Armando Cossutta

Cossutta was born in Milan into a working-class family that was active in the political reality of the time. His father, originally from Trieste, took part in Gabriele D'Annunzio's takeover of Fiume. == Political career ==

Italian Communist Party After World War II, Cossutta became part of the leadership group within the PCI, of which he embodied the more pro-Soviet current, About the expulsion of il manifesto members, he said: "But with the rules of the party, expulsion was inevitable." also consisted of various ex-workerist militants and he himself was close to the demands of their movement, even though he never detached himself from the PCI. He denied or diminished his own faction, and said: "Cossuttismo does not exist, and if it does exist it is only Togliattismo. It means one step after another, realizing the most advanced ideal aspirations in each step. And without unnecessary propaganda. In a word, the PCI. A great and unrepeatable reality. To be rethought, of course, in other forms. In 2010, he recalled: "We had in mind the gravity and delicacy of the moment. Thus it was that we revived what had existed since the Liberation, i.e. the mythical 'order service' which had concrete tasks: to defend the headquarters, as the note from the secret services says, the houses of comrades, during demonstrations to avoid infiltrations. Our order service did not allow it." and led to the establishment of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), of which Cossutta held the position of president from 1992 to 1998 and with which he was elected deputy in 1994. Following the 1996 Italian general election, in which he was re-elected a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the PRC was part of the majority that supported the first Prodi government. a member of the bicameral Commission for Institutional Reforms (1996–2001), the group leader of the Fourth Defense Commission (2001–2006), and a member of the Committee for Parliamentary Diplomacy (2001–2006). Party of the Italian Communists In 1998, Fausto Bertinotti, the then secretary of the PRC, withdrew confidence in Romano Prodi's government, and caused its subsequent crisis and fall. Cossutta, who disagreed with this choice and more generally with the political profile assumed by Bertinotti, it is recounted that Cossutta did so through a fax sent by Pro Loco di Bonassola, near La Spezia. About this, he said that he did it "in the interest of the country". Going back to the World War II years, as well as the fall of Prodi's government and the establishment of a new one led by Massimo D'Alema, he said: "I fought fascism, I determined the survival of a communist force after the end of the PCI, I served a split to save the first left-wing government in the history of Italy. And if after Prodi's fall we had gone to the polls, my party would have taken off and Bertinotti's would have almost disappeared. However, the right would have won and Berlusconi would have gone up to the Quirinale. Hence my sacrifice." In 2004, Cossutta published his autobiography entitled Una storia comunista (A Communist History). in his earlier senatorial terms, he held many parliamentary positions. In June 2006, opposed to the political line taken by Diliberto, Cossutta resigned from the position of president of the PdCI. Despite this, from time to time, he was seen in the Senate's restaurant. In 2009, asked by Fabrizio D'Esposito whether he was no longer a communist, Cossutta replied: "I was, am and will remain a communist." He expressed one regret to D'Esposito, namely the lack of communist representation, and that his vote for the PD did not change his views. He said: "And what should I regret? I was among the builders of a large party. Of course, we are small compared to the founders, to the generation of Palmiro Togliatti. I'm celebrating my 80th birthday, but at 19 I found myself secretary in Sesto San Giovanni where the PCI had 18,000 members in a huge concentration of workers." Among the leaders who guided the growth of the party, Cossutta named Giorgio Napolitano in Naples, Emanuele Macaluso in Palermo, Alfredo Reichlin in Rome, in Turin, and Guido Fanti in Bologna. In 2009, Cossutta became vice-president of the National Association of Partisans of Italy (ANPI). Until his death in 2015, Cossutta remained a committed communist and faithful to the October Revolution. He said: "In Italy there are millions of communists who no longer feel represented. We have to shoot ourselves with this poor left." Despite political differences, Cossutta was one of the few parliamentarians and First Italian Republic figures, including Giulio Andreotti, who was respected by political opponents, who shaked his hands or saluted respectfully. == Post-Cold War allegations and controversies ==

