Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Palmiro Togliatti was both a prominent leader of the Communist International and the secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) between 1927 and his death in 1964. After the fall of Fascism he returned to Italy and contributed to shape the PCI as a new mass party, with a large electoral support and roots in the Italian working classes and society. Togliatti was born in Genoa on March 26, 1893 and as a law student in Turin was active in the Socialist Party before World War I. During the war he was an interventionist, but he later joined the Ordine Nuovo group, and in 1921 the Communist Party. The year after, at the Congress in Rome, he was elected to the Central Committee. He then worked with Antonio Gramsci at the Congress in Lyon in 1926 to draft the Lyon Thesis, which became the political statement of the new Gramsci leadership. Togliatti attended the 5th Congress of the International in Moscow in 1924 and was elected to its Executive Committee. The final takeover of Fascism and the disrupting of the Communist Party in 1926 found Togliatti in the USSR, where he was to become one of the foremost leaders of the International, one of the few not from the Russian Communist Party. However, his full support for Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin against Leon Trotsky brought him into conflict with Gramsci. Togliatti then succeeded Ruggiero Grieco as secretary of the PCI ... log in or subscribe to read full text