Italian Communist Party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Italian Communist Party | |
|---|---|
| Partito Comunista Italiano | |
 |
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| Former Italian National Party | |
| Political ideology | Communism, Socialism, Eurocommunism |
| Official Newspaper | L'Unità |
| Website | N/A |
| See also | Politics of Italy |
The Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) or Italian Communist Party emerged as Partito Comunista d'Italia or Communist Party of Italy from a secession by the Leninist comunisti puri tendency from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) during that body's congress on 21 January 1921 at Livorno. Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split.
In 1991 the PCI disbanded to form the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), with membership in the Socialist International. The communist tendency, led by Armando Cossutta, left the party to form the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) or Communist Refoundation Party. In 1998 the PDS, with several smaller parties, the Laburisti (liberal socialists), the Cristiano Sociali (christian socialists), the Comunisti Unitari (right-wing split of the PRC), the Sinistra Repubblicana (left republicans) and the Riformatori per l'Europa (social democratic trade unionists), co-founded the "Democratici di Sinistra" (DS) or Democrats of the Left party. Later in the same year the Armando Cossutta tendency left the PRC to form the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (PdCI) or Party of Italian Communists.
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[edit] History
PCI contested the 1921 general election, obtaining 4.6% of the nationwide vote and 15 seats in the parliament. [1]
In 1926 the PCI was outlawed by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Although forced underground, the PCI continued in clandestinity and exile. In 1926 its left wing led by Bordiga was defeated and replaced by a new leadership around Antonio Gramsci at a conference in Lyon which issued a set of theses expressing the programmatic basis of the party at that point. However Gramsci soon found himself jailed by Mussolini's repression and the leadership passed to Palmiro Togliatti. Togliatti would lead the party until it emerged from illegality in 1944 and relaunched itself as the Italian Communist Party.
The party took part in every government during the national liberation and constitutional period from June 1944 to May 1947. In the first general elections of 1948 it joined the PSI in the Democratic Popular 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, never joining directly. One of its successes was the lobbying of Fiat to set up the AvtoVAZ (Lada) car factory in the Soviet Union. The party always had its stronghold 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 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, intervention and brutal suppression by the Soviet forces 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 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 correctness of his party's position[2], and he would eventually write in Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica (From the Communist Party to European Socialism. A political autobiography) that he regretted his justification of the Soviet intervention, but quieted his concerns because he believed in Party unity and the international leadership of Soviet communism. [3] 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.
After the Athens Colonel Coup in April of 1967, Longo and other PCI leaders became alarmed at the possibility of a repeat in Italy (there were two attempted coups in Italy, Piano Solo in 1964 and Golpe Borghese in 1970, by neo-fascist and military groups). 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 PCI was given in 1971. The Soviets also provided additional funding through the use of front companies providing generous contracts to PCI members. [4]
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. Berlinguer's unexpected stance made waves: he gave the strongest speech by a major Communist leader ever heard 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 termed 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 biggest Communist Party in a democratic state, obtaining a score of 34,4% 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 1970-80s, definitely embracing eurocommunism and the Socialist International. The PCI sought a collaboration with Socialist and Christian Democracy parties (the historic compromise). Christian-democrat 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.
During the "anni di piombo" 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.[4] 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.
In 1991 the Italian Communist Party split into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), led by Achille Occhetto, and the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista), headed by Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the PCI since 1988, stunned the party faithful assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now called in Italian politics 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. [5]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Timeline of Italian political institutions (3/5/1998)
- ^ (Oct/Dec 1980) The Italian Communists: foreign bulletin of the P.C.I., No. 4 (in English).
- ^ Napolitano, Giorgio (2005). Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica (in Italian). Laterza. ISBN 88-420-7715-1.
- ^ a b 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 0-3000-7724-6.
[edit] External links
- Official DS web page
- Official PRC web page
- Official PdCI web page
- Archive of PCI posters
- Archive of PCI posters, part 2
- Archive of PCI posters, part 3