In 1991, the Russian journalist Alexander Evlakhov, citing documents from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, stated that Cossutta had received $824,000 million from Russia for propaganda reasons during the 1980s. Cossutta dismissed these claims, saying that he had never received money from the Soviet Union. In 1999, Cossutta appeared on a list of alleged Italian KGB spies. In 2000, he sued Silvio Berlusconi, the then prime minister of Italy, for slander and defamation, asking for ₤100 billion in compensation. In a Porta a Porta broadcast, he had stated that "Cossutta managed armed gangs in the post-war years and had continued until a few years ago to keep an armed organization in Italy." He later retired the lawsuit after Berlusconi issued a statement of retraction and apology. A parliamentary commission to investigate the allegations, among others, was instituted in 2002. Although it was led by the centre-right coalition majority, which instrumentalized it and used the contents of the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources, and official documents that were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, to attack its political opponents and delayed the final report, it was sceptical or dismissive of the claims; criticized as politically motivated, as it was focused mainly on allegations against opposition figures, it was shut down in 2006 without having developed any new concrete evidence beyond the original information in the Mitrokhin Archive. A subsequent parliamentary commission, this time led by the centre-left coalition, was established in 2006 to determinate whether the allegations were politically motivated. The 2006 parliamentary commission concluded: "Considering the British precautions that have been analyzed above, and which led to the elimination of many surnames and to making many events indecipherable and many characters unrecognizable, one can only speak, in the case of Cossutta – so clearly identified and accused, and moreover without the use of documents from the Mitrokhin Archive but on the basis of documentation, however distorted, of journalistic origin – of authentic persistence." The main sources of the allegations were Evlakhov, Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, and Stephen Hellman, who based his claims on Evlakhov (who said that he never had the documents he was referring to but that he had seen them) and supported Occhetto's turn in 1989 and opposed Cossutta. According to the 2006 commission, the case of Cossutta was different from others because it was alleged that SISMI, Italy's secret service, engaged in a cover up; in fact, SISMI delivered news articles making the allegations to the British secret services, who were in the process of writing a book about it. All these newspapers, from Avanti!, La Padania, and Il Giornale, to Il Giorno and Il Tempo, were opposed to Cossutta and the centre-left government. In addition, there were many changes between the draft and Hellman's book, and in the footnotes, regarding Cossutta, who was variously referred to as "the Soviet loyalist on the Directorate" and "a KGB informant on the Directorate". Especially during the years of the First Italian Republic, Cossutta had been accused of being a "confidential contact of the KGB" in Italy. Despite the conclusions of the 2002 and 2006 parliamentary commissions (Mitrokhin Commission), these allegations continued to be reiterated by some media even after his death. Il Tempo called him a "man of the KGB", and wrote that he traveled "frequently to the USSR to develop strategies against the deviationist drift" of Berlinguer. In November 2009, Cossutta was awarded €30,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article by , the founder of , in which it was alleged that he was involved in the 1973 attempt on Berlinguer's life. In January 2015, the publisher of Libero in the legal entity Editoriale Libero s.r.l., the director Maurizio Belpietro, and the author of the 2003 article were definitively sentenced by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation to compensate Cossutta to €50,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article in which the newspaper, == Personal life and death ==

Cossutta was married to Emilia Clemente, with whom he had been linked for about seventy years and who died on 8 August 2015. Together, they had three children: Anna, Dario, and Maura, who was also active in politics as a parliamentarian. He was buried in the PCI's resting place of the Campo Verano cemetery. In 2016, Milan's comune decided to inscribe his name, among fourteen other personalities, in the city pantheon inside Milan's Cimitero Monumentale. His nephew, Simon Cossutta, is a member of the PD, and in 2015 was part of Gianni Cuperlo's and left-wing opposition within the party to the then PD secretary Matteo Renzi. He was also a supporter of Inter Milan, and was one of the founders, alongside Ignazio La Russa and , of the Inter Club Montecitorio in the Italian Parliament. In 1998, he was imitated by Teo Teocoli during a broadcast of Quelli che il calcio. Cossutta appreciated the comedian's sketches and called him to congratulate him. == Works ==

• I problemi del finanziamento del partito e la campagna per la stampa comunista. Rome: Iter. 1974. • Il finanziamento pubblico dei partiti. Roma: Editori Riuniti. 1974. • ''Decentramento e partecipazione. Iniziativa dei comunisti per l'attuazione della legge sui consigli di circoscrizione''. With Marcello Stefanini and Renato Zangheri. Rome: Editori Riuniti. 1977. • I comunisti nel governo locale. With Enrico Berlinguer. Rome: Editori Riuniti. 1978. • Il modo nuovo di governare. Rome: Edizioni delle autonomie. 1980. • Lo strappo. Usa, Urss, movimento operaio di fronte alla crisi internazionale. Milan: A. Mondadori. 1982. • Dissenso e unità. Dibattito politico nel PCI dal XVI al XVII congresso. Milan: Teti. 1986. • Vecchio e nuovo corso. Milan: Vangelista. 1988. • Una storia comunista. With Gianni Montesano. Milan: Rizzoli. 2004. . ==Electoral history==