The Ghost of Palmiro Togliatti
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
EXPOSING ITALY'S COMMUNIST HERO The Ghost of Palmiro Togliatti By Silvio f. Senigallia Rome A critical reappraisal of Palmiro Togliatti, the legendary leader of the Italian Communist...
...Tasca, one of the PCI's founders, had participated in top-level Comintern meetings and was among the first to recognize and to state unequivocally that blind obedience to Stalin amounted to participating in his current and future crimes...
...At any rates, the attitude taken by the Kremlin is bound to affect the line pursued by the PCI leadership on the entire issue...
...Possibly because of the recent rehabilitation of Nikolai I. Bukharin, theSoviet scholar is particularly severe in denouncing the Italian's betrayal of his friendship with the Bolshevik leader Stalin would eventually have executed...
...Silvio F. Senigallia reports regularly for The New Leader on Italian affairs...
...What has come under particularly close scrutiny is the role he played in the 1930s as Joseph Stalin's assistant and emissary in Eastern Europe and civil-war Spain...
...The unnecessary acknowledgment was no less ambiguous than surprising...
...His funeral was an apotheosis: A party of orphans in tears rendered its last tribute to the man who had for two decades personified the dream of a proletarian dictatorship in Italy...
...Togliatti is a has-been: There is no need for an ideological campaign to transform him into a monster or a nonperson...
...For the Italian Communist leader that was unthinkable...
...The truth is now emerging even in the USSR...
...It is difficult to know whether the debate about Togliatti initiated by Occhetto's statement will continue when political activity resumes after Parliament's long summer recess...
...Communism, the magazine maintains, is steadily losing all sense and credibility because of the gradual weakening of its two pillars: Marxism and the working class...
...He conceded that the complicity of the Comintern members arose from the fact that they happened to be living in the Soviet Union at the time...
...No one forced him to come out with his sudden pronouncement...
...Togliatti's significance to the Italian Communists became still clearer in August 1964 whenhedied...
...Thus tempers cooled off, firearms went back into hiding in barns, backyards and cellars, and the situation slowly returned to normal...
...All the history books published on the west side of what used to be called the Iron Curtain specify Togliatti's heavy responsibilities as a servile supporter of Stalin's Great Purges...
...DC Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi had excluded the Communists from the government in 1947, and the Christian Democrats then scored a landslide in the general elections of April 1948, so the PCI activists were already in a particularly ugly and belligerent mood...
...The crux of his assessment is that despite the heavy pressure brought to bear on Togliatti, he is guilty before history because he did have an alternative: a clean break...
...The official organ of the Jesuits interpreted the Togliatti episode as further proof that the Italian Communist Party has no future...
...Perhaps, though, it reflects an effort to stem the substantial decline both in the numerical strength and the electoral clout of the PCI, by steering anew course with as few skeletons as possible—regardless of how illustrious—in the closet...
...Adjusting his rhetoric to the anti-Stalinism now prevailing in the Soviet Union, Occhetto admitted that the once-revered II Migliore (The Best) had been "inevitably a Stalinist...
...Thus he did what Togliatti, out of a mixture of ambition, ideology and fear for his life failed to do, and paid a heavy price for it...
...Many party members believed that the attempt on the life of Il Migliore had been engineered by their archenemy, Christian Democratic (DC) Minister of Police Mario Scelba, and were ready to march on the Establishment...
...That was certainly not the case for Occhetto...
...The peak of the PCI leader's open alliance with Stalin, however, was his signature on the decree dissolving the Polish Communist Party that led to the physical elimination of all its leaders...
...For decades Tasca was villified by the Italian Communists as a "social-fascist...
...But two prominent Italian Communists in exile did break with Moscow: Ignazio Silone, who became an internationally famous writer, and Angelo Tasca, who ended up a comparatively obscure journalist living in Paris...
...It could be interpreted as meaning that Togliatti's views and beliefs made him a convinced Stalinist, or that his stance was simply forced upon him by circumstances...
...EXPOSING ITALY'S COMMUNIST HERO The Ghost of Palmiro Togliatti By Silvio f. Senigallia Rome A critical reappraisal of Palmiro Togliatti, the legendary leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI)—whose picture used to be standard equipment in thousands of neighborhood cells and assembly halls— has been launched almost accidentally...
...The Number Two man of theSocialist Party, Claudio Martelli, merely voiced regret that "only now Leftist, and especially Communist, culture is beginning to take its distance from a mythical personality who is inextricably connected with Stalinist terror...
...In Italy, outside Communist circles, there has been little tendency to exploit Occhetto's rehashing of an old historicalfact...
...The immediate reaction of the PCI rank and file was violent rage and a thirst for revenge...
...Twenty-four years of economic prosperity and the PCI's gradual socialdemocratization, plus three years of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's perestroika have pulverized the Togliatti myth, turning yesterday's orphans into third cousins twice removed...
...But he bluntly added that "there are no justifications for those who supported the shameful trials and the wave of repression" obtaining then...
...Firsov's appraisal of Togliatti's responsibilities is very interesting, although not as stunning in year III of the Gorbachev era as it would have been earlier when it would have meant an immediate trip to Siberia for the candid historian...
...The most severe comment has come from the biweekly La Civiltà Cattolica...
...Togliatti originally supported Bukharin's urging a slower, less brutal pace of collectivization and industrialization, but after that position lost out he dubbed its proponent a double-crossing, treacherous, vain little professor...
...This past July 25, an interview was granted to the Moscow correspondent of the Rome daily La Repubblica by Frederik Firsov, one of the leading experts of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party...
...Forty years ago, in July 1948, Italy was for a few hours on the verge of civil war after Antonio Pallante, a deranged Sicilian student, shot and seriously wounded Togliatti...
...Now, for the first time in 58 years, a prominent Soviet authority, namely Firsov, says "Yes, without a shadow of a doubt, he was right...
...The fact that it did not arouse the emotional storm of protest one might have expected—the only objections raised by prominent PCI personalities had to do with the wisdom and timing, rather than the substance of the criticism—may indicate that no follow-up is forthcoming...
...This could provide additional documentary evidence of Togliatti's involvements in the years of the Great Purges...
...In what was probably his finest hour, Togliatti—from his hospital bed—instructed his closest assistants not to let anyone "do anything hasty...
...On the other hand, since the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party has announced its intention to open the Comintern files to the other Communist parties and foreign historians, new material may be, so to speak, unearthed...
...The government took prompt and stringent action as well...
...The president of the Christian Democratic Senators, Nicola Mancino, emphasized that Italy owed a debt to the leadership of Alcide de Gasperi and to the Allies for keeping it out of the Soviet orbit and within the free Western world...
...Any attempt to bolster its brand of socialism is therefore doomed to fail...
...It was a totally unexpected remark, made a few weeks ago by newly elected Party Secretary Achille Occhetto, that started the political and ideological reassessment...
...Occhetto and company will probably not have the decency to concur and thereby revise the PCI's old, unfair judgment of Tasca...
...They proved equal to this difficult task, and succeeded in tightly controlling the party both on the national and local levels...
...Indeed, the issue of Togliatti's Stalinism is dead, the former idol having become at most an embarrassing heirloom...
...Firsov passed a harsh judgment on what he called Togliatti's "objective responsibility" for doing Stalin's bidding...
Vol. 71 • August 1988 • No. 14
