Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A trend among Western European communist partners to free themselves from the domination of the cpsu (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). The name was first used in the mid-1970s and received wide publicity after the publication of Santiago Carrillo's Eurocommunism and the State in 1976. Many of the ideas associated with Eurocommunism were not new and went back to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1929–35) and to Tito's break with stalin in 1948. khrushchev's secret speech to the twentieth congress on the cpsu in 1956 gave a great boost to those seeking a revision of communist doctrine, Palmiro togliatti , leader of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), expounding his ideas on polycentrism. The brutal suppression of the hungarian rising of the same year and of the prague spring in 1968 alienated many Western communists and speeded up their move towards independence. There was no formal manifesto but the leaders of the French, Spanish and Italian communist parties signed a declaration in Madrid in 1977 which said that they were committed to independence from the Soviet Union and that they valued democratic principles: freedom of the press, of religious belief, civil liberties and political pluralism. Within communist parties Eurocommunism implied a greater participation for members in making decisions and less dictation from leaders. Yet each communist party soon went its ... log in or subscribe to read full text