Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (Communist Lives)

PALMIRO TOGLIATTI

Aldo Agosti is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin in Italy. He is the author and editor of numerous books about the the history of the Socialist and Communist movements.

Other titles in the Communist Lives series

Maurice Thorez John Bulaitis Ernst Thälmann Norman LaPorte Antonio Gramsci Claudio Natoli Imre Nagy János Rainer Georgi Dimitrov Marietta Stankova Tito Geoff Swain

PALMIRO TOGLIATTI A Biography Aldo Agosti

Published in 2008 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 This edition copyright © 2008 I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd Original edition © 1996 UTET S.P.A., Torino Paperback edition © 2003 UTET Diffusione s.r.l., The right of Aldo Agosti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the licensor in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher Communist Lives: Volume 1 ISBN: 978 1 84511 726 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Series Foreword by Matthew Worley Foreword by Donald Sassoon Preface by Aldo Agosti

vii ix xi xvii

1.

Political and Cultural Development

001

2.

A Revolutionary Party Facing Reaction

19

3.

Moscow, Switzerland and Paris

41

4.

The Night of Social Fascism

67

5.

The Season of the Popular Front

85

6.

Europe in the Storm

119

7.

National Unity

151

8.

Cold War and Retreat

189

9.

Years of Détente and the Crisis of Centrism

223

10. The Last Years, The Last Question Endnotes Index

265 297 331

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and the series editor wish to acknowledge the support provided for this project by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. The Trust’s substantial financial support made this translation possible. Thanks also to the Gramsci Foundation and the University of Turin, both of which provided funding, and to Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis for translating the manuscript. Throughout the project, Nina Fishman has been extremely helpful and supportive, while the input and backing of Donald Sassoon, Toby Abse, Gino Bedani, Enrico Sartor, Milena Nuti, Giuseppe Vatalaro, Ilaria Favretto, Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Anne Showstack Sassoon and Martin McGarry has similarly been invaluable.

SERIES FOREWORD

Communism has, traditionally, appeared to be something of a faceless creed. Its emphasis on the collective over the individual, on discipline and unity, and on the overwhelming importance of ‘the party’, has meant that only the most renowned (and mainly Soviet) communist leaders have attracted interest from English-speaking political historians and biographers. In particular, the party rank-and-file have tended to be dismissed as mere cogs within the organisations of which they were part, either denigrated as ‘slaves of Moscow’, or lost in the sweeping accounts of communist party policy and strategy that have dominated the historiography to date. More recently, however, historians have begun to delve beneath the uniform appearance of democratic centralism, endeavouring to understand the motivations and objectives of those who gave their lives to revolutionary struggle. The current series, therefore, has been established to bolster and give expression to such interest. By producing biographical accounts of communist leaders and members, it is hoped that a movement that helped define the twentieth century will begin to be understood in a more nuanced way, and that the millions who – at various times and in various ways – subscribed to such a Utopian but ultimately flawed vision will be given both the personal and historical depth that their communist lives deserve. Matthew Worley Series Editor – Communist Lives

FOREWORD

The art of political biography does not bloom in Italy the way it does in the AngloSaxon world, where no self-respecting politician, including the second-rate, fails to chance upon a biographer. Even the inevitable self-serving memoir finds a publisher. Gerald Ford, the only US president never to have won a national election, scored on both counts. Alec Douglas Home, British prime minister for just a year, has four biographies and published several volumes of memoirs and letters. Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party between 1983 and 1992 and lost two elections, has at least three biographies. Italians are more circumspect. Writing biographies is regarded as the prerogative of journalists. Academics who experiment with the genre try hard to avoid the trivia they disdain but readers love. Italians who want to know about Mussolini read British (or, more recently, Australian) biographies and use Renzo De Felice’s barely readable multivolume biography of the Duce (in reality a history of fascism) to embellish their bookshelves. In 1973, Giorgio Bocca, a well-known journalist, produced the first comprehensive biography of Palmiro Togliatti (who had died in 1964) using a wide range of interviews and published sources. Bocca exhibited the endearing trait of acknowledging the subject’s remarkable political intelligence and his leading role in the transformation of the post-war Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a force for progress and democracy, while expressing quite forcefully his unremitting antipathy towards Togliatti. No other significant life appeared until 1996, when Aldo Agosti published the first and, so far, the only authoritative, archive based, serious and balanced biography of the communist leader. This, in an abridged and updated form, is the volume you are about to read. The paucity of works on the life of Palmiro Togliatti is all the more remarkable if one considers that he was one of the towering political figures of twentieth-century Italy, along with the Liberal statesman Giovanni Giolitti, Benito Mussolini, and the Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi. Unlike them, he was never prime minister. It is rare for someone who never won an election, made a revolution, or staged a takeover to achieve such status. One of Togliatti’s peculiarities was that he spent almost his entire lifetime in opposition, but then occupied his last twenty years behaving as if he were in government. He thought that one had to operate on a dual track; that it was necessary to combat the adversary, yes, and with all means at one’s disposal; but, in the end, the objective was not to oppose but to govern. His favourite expression was fare politica. Literally, this means ‘make politics’, an expression which – in English – has little meaning. For in Anglo-Saxon countries one does not ‘make politics’; one is ‘in’ politics (whether to change things or to stop things

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from changing). But the broader political canvas remains unaltered as befits nations blessed or cursed with uncommon political stability. In Italy, ‘making politics’ implies changing the shape of the political, its rules, its flavour. It is a dynamic concept; it underlines the unfinished nature of the Italian polity, the relatively recent construction of its state, and the undetermined character of its foundations. But there is also, I think, behind this expression, the weight of older political traditions stretching back a few centuries, all the way to Machiavelli, whose Principe was less concerned with the management of existing states than with the creation of new ones. And in the creation of ‘the new’ Togliatti had two political accomplishments to his credit. The first was the invention of the partito nuovo, the post-war PCI with its one-anda-half-million members, its network of branches and federations, its affiliated cultural and sporting associations, and its mass daily and weekly press. This was quite distinct from the traditional Leninist sect, based on trusted and dedicated activists, waiting for the moment of revolutionary rupture, ‘a small, closed association of propagandists of the general ideas of communism and Marxism’. After opposing fascism for twenty years, Togliatti believed the time had come to co-operate in the hard task of national reconstruction. The partito nuovo he had in mind had to become ‘national’, Italian, deeply rooted in society – an active participant in the country’s hopes and aspirations – and not a distant observer of the woes of capitalism, exulting at every sign of its failings in the hopeless expectation that things have to get much worse before they can get any better. National reconstruction was Togliatti’s second great political accomplishment. Its centrepiece was the constitution of 1948, drafted in a new common political language which embraced the main political families that had emerged or re-emerged out of the destruction brought about by the war and the dictatorship: the liberal-secular, the Catholic and, of course, the socialist-communist. This compromise, for it was a compromise, was to be held together by the spirit of anti-fascism which had given a sense of purpose to the Resistance. Such co-existence withstood even the most difficult moments of the Cold War and lasted until the early 1990s when the post-war party political system collapsed under the double impact of massive corruption scandals and the end of communism. Togliatti understood that a constitution had to enshrine the possibility of coexistence between the contending parties. Bypassing the socialists he dealt directly with the other great mass party of post-war Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats), and produced the only constitution in Western Europe which bore the decisive imprint of a communist party. The subversive had become a state builder. The post-war settlement could have gone another way. The role played by Togliatti and the PCI in the construction of the Italian republic and its constitutive charter contrasts with that of the French Communist Party (PCF), the only other comparable communist party in Western Europe. The PCF too pushed for a new republican constitution, but failed to mobilise enough support behind it. It was defeated in a referendum. A new amended constitution, grudgingly endorsed by the increasingly isolated communists, was reluctantly approved by the electorate and lasted a decade or

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so. The French communists never felt at home in the short-lived Fourth Republic (a pathetic copy of the Third) and opposed – understandably so – the creation of the Fifth, Gaullist, Republic. The PCF remained an antagonistic force until the day it died. More nationalist than national, the PCF, like de Gaulle, had ‘a certain idea of France’ though not the same as the General or indeed anyone else outside its own ranks. Yet, the beginnings of Togliatti’s career had not been auspicious. In his early days he often wavered and showed indecision. When the First World War broke out and Italy stayed out of it (joining the Anglo-French Alliance the following year, in spite of great opposition in parliament), Togliatti’s position (and Gramsci’s) – as this biography makes clear – was closer to Mussolini’s than to the leadership of the socialist party. Absolute neutrality was not a position with which Togliatti felt comfortable. Italy should not be left out of a momentous event which was about to reshape Europe. He even thought it might not be a bad outcome if the principles of economic liberalism championed by Great Britain were to triumph in Europe. His Marxism was suis generis (as it would remain ever after). In 1917, unlike Gramsci, he seemed barely aware of the importance of the Soviet Revolution. And, also unlike Gramsci, Togliatti was cautious, pragmatic, aware of the lasting strength of institutions, less confident of positive outcomes. He could not ‘make up his mind, as was always somewhat his habit’, wrote Gramsci, a little disparagingly, in January 1924. Togliatti, the prudent revolutionary, was disdainful of the maximalist rhetoric of many socialists. Events confirmed him in this attitude. During the turmoil of the wave of strikes of the so-called biennio rosso (the ‘two red years’ of 1919–20) Togliatti soon realised how little his small group of activists could influence the Italian labour movement. His great gift, essential for a politician, consisted in being able to learn from mistakes. In L’Ordine Nuovo, the journal he edited with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti refined his skill as a sarcastic polemicist. But he was not aware, any more than anyone else, of the real threat posed by fascism. Too busy with the daily edition of the paper, he was not even present in Livorno in January 1921 when the new communist party was founded. Togliatti, like many others, fell at first under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga, the sectarian leader of the new party. Soon he realised that the advent of fascism meant that the Left had been defeated, and – what was almost worse – that it had not realised the historic magnitude of this defeat. He hesitated. The alternatives he faced seemed to be either to dedicate himself to cultural pursuits – the cultivation of one’s garden, as Voltaire’s Candide would have it, or to spend the rest of his life in politics. By May 1923 he had taken the plunge (something he would occasionally regret) and threw himself into reorganising a party soon to be banned and persecuted. This reluctant revolutionary faced a new, agonising choice: whether to follow Bordiga’s line, thus breaking with the Comintern (Lenin had been scathing about Bordiga, finding him guilty of ‘infantile’ communist extremism) or accept the discipline required by Moscow. He chose Moscow. As he wrote to Gramsci, on 1 May 1923, ‘entering into open battle with the Communist International, putting ourselves outside of it, then finding ourselves without powerful material and moral

