Italian Communist Party
| Italian Communist Party Partito Comunista Italiano |
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| Former leaders | Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, Luigi Longo, Enrico Berlinguer, Alessandro Natta, Achille Occhetto |
| Founded | January 21, 1921 |
| Dissolved | January 3, 1991 |
| Newspaper | L'Unità |
| Membership | 989,708 (1991) max: 2,252,446 (1947)[1] |
| Ideology | Communism |
| International affiliation | Comintern (1921–1943) Cominform (1947–1956) |
| European affiliation | None |
| European Parliament Group | Communists and Allies (1973–1989), European United Left (1989–1991) |
| Politics of Italy Political parties Elections |
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The Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) was a communist political party in Italy.
The PCI was founded as Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno, by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split.
Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played a major part in the Italian resistance movement. It changed its name in 1943 to PCI and became the strongest political party of the Italian left after World War II, attracting the support of about a third of the voters during the 1970s. At the time it was the biggest communist party in the West (1.8 million members and 34.4% of the vote in 1976).
In 1991 the PCI was disbanded and replaced by the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), that was accepted in both the Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists. More radical members of the party left the party to form the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC).
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History
Early years
The PCI participated to its first general election in 1921, obtaining 4.6% of the vote and 15 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. At time, it was an active but small faction within Italian political left, which was strongly led by the Socialists, while on international plan it was part of Soviet-led Comintern.
In 1926, the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini outlawed the PCI. Although forced underground, the PCI maintained a clandestine presence within Italy during the years of the Fascist regime. Many of its leaders were also active in exile. During its first year as a banned party, Antonio Gramsci defeated the party's left wing, led by Amadeo Bordiga.
Gramsci replaced Bordiga's leadership at a conference in Lyon, and issued a manifesto expressing the programmatic basis of the party. However, Gramsci soon found himself jailed by Mussolini's regime, and the leadership of the party passed to Palmiro Togliatti. Togliatti would lead the party until it emerged from suppression in 1944 and relaunched itself as the Italian Communist Party.
Post World War II
The party played a major role during the national liberation (Resistenza) and in the April of 1944 after the Svolta di Salerno ( Salerno's turn ), Togliatti agreed to cooperate with the king so the communists took part in every government during the national liberation and constitutional period from June 1944 to May 1947.[2] The communists' contribution to the new Italian democratic constitution was decisive. In the first general elections of 1948 the party joined the PSI in the Popular Democratic Front but was defeated by the Christian Democracy party. The party gained considerable electoral success during the following years and occasionally supplied external support to center-left governments, although it never directly joined a government. It successfully lobbied Fiat to set up the AvtoVAZ (Lada) car factory in the Soviet Union. The party did best in Central Italy, particularly in Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Umbria, where it regularly won the local administrative elections, and in some of the industrialized cities of Northern Italy.
The Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 created a split within the PCI. The party leadership, including Palmiro Togliatti and Giorgio Napolitano (who in 2006 became President of the Italian Republic), regarded the Hungarian insurgents as counter-revolutionaries, as reported at the time in l'Unità, the official PCI newspaper. However Giuseppe Di Vittorio , chief of the communist trade union CGIL, repudiated the leadership position, as did prominent party member Antonio Giolitti and Italian Socialist Party national secretary Pietro Nenni, a close ally of the PCI. Napolitano later hinted at doubts over the propriety of his decision.[3] He would eventually write in From the Communist Party to European Socialism. A political autobiography (Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica) that he regretted his justification of the Soviet intervention, but quieted his concerns at the time for the sake of party unity and the international leadership of Soviet communism.[4] Giolitti and Nenni went on to split with the PCI over this issue. Napolitano became a leading member of the miglioristi faction within the PCI, which promoted a social-democratic direction in party policy.[5]
In the mid 1960s the U.S. State Department estimated the party membership to be approximately 1,350,000 (4.2% of the working age population, the proportionally largest communist party in the capitalist world at the time, and the largest party at all in whole western Europe with the German SPD).[6]
Declassified information from Soviet archives confirms that the PCI relied on Soviet financial assistance, more so than any other Communist party supported by Moscow.[7] The party received perhaps as much as $60 million from the end of World War II until the PCI’s break with Moscow in the early 1980s. The party used these funds mainly for organizational purposes. [7] According to the former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, after the Athens Colonel Coup in April of 1967, Longo and other PCI leaders became alarmed at the possibility of a coup in Italy. These fears were not completely unfounded, as there had been two attempted coups in Italy, Piano Solo in 1964 and Golpe Borghese in 1970, by neo-fascist and military groups. The PCI’s Giorgio Amendola formally requested Soviet assistance to prepare the party in case of such an event. The KGB drew up and implemented a plan to provide the PCI with its own intelligence and clandestine signal corps. From 1967 through 1973, PCI members were sent to East Germany and Moscow to receive training in clandestine warfare and information gathering techniques by both the Stasi and the KGB. Shortly before the May 1972 elections, Longo personally wrote to Leonid Brezhnev asking for and receiving an additional $5.7 million in funding. This was on top of the $3.5 million that the Soviet Union gave the PCI in 1971. The Soviets also provided additional funding through the use of front companies providing generous contracts to PCI members.[8]
Enrico Berlinguer
In 1969, Enrico Berlinguer, PCI deputy national secretary and later secretary general, took part in the international conference of the Communist parties in Moscow, where his delegation disagreed with the "official" political line, and refused to support the final report. Unexpectedly to his hosts, his speech challenged the Communist leadership in Moscow. He refused to "excommunicate" the Chinese communists, and directly told Leonid Brezhnev that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries (which he called the "tragedy in Prague") had made clear the considerable differences within the Communist movement on fundamental questions such as national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and the freedom of culture. At the time the PCI was the largest Communist Party in a capitalist state, garnering 34.4% of the vote in the 1976 general election.
