Early years The roots of the PCI date back to 1921, when the
I Congress of the Communist Party of Italy was held in Livorno on 21 January, following a split in the
XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party. The split occurred after the Congress of Livorno refused to expel the
reformist group as required by the
Communist International (Comintern). The main factions of the new party were L'Ordine Nuovo, based in Turin and led by
Antonio Gramsci, and the Maximalist faction led by
Nicola Bombacci.
Amadeo Bordiga was elected secretary of the new party. The party was officially founded as the
Communist Party of Italy – Section of the Communist International (''Partito Comunista d'Italia – Sezione dell'Internazionale Comunista''), since the Comintern was structured as a single world party according to
Vladimir Lenin's vision. In the
1921 Italian general election, the party obtained 4.6% of the vote and 15 seats in the country's
Chamber of Deputies. At the time, it was an active yet small faction within the Italian political left, which was strongly led by the PSI, while on the international level it was
Soviet-led. During its 2nd Congress in 1922, the new party registered 43,000 members. This was in part due to the entrance of almost the whole Socialist Youth Federation (
Federazione Giovanile Socialista). The party adopted a slim structure headed by a Central Committee of 15 members, five of whom were also in the Executive Committee (EC), namely Ambrogio Belloni, Nicola Bombacci, Amadeo Bordiga (EC),
Bruno Fortichiari (EC),
Egidio Gennari, Antonio Gramsci,
Ruggero Grieco (EC), Anselmo Marabini,
Francesco Misiano, Giovanni Parodi, Luigi Polano, Luigi Repossi (EC), Cesare Sessa, Ludovico Tarsia, and Umberto Terracini (EC). Since its formation, the party strived to organise itself on some bases that were not a mere reproduction of the traditional parties' bases. It then took again some arguments that distinguished the battle within the PSI, namely the idea that it is necessary to form an environment fiercely hostile to bourgeois society and that is an anticipation of the future socialist society. The purpose of this was not considered utopian because already in this society, especially in production, some structures are born on future results. In the first years of the PCd'I, there was no official leader; the accepted leader, first of the faction/tendency and then of the party, was Bordiga (Left) of the
communist left current. Leaders of the minority currents were Angelo Tasca (Right) and Gramsci (Centre).
Conflict between factions As a territorial section of Comintern, the PCd'I adopted the same program, the same conception of the party and the same tactics adopted by the II Congress in
Moscow of 1920. The official program, drawn up in ten points, began with the intrinsically catastrophic nature of the capitalist system and terminated with the extinction of the state. It follows in a synthetic way the model outlined by Lenin for the
Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). For a while, this identity resisted, but the fast progress of the reaction in Europe produced a change of tactics in a democratic direction within the Bolshevik party and consequently within the Comintern. This happened in particular regarding the possibility, previously opposed, of an alliance with the social democratic and bourgeois parties. This provoked a tension in the party between the majority (Left) and the minority factions (the Right and the Centre) supported by the Comintern. The proposals of the Left were no longer accepted and the conflict between the factions became irremediable.
Bolshevisation In 1923, some members of the party were arrested and put on trial for "conspiracy against the State". This allowed the intense activity of the Communist International to deprive the party's left-wing of authority and give control to the minority centre which had aligned with Moscow. In 1924–1925, the Comintern began a campaign of
Bolshevisation, which forced each party to conform to the discipline and orders of Moscow. During the clandestine conference held in Como to ratify the party leadership in May 1924, 35 of the 45 federation secretaries, plus the secretary of the youth federation, voted for Bordiga's Left, four for Gramsci's Centre, and five for Tasca's Right. Before the Lyon Congress in 1926, the Centre won almost all the votes in the absence of much of the Left, who were unable to attend as a result of fascist controls and lack of Comintern support. Recourse to the Comintern against this evident manoeuvre had little effect. The PCd'I as conceived by the Left terminated. The organisation continued with the support of the Comintern and a new structure and leadership. In 1922, the newspaper ''
L'Ordine Nuovo was closed and in 1924 a new Centre newspaper, l'Unità, edited by Gramsci, was founded. The Left continued as a faction, principally functioning in exile. It published the newspaper Bilan'', a monthly theoretical bulletin. In 1926, Bordiga and Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned on the island of
Ustica. In 1927,
Palmiro Togliatti was elected secretary in place of Gramsci. In 1930, Bordiga was expelled from the Comintern and accused of
Trotskyism. After
Joseph Stalin dissolved the Communist International in 1943, the exiled members of the PCd'I in Moscow changed the party's name to the PCI on 15 May. Under this name, it reorganised in Italy and became a parliamentary party after the fall of Fascism.
Resistance to fascism The party and its militants were actively involved in the resistance to
Benito Mussolini's regime through clandestine action. They were well prepared for clandestine activity because of the structure of their organisation, and the fact that they had been victims of systematic repression by the authorities; more than three quarters of the political prisoners between 1926 and 1943 were communists. Throughout the dictatorship, the party was able to maintain and feed a clandestine network, distribute propaganda leaflets and newspapers, and infiltrate fascist unions and youth organisations. In 1935, the party led a campaign against the
Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The party and communist partisans, among others, then went on to play a major role in the resistance movement that led to the
fall of the Fascist regime in Italy. agreed to cooperate with
King Victor Emmanuel III and his
prime minister of Italy, the Marshal
Pietro Badoglio. After the turn, the PCI took part in every government during the national liberation and constitutional period from June 1944 to May 1947. Their contribution to the new Italian democratic constitution was decisive. The Gullo decrees of 1944, named after
Fausto Gullo, sought to improve social and economic conditions in the countryside. During Badoglio and
Ferruccio Parri's cabinets, Togliatti served as the
Deputy Prime Minister of Italy. During the Resistance, the PCI became increasingly popular, as the majority of partisans were communists. The
Garibaldi Brigades, promoted by the PCI, were among the more numerous partisan forces. The Garibaldi brigades trained and fought alongside future historical and leadership figures of the party or the communist:
Giorgio Amendola,
Pietro Ingrao,
Luigi Longo,
Giancarlo Paietta,
Armando Cossutta,
Aldo Tortorella and
Alfredo Reiclin; prominent figures in the
CGIL trade union :
Luciano Lama and
Bruno Trentin. Also worth mentioning are future writers of the caliber of
Italo Calvino and
Gianni Rodari film directors such as
Carlo Lizzani Gillo Pontecorvo Luchino Visconti educators such as Anna Maria Princigalli and Dina Rinaldi, and finally women journalists as
Rossana Rossanda and
Miriam Mafai.