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support, reduced to a tiny group held together by almost solely personal ties’ would entail ‘losing all real and practical immediate influence on the development of the political battle in Italy’. In Moscow in 1926, he became head of the party after the effective establishment of Mussolini’s dictatorship. He lived in exile returning again to Moscow from France when the war broke out. By 1927 Gramsci was in prison. Angelo Tasca eventually drifted away, gathering a remarkable archive while becoming a police informer. Bordiga, expelled from the party in 1930, lived a quiet life under fascism. Togliatti was now in charge. But in charge of what? The PCI was little more than an insignificant little sect, barely able to organise against fascism. Its best activists were in exile or in jail. The liberal and socialist oppositions to fascism were just as ineffectual, resorting to futile gestures or keeping their head down, waiting for better times. Togliatti now inhabited two worlds: the world of the international communist movement and that of the Italian party. Each of these worlds was in turn divided. The leaders of the Comintern, of which Togliatti had risen to become one, were, in theory, in charge of a global communist revolution. They received and read reports from China and India, from the Philippines and from Brazil, from Berlin and from Madrid. They were aware of what was going on, not just in Paris and London but also in Ulan Bator and Cairo. They discussed the impact of strikes and wars, debated who should be in alliance with whom and why. At the same time they lived in a surreal atmosphere, cooped up in the Hotel Lux in Moscow, ‘its dusty corridors were still populated by rats’ and Soviet secret agents, and were participants in the momentous sectarian clash taking place inside the vanguard party which was supposed to lead the global revolution. This is where Togliatti met Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin and Trotsky and, of course, Stalin. It was a dangerous milieu but one which, until Stalin established his final control, was relatively open to debate and disagreement – described by Agosti with uncommon poise and balance. In fact the situation was all the more dangerous when the debate was open, since one was less prudent and would pay the price later. The other world, that of the PCI, was equally disjointed. Inside the country, bands of clandestine activists, constantly suspicious of everyone and yet more in touch with the life and feelings of ordinary people, carried on a brave, if largely ineffectual, struggle. Outside the country, a band of exiles, under the prestigious mantle of an international revolutionary movement, pretended to direct them. The conventional anti-communist narrative, taking the same line as the official communist one, has regarded the Comintern and its affiliated organisations as an amazingly efficient monolith, endowed with a near perfect communication system, able to move its various pawns, almost at will, on the great chessboard of revolutionary politics. The reality, as Agosti deftly shows, was more complicated. The truth of the matter is that the Comintern was an organisation in disarray. During its reign (1919–43) not a single successful communist revolution occurred anywhere in the world, (with the possible exception of the People’s Republic of Mongolia whose entry into the roster of communist states in 1924 was due to the Red Army rather than the Comintern). Indeed while the Comintern was laying down the line, trying to locate the

FOREWORD

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contradictions within the ranks of the enemy, the ‘enemy’ was scoring repeated successes. By the time the Second World War broke out, staunchly anti-communist authoritarian governments of various hues were in power throughout eastern, central and southern Europe, from Metaxas’s Greece to Antanas Smetona’s Lithuania, from Franco’s Spain to King Carol’s Romania. The Comintern offered hope and faith in these trying times. The prospects were dismal and the enemy powerful, but the future belonged to the International – or so they felt. Togliatti’s relationship with the Comintern was complex, but not unusual for communists of the interwar years. He did not regard himself merely as a leader of the PCI, loyal to Moscow, but as a leader of the international communist movement. He could not see any contradiction between the two positions. In the 1920s one could argue about whether Italian fascism was in crisis, whether it had succeeded in building around itself a compact system of power, and whether the PCI could defeat fascism on its own. These were not just debates between Moscow and the Italian party but within (above all within) the party. At least in the 1920s, Togliatti could and did express positions which went against the prevailing mood in the Comintern, in particular by his insistence that fascism was an exceptional form of capitalist rule against those who maintained that the differences between fascism and the hated social democracy were insignificant. But he then realised that he was in danger (he had been too close to Bukharin) and knuckled under. He allowed his work in the Comintern to take second place to the business of defending his position in the PCI. The enthralling fourth chapter of the biography (‘The Night of Social Fascism’) maps out this most difficult period in Togliatti’s life. His caution was such that it was Dimitrov who was instrumental in getting the Comintern to adopt the new line of the popular front. Togliatti threw his weight behind the new policy only when he was sure it had Stalin’s imprimatur. Even so he remained distrustful of the French communists. The new situation enabled him to produce one of the most interesting analyses of fascism during the interwar years: the lectures on fascism to the cadres at the Moscow party school – lectures (published in English in 1976) which urged activists to work within fascist organisations and fare politica. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Togliatti, abandoning the caution of the previous year, explained that the struggle (which had previously been between communism and all forms of ‘capitalist dictatorship’, whether fascist or ‘bourgeois’ democratic ) was now today, everywhere in the world, between fascism and democracy. The testing ground for this struggle was Spain where Togliatti was sent, as chief Comintern adviser, or Stalin’s henchman as some would have it. Those who propound for the henchman’s thesis would do well to read chapter six (‘Europe in the Storm’) in which his criticism of the sectarianism of the Spanish Communist Party is analysed and contextualised. Other crucial and controversial moments of Togliatti’s career are examined by Agosti without reticence: the reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact; the revitalisation of the resistance against fascism; the role he played in the formation of a unity government after Italy joined the Allies in 1943–44; the reconstruction of the Italian state; the beginning of the Cold War; and, above all, Togliatti’s reception of Khrushchev’s de-

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Stalinisation speech in 1956 and his clear support for the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Regardless of the differences he had with Stalin and his successors, he knew and probably believed that there was no other choice open to a leader of a communist party than complete subordination to the ‘vanguard state’. One can speculate whether – had he broken with the USSR – he would have been able to carry his party with him, but there is little doubt that this was not an option Togliatti ever seriously considered. There was, inevitably, a kind of political schizophrenia. On the one hand there was Togliatti’s genuine attempt to develop a distinctive ‘Italian Road to Socialism’ quite different from that taken by Lenin and his successors. On the other there was the realisation that – in a bipolar world and in the situation in which Italy found itself – one had to choose one’s own camp. This, of course, meant that Togliatti’s analysis of international relations during the Cold War, though often subtle, was debased by an inability or unwillingness to do what he did so well in domestic politics: to see the reasons of the enemy. To see the reasons of Togliatti and situate his life in the context of his times is the supreme achievement of this biography. Donald Sassoon London, 2008

PREFACE

This biography was first published in Italian in January 1996. Although it is condensed, this revised and updated English version has retained the structure of the first Italian edition. Some quotations have been omitted or abbreviated, mainly in the last three chapters. The sections specific to the inner-workings of Italian politics have been simplified. In addition, I have expanded the treatment of Togliatti’s role as a leader of the international communist movement, as brought to light by documents released from the Moscow archives after 1994 and from Dimitrov’s diary. I have also considered some of the most significant historiography of the last decade, which has informed the study of Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the party of which he was the undisputed leader for 40 years. These revisions have resulted in the substantial rewriting of certain sections and the bibliographical notes, which seek to give an albeit brief account of the new research which emerged between 1996 and 2007. Togliatti has left an uneven imprint on historiography. In Italy, his character has attracted almost as much attention as Gramsci’s. Even more than the latter, obviously, he has been identified with the history of the PCI, which – from at least the 1960s – has become a particularly contentious topic for historical research no less than an object of burning political passion. Togliatti’s place in the historiography of other countries is less clear. An enormous amount of literature concerning the communist movement was produced in the years of Cold War, especially by American historians and political scientists. But in attempting to retrace Togliatti’s activities and political thought in the years of the Communist International (Comintern), the Englishspeaking reader would have found little to rely on until at least the mid-1970s. Considerable attention had been paid, it is true, to his role alongside Gramsci in the founding of the PCI1; but very little was known about his role in the Comintern. This was only been touched on in the admirable books of E. H. Carr and Jane Degras. Both are accurate in reconstructing the events; but neither enter deeply into the more subtle details of the ideological and strategic issues confronting the Comintern.2 No selection of Togliatti’s works was published in English before 1976, when the Lectures on Fascism were translated by Lawrence and Wishart. This included an introduction by James Klugmann, which was both didactic and ‘militant’, without catching the complexity of its subject. Three years later, Donald Sassoon edited and introduced a rich selection of Togliatti’s writings. Of the twelve published texts, only four could be considered directly political; the remainder had been selected, in the editor’s words, ‘to trace the essential elements of the politics of transition which is at the core of the strategy of Italian communism’.3 Within this perspective, Sassoon’s introduction offered an excellent overall survey of Togliatti’s thought, especially after 1944.

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It is only in the last two decades that Togliatti’s role in the Comintern has been more closely scrutinised, both in works of synthesis about the international communist movement and in studies specifically concerning the PCI.4 In contrast, the second phase of Togliatti’s political career, coinciding with the final 20 years of his life, has been more closely examined by English-language historians since the 1960s. This was partly due to the blossoming of a rich school of studies in English-speaking universities on Republican Italy, but also due to the great interest aroused in the PCI’s ‘peculiarity’ in the international communist system. As early as 1968, Donald Blackmer produced a very serious analysis of the PCI’s role in the debate within international communism after 1956.5 In 1981, Donald Sassoon wrote a lengthy and penetrating monograph on the strategy of the Italian communists after 1944, which focused especially on Togliatti’s role.6 In the 1990s, Paul Ginsborg and Patrick McCarthy published two of the best histories of the Italian Republic, offering a stimulating, partly critical interpretation of the role played by the PCI and its leader. 7 After the political earthquake of 1992, which caused all the Italian political parties acting on the political scene over the previous forty years to disappear or to radically change their nature, the history of the PCI seemed, with few exceptions, to lose much of its appeal for English-language historians. 8 Italian scholars, on the contrary, have never ceased to deal with the subject, following mainly two paths. On the one hand, they explored the social and cultural history of the party, often at a local level. On the other hand, stimulated by the opening of the Soviet archives, they concentrated on the ‘external bond’ (vincolo esterno) that loyalty to the Soviet Union exerted over the PCI as the main key to unlock its part in the history of the Italian Republic. As a result, many Italian historians changed their views on the scope of the PCI’s perceived ‘autonomy’. This issue had been presented – with some difficulty – as the pivot of previous Italian communist historiography, and there were reasons in favour of such reappraisal. 9 But the ‘external bond’ thesis seems too reductive for understanding the complex events in the PCI after 1944, and therefore indirectly for rereading the last 20 years of the life and work of Togliatti. In its second part, this book poses, starting from Togliatti’s biography, a series of more general questions that are still pertinent for the history of the Italian Republic. Was the PCI’s distinctive identity formed wholly by the ‘external bond’ of double loyalty? How important was the other side of the ‘external bond’ to which the Italian political system was subjected, namely its place inside the strategic arena of American influence? And how much did internal matters count? Was the only reason that the governing class isolated the PCI its affiliation to the communist international movement? Or does this choice rather also reflect another historical characteristic of the governing classes, namely a timid management of the resources of political democracy? What impact did the presence of the Catholic Church in Italy have on this choice, at least until the papacy of Pope Pius XII, and even afterwards? These are all questions that must become a part of a general rethinking of the history of the Italian Republic; otherwise there is a risk that historians will use the PCI as a convenient scapegoat for all its distortions. Nobody could question the importance of the relationship between the PCI and the Soviet Union, nor its persistence long after Togliatti’s death. Nevertheless, this

