Palmiro Togliatti

Family Togliatti was born on 26 March 1893 in Genoa, the capital city of the Italian region of Liguria, in the Kingdom of Italy, into a middle-class family, His father Antonio was also an accountant in the public administration, while his mother Teresa Vitale was an elementary school teacher. Togliatti later described his mother as "the central figure of the family". His father's job forced the family to move frequently to different cities. Before his birth, they moved from Turin to Genoa. He was named Palmiro because he was born on Palm Sunday; Togliatti's parents were observant Roman Catholics. Togliatti had one sister (Maria Cristina) and two brothers (Enrico and Eugenio Giuseppe). Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti became a mathematician and discovered Togliatti surfaces. Education and military service In 1908, Togliatti studied at the Azuni classics high school (classical lyceum) in Sassari, where he was recognised as the best student in the school. After a series of studies concluded with an average of 30, the highest vote, Togliatti graduated in November 1915 with the thesis Il regime doganale delle colonie ("The colonial customs regime"), which was discussed with Luigi Einaudi. He also enrolled in the faculty of letters and philosophy. When his father died on 21 January 1911 of cancer, his family ended up in poverty; it was only thanks to a scholarship that Togliatti was able to graduate from the University of Turin with a degree in law in 1917. In 1914, Togliatti had entered politics by joining the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) prior to the First World War; however, he focused on his studies rather than activism. The war and his political activity prevented him from obtaining a second degree, and he fullt dedicated himself to politics starting in 1923. According to Togliatti's brother Eugenio Giuseppe, Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci were "both hypercritical of the government's neutralist attitude and harshly anti-Giolittians". The precise intellectual path of the young Togliatti is not clear. In the cultural climate of those years, the neo-idealistic and Hegelian currents were prevailing, and they ranged from the teaching of Benedetto Croce to the most exasperated expressions of nationalism and spiritualism. Togliatti would always declare that he remained a stranger to the latter; it is certain that Croce in particular, then La Voce of Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, and Gaetano Salvemini and Romain Rolland had no small part in his youthful formation. The first approach to Marxism would have occurred all through the writings of Antonio Labriola; the decisive elements that led Togliatti to Marxist socialism were his friendship with Gramsci and the concrete social reality of Turin, which saw the development of a strong and organised workers' movement. Initially permanently discharged from military service due to physical incapacity (a severe short-sightedness), Togliatti served as a volunteer army officer during the war, ''L'Ordine Nuovo'' Returning at the end of the conflict, Togliatti was a part of the group around Gramsci's ''L'Ordine Nuovo paper in Turin, while working as a tutor. Like the other founders of L'Ordine Nuovo'', Togliatti was an admirer of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and strongly supported the immediate creation of soviets in Italy. He believed that existing factory councils of workers could be strengthened so that they could become the basis of a communist revolution. Initially, the newspaper, which was founded with union backing, focused on cultural politics. In June 1919, the month following its founding, Gramsci and Togliatti pushed out Angelo Tasca and re-focused as a revolutionary voice. The newspaper reached a circulation of 6,000 by the end of the year and its reputation was heightened by its support of the April 1920 general strike, while the PSI and the affiliated General Confederation of Labour did not support it. On 1 January 1921, the paper began to be published daily. Like Gramsci, Togliatti took an interest in association football, which was becoming a sport with massive following, and was said to have been a supporter of Juventus, as were other notable communist and left-wing leaders. Allegedly, Togliatti used to ask Pietro Secchia every Monday morning (according to others, the interlocutor was Luigi Longo) what Juventus had done the day before; if the interlocutor did not have an answer, Togliatti was said to reply: "And you, do you expect to make the revolution without knowing the results of Juventus?" Some alleged that "What did Juventus do?" was the first question Togliatti had asked upon awakening after his assassination attempt on 14 July 1948. That same year, he had been pictured at the stadium with Gianni Agnelli. == Communist Party of Italy ==

