Palmiro Togliatti

Palmiro Togliatti (born March 26, 1893, Genoa—died Aug. 21, 1964, Yalta, Ukrainian S.S.R.) was a politician who led the Italian Communist Party for nearly 40 years and made it the largest in western Europe.

Born into a middle-class family, Togliatti received an education in law at Turin University, served as an officer and was wounded in World War I, and became a tutor at Turin. In 1919 he helped launch a left-wing weekly, L’Ordine nuovo (“New Order”), which became a rallying point for the Communist wing that broke away from the Socialist Party in 1921. Beginning in 1922 Togliatti edited Il Comunista and in April 1924 became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. While he was attending a meeting of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in 1926, the party was banned by Mussolini, and nearly all its leaders except Togliatti were arrested. He remained in exile, organizing clandestine meetings of the Italian Communist Party at Lyon in 1926 and at Cologne in 1931. In 1935, under the name of Ercoli, he became a member of the secretariat of the Comintern and later was involved with the Spanish Civil War. Togliatti managed to survive in the Soviet Union despite frequent purges of Communists. While in Moscow, he analyzed the rise of fascism in Italy and began to construct a strategy based upon broad alliances across middle-class categories. During World War II he broadcast resistance messages to Italy, appealing to Fascist rank and file to join forces with liberal and left elements. He followed the same path on his return to Italy, entering the government of Marshal Badoglio in April 1944 as minister without portfolio and serving as vice premier under Alcide De Gasperi in 1945. In the 1948 elections his coalition tactic paid dividends with the return of 135 communist deputies.

On July 14, 1948, Togliatti was seriously wounded by a young fascist, and workers rose on strike throughout Italy in protest. Yet Togliatti stuck to his “Italian road to socialism” in preference to violent revolution, rejecting the Stalinist concept of an internationally directed movement in favour of a democratically oriented and national one. Atheistic propaganda he also repudiated as of no value to the Italian Communist Party, which had “stretched out its hand” to the Roman Catholics.

A memorandum outlining his political doctrine, published after his death, strengthened the trend toward liberalization in communist countries, including the Soviet Union, which in 1964 renamed Stavropol for him (as Tolyatti; since 1991 Tolyattigrad).

Severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base, Togliatti was known as Il migliore (“The Best”). He was the first Italian Communist to appear in television debates, and his funeral in Rome in 1964 was attended by a million people. His standing in Moscow was the continuing subject of scholarly and political debate after his death.