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‘iron bond’ – as he himself called it – does not explain the long survival in Italy of such a strong communist party. Roberto Gualtieri has given a very thought-provoking, and partly convincing, explanation of this fact: he has argued that ‘the PCI was far more fit than the Italian socialists and social democrats to underpin the “negative integration” of the world of labour in the new democratic State, unifying and regulating most of the various forces and subcultures that constituted the variegated and turbulent world of the Italian left into a robust national (and international) backbone’. 10 In other words, perhaps only a mass communist party was able to absorb the shock of an extraordinarily rapid modernisation process with its extremely high social costs. As intriguing as this explanation may be, it does not entirely resolve the question. It underestimates both the contribution of the PCI to the defence of the constitutional legality of Republican Italy and the growth of a pervasive democratic culture. This aspect has often been better perceived by external observers of Italian affairs than by Italian historians.11 Of course some – often serious – incongruities and delays may come to the fore in this field. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the PCI is a force which has long persisted in Italian society. Its significance can be traced by observing its ability to teach its militants the principles of democracy, which has resulted in great civil growth, transforming, as I state in the conclusion to this book, millions of ‘subjects’ or ‘rebels’ into ‘citizens’. This is Togliatti’s most important legacy. It is a legacy that has generated an extraordinary paradox, allowing Italian communists to renew their organisational forms and open up their ideology to changes. Togliatti’s achievement was to preserve the Italian communist party from the ghettoisation which afflicted its ‘brother parties’. It status as a mass party also made it so strong and dangerous – in the bipolar logic of international relations – that it was denied access to national government. The realisation of this English edition was made possible by a team of friends and colleagues, to whom I would like to express my profound gratitude: first, Matthew Worley, who with great passion has followed each step of my work; also Donald Sassoon and Nina Fishman, who proposed an English translation of this book and who worked to find the necessary resources; Gino Bedani, who has read some chapters and given precious advice. Special thanks also to Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis, who translated this book with particular skill. And just because I have been given the occasion of fully appreciating the art of translation, I would like to dedicate this edition to the memory of my mother, Maria Luisa Castellani, an Italian translator of Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James and many other English-language classics. Aldo Agosti Turin, 2008

1 POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa on 26 March 1893 in an old house on Via Albergo dei Poveri to Antonio and Teresa Viale. He was the third of four siblings: Eugenio Giuseppe (born 1890), Maria Cristina (1892) and Enrico (1900). With characteristic historical and philological precision, the future secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) appears to have undertaken research into his own family history. He wrote in a letter to Carlo Trabucco in 1962: According to the registers of Castellania di Lanzo – a Toglià (the name will then become Togliat, Togliatto, Togliatti) Pietro bought fields and woodland from a Giovanni de Toglià to the value of 100 Viennese monies. The sale is registered in an account of N. Agnone of Challand and dates from 1347–48. […] As you can see, I’m not short of titles of nobility, and of the true kind. Free peasants since the 1300s!1

Free indeed, but poor. Palmiro’s father was born in 1852 in Coassolo, a village of around 4,500 souls, 30-or-so kilometres from Turin. His parents owned little more than a hectare of grazing land and some fruit trees. Antonio had six brothers and sisters, and the land was not enough for all of them: one, Martino, emigrated to the United States, while Caterina became a nun. Initially, Antonio also appeared destined for an ecclesiastic career; but, on the eve of his entrance into the seminary, the young man, not feeling the vocation of priesthood, left his birthplace to seek his fortune in Turin where he succeeded in taking the diploma to become a primary school teacher. Having taught for a while in private schools, he worked as a tutor in the Turinese Convitto Nazionale. In the meantime, he had met Teresa Viale – in a school where they both taught – and married her. The social class of Togliatti’s mother must have been quite modest. She was adopted at the age of six by a well-to-do Turinese family. It seems that a brother, a worker in a bakery, died young from tuberculosis (and Togliatti would not fail to note this modest proletarian ancestry in the autobiographical file compiled in 1932 for the personnel office of the Communist International). Teresa Viale’s adoptive family had her undertake teacher training. 2 Teresa Viale was an energetic woman, ready to sacrifice herself to ensure a satisfactory social position for her children. Her tenacity was rewarded, if it is true that all four of them received a degree. She was gifted with an artistic temperament and was highly cultured. Very religious, she imparted to her children a rigorous Catholic education. ‘Nevertheless’ – Togliatti recalled – ‘the family atmosphere I lived in was

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not bigoted even though it was very religious. I would go to church every Sunday out of habit, but did not feel the question of religion with much intensity.’3 Togliatti’s family, then, exhibited some of the traits possessed by a typical Piedmontese petit-bourgeois family at the end of the century, characterised by attachment to religious values and to the royal dynasty that constituted the backbone of Piedmontese bureaucracy; but there was in both mother and father a certain refusal to submit to a pre-established destiny.4 Antonio’s salary as a state employee was barely sufficient to cover the upkeep of his wife (who stopped teaching as soon as she married) and his children. Having moved from the post of tutor to that of administrator, Antonio was forced by his profession to transfer frequently from one city to another. From Turin, the Togliattis moved to Genoa, where the third child was born, then briefly to Novara, where Palmiro began primary school, and then back to Turin. Yet another transfer order took the whole family to Sondrio, where Palmiro enrolled in the Ginnasio G. Piazzi in the same class as his sister Maria Cristina. FROM SONDRIO TO SASSARI : AN ADOLESCENCE IN ‘ DIGNIFIED POVERTY’

Sondrio at the beginning of the century was a quiet town with a relatively prosperous economy based on wine, textiles and livestock. Political life was quite lively, although largely restricted to the local dimension. The Radical Party was prominent, looking towards the figures of the pedagogue Luigi Credaro and the ex-Garibaldian Giuseppe Marcora.5 It seems Antonio Togliatti was a regular reader of the radical paper La Valtellina that often distinguished itself with lively anti-clerical polemics. It is not unlikely that during this period Togliatti’s father was at least tending towards radical and socialist sympathies, which would explain the ‘small bundle of socialist leaflets’ Palmiro happened to find in a wardrobe at home. Reading this ‘prohibited’ material made a considerable impression on the boy, who must have been between 12 and 14 at the time, perhaps because an interest in the ‘social question’ had already been excited by two distinguished teachers. One was Baldo Peroni, a scholar of Italian Jacobins and a historian of education; the other (in fact more influential, if we are to believe that Palmiro wrote him on finishing the lyceum to ask for advice on his future) was Mosé Niccolini, a socialist from the Trentino. Togliatti excelled in his studies from the outset: after all, a very high mean score was a condition of exemption from fees. As a model student, he disseminated his knowledge generously, letting his classmates copy Greek and Latin translations. A taste for mockery in the face of authority emerged alongside this spirit of solidarity according to the memory of his sister, as when ‘he carefully rolled up the exam exercise in a fountain pen, asking the teacher himself to pass it on to the recipient’.6 The boy does not appear to have made particularly significant friendships: his life flowed serenely in the circle of family affections and in the furrow of habits that would re-emerge in future years whenever circumstances allowed. Palmiro and his siblings had a marked sense of nature: an allotment behind the Sondrio house allowed them to rear all kinds of small animals and to cultivate flowers. A passion for botany would never leave Togliatti, just as he never lost his passion for walks, in particular for mountain

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excursions. On days off work, the father led the children on extremely long trips. It was, surely, such experience which tied Togliatti so intensely to the mountains, and led him once he returned to Italy after 18 years in exile to retreat there every time a pause in his political work permitted. It was, moreover, a connection loaded in memory but, perhaps, already nourished by adolescent readings on the meaning of a metaphor of typically romantic origins. On 9 August 1946, he wrote in a letter to Nilde Iotti: I saw again the fresh, large Alps and again I felt their call to freedom, to solitude. One day I will tell of what the Alps meant to me when I ran them as a boy, alone with my pride, alone with my dreams. Perhaps they are what taught me to desire, and to live alone in myself, and to despise what is easy, and to rebel, and to go forward when there is no longer a road, but only the body that grips the rock and fingers that search for purchase and the knee that trembles but does not give.7

It was in Sondrio that Togliatti first tackled involved readings and got into the habit of dedicating much of his free time to them outside his studies. He would later tell his biographers that he had been impressed by Voltaire, and even more by Francesco De Sanctis, whose work ‘was a revelation, perhaps not so much for the aesthetic analyses as for the profound new vision of history and of the cultural upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’. 8 His interests concentrated mainly on history. He remembered in 1961: What struck me in the history of the Risorgimento was above all the universal popular element: universal in the sense of a particular vision of the world, even though the Risorgimento movement was without doubt national. The poet I felt most was Carducci, for the universal concept of the Risorgimento and for the re-evaluation that he made of the French Revolution.9

In May 1908, Antonio Togliatti was transferred to Sassari in Sardinia. 10 Palmiro and Maria Cristina enrolled in class 1B of the Lyceum Azuni. The political climate of the city, provincial but lively, was characterised by the clash between clericals and anticlericals, and by a vivid anti-Giolittism amongst a section of the intellectual bourgeoisie. It appears the Togliattis took no direct participation in local political life, although Palmiro later remembered witnessing with his father a protest demonstration against the assassination of Francisco Ferrer in October 1909. As a teenager, Togliatti’s efforts were poured totally into study, always with excellent results. Confirming a striking predilection for the humanities, in his second year, as was then possible, Togliatti opted for ‘Greek culture’ rather than for mathematics. In truth, the Lyceum Azuni, which Togliatti himself described as ‘rather shoddy’, was – as remembered by fellow student Nunzio Cossu – a school where there was no space for ‘the questions of the day that agitated culture and science […] all the work was undertaken in quite a gloomy and stuffy atmosphere, lacking in light and sun [… ] life was rather miserable and sterile’.11 Not even in Sassari did the young Palmiro appear to forge particularly firm or long-lasting friendships. Some of the schoolmates to whom he was closest sided with the democratic-republican camp and, like Mario Berlinguer, father of the future

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secretary of the PCI, also took a stance against the war in Libya. Togliatti shared their anti-Giolittian attitude, but shunned any active display of political engagement. He had only recently begun his last year at the lyceum when a terrible tragedy befell his family. Antonio Togliatti became ill with a throat tumour: he was taken to hospital in Turin and died aged 59 on 21 January 1911. The family’s economic condition, deprived of its sole income, became very precarious and a question hung over the continuation of the adolescents’ schooling. Teresa Viale obtained the sum of 400 lire from the Sassari Convitto in recognition of ‘the extraordinary administrative services’ rendered over the three previous years together with her husband. Palmiro and Maria Cristina added to the income of the family by giving private lessons. Both brilliantly obtained the lyceum certificate. Thanks to the extremely high marks achieved, they took part in the annual competition held by the Collegio Carlo Alberto reserved for young people born in the old provinces of the Kingdom of Sardinia. In October 1911, joining their mother in Turin, they succeeded: the boy even came second, his sister eleventh, while the ninth place on the pass list for the same group of law and literature students featured a young man from the lyceum in Cagliari, Antonio Gramsci. The winners were guaranteed a monthly cheque of 70 lire for ten months a year until graduation, on condition that they did not fall behind with their exams and their marks did not fall below a certain average. UNIVERSITY STUDIES