Founding and Bolshevisation Togliatti was a member of the communist faction within the PSI, which was part of the Communist International, commonly known as the Comintern. On 21 January 1921, following a split in the PSI on their 17th Congress in Livorno, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I). The PCd'I was formed by ''L'Ordine Nuovo'' group led by Gramsci and the culturalist faction led by Angelo Tasca. In the 1921 Italian general election held on 15 May, the PSI suffered losses but remained the largest party, while the PCd'I achieved 4.6% of the votes and 15 seats. In 1923, some members of the party were arrested and put on trial for alleged conspiracy against the state. This allowed the intense activity of the Comintern to deprive the party's left-wing of authority and give control to the minority centre, which had aligned with Moscow. In 1924 and 1925, the Comintern began a campaign of Bolshevisation that forced each party to conform to the discipline and orders of Moscow. The policy of Bolshevisation moved Gramsci to write a letter in 1926 to the Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of Joseph Stalin. Togliatti, who was in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti, one that they never completely resolved. According to the journalists Mario Pendinelli and Marcello Sorgi, Togliatti did this because he was aware that Gramsci's hegemony and war of maneuver theories contrasted with Stalin's Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy; he kept the letter along with Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and gave them to a journalist. Fascist regime In October 1922, Benito Mussolini, leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF), took advantage of a general strike by workers and announced his demands to the government to give the PNF political power or face a coup d'état. With no immediate response, a small number of Italian fascists began a long trek across Italy to Rome that was called the March on Rome, and told Italians that they were intending to restore law and order. Mussolini himself did not participate until the very end of the march, with Gabriele d'Annunzio being hailed as leader of the march, until it was revealed that he had been pushed out of a window and severely wounded in a failed assassination attempt. This deprived d'Annunzio of the possibility of leading the coup orchestrated by an organisation he himself had founded. Under the leadership of Mussolini, the Fascists demanded Luigi Facta's resignation as prime minister of Italy and that Mussolini be named prime minister. Although the Italian army was far better armed than the Fascist paramilitaries, the Italian government under Victor Emmanuel III faced a political crisis. The King was forced to choose which of the two rival movements in Italy would form the government: Mussolini's Fascists, or the anti-monarchist PSI. He selected the Fascists and appointed Mussolini as the new prime minister. Initially, Togliatti minimised the dictatorial aspects of the new Fascist government. In the same year, he said: "The fascist government, which is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, will have no interest in getting rid of any of the traditional democratic prejudices." Upon taking power, attacks by the Blackshirts on communist militants increased, as did their arrests. In the 1924 Italian general election, the National List of Mussolini (an alliance with liberals and conservatives) used intimidation tactics, resulting in a landslide victory and a subsequent two-thirds majority, while the PCd'I gained 3.7% of votes and 19 seats. In January 1926, Togliatti co-authored with Gramsci the thesis of the third congress of the PCd'I. and he began to construct a strategy that was based on broad alliances of middle-class categories. While in Moscow, he was accused by critics of not doing enough to help fellow communists and others in Fascist Italy. He was aware that the party's clandestine organisation and resistance to fascism would not have been possible without Soviet support, and it was for this reason that he flattened to Stalinist positions. In August 1936, the Comintern published a manifesto, titled "For the Salvation of Italy and the Reconciliation of the Italian People", which was allegedly written by Togliatti. It was addressed to "the blackshirt brothers" and appealed for unity between Communists and Fascists. It read: "We Communists have made ours the Fascist programme of 1919, which is a programme of peace, liberty and defence of the interests of the workers. ... The Fascist programme of 1919 has not been realised! Let's struggle united for the realisation of this programme." In March 1941, Togliatti told the Comintern that the strength of Fascism lay not only in violence. He said: "This dictatorship has done something – not just by means of violence. It has done something even for the workers and the young. We cannot deny that the introduction of social security is a fact." Those appeals to fascists were not limited to Togliatti. Giuseppe Di Vittorio wrote a letter to a Fascist union leader and asked him: "Between communists and fascists in good faith, are there any possibilities of working together, for the well-being of the Italian people and for the progressive march of our country?" The party and communist partisans, among others, then went on to play a major role in the Italian resistance movement that led to the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, and Togliatti became a revolutionary constituent and constitutionalist of the Italian Republic, On 15 May 1943, the party changed its official name to Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party). This change was not surprising as