became Communists even though they fundamentally believed in freedom and democracy and had little taste for Stalinist totalitarianism, which they excused as a passing evil, a disease of childhood...

...Hence, there is strong resistance to the influx of disillusioned defectors from the allied Communist party...

...Since Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Soviet Party Congress, Togliatti has been careful not to antagonize any more intellectuals with new heresy trials than is absolutely necessary...

...The Party had simultaneously drawn into its ranks many outstanding intellectuals and great masses of illiterates...

...In the long run, however, it is impossible to turn away men like that who regard themselves as Socialists...

...A defection which hurt badly was that of Antonio Giolitti, the 40-year-old Deputy from Cuneo in Piedmont...

...finally, he quit...

...But the events in Poland and Hungary— above all, the intervention of Soviet troops against Hungarian workers— were the last straw for him, as for thousands of other Italian Communists...

...Thus, Giolitti's criticism was directed less against the misdeeds that had been uncovered than against the "failure" of Togliatti, who was not preparing to gain power and whose party, despite 1.5 million members and 6 million voters, had maneuvered itself out of the political game and into a state of isolation...

...It should not be overlooked that many of the thousands who are leaving the Communist party are doing so not because it has defended so many Soviet crimes, but because it obviously no longer has any chance of coming to power...

...Thousands of intellectuals and workers have left Togliatti since 1956 and are casting about for a new type of socialism Italy's New Ex-Communists By Franqois Bondy I had not seen the Neapolitan doctor and Senator Eugenio Reale in 17 years...

...More than 40,000 Party members resigned, and more than ten times that many simply failed to pay their dues, renew their Party cards or attend cell meetings...

...The popular former Mayor of Leghorn, Furio Diaz, and his friends, for example, encountered every conceivable difficulty in their efforts to join the PSI...

...Reale replied by publishing diary excerpts in which he had recorded his last conversations with his new-found adversaries—and the attacks promptly ceased...

...But the "Stalinists" have grown very strong in the PSI, and even Nenni, who dissociates himself from them, is unable to deal with them...

...He was a leader of the subsequent anti-Nazi uprising in Naples and later was Communist party chief in southern Italy and editor of the Party paper Unitd in Naples...

...As the party of the discontented, it will continue to win mass support...

...Also among us was Laszlo Rajk, who was one day to be Communist Foreign Minister of Hungary and then tortured, forced to confess and hanged by Party boss Matyas Rakosi...

...After the Communists were expelled from the Government, Reale was one of the Italian party's two representatives in the Cominform (the other was Longo...

...Together they solemnly expelled from the Party a dissenting comrade (who later became a legendary figure among the North Italian partisans...

...but it no longer appears to the intellectual elite as the party of national renewal, and that is a tremendous difference...

...It was he who founded the import-export banks which provided illegal funds for the Party treasury through Italian trade with Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Communist countries...

...Reale had previously been editor of the Communist Voce degli Italiani in Paris, and had long since abandoned the medical profession for that of a revolutionary...

...After the events of October 1956, many of these people could no longer convince themselves that Communism was "really" leading to democracy and progress...

...He must have inherited something of hin grandfather's political instinct, for he has always maintained his popularity—in Cuneo, he received 30,000 preferential votes—and, during the months of his battle with the Party, he held hundreds of meetings, concerned himself more than ever with trade-union affairs, and built up his personal influence...

...Today, it is left for the most part with the illiterates...

...In the same breath, the Party is reproached for its moral depravity and its lack of political success—two basically contradictory motives which together provide the special dynamism of the defection movement...

...Rajk's shocking fate hastened Reale's break with the Party —but that was much later...

...He was placed on trial in Toulouse by the Vichy regime, but nothing could be proved against him...

...For a time, Giolitti was permitted to criticize the "line" in Party publications...

...He gradually withdrew from the political leadership of the Party—after 1951, he was no longer a member of the Central Committee, and two years later did not seek re-election to Parliament—but he remained the Party's financial genius...

...Like many others, Reale might well have withdrawn gradually and silently from the Party—disillusioned, disgusted, yet not prepared to become a "renegade...

...A French Communist who leaves the Party becomes lost in sectarianism or leaves politics altogether...