Palmiro Togliatti enrolled in the law faculty, the most heavily subscribed in Turin University. A law degree offered the possibility of a qualified and relatively well-paid job, especially in the public sector. Indeed, such reasoning induced Togliatti to renounce the philological and literary studies for which he felt he had more talent. When the 18 year-old student arrived in Turin in the summer of 1911, Italy was on the verge of an event destined to stand as a watershed in its national history: the war in Libya. The Giolittian experiment, characterised by the union of the liberal government with the left in the name of social progress and resolution of class conflict, showed clear signs of wear and tear. In Turin, the industrial capital of the kingdom, amidst celebrations commemorating 50 years of unification, social radicalisation presented itself more acutely than elsewhere. For Togliatti, the leap from the sleepy provincial atmosphere he had experienced earlier in the century could not have been more clear-cut. The demonstrations for and against the war were intensifying and the protagonists on the two opposing sides were most often workers and students, with the latter representing ‘the current of bourgeois opinion that will bring the atmosphere of rising nationalism to the streets and squares with greater impetuosity and physical presence’.12 It is true that there was a small but militant group of socialist students13, but the university environment was generally dominated by an atmosphere of fervent nationalism. In truth, Togliatti did not seem to have been infected. During the first years of university, the generically anti-Giolittian position he had matured in Sardinia found a reference point in La Voce magazine that he subscribed to and whose criticism of the war he agreed with. But these were political trends that were still ill-defined, certainly

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not such as to induce the young man to participate in political battles in the first person; also, to meet his own material needs and those of his family, much of his free time went towards those private lessons, largely on Italian composition, for which ‘he received a small sum and a vermouth, and wrote off the cuff in an hour a lyceum student’s essay’.14 Togliatti was an extraordinarily diligent university student: he followed all the obligatory courses and frequented numerous others outside his faculty; he kept himself abreast of the study programmes needed to obtain renewal of the Carlo Alberto scholarship, and also to attain a series of study awards for deserving students. The cultural atmosphere that was breathed in Turin during the years of Gramsci and Togliatti’s ‘university apprenticeship’ has been the subject of deep and exhaustive studies.15 The cult of science and of severe philological discipline linked to positivism began to be questioned by spiritualistic currents and, especially, by neo-idealism; but the level of teaching, which remained extremely high, was not impaired. Togliatti would have been influenced by it, and he later noted that Gramsci was too: ‘the precision in thought, the taste for exactness of information, disdain, even moral repugnance […] for improvisation and superficiality’.16 Palmiro’s university career would know no défaillances: he would pass though all the faculty exams with marks never lower than 30/30, even though he was not passionate about studying jurisprudence. Between 1912 and 1914, the young man met the teachers destined to have most influence on his development. Among them was Francesco Ruffini, lecturer in ecclesiastical law who in his course illustrated a conception of the relation between church and state that Togliatti would refer to explicitly as the basis for his position in the Constituent Assembly of 1946–47. Above all, he met Luigi Einaudi, holder of the chair of fiscal policy. The intellectual influence that the youth was subject to in greatest measure was certainly Einaudi’s liberalism, as testified by his writings of 1917–18 and his degree thesis, discussed in November 1915, which was apparently based on the theme ‘The Customs Regime of the Colonies’. Unfortunately, this thesis, which obtained maximum marks cum laude, has been lost.17 Togliatti’s attendance at three complementary courses in his last two years at university (forensic medicine, scientific policing, and the extra-curricular ‘madness and its crimes’), along with his at least occasional attendance of clinical psychiatry courses, demonstrate how the influence of positivism continued to be well represented. However, anxious to widen his knowledge and broaden his horizons, he also followed courses in the arts faculty. Those of the Germanist Arturo Farinelli, who held lessons in 1912 on the Romantic German poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel, made a profound impression on him.18 Of the ethical content of Romantic German thought, he would later recall having found inspiration also in the Dantesque lessons of Umberto Cosmo, ‘[in which] Hegel’s dialectic in its idealistic form was already making a comeback’.19 From all this came a growing interest in idealist philosophy, which led Togliatti to translate of his own accord 150 pages of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit from German. It is certain that the scope of Togliatti’s reading continued to expand beyond the subjects he studied, into areas which conflicted with the positivism and philological

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erudition prevailing within the university. The idealism of Croce almost inevitably came to represent the catalyst to this reaction. Revisiting a posteriori his adherence to its inspiring motives, Togliatti would always be concerned to present it as an indispensable stage for the recovery of a non-spurious Marxism freed from the encrustations of positivism. He also sought to keep his distance from those degenerations of Idealism that resulted in an ‘exasperated anarchic and aestheticising individualism, in nationalism, in the cult of the person superior not just to the social being but even to the common human being, in the exaltation of will for will’s sake, [and] in the preaching of violence for violence’s sake, all covered by a brilliant aesthetic and philosophical veneer’.20 In reality, the process must have been less clear cut, and the charm of the spiritualistic currents greater than Togliatti was later prepared to acknowledge, even though never sufficient to produce full identification with the most frequent of their political expressions, nationalism. Two things probably acted as an antidote to this temptation: on the one hand, reading Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine, through which Togliatti discovered the Romantic universalism of Romain Rolland, the French writer destined to leave a strong impression on the Ordine Nuovo group (see below); and, on the other, familiarity with Salvemini’s L’Unità, with its attention to social and economic problems and its intransigent anti-protectionist and ‘meridionalista’ (pro-South) battle. It is not documented what were, in this process of cultural development, the fundamental stages of Togliatti’s approach to Marxism, except for the rationalisation he himself undertook with hindsight. The decisive step was supposed to have been the discovery of Antonio Labriola: ‘his texts explaining and delving deeper into Marxism […] were read, re-read, studied, commented’. 21 It is an affirmation that needs to be ‘calibrated’ in the light of the politico-cultural operation that Togliatti himself conducted after his return to Italy in 1944, aiming to reconstruct a particular genealogical tree of Italian Marxism. It is more likely that Togliatti’s adherence to Marxism matured along a less linear path, interwoven with multiple intricate components. In any case, two factors appeared decisive in its determination: the first was the beginning of the friendship with Gramsci; the second was the encounter with the Turinese workers’ movement. GRAMSCI, SALVEMINI, MUSSOLINI

Togliatti met Gramsci briefly for the first time towards the end of October 1911 on the day of the competition for the Carlo Alberto bursary; he subsequently met him again in the lecture theatres of the faculties of law and literature. If not real friendship, a habitual dialogue grew between them, rooted in their common provenance and direct knowledge of Sardinia, as well as in their similar condition of economic difficulty bordering on extreme poverty, unusual among university students of the time. Without doubt, Gramsci was the more mature of the two, and the more politically oriented, for he frequented a young socialist group, having made friends with one of its most active representatives, Angelo Tasca. Togliatti shared this experience, albeit in a milder and more casual way, although his encountering workers marching through the crowded streets of the city in 1912–13 (years of intense union battles in Turin) made a

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strong impression on him. According to Togliatti himself, he became a card-carrying member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1914. Such a claim has been questioned by Andrea Viglongo, who was the active director of the young socialist branch, 22 but is probably true: both because Togliatti reaffirmed it in significant documents such as a Communist International (Comintern) questionnaire, and because it would have been less difficult for him to justify his ‘interventionist’ position towards the war – discussed below – had he not had any formal tie with the PSI. However, his adherence did not translate into active militant engagement. What was the nature of Togliatti’s socialism at this time? To answer this, two points of reference may be discerned: Gaetano Salvemini and Benito Mussolini. Togliatti read Salvemini’s articles in La Voce and L’Unità and shared his antiprotectionist position: it is, therefore, not unlikely that he might have been, with Gramsci, Tasca and Ottavio Pastore, among those young socialists who in 1914 supported the southern historian’s candidature to the supplementary elections for a vacant Turin constituency. With regard to Mussolini, ‘the “Mussolinismo” of young socialists in the period 1912–14 […] was in reality something more and of greater importance in their ideological and political formation […] than would appear from the testimonies of the young protagonists of the time’,23 and this holds undoubtedly for Togliatti, who later recognised that in 1914 the editor of Avanti! had made a great impression on him ‘for his will, for his energy’. What is certain is that Mussolini personified the mixture of heterogeneous elements (from Bergsonian spiritualism to Sorelian ‘leftist’ revisionism to voluntaristic activism) that characterised the development of a generation of young socialists. And there was a more than ephemeral trace of Mussolini’s influence in the attitude that Gramsci and Togliatti took towards the war. On 31 October 1914, Gramsci wrote an article in Il Grido del Popolo, a publication of the Turinese socialist branch, in which he criticised ‘the comfortable position of absolute neutrality’, fearing that it might induce socialists to ‘an overly naïve contemplation and Buddhist renunciation of our rights’. According to Togliatti, Gramsci submitted the article to him before its publication, and he approved it without reservations. In fact, after the end of the war, Il Grido del Popolo would conduct a resentful campaign against the men who had sided with intervention or even just hesitated about it. In this, ‘Doctor Togliatti’ would be one of its main targets. Of course, it was not an interventionism inspired by myths of nationalism, nor did it blindly follow that of Mussolini: rather, it was quite close to the democratic interventionism of Salvemini, based on a confidence that a British victory would be followed by ‘a triumph of commercial freedom in the whole of Europe’. Indeed, such a liberalist theme of Togliatti’s philo-interventionism would receive full confirmation in his first articles in Il Grido del Popolo in autumn 1917, and more still from an article that appeared in L’Ordine Nuovo on 9 August 1919, where Togliatti went back over the fortunes of Wilsonism: It really seemed that […] the liberal idea was then about to come out of the realm of dreams, the world of utopias, to become embodied in a world political system! The world would have thereby become all one great democratic republic; the international would have become a

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PALMIRO TOGLIATTI reality, with a white flag, with principles of liberalism, and a programme of peace in perpetuity.24

Declared unfit for military service (apparently due to the severe myopia he suffered from) immediately after having received his degree in November 1915, Togliatti enrolled as a volunteer in the Red Cross and saw service in various territorial hospitals, first in Turin and later in a field hospital in the Isonzo valley. During 1917, however, following revision of the enrolment criteria imposed by the need to recruit new soldiers, Togliatti was declared fit. Once attendance on courses for obtaining the degree of complementary officials became obligatory for pupils with the necessary educational qualifications, he was admitted to the Officers’ School of Caserta in February 1918, where he followed a five-month course. Here he told of listening to the ‘military morale’ lessons that young infantry lieutenant Luigi Russo, future illustrious historian of Italian literature, held for aspiring officers. According to him, however, he was more passionate about the ‘visits made carefully and alone, during half-days off, to the locations of the battle of Volturno […], with the help of history books and Garibaldine memories’. Before the end of the course, Togliatti was recognised as ‘physically unfit’, apparently because of a bout of pleurisy that forced him into protracted confinement in various military hospitals. It is not known whether during his military service he remained in contact with his Turinese friends, and with Gramsci in particular; but his brief leaves, which allowed Togliatti to sit exams in literature and philosophy, may well have provided occasional opportunities for encounters. For this faculty was the one Togliatti had enrolled in as soon as he had received his law degree, gaining admission to the third year, and it was a choice that suggests a need to integrate his own juridical formation by obeying the inclinations he had matured in previous years. Between April 1917 and July 1919, Togliatti passed eight exams, four of them in philosophy, with top marks. His university career would stop, however, at the threshold of a second degree because, in the summer of 1919, he decided to embark on the road of political engagement. A first signal of this direction was his participation in a special issue of Il Grido del Popolo in October 1917, edited by Gramsci and entirely devoted to the problem of free trade, where Togliatti published in his own name an article entitled ‘Lotta economica e guerra’ [‘Economic Battle and War’]. Together with a second essay published two weeks later,25 it bore witness to a phase of critical re-evaluation of the unconditional liberalist faith of the previous years. The profound influence of the democratic ‘meridionalismo’ of Nitti, Fortunato and Salvemini could be perceived in both articles, and they attempted to analyse the social-political forces capable of cancelling the gap between the ‘Two Italys’, proposing a more radical sense of liberalism ‘which is not a battle for a few reforms to be obtained with parliamentary repairs, but is a social battle that assails the whole structure of the nation’. L ’ ORDINE NUOVO AND THE ‘ BATTLE OF IDEAS ’