Relationships between the PCI and the Soviet Union gradually fell apart as the party moved away from Soviet obedience and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the 1970s and 1980s, and toward Eurocommunism and the Socialist International. The PCI sought a collaboration with Socialist and Christian Democracy parties (the Historic Compromise). However, Christian Democratic party leader Aldo Moro's kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades in May 1978 put an end to any hopes of such a compromise. The compromise was largely abandoned as a PCI policy in 1983.
During the Years of Lead the PCI strongly opposed the terrorism and the Red Brigades, who, in turn, murdered or wounded many PCI members or trade unionists close to the PCI. According to Mitrokhin, the party asked the Soviets to pressure the Czechoslovakian State Security (StB) to withdraw their support to the group, which Moscow was unable or unwilling to do.[8] This as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a complete break with Moscow in 1979. In 1980, the PCI refused to participate in the international conference of Communist parties in Paris although cash payments to the PCI continued until 1984. [7]
Dissolution
In 1991 the Italian Communist Party split into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), led by Achille Occhetto, and the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), headed by Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the PCI since 1988, stunned the party faithfully assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now referred to in Italian politics as the Bolognina. The collapse of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had convinced Occhetto that the era of Eurocommunism was over, and he transformed the PCI into a progressive left-wing party, the PDS. Cossutta and a third of the PCI membership refused to join the PDS, and instead founded the Communist Refoundation Party.[9]
Leadership
- Secretary: Antonio Gramsci (1926), Camilla Ravera (1927–1930), Palmiro Togliatti (1930–1934), Ruggero Grieco (1934–1938), Palmiro Togliatti (1938–1964), Luigi Longo (1964–1972), Enrico Berlinguer (1972–1984), Alessandro Natta (1984–1988), Achille Occhetto (1988–1991)
- President: Luigi Longo (1972–1980), Alessandro Natta (1989–1990), Aldo Tortorella (1990–1991)
- Party Leader in the Chamber of Deputies: Luigi Longo (1946–1947), Palmiro Togliatti (1947–1964), Pietro Ingrao (1964–1972), Alessandro Natta (1972–1979), Fernando Di Giulio (1979–1981), Giorgio Napolitano (1981–1986), Renato Zangheri (1986–1990), Giulio Quercini (1990–1992)
References
- ↑ http://www.cattaneo.org/archivi/adele/iscritti.xls
- ↑ Monanelli, Cervi Storia d'Italia Rcs Quotidiani 2003
- ↑ The Italian Communists: foreign bulletin of the P.C.I., No. 4. Rome. Oct/Dec 1980. p. 103.
- ↑ Napolitano, Giorgio (2005) (in Italian). Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica. Laterza. ISBN 88-420-7715-1.
- ↑ Paolo Cacace. "Napolitano e l’“utopia mite” dell’Europa" (in Italian). http://www.toscanaeuropa.it/att_politica/documenti/dettaglio.asp?id_doc=4451. Retrieved 2007-07-14.
- ↑ Benjamin, Roger W.; Kautsky, John H.. Communism and Economic Development, in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, No. 1. (Mar., 1968), pp. 122.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Richard Drake. The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism, Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 115-119
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Andrew, Christopher; Mitrokhin, Vasili. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB Basic Books (2001)
- ↑ Kertzer, David I. (1998). Politics and Symbols: The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07724-6.
External links
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Historical Italian political parties (active parties: template)