PCI started being used as the party's acronym around 1924 and 1925. This name change also reflected a change in the Comintern's role, as it increasingly became a federation of national Communist parties. This trend accelerated after Vladimir Lenin's death and its new name emphasised the party's shift from an international focus to an Italian one. At the time, it was a hotly contested issue for the two major factions of the party. On one side, the Soviets preferred the single world party as it was internationalist and strongly centralised, while on the other side the Italians wanted a party more tailored to their nation's peculiarities and more autonomy. Togliatti returned to Italy in March 1944, after 18 years of exile in Switzerland, France, Soviet Union, and Spain where, with the cover name of Alfredo, he represented the Comintern in the Garibaldi Battalion during the Spanish Civil War. == Secretary of the Italian Communist Party ==

Salerno Turn and national unity governments On 2 April 1944, Togliatti returned from Moscow to Italy, and led the renamed Italian Communist Party (PCI) and other political forces to the svolta di Salerno, variously referred to in English as the Salerno Turn, the Salerno Turning Point, and the U-turn at Salerno, the city where this took place. Togliatti also founded a political journal, Rinascita, following his return to Italy in 1944, which he edited until his death. '' newspaper in the 1950s Starting with the second Badoglio government, the national unity government including the PCI, Togliatti held several positions in the Italian government. From April 1944 to June 1945, he was both a minister without portfolio and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy under Badoglio (April–December 1944) and Ivanoe Bonomi (December 1944–June 1945). As the Italian Minister of Justice, Togliatti's pragmatism was put to the test when he approved, not without internal disapproval within the PCI, an amnesty. The amnesty bearing Togliatti's name was controversial because, in addition to partisans, who were in less numbers compared to the fascists and their collaborators in terms of crimes, pardoned and reduced sentences for Italian fascists, excluding the most grave crimes, The amnesty was considered necessary both for the unity of the country and for the rebuilding of the Italian nation after the war. Later less publicised pardons and releases on parole between 1947 and 1953, when Togliatti was no longer the Italian Minister of Justice, further reduced sentences for political crimes committed during the war and turned Italy's amnesty into an amnesia. In January 1947, Togliatti acknowledged De Gasperi as "the main exponent of the strongest among the popular and democratic parties on which the government will have to be based". In March 1947, in opposition to the dominant line in his own party, Togliatti voted for the inclusion of the Lateran Pacts in the Constitution of Italy, where it became its Article 7. Togliatti said the vote in favour of his party was more due to political responsibility than personal conviction. Communist ministers were evicted during the May 1947 crisis in both Italy and France after United States involvement. The same month also saw the Portella della Ginestra massacre of communist Sicilian peasants on 1 May. As in Italy, the French Communist Party (PCF) was a major party, taking part in the three-parties alliance known as Tripartisme, and became the largest party after scoring 28.3% at the November 1946 French legislative election. As was done by the United States in Italy, Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF, was forced to quit Paul Ramadier's government along with the four other party ministers. The crisis contributed to the start of the Cold War in Western Europe. Under Togliatti, the PCI became the largest Communist party in Western Europe. In 1948, Togliatti led the PCI in the first democratic election after World War II. The 1948 Italian general election resulted in a win for Christian Democracy (, DC) while the Popular Democratic Front (, FDP), the left-wing coalition of the PCI and the PSI respectively led by Togliatti and Pietro Nenni, achieved 31% of the votes, and the PCI returned 131 deputies to Parliament. and was thus significantly affected by this. It was marred by foreign electoral interventions, in particular by the United States through heavy funding, propaganda, and covert operations, the Soviets were apprehensive about committing to Italy financially, Togliatti himself, who was taunted with banners stating "Togliatti—do you understand? Go back to Russia!", argued that the election had not been free, citing interferences by both the United States and the Vatican. On 22 April, four days after the defeat of the FDP in the election, Togliatti said: "The elections were not free ... Brutal foreign intervention was used consisting of a threat to starve the country by withholding ERP [Marshall Plan] aid if it voted for the Democratic Front ... The menace to use the atom bomb against [pro-FDP] towns or regions." On 14 July 1948, at about 11:40 am, Togliatti was shot three times, being severely wounded by Antonio Pallante, a neo-fascist student, Togliatti's life hung in the balance for days and news about his condition was uncertain, causing an acute political crisis in Italy, with civil war and insurrection implications, which included a general strike called by the Italian General Confederation of Labour, as well as portraits of Togliatti being brought in during the celebration of the storming of the Bastille and a telegram from Stalin. Upon regaining consciousness, Togliatti himself was instrumental in calling for calm and a return to normalcy; from his hospital bed, he reassured his comrades and tried to pacify spirits, averting the danger of an armed insurrection. In January 2023, it was publicly revealed that Pallante had died on 6 July 2022, aged 98, and that he never regretted the shooting. 