Having been discharged from the army in November 1919, Togliatti returned permanently to Turin, where he lived with his mother and siblings in modest quarters

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in council housing at ‘Borgo Rossini’. He was nearly 26 and had behind him a solid cultural education; he had reached maturity having been sheltered from the profound disorders that marked Italian and European history. His return to civilian life, however, seemed to coincide with what quickly became total immersion in the acute political and social tensions that animated the industrial capital of the kingdom. Togliatti’s attendance at socialist meetings now became assiduous. He was also regularly present in the head office of the Piedmontese edition of Avanti!, first published in December 1918 and for which Togliatti worked as a temporary clerk. Alfonso Leonetti, a young socialist from Puglia who at the time was a reporter on the paper, remembered his first encounter with him: He wore a modest bourgeois suit, dark, a ‘pan’ hat and very thick glasses. He wanted to have a familiar air, but one sensed he was a bit awkward on those premises. At the end of the conversation, Gramsci accompanied him to the door to say goodbye, then coming towards me said: ‘He’s Togliatti, a very well-prepared friend.’26

At least for the time being, his interventionist past did not seem to be an obstacle to his reintroduction into the Turinese socialist branch. One of the first problems that those socialists were posing themselves was the task of proselytising in the university, where ‘socialist students, militant or sympathisers, could be counted on the fingers of one hand’,27 and Togliatti’s engagement was addressed in just that direction. It is certain in any case that he had by now developed an idea of direct engagement that involved a new conception of the duties of an intellectual and his relationship to social and political reality. It is not surprising, then, that Togliatti was, with Gramsci, Tasca and Terracini, to the fore in promoting the idea of a magazine that, as Mario Montagnana (a young worker who became a frequent contributor) wrote a few months later, ‘must be for young socialists what up until recently La Voce was for the most intelligent part of the bourgeoisie […]; that is, it must be the fulcrum around which all the intelligences and the wills to understand take place and develop’.28 Thus was born L’Ordine Nuovo, the first number of which came out on 1 May 1919. Tasca, exploiting his contacts in the organisation of the party and the network of trade union and cooperative associations, had found the necessary financial resources for print and distribution, as well as a head office in the same building as the editorial office of the Piedmontese Avanti!29 Little more than a year later, Gramsci – having mainly let the responsibility fall on Tasca – gave a very critical and perhaps overly severe verdict on the first issues of the magazine: ‘No central idea, no intimate organisation of the literary material published […] a review of abstract culture, with a tendency to publish hair-raising short stories and well-intentioned xylographies […] a product of mediocre intellectualism which on all fours searched for an ideal basis and a route to action.’ 30 According to a later testimony of Terracini, Togliatti also seemed from early on to nurture some concerns about the line taken by the magazine, and wanted to make it ‘an instrument of action, therefore a light on reality, an elaborator of experiences, a generator of creative force’, directed above all at factory workers. 31 Nevertheless, the articles that he published in

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the first six issues were for the most part book reviews, in line with the primitive set-up of a ‘socialist cultural review’ which was characteristic of the magazine. It was these articles, however, collected in the survey La battaglia delle idee (‘The Battle of Ideas’) – a name that would remain dear to Togliatti and would appear again 25 years later in La Rinascita – that constituted the principal trace of the ‘rendering of accounts’ achieved by his own intellectual formation with the authors and teachers that had nourished his youthful readings. The double yardstick by which the validity of that cultural baggage was measured was given by the war and the Russian Revolution. The war demonstrated for Togliatti the inability of the capitalist world to renew itself and overcome its contradictions. The Bolshevik Revolution – from the beginning of which he had been keen to underline the originality of a movement that ‘has a practice and ideology all of its own, that cannot be those of any preceding bourgeois movement’ 32 – appeared only fleetingly in these first writings of Togliatti. He evidently had a still incomplete and imprecise image of it: but the awareness of the acceleration that it imposed on history can be sensed behind his every argument. The heads of Italian Idealism, Croce and Gentile, whom Togliatti recognised respectively as ‘the major educator of our generation in Italy’ and ‘the most illustrious and listened to of the Italian philosophical school’, appeared incapable of understanding the significance of war and revolution as both expression and cause of an epochal caesura. Beyond the differences in tone – that denoted on the one hand a greater familiarity with the work of Croce and on the other a more direct interest for the themes discussed by Gentile – Togliatti’s reservations in relation to the two Idealist philosophers were, as he himself specified, ‘the reservations of a revolutionary’. As such, he assailed the inadequacy of their thought to capture the importance of the revolutionary antithesis as a crucial moment of historical development and, above all, their concept of the state, in which he saw an implicitly conservative idea of a subject superior to every law and without ‘concrete support of the moral wills of individuals’.33 Far harsher and more dismissive, however, was his polemic against a number of individuals who had a more prominent role in political culture before the war and in his own development. His attitude towards the vociani (followers of La Voce) of the first generation was pitiless: Prezzolini, for instance, was now dismissed as a preacher of ‘school teacher’s morality, pre-destined to sterility’.34 While there still remained a sentiment of respect towards Sorel – if only for his capacity to comprehend the revolutionary greatness of the Bolshevik Revolution – harsh indeed was the slating criticism of the Italian followers of revolutionary syndicalism, portrayed as ‘nits’ on the bodies of those giants of thought, such as Sorel and Bergson, whom they claimed to be their inspiration. Even the extremely young Gobetti of Energie Nove (‘New Energies’) did not escape Togliatti’s caustic criticism; with respect to him, the sarcasm assumed ferocious tones: [Here] the whole universe is judged while remaining suspended half in the sky in a nebulous vocabulary that is supposed to give an illusion of depth […] Blessed be positivism, which sent

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its neophytes around mad-houses to measure the skulls of delinquents, and didn’t make of each ‘youth of understanding’ a preacher of the moral renewal of the world.35

One must recognise that Gobetti, who replied in a measured but curt way to the criticism and earned himself a further ugly response from Gramsci, showed evidence of notable fair play when, three years later, he judged the ‘brilliant cultural reports of Togliatti’ as ‘the only lively things’ in the first series of L’Ordine Nuovo.36 In any case, behind the harsh tone of the Ordine Nuovo editors there seemed to be a vexed attitude towards the intellectual who wanted to rise to teacher of moral life and politics, a role which they viewed as an aristocratic anachronism isolated from collective action organised by the masses. Such attitude was, particularly in Togliatti’s mind, the expression of an almost iconoclastic anxiety to make a blank slate of a past of uncertainties, of illusions and inaction which was his own. But, alongside this corrosive pars destruens, a pars construens also began to take shape, with an ever more precise outline. In one of the most mature of Togliatti’s writings of this period, he saw in the crisis of the unitary state the re-emergence of ‘the original sin of home-grown liberalism, that of having been the movement of an intellectual aristocracy and not the insurrection and reorganisation of strong social energies’: class war had been, for a good part of the people, ‘the only school of liberty’, and thus ‘socialism can become the true liberator of the whole of our country, making us accustomed to considering freedom as a conquest, political institutions as an incarnation of wills organised and coordinated to a common end.’37 WORKERS ’ COUNCILS AND THE PARTY

When Togliatti wrote these words, in September 1919, L’Ordine Nuovo had already profoundly transformed its nature. From the seventh issue, in June, after what Gramsci would recall as an ‘editorial coup d’etat’ enacted with the full participation of Togliatti and Terracini, it began to lose its initial character of ‘socialist cultural review’ to become the platform on which the theme of factory councils, seen as possible equivalents in Italy of Russian soviets, was developed with most coherence. Gramsci planted the seed from which the new organisms could develop in the factory internal commissions, which had to be revolutionised on the basis of two guiding principles: the right of all workers, including those not organised in the union, to elect members, and the organisation of the workers’ representation by workplace rather than by trade.38 Togliatti did not arrive unprepared for the direction in which his friend wanted to take the magazine. The translations that he had previously carried out for the Turinese socialist press, thanks to an excellent knowledge of foreign languages, had enabled Togliatti to familiarise himself with the new institutions of workers’ democracy – the shop stewards’ movement in Britain, the Arbeiterräte in Austria, the Revolutionäre Obleute in Germany – then reinvigorating the workers’ movement. It is likely that his knowledge of the few writings of Lenin that circulated in Italian and French dates from these months. It is not surprising, then, that he not only followed without reservation the new policy of the magazine, but was also among its promoters. In collaboration

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with Gramsci, he wrote the first editorial of L’Ordine Nuovo, ‘Democrazia Operaia’ (‘Worker Democracy’), addressing the topic of councils and, from here on, he dedicated much of his writing to the theme of factory councils and their function. He was concerned with defending their essence as a functional instrument in the construction of a proletarian state in Italy: from his first article he upheld the thesis that the factory council, based on the premise of a ‘spontaneous organisation of the self-governing masses’, must prepare itself to become the ‘supreme regulator of work in practice and by rights the organiser of the whole regime of production and exchange’, until it constituted effectively ‘the new State, the State of labour’.39 On these grounds, Togliatti decisively rejected the attacks on the council experiment coming simultaneously from left and right: from the leaders of the powerful Federation of Engineering Workers (FIOM), who saw in it the spectre of anarcho-syndicalism and feared that conceding the vote to non-members drained the power of union organisation, but also from those exponents on the left of the PSI, like Serrati and Bordiga, who accused the followers of L’Ordine Nuovo of believing that ‘the proletariat can emancipate itself by gaining ground in economic relations while capitalism along with the state still holds political power’ – as Bordiga affirmed in Soviet on 4 January 1920. In the meantime, the campaign launched by L’Ordine Nuovo achieved wide success: the council movement was rapidly extended, so much so that towards the end of the year it affected around 30 plants and more than 50,000 workers. On 1 November 1919, an assembly of the Turinese branch of the FIOM approved with a large majority the principle of the constitution of factory councils based on the election of workshop ‘commissars’ chosen by each ‘work team’.40 Togliatti participated intensely in the development of the movement: hardly a day went by when he was not engaged in debates, conferences and meetings to explain and popularise the function of the councils. 41 Having been hired as a member of the editorial staff of the Piedmontese Avanti!, it can be said that his career as a ‘professional revolutionary’ began here. The first months of 1920 saw him engaged in the internal battle of the socialist party for the election of a new executive committee: together with Gramsci and almost all the working class core-followers of L’Ordine Nuovo, but not with Tasca and Terracini, he sided with the ‘communist-abstentionist’ faction in opposition to the ‘maximalist-electionist’ one. In reality, the denominations that reflected the complex national geography of the socialist factions did not have a defined and stable organising equivalent in Turin: the problem of participation (or lack of it) in elections was not felt as fundamental or decisive. Rather, the reasons for opposing the maximalist current stemmed from concern that it had not provided an effective critique of the reformist influence in the national Direzione42, which was deemed incapable ‘of giving a firm and precise direction to class war’.43 The communist-abstentionist list won the majority of the branch: Togliatti obtained 239 votes and got onto the executive, of which a worker, Giovanni Boero, was secretary. From this point, the Ordine Nuovo group began to come out of its narrowly Turinese focus, concentrating more on how to reconcile the renovating