Post-war years The PCI took part in the
1946 Italian general election and the
1946 Italian institutional referendum, campaigning for a republic. In the election, the PCI was third, behind
Christian Democracy (DC) and the PSI, gaining almost 19% of votes and electing 104 members of the
Constituent Assembly of Italy. The popular referendum resulted in the replacement of the monarchy with a republic, after 54% of the votes were in favour and 46% against.
Luciano Canfora saw the Salerno Turn and 1944 as a rebirth of the PCI, and said "the PCI had gradually followed a path which required it, as a historical task, to occupy the space of social democracy in the Italian political panorama." As part of the
May 1947 crises, the PCI was excluded from government.
Alcide De Gasperi, the DC leader and prime minister of Italy, was losing popularity, and feared that the
leftist coalition would take power. While the PCI was growing particularly fast due to its organising efforts supporting sharecroppers in
Sicily,
Tuscany, and
Umbria, movements that were also bolstered by the reforms of
Fausto Gullo, the
Italian Minister of Agriculture. On 1 May, the nation was thrown into crisis by the
Portella della Ginestra massacre, in which eleven leftist peasants (including four children) were murdered at an
International Workers' Day parade in
Palermo by
Salvatore Giuliano and his gang. In the political chaos that ensued, the United States government engineered the expulsion of all left-wing ministers from the cabinet on 31 May. The PCI would not have a national position in government again. De Gasperi did this under pressure from the United States Secretary of State,
George Marshall, who had informed him that
anti-communism was a pre-condition for receiving American aid, and Ambassador
James Clement Dunn, who had directly asked de Gasperi to dissolve the parliament and remove the PCI. In the
1948 Italian general election, the party joined the PSI in the
Popular Democratic Front (FDP) but was defeated by the DC. The United States government provided support to anti-PCI groups in the election, and argued that should the PCI win, the
Marshall Plan and other aids could be terminated. It spent $10–20 million on anti-communist propaganda and other covert operations, much of it through the
Economic Cooperation Administration of the Marshall Plan, and then laundered through individual banks. Fearful of the possible FDP's electoral victory, the British and American governments also undermined their campaign for legal justice by tolerating the efforts made by Italy's top authorities to prevent any of the alleged
Italian war criminals from being extradited and taken to court. The denial of Italian war crimes was backed up by the Italian state, academe, and media, re-inventing Italy as only a victim of
Nazism and the post-war
Foibe massacres. After the
1975 Italian local elections, the PCI was the strongest force in nearly all of the municipal councils of the great cities.
From the 1950s to the 1960s 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 Italy), regarded the Hungarian insurgents as counter-revolutionaries as reported at the time in ''
l'Unità, the official PCI newspaper. Giuseppe Di Vittorio, chief of the communist trade union Italian General Confederation of Labour (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. 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. 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 that promoted a
social-democratic direction in party policy. In the mid-1960s, the
United States Department of State estimated the party membership to be approximately 1,350,000, or 4.2% of the working age population, making it the largest Communist party in per capita terms in the capitalist world at the time and the largest party at all in the whole of Western Europe with the
Social Democratic Party of Germany. United States government sources said that the party was receiving $40–50 million per year from the Soviets when their investment in Italy was $5–6 million. Although the PCI relied on Soviet financial assistance more than any other Communist party supported by Moscow, declassified information shows this to be exaggerated. According to the former
KGB archivist
Vasili Mitrokhin, Longo and other PCI leaders became alarmed at the possibility of a coup in Italy after the Athens Colonel coup in April 1967 that led to the
Greek junta. 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 military and
neo-fascist 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
1972 Italian general election, 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 organisations providing generous contracts to PCI members.
Leadership of Enrico Berlinguer In 1969,
Enrico Berlinguer, the 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 Communist Party and directly told Brezhnev that the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 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, which had absorbed the PSI's left-wing, the
Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, so strengthening its leadership over the Italian left, was the largest communist party in a
capitalist state, garnering 34.4% of the vote in the
1976 Italian 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 the socialist and Christian democracy parties, a policy known as the
Historic Compromise. The
kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the DC leader, 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 1981. The
Proletarian Unity Party merged into the PCI in 1984. 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
StB, Czechoslovakia's State Security, to withdraw their support to the group, which Moscow was unable or unwilling to do. A third of the PCI membership, led by
Armando Cossutta, refused to join the PDS, and instead seceded to form the
Communist Refoundation Party. The Democratic Party of the Left includes both those who were in favor of dissolving the Communist Party and those Ingraiani who, despite being opposed to it, preferred to remain in the party. The latter would go on to form the internal left wing of the Democratic Party of the Left:
Fausto Bertinotti and
Luciana Castellina (who would later join Rifondazione Comunista),
Aldo Tortorella,
Gavino Angius, Fulvia Bandoli, Gloria Buffo, Vincenzo Vita and Giacomo Princigalli. ==Popular support==