1950s and 1960s On 22 August 1950, a car accident caused Togliatti to crack the frontal bone and fracture a vertebra. As with the 1948 assassination attempt, the event caused an international sensation, and was followed by an investigation, which blamed the accident on "the unacceptable levity of fellow driver Aldo Zaia". At the time, no one was aware that in October 1950 he had lost consciousness and went into a coma; his doctor suspected that Togliatti had been poisoned. Togliatti was saved by brain surgery. During his period of convalescence in a Piedmontese clinic, it was reported that Togliatti had played chess with the Italian senator and fellow party member Cino Moscatelli. In December 1951, within the context of the birth of the Gladio anti-communist organisation, spy microphones were set up in Togliatti's house by the head of the Supervisory Commission, and were intended to also monitor his partner, Nilde Iotti, who was suspected of being in contact with Vatican circles. Under Togliatti's leadership, the PCI became the second largest party in Italy and the largest non-ruling Communist party in Europe. Although permanently in the opposition at the national level during his lifetime, the party ran many municipalities and held great power at the local and regional level in certain areas. In 1953, Togliatti fought against the Scam Law, an electoral legislation passed by the DC-led majority of the time, which aimed at using first-past-the-post to augment its power. Ultimately, the law was to prove of no use for the government in the elections of that year, where the PCI won 22.6% of the vote and confirmed itself as the first party within the parliamentary opposition and the second biggest party after the DC. It was repealed in July 1954. Togliatti was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and he remained a member of Parliament until his death in 1964. He developed a theory of unity in diversity within the Communist parties in all countries, which he outlined in a Rinascita article in December 1961, and named polycentrism. "Italian Road to Socialism" After the Khrushchev Thaw in the Soviet Union, Togliatti was inspired by the new set of reforms and launched the party program of the "Italian Road to Socialism". He said: "We are democrats in that we are not only anti-fascists, but socialists and communists. There is no contradiction between democracy and socialism." The new policy proposed by Togliatti was opposed to any revolutionary means of gaining power and aimed at accompanying institutional action with the extension of social and trade union struggles, and supported the concept of peaceful coexistence. On 15 February 1956, Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera published on the front page a correspondence by Piero Ottone on the five-hour speech with which Khrushchev the previous day explained to the 1,400 Soviet delegates and the leaders of international Communism, including Togliatti and Mauro Scoccimarro, the new strategies of communism. The main points of Khrushchev's speech were the peaceful coexistence between the blocs, the prevention of war, and the forms of transition of the various countries to socialism that, in the words of Ottone, means "the forces of socialism can assert themselves without revolutions, without civil wars, through parliamentary processes", akin to Togliatti's "Italian Way to Socialism" that was first inaugurated with the Salerno turning point and that he reiterated in his speech of response. In the 1958 Italian general election, the number of votes for the PCI was still on the rise. In the 1963 Italian general election, the PCI gained 25.2% of the votes but again failed to reach a relative majority. Nonetheless, the 1963 election ended centrism as party system and resulted in the first centre-left government in the history of the Italian Republic, with the PSI giving its first external support, a system of government known as the organic centre-left. == Personal life ==

From 1924 to 1948, Togliatti was married to fellow party member and politician Rita Montagnana. Until his death, he was in a relationship with Nilde Iotti, also a fellow party member and politician. == Death and funeral ==