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13

function of the new institutions with transforming the PSI into a revolutionary party. Togliatti, too, shifted the emphasis of his argument in this direction, for the first time engaging in internal party battles at the national level. Between February and March, he wrote a detailed critique of the constitution of the soviets presented by Nicola Bombacci, one of the leaders of the maximalist current, which he admonished for being too abstract.44 The lockout decreed by Turinese industrialists following a engineering strike in protest against working hours marked the beginning of a bitter struggle that continued for a month, including a ten-day general strike. At stake, as clearly perceived on both sides, was the very legitimacy of factory councils and, consequently, the workers’ control of production. The almost total isolation of the Turinese workers due to the lack of support on a national scale was proof that the leading organs of the PSI and the Italian Confederation of Labour (CGIL) were not willing to back any initiative that could lead to a revolutionary outcome that they judged premature or inopportune. For the Ordine Nuovo group, it was a decisive turning point: ‘the illusion that a regeneration of the party could be born spontaneously given the existence of an organised mass movement on the production site’ was no longer plausible. 45 In April, Gramsci prepared – and the Turinese branch approved – a document that a few months later would be judged by Lenin to be the PSI ‘fully responding to the fundamental principles of the Third International’. It contained an extremely harsh criticism of the politics of the PSI leadership, and it enjoined its transformation from a ‘mere parliamentary party that keeps itself immobile within the narrow-minded limits of bourgeois democracy’ into a ‘homogeneous, cohesive [party] with its own doctrine, own tactics, a rigid and implacable discipline’, from which ‘revolutionary noncommunists’ must be excluded. The Turinese branch expressed a very clear-cut verdict on the situation: ‘the current phase of class war in Italy is the phase that precedes either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat […]; or a dreadful reaction on the part of the property-owning class and the governing caste.’46 Togliatti seemed to agree completely with this analysis. In an article entitled Guerra di classe (‘Class War’), he explained more concisely – but no less dramatically – the alternative indicated by Gramsci: ‘either all power is won, or all is lost in the battle.’47 Hence the urgency to forge a new type of party and the requirement to win over the decisive levers of the organisational structure of the PSI. On this ground, however, a quite clear-cut differentiation within the Ordine Nuovo group became manifest at the beginning of the summer. The first and most serious disagreement divided Gramsci from Tasca, who at the end of May presented to the Turinese congress of the Camera del Lavoro48 a report aimed at bringing the council movement back under the guardianship and direction of the union. Despite what Tasca stated subsequently, it seems unlikely that Togliatti had been informed of this and that he made ‘no objection’. In these weeks, he still appeared to be counting on a re-launch of the councils, underlining their adverse function with respect to ‘union bureaucracy’. His differences with Gramsci came to the surface later when, in July 1920, Giovanni Boero resigned as secretary of the socialist branch and

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the different positions of the Ordine Nuovo followers revealed a deeper disagreement on the very conception of the party. Gramsci, who had collected around himself a small ‘group of communist education’, declared himself out of the contest, concentrating on the task of education in the factories and re-launching – as he himself said – the ‘integral thesis of the councils’. Togliatti and Terracini instead held the conquest of the branch to be extremely important. Their objective was the ‘purging of the party’, even if they rejected an ‘immediate division’, which would allow the reformists to drag away an important part of the proletarian base of the party. Rather, it amounted to establishing rigid discipline, excluding ‘unreliable elements’ from any office, preparing armaments of the proletariat ‘with organic military criteria’, promoting the formation of councils and ‘communist groups’ in factories and unions, whilst also maintaining close connections with other sections at a national level in order to arrive at a future congress in strong positions. It was necessary to participate in the then imminent administrative elections as well: ‘for a political affirmation, to snatch another position from the bourgeoisie, to lay the foundations for the essential organisms of future society, connecting with each other districts, unions, cooperatives of production and consumption’.49 This position obtained a wide majority, and Togliatti was nominated secretary of the executive committee. However, the emerging divergence was no small matter: so much so, that Gramsci even talked of ‘a revenge of union bureaucracy and of the opportunist elements of the socialist section’, and again in 1924 he would criticise Togliatti and Terracini for having ‘caught up with Tasca’. For his part, Togliatti recalled the episode in the Turinese commemoration of Gramsci in 1949, hinting at ‘a few moments, I don’t want to say of demoralisation, but uncertainty’ of his friend, ‘when perhaps he was assailed by doubt whether the road of battle was the one to take immediately, or whether wide educational work might not be needed first’.50 The episode highlighted, as Ragionieri revealed, different personality traits in Gramsci and Togliatti, the first capable of ‘penetrating within the general awareness of a universal historical situation even the internal discussion of a party section, and in the end so profoundly trusting of the creative revolutionary forces of history’, the second more cautious and pragmatic, ‘more inclined to recognise the importance of historically established and realised institutions’.51 The disagreement, of which no trace appeared in the pages of L’Ordine Nuovo (whereas the polemic with Tasca was open and he ceased to collaborate on the magazine), was destined however to be overtaken by events. FROM THE OCCUPATION OF FACTORIES TO THE LIVORNO SCHISM

The resistance from the engineering industrialists to the demands for improvements in wages and conditions presented by FIOM led the union, in mid-August 1920, to choose obstructionism, consisting in suspension of piecework and in meticulous observance of all safety regulations. The contractors responded with a lockout, and the workers in turn spontaneously occupied the factories at the beginning of September 1920.52

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15

In Turin, the workers’ councils organised and directed the occupation of all the factories in the city, preparing armed guards and also managing to continue production activity: the tenacious propaganda started by L’Ordine Nuovo little more than a year before had borne fruit. The editors of the magazine threw themselves into the movement heart and soul, holding rallies in the occupied factories, participating in the workers’ assemblies, making efforts to guarantee internal discipline and armed defence. In the heat of battle, the differences that had emerged the previous July–August were forgotten: Tasca, the Gramscian group of ‘communist education’, the ‘electionists’ and the ‘abstentionists’ were all united in this gigantic effort. As secretary of the socialist branch, Togliatti found himself in the front line. He had a strong conviction that he was facing a revolutionary situation unlikely to be repeated. A year later, in a profoundly changed context marked by defeat, he would write that in September 1920 ‘the proletarian dictatorship appeared realisable as its fundamental historical premise had been achieved: the predominance of the industrial and revolutionary proletariat in the life of the country, and the transmission of its ideology of victory to all categories of workers.’53 In line with this conviction, his intent was to overcome the original trade union nature of the movement and have it assume the character of a struggle for power. At a meeting of the governing bodies of the CGIL and the PSI held in Milan on 9 September, he declared that the Turinese branch ‘has drawn the battle on political ground’ and that a ‘national action’ should also ‘be centred on a movement of political character, [while] union and parliamentary action must only serve as a smokescreen’. Although sceptical about the possibility of success should the workers attack first, Togliatti declared ‘insurrectional action [to be] better, as long as the Direzione, which has the means to judge, warns us in this sense’.54 Demanding from the top of the PSI the choice of which direction to take, without expressing his own opinion on whether the conditions existed to attempt a seizure of power, Togliatti’s conclusion exposed the dramatic isolation in which the Ordine Nuovo group had developed its project, and the excess of trust that it placed in the creative spontaneity of the council movement as an element in and of itself capable of resolving the political contradictions of the PSI. At this point, the decision of the CGIL to look for a trade union resolution to the dispute in compliance with the PSI Direzione was already clear. Equally clear to Togliatti was his own impotence with regard to influencing the orientation of the Italian workers’ movement. On 19 September, the Confindustria (employers’ federation) and the FIOM, with government mediation, negotiated an agreement for the conclusion of the dispute; a week later, the workers began to leave the occupied factories. The outcome of the battle was not immediately perceived as negative, even by the Turinese: the engineering workers obtained notable wage increases, and the Giolitti government instituted a joint committee to formulate a bill on the workers’ control of industries. Togliatti himself seemed worried, not so much about the consequences of what for him did not yet appear to be a defeat, as about the dangers for preserving class autonomy in such an agreement. The fundamental lesson drawn from the conduct of the engineers was very clear, however: the awareness of the vacuity of every effort

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aimed at ‘renovating’ the PSI. The need for division, too, was affirmed by the Ordine Nuovo followers without any hesitation. Already on 18 September a communiqué from the Turinese branch, almost certainly drafted by Togliatti, affirmed that ‘the conviction that the destiny of the socialist revolution depends above all on the existence of a party that is truly a communist party has been confirmed’.55 All the action and all writings of Togliatti in the last months of 1920 were now dominated by this objective. However, there was some oscillation in his position on the modal and timescale for the constitution of the new party. While the occupation of the factories lasted, and for a few weeks longer, Togliatti suggested he was aiming at a communist party capable of bringing with it a large majority of the organised proletariat in the PSI. Therefore, he firmly rejected every ambition to provoke the split as ‘damaging, disastrous to the fate of our movement’ and fully engaged the energies of his branch in the battle for the PSI administrative elections, expected on 7 November.56 In this case, even though he made efforts to exclude the ‘mandarins’ of trade union and cooperative reformism from the list, he still called upon the forces of the Turinese proletariat to gather around the banner of the old PSI, in order to leave an important power lever such as the city administration as a legacy for the gestating communist party. The result of the elections was, however, unfavourable to the socialists. By very few votes, and with strong suspicions of fraud, the conservative block, formed by liberals and ‘populars’ (Catholics), prevailed. Togliatti, in turn, missed election to the town council by only a few votes. The elections were the last important event before the decisive national congress of the PSI. In the Turinese pre-congressional debate, the full complement of the executive immediately sided in favour of the communist fraction that would be officially constituted at the Imola convention. Togliatti, in the opening address, echoed the motion presented by Gramsci in April ‘that comrade Lenin and the Executive of the International have [since] made their own’; a fact, he underlined, that counted to refute the accusation ‘made of Italian communists of being blind executors of Russian orders, and of the blame apportioned to Russian communists of judging things about Italy without knowing them’.57 The communist fraction prevailed with a large majority; shortly afterwards, Togliatti resigned as secretary and took over as editor-inchief of L’Ordine Nuovo, which from 1 January 1921 became the daily paper of the communist fraction. After the Imola convention, Togliatti – like Gramsci – appeared to accentuate the ‘anti-centrist’ polemic rather than underline the necessity of a majority split. He traced a ruthless analysis of the components of Italian socialism: that the vain ambitions of government held by the reformists were destined to be frustrated due to the absence of a social base capable of sustaining them, while Serrati’s fraction ‘paralysed’ the proletariat with the equivocation of having as its ‘sole programme’ the maintenance of a fictitious unity, which jeopardised every possibility of ‘accelerating revolutionary development’. 58 This constant concern about programmatic clarity, ideological cohesion and internal discipline developed into exaltation of an openly Jacobin conception of the party as:

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17

[A] minority that is furnished with greater conscience and more precise historical perception. To this minority is entrusted the future of the whole class which it has to save from every danger, internal and external. It is thus the natural guide of the historic movement through which the proletariat is brought to conquer power; it understands the class in its different stages, evaluates every fact on a par with the end it is aware of, exercises at the same time a function of criticism, of clarification and framework for action.59

The conception of the party as a direct expression of the masses’ revolutionary organisation inspired by the experience of the workers’ councils was now relegated by Togliatti to the background.

