Italy's Reaction to 'Glasnost'
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
Italy's Reaction to 'Glasnost' BY SILVIO E SENIGALLIA Rome After almost four years of relative calm under the stewardship of Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Italy is once again racked with...
...What is novel about Gorbachev, writes Guerra, ishis determination to beat down the forces that have kept the liberalizing legislation from being carried out...
...Gorbachev's strugg le is one whose outcome is still unquestionably uncertain...
...This is not to say that Mikhail S. Gorbachev is as crude and dangerous as Khrushchev was...
...As former Moscow correspondent Adriano Guerra further spells out in a February article in the PCI cultural weekly Rinascita, the Soviet chief's "new course" is codified in laws that have been on the books for decades in the USSR...
...The current Soviet leader has in his celebrated glasnost campaign shown considerable tolerance for dissent and a real interest in keeping the people better informed on domestic events...
...Yet the government crisis precipitated by Craxi's March 2 resignation has had at least one positive aspect: a decrease in the steady diet of Gorbocheviana Italian newspapers have been feeding their readers over the last few months...
...In all that time it has not framed or shaped a program that might bring it back into power...
...The sober quality of Guerra'sanalysis should not be surprising...
...But more than one Italian Kremlinologist should be reminded that there is no necessary connection between modernization and democratization...
...And this fai Iure, not the PCI's allegedly radical politics, has enabled Center-Left coalitions to retain their dominance in Italy...
...Indeed, the Italian Communists have been quick to note that the changes proposed by Gorbachev were urged years ago by the PCI...
...Italy's Reaction to 'Glasnost' BY SILVIO E SENIGALLIA Rome After almost four years of relative calm under the stewardship of Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Italy is once again racked with political instability...
...I vividly remember when Nikita S. Khrushchev was extolled here as one of a trio of harbingers of hope for mankind (the other two were John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII) by "experts" who somehow forgot the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missiles...
...It has been the old story: Whenever any evidence, no matter how flimsy, can be found pointingtoa possible liberalization of Soviet society, Western European intellectuals and molders of public opinion latch on to it as cause for unbridled optimism,as thoughthe transformation of the USSR into a social democracy were just around the corner...
...Despite its being the second largest party in Italy, the PCI has been out of government for exactly 40 years...
...Recent trends within the PCI indicate that the middleaged cadres at intermediate levels are much closer to Western values, including private ownership, than they were 10 or 15 years ago—for good political, rather than ideological, reasons...
...The party's attitude has i nstead been characterized by a sense of satisfaction with its own policy of reappraisal, begun by the late PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer, which led to itsshift away from theSovietblocand alignment with the Northern European social democracies...
...He also seems intent on revitalizing his country's feeble economic structure...
...For all his outward attractiveness, Gorbachev remains an orthodox Leninist...
...Oddly enough, a note of caution and restraint is being heard from the very source that might have been expected to respond to glasnost with expressions of pride and joy—the leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCI...
...The fact that they are deeply rooted in Soviet political institutions means one must not look at present developments in Moscow "with complacent enthusiasm or absurd concern," he concludes...
Vol. 70 • March 1987 • No. 4