before 1964 On 21 August 1964, Togliatti died as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage, while vacationing with his companion Nilde Iotti in Yalta, in the Crimean Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR, then part of the Soviet Union. The day before, he had been urgently hospitalised as a result of a stroke, for which he underwent surgery; he was 71. According to some of his collaborators, Togliatti was traveling to the Soviet Union to give his support to Leonid Brezhnev's election as Nikita Khrushchev's successor at the head of Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His favourite pupil, Enrico Berlinguer, was later elected as his successor to the National Secretary of the PCI position; Berlinguer's time in office saw the Historic Compromise and the moral question. The news of Togliatti's death was first given by Italy's leading agency ANSA. The party's newspaper ''l'Unità'' described him as "a great son of the Italian people, a brilliant leader of international communism, a fighter who spent his whole life in a hard and tireless struggle for socialism, for democracy, for peace." The Soviet Russian city of Stavropol-on-Volga, where Togliatti had been instrumental in establishing the AutoVAZ (Russian: Lada) automobile manufacturing plant in collaboration with Fiat, was renamed after him (in Russian: Tolyatti, as transliterated from , the Russian spelling of his name) in his honor in 1964, after his death. One of the main town squares in the Croatian city of Rijeka (Italian: Fiume) was named after Togliatti while Croatia was part of SFR Yugoslavia, until it was renamed to Jadranski trg (Adriatic Plaza) in 1994. There is still a street in Belgrade named after him (Serbian: ulica Palmira Toljatija, ). Togliatti's funeral, held on 24 August 1964, was attended by a million and saw much popular participation, comparable to that of Berlinguer years later; A 1972 painting by Renato Guttuso, titled I funerali di Togliatti, was made to recreate the event. The painting includes, in addition to Iotti, Brezhnev, and Berlinguer, notable global Communist movement figures and others whom Guttuso imagines being present at the funeral, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda, Elio Vittorini, Angela Davis, Antonio Gramsci, Dolores Ibárruri, Anna Kuliscioff, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Curzio Malaparte described Togliatti as the thinking head of Italian Communism. == Legacy ==

The Salerno Turn anticipated the "Italian Way to Socialism" and the Eurocommunist trend. While its motives have been widely discussed and argued about by scholars, the national peculiarity of the PCI is not limited to Togliatti and is well-founded by the fact that it was a co-founder of the Italian Republic and its constitution, as well as its significant contribution to the resistance against Nazi–fascism and its mass base. The PCI under Togliatti and their attitude towards the Marshall Plan is placed within the context of the Cold War and anti-communism. After orchestrating the fall of the PCI and PSI from government, amid a crisis within the DC and fears that a left-wing coalition would take power, the United States and George Marshall had informed the Italian government that anti-communism was a pre-condition for receiving American aid, and James Clement Dunn had directly asked Alcide de Gasperi to dissolve the parliament and remove the PCI. Additionally, the United States provided support to anti-PCI groups in 1948, and reiterated that should the PCI win, the Marshall Plan and other aids could be terminated. According to one estimate, the United States spent about $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 a possible electoral victory for a left-wing coalition, 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. For their part, the Soviets would fund the PCI until 1984, and the party relied on Soviet financial assistance more than any other Communist party supported by Moscow. United States and Soviet interference and funding led to criticism of the other and accusing each other of going too far. United States government sources said that the PCI was receiving $40–50 million per year from the Soviets when their investment in Italy was stated to be $5–6 million; declassified information showed this to be exaggerated. Stalin forced the PCI to reject and work against the Marshall Plan, despite the loss of much support from Italian voters who wanted the American aid. First published in 1997, this view was criticised by Luciano Canfora. Canfora saw the Salerno Turn and 1944 as a rebirth of Italy's Communist party, and said that "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." The manipulation of some words and phrases of the text in the letter reported in the weekly was discovered only ten days later, and it negatively affected the electoral campaign of the PCI's legal successor party, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Andreucci had corrected a photocopy that came badly and in part incomplete given to him by the historian Friedrich Firsov, dictating it via telephone to the director of Panorama from home of the journalist Francesco Bigazzi, correspondent in Moscow for the newspaper il Giorno, as a result of which he had to resign from the position of consultant held at the publishing house Il Ponte alle Grazie, which soon suffered a collapse in sales due to the loss of credibility and was absorbed in 1993 by Edizioni Salani. The political result of the operation was partially achieved, as the attack on Togliatti, in addition to influencing the result of the 1992 Italian general election, also served to put Iotti out of the running from a possible election to the presidency of the Italian Republic. == Electoral history ==