2 A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY FACING REACTION

BEYOND THE TURINESE DIMENSION : THE DISCOVERY OF FASCISM

Togliatti was not present in Livorno on 21 January 1921, when the division of the PSI was officially confirmed and the birth of the Communist Party of Italy, section of the Communist International, was registered. He had stayed in Turin to edit L’Ordine Nuovo. After all, the role of the Turinese group in the new party – solidly directed by the Bordiga fraction, the only one with a semblance of national organisational substance – initially appeared to be of secondary importance to maintaining contact with the workers. Togliatti wrote a far from triumphalist comment on the split in L’Ordine Nuovo.1 He was too realistic to deny that the conditions in which the new party would be operating were far more difficult than had been foreseen when the decision to break away had been taken. In the first months of 1921, the Italian situation had undergone a radical change which overturned the relationship between the classes existent during the ‘red years’ of 1919–20. The PCI had been formed on the hypothesis that Italian society would succumb to a revolutionary crisis. It had to establish itself amidst a disturbed social fabric, whilst also defending its fledgling organisation from the double threat of a managerial counter offensive and fascist violence. And yet, the exit from the PSI was certainly felt by Togliatti as a liberation. Gramsci’s statement, made a few weeks later, that thanks to the split the communists ‘saved themselves […] from a tomb, […] released from the embrace of a cadaver’,2 reflected Togliatti’s most deep convictions too. There was in him an almost exasperated will to sever ties with the past of Italian socialism. Nothing better expressed this mood than a curious article written just four days after Livorno, provocatively titled ‘In Praise of the Cynic’, that set to counterpose in deliberately paradoxical tones the considerations of the mind to those of the heart, ‘this cumbersome and tiresome muscle, so dear to the poets of the past, to the politicians of today, and to women of all ages’.3 But fierce sarcasm did not succeed in hiding entirely the sense of loss that originated from the trauma of a painful fracture; it rather strengthened the impression that in the cold rationality that Togliatti applied to rule his own political action there was a strong dose of self-denial. The activity of political journalist was Togliatti’s principal occupation until the end of 1922. He was, as we have seen, editor-in-chief of L’Ordine Nuovo. A whole series of organisational duties occupied part of the day and the whole night in the Turinese office of the paper. This office was by then fortified – as recalled by Benedetto Croce on a page of his diary from 1944 – ‘with Friesian horses and other similar military preparations’ to safeguard it from possible attacks from the fascist squads. In addition

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to his editorial work, Togliatti wrote increasingly and with continuity on topics of a national character. In Turin, the local fascist group – which had links to another group of extreme nationalists – did not constitute a spearhead of Mussolini’s movement. For a long time, the Turinese fascists were unable to find a way of reaching the local bourgeoisie, who were still sensitive to Giolittian politics. The direct observations of the most virulent forms of fascist violence made by Togliatti during 1921, particularly in Tuscany, therefore represented an important broadening of his own horizons. It is worth recalling in particular his comments on the events in Florence, where in February 1921 the fascist squads attempted a sortie, culminating in an attack on the proletarian areas of the city and the assassination of the communist railway worker Spartaco Lavagnini, secretary of the Camera del Lavoro. This, in turn, precipitated a tough popular response. Togliatti considered the unfolding events paradigmatic of the very nature of fascism and its relationship with the ruling classes. The withdrawal on the part of the ‘private bourgeois forces – fascists, ex-officials, students’ in the face of the worker counter-offensive and the re-establishment of ‘order’ by the Royal Guard and the ‘carabinieri’ symbolised ‘the moment of class war when, as conflict spreads and social laceration deepens, the State intervenes and takes the place of the forces that have operated up until now, at least apparently, on their own’.4 Togliatti appeared entirely in accord with both Bordiga’s and Gramsci’s analysis, though with different nuance. Having denied all originality and autonomy to the fascist movement, which they considered a manoeuvrable instrument at the command of the bourgeoisie, the communists saw in the actions of the fascist squads the means to a solid counter-revolutionary coalition, from democrats to populars, from socialists to fascists, in the footsteps already followed by other countries, such as Germany. The possible variants and the tensions internal to this design, like those between the two liberal leaders Nitti and Giolitti, were considered a secondary aspect of the problem. The reading of the ministerial crises in which the death throes of the liberal state were consumed was all inspired by this schema.5 Certainly, while Bordiga looked at the succession of blows fascism landed on the scaffolding of the liberal state with a certain detachment not alien from satisfaction, Togliatti appeared to feel a sense of almost rabid impotence for what, beyond declamations, he believed was a dramatic defeat of the proletariat. Every hint of resistance, every symptom of recovery was saluted with enthusiasm: ‘the proletariat must never provide examples of cowardice,’ he writes after the events of Florence in March 1921, ‘[…] better, one hundred times better, to leave fifty dead on the pavement of a city than to tolerate without reaction violence and offence’. 6 But when it was a matter of indicating a route to overcome impotence, he appeared almost always a prisoner of the rigid sectarian and class prejudices of the PCI Direzione: ‘the proletariat must know that suppression of legality is a fact closely linked with the sharpening of class differences, and must not seek to end this state of affairs prematurely, but to aggravate it to make class conflict ever more acute, open, evident’.7

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THE CHARM OF BORDIGA

Without doubt, this position was accentuated when Togliatti, towards the end of the summer of 1921, moved to Rome to become editor-in-chief of Il Comunista, the daily newspaper of the PCI published from 11 October. Later, he would advance the hypothesis that the decision to call him to the capital was due to Bordiga’s intention of breaking up the Ordine Nuovo group. This is not really credible; in autumn 1921, no covert dissent with regard to national Direzione positions was evident amongst the Turinese. It is likely that distancing himself from the city where he spent his youth and developed culturally and politically affected Togliatti; that he reacted against his enforced transplant to Rome, ‘the city of traffickers and bureaucrats, the city of the heroic and generous populace and the vile and parasitic bourgeoisie’, is certain. So different from Turin, he learnt only to love Rome with time. 8 Nor can it have been easy for his temperament of ‘cold person, controlled and reserved so as to appear apathetic, […] closed within himself, little inclined to formulate conversations’ – thus Giovanni Giardina, the manager of Il Comunista, remembered him9 – to adapt to a new common working practice with comrades who were for the most part unknown, or to create for himself a circle of friends. Nevertheless, in Rome Togliatti came more directly under the political influence (and probably also the charm) of Bordiga, with whom he had almost daily meetings. The harmony of their judgements on the Italian situation seemed to deepen as the crisis in the country increased. In the meantime, the communist polemic against the socialists intensified following the parliamentary elections of May 1921, whereat 123 PSI deputies were returned compared to just 15 from the PCI – a proportion that did not reflect the less imbalanced relationship between the two parties sanctioned by the Livorno division. Later, on 29 July 1922, when the king consulted Turati as to the solution to the new governmental crisis, Togliatti wrote: ‘Turati went to the king: the Italian socialist movement is undone. It is one less corpse to drag along for the future, one less encumbrance for the day of the supreme trial.’10 If anything, the specificity of Togliatti’s position on the PSI lay in a depth of historical analysis rarely found in the writings of other Italian communist leaders, except for Gramsci. So, for example, in an article of June 1921 on socialist policy in the countryside, he questioned the reasons for the sudden crisis in the peasant leagues in the Po Valley, and located it in the lack of connection between their actions and the wider prospect of the ‘conquest of the state’. Thus, ‘the violence, limited, circumscribed within the limits of trade union action, rather than being an instrument of revolution, took on the aspect of arrogance and arbitrariness.’ Nevertheless, this judgement did not stop him from recognising in an interview held on 8 June 1922 with the leader of the cooperatives, Giuseppe Massarenti, ‘the real, enormous, perhaps never yet equalled importance that the propaganda and organisational action of the agricultural masses had in the history of the awakening of the Italian masses’.11 Togliatti also followed the evolution of the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) with perhaps greater attention than he devoted to the PSI between the summer of 1921 and the spring of 1922. In so doing, he tried to trace the background tendencies of the

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Catholic world from everyday political reporting. His starting point was to evaluate the lay character assumed by this political force. This, in turn, was set against a background of the secularisation of Catholic parties in the wider European context, which made them a dam against the revolution.12 In Italy, the party of Don Sturzo appeared, since the summer of 1921, to be the only party to pose without reticence ‘the problem of taking advantage of the depression of the masses in order to constitute a solid base for a government party’.13 However, whilst identifying the PPI as the most advanced and coherent form of bourgeois political expression, Togliatti also recognised at the beginning of 1922 ‘the first signs of a greater awareness of the ecclesiasticalreligious dimension of the Catholic problem’. 14 Commenting on an official agreement between the Soviet Union and the Vatican, he held that for Italy the deep roots of Catholicism were such that ‘a mass […] could even be in the sights of communists’. Thus, the party could combine the struggle for economic and political liberation, complete with its objective ‘anti-religious meaning’, with the conservation of ‘that which is called “faith”, that is a rudimentary transcendental conception of the world and of life’.15 This capacity for articulated analysis was not, however, reflected in an adequate evaluation of the extremely serious political crisis which in the summer of 1922 opened the way to power for fascism. Faced with the crisis of the Facta government, which officially began on 20 July, Togliatti adopted a detached and scornful position. After the substantial failure of the ‘legalitarian strike’ of 1 August, the comments of the PCI press – almost all attributed to Togliatti – were preoccupied with reacting to the feeling of distrust in the masses and, above all, developing the propagandistic motif of social democratic betrayal.16 Immediately after the strike, at the request of the local communist federation, Togliatti was invited to Turin ‘to assume on the mandate of the E[xecutive] C[ommittee] the direction of the whole […] party movement in the eventuality of a worsening of the situation’. We do not know precisely how and by overcoming what resistance Togliatti fulfilled the mandate he had received. Certainly, the report that he gave on 8 August to the Turinese section appears entirely in tune with the positions of the leading Bordighian group. He insisted on the fact that ‘the process of disintegration of the Italian government as a whole is taking place inexorably’. He reaffirmed the thesis of convergence of ‘mass parties (socialists, populars, fascists)’ in an attempt to pre-empt the ‘proletarian recovery’ and to ‘stop it channelling towards its natural outlet’, that is the transformation of ‘civil battles […] into true class war organised according to a single plan’. To reach this end – he continued – it was necessary to ‘clarify the misunderstanding of the Italian socialist party’.17 THE SOCIALIST SPLIT AND THE MARCH ON ROME

Togliatti, then, did not notice that the failure of the general strike had disarmed the entire workers’ movement, and that the communists ‘far from being able to turn the defeat in their favour, were destined to be the first victims of the success of reactionary forces and of the disintegration of the proletarian front’. 18 Nevertheless, when the division of the PSI occurred, and congress decreed the expulsion of reformists,

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23

Togliatti’s position registered a sudden change of direction.19 His statement of 5 October 1922 had a strikingly different tone from the past: in Serrati’s final speech he picked up on not only ‘the recognition of many errors and many aberrations’, but also ‘a promise for the future’. 20 It was a position that, in effect, took into consideration pressure from the Comintern in favour of a speedy fusion of the residual revolutionary forces in Italy. This was clearly different from the position of Bordiga, who expressed maximum indifference to the split. Albeit very cautiously, Togliatti confirmed his position in the discussion of the leading organs of the party: in the Central Committee (CC) session of 12 October he showed a willingness to confront the problem of fusion, so long as it followed a lengthy period of common action that put to the test the ‘maximalist elements’. His declared concern was to avoid retreating into a position of absolute intransigence, which would offer the Comintern the pretext to deprive the leading group of authority and consign the reins of the party to the ‘right’ (Tasca and Graziadei), who were ready to accept the line of the united front. 21 In fact, it was the first sign of difference within the PCI’s majority and, on close inspection, the first political act of national importance undertaken by Togliatti. Undoubtedly, in October 1922, he had already become one of the most authoritative leaders of the PCI. Having been elected onto the CC by the second congress, held in Rome in March 1922, the role of journalist had become too narrow, and the intention on the part of the party executive to use his abilities in tasks of more direct political responsibility had been raised already with his mission to Turin in August. The decision to entrust him with a ‘Report on Fascism’ in October, to be presented to the fourth congress of the Comintern, was further significant recognition. The document – which did not arrive in Moscow in time to be used in discussion – was notable for its remarkable breadth. First of all, it underlined the specifically Italian character of the fascist movement, and therefore recalled the structural problems of the process of national unification of the peninsula, the heterogeneous composition of a bourgeoisie that had never lived up to its role of ruling class, the repercussions of this on the workers’ and peasant movement, and the permanent limits of its ‘subversionism’. Secondly, the evaluation of the role played by the middle classes in the formation of a mass base for fascism was much more developed than Bordiga’s schematic analysis, even though it was still far from attributing to the petit bourgeoisie the revolutionary potential that the Comintern leader, Karl Radek, saw in it. Despite such originality, Togliatti gave the same dismissive judgement to the March on Rome and the accession of the fascists to government as the majority of the leading group of the PCI. He displayed the opinion that the events of 28–30 October ‘have not profoundly modified the internal Italian situation’, and that ‘the fascist government, which is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, will have no interest in freeing itself of any of the traditional democratic prejudices’.22 And yet, when he wrote these words, Togliatti had just lived through the violence of fascist squads in all its drama. He had been, as he would tell his biographers 30 years later, ‘for the first time placed, by the enemy, face to face with death’. For on 29 October, the head office of Il Comunista was invaded and seriously damaged by the blackshirts. According to his story, Togliatti, having been recognised, managed to

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escape the firing squad because he had been left in the charge of a single squadron member, an army officer who, perhaps astonished by his sang froid, allowed him to slip out of an unguarded exit at the printers. 23 Bordiga would pay tribute to his ‘truly heroic attitude’ a few days later from the platform of the fourth congress of the Comintern, generating applause from the assembly.24 A ‘ TEMPEST OF DOUBT ’?

After this episode, with the illegal publication Il Comunista all but impossible, the party again sent Togliatti to Turin. His task was to ensure the survival of L’Ordine Nuovo. Its head office, however, was first cleared out by the police, and then destroyed by fascists. Only a few zinc printed issues of the paper could be produced, distributed directly to the factories. For some weeks, Togliatti worked tirelessly in Turin (sometimes underground and sometimes openly) to re-establish interrupted contacts and to disseminate the presence of the party. On 7 November, in a working-class area of the city, he even arranged to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a rally protected by ‘communist defence squads’.25 The knowledge of belonging to a world movement, and the strength of connection with the country where the working class had seized power, began to constitute for Togliatti one of the decisive factors in the will to resist fascism, as testified by an article that appeared on 9 December in the Trieste Il Lavoratore, the only communist newspaper that continued publication: The biggest country in Europe is governed by workers and peasants […] Around the Soviet Republic are gathered all the oppressed peoples that threaten the heart of English Imperialism. On the other hand revolutionary ferments mature throughout Central Europe. What then is the equilibrium that the bourgeoisie has reached? Where is the defeat of the revolution?26

In reality, the ‘defeat of the revolution’ weighed heavily on the Turinese proletariat, with all its tragic consequences. Fascism wrote one of the most atrocious pages of its history in the Piedmontese city, that of the massacre of 18–20 December. At least eleven people were confirmed dead, while the majority of the active cadres of the PCI were forced to leave the city or go into hiding. 27 The December massacre was then followed in February 1923 by a wave of arrests unleashed against the communist leaders at the national level. What of Togliatti? Apparently, and inexplicably, his contact with the party was interrupted for at least a month. On 7 April, Umberto Terracini wrote to his Turin address, tersely recalling him to his duties: Dear Palmiro, we will talk at length as soon as we have the pleasure of seeing you again. I will not hide from you, however, our surprise at your behaviour in these most serious of times for the party […]. Your splendid isolation, that has stretched now over two weeks […] is damaging to the party and to our movement. We pray you on receipt of this communication to leave whatever is currently keeping you that you hold to be more important and worthy of attention than the party and come immediately to speak with us.

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Togliatti answered, but in terms that left his interlocutor understandably dumbfounded: Dearest, a note from you dated 7 April has reached me. I had already sent to warn you that I was and am curing a tiresome relapse of pleurisy, which is appreciated neither by me nor my affairs. You talk to me of a worsening of conditions of the party and that pains and surprises me. Just think, I have spent quite a few days without even reading the papers.

Terracini’s answer, dated 13 April, did not hide his growing irritation, nor did it neglect sarcasm. It concluded, however, with a heartfelt appeal to Togliatti: ‘Your place is on the Executive, and it is all the more necessary that you should fill it as much as it is likely that the methodical police raids on us will continue.’ A few more days passed and Togliatti, who in the meantime had made known that he now felt ‘reasonably’ well, returned to his post.28 Some shadows of uncertainty remain. In the few mentions that he made of it, Togliatti kept to the version of illness; but this is apparently contradicted by the testimony that his sister Maria Cristina gave to Giorgio Bocca: After the massacre, Palmiro returned to our house […] and he practically retired from political life […] He was not ill, he read and wrote until late at night, he received with much caution comrades Santhià and Robotti. They would enter on tiptoe, and stayed for a short time, but he would not talk to us about it. Mother every so often would say to me, as if in thanks: ‘Palmi has returned to the roost.’

It seems then that Togliatti – whatever his state of health – was going through a personal crisis in these months, something similar to the famous ‘storm of doubt’ reminiscent of Mazzini. What were the reasons for it? The understandably reticent explanations of his comrades at the time hinted at different factors: irritation towards Bordiga’s position (not such as to translate into open dissent over the party line, however), and uncertainty about his own private future (during these months, Togliatti’s relationship with his long-term fiancé, Elda Banchetti, was disrupted. Her family apparently posed him the classic dilemma of choosing between political engagement and the commencement of an ordered family and working life).29 Only Andrea Viglongo, ex-journalist from L’Ordine Nuovo and recently expelled from the PCI, alluded openly in July 1923 to ‘he who must still explain certain lacunae of his activity as revolutionary leader, which coincide with the most difficult moments encountered by the communist party’. Togliatti reacted icily, writing to Terracini in these terms: I personally couldn’t give a damn. Since I entered the party, I have as a principle not to hold in any regard the opinions that people have of me. Only I know whether I am a scoundrel or not, and in the judgement of others I never find reason for either satisfaction or displeasure.30

It seems certain, however, that between the end of 1922 and the first few months of 1923 Togliatti reflected deeply on the choice before him. It was neither an easy

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choice nor a painless one; nor was it made all at once. On 8 March 1923, just before his contacts with the party were interrupted, an article of his appeared that hinted at something of his path. Its title was ‘In Praise of Fascism’ and, like ‘In Praise of the Cynic’ written little more than a year before, it relied on sarcasm and paradox to mask a moment of serious personal upheaval. Among the reasons that – according to him – made it tempting to write ‘in praise’ of fascism, before giving way to disdain and contempt, there was one that resonated: Better still if revolutionaries had learnt that theirs is a mission and not a job; a mission that requires self-sacrifice and in which the bitterest of fruits are harvested: deprivations of liberty and a wretched life and exile and tenacious resistance in the middle of desperate events. And better still if all this had been done consistently and persistently, with bitterness it’s true, but with seriousness.31

‘ WOE BETIDE

THE TIRED IN A MOVEMENT SUCH AS OURS’

At the beginning of May 1923, Togliatti returned to party work, having been co-opted on to the Executive Committee (EC) as a full member on 5 March. He dedicated himself to the job of reorganising the party with total determination, evidently keen to bury the anxieties that had tormented him over the previous weeks. Camilla Ravera remembers: At work Togliatti was tireless. Precise, patient, rigorous in examining problems and possible solutions, and then considered in his decisions, in assuming tasks and engagements. In checking the carrying out of assigned tasks he was tenacious, demanding, severe. And he always bore in mind the practical reality within which men operated; their way of being, of thinking, of feeling: different in each one, he said, and to be considered with attention and serene detachment.32

This portrait, beyond its ‘edifying’ tints, seems to correspond well with a ‘style of work’ that became one of the distinctive traits of Togliatti’s persona, and that gradually imposed its authority on his comrades, making secondary those aspects of insecurity that had not been erased from his personality. The hold of the party, the tenacity and the spirit of sacrifice of its militants, were for Togliatti ‘reasons to believe’ in the final victory and guarantee of its realisation. In August 1923, criticising a manifesto of the Turinese communist trade union committee wherein he sensed signs ‘of a tiredness, a mistrust and a lack of enthusiasm and complete faith in what is said’, he offered a revelatory comment: ‘It is perhaps a matter of tiredness and personal temperament. Well, woe betide the tired in a movement such as ours.’33 Togliatti’s attitude towards fusion with the PSI, or at least with a part of it, which the Comintern continued to enjoin as the primary task of the Italian party, must be understood in the light of this moral view. For Togliatti, the revival of the Italian workers’ movement could not occur other than outside and against the whole socialist tradition, which was ‘encumbered with [a] body without [a] soul that can live no more and [yet] is incapable of disappearing’. 34 The priority for the communist party was to

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select a leading cadre able to arrive prepared for a new revolutionary situation that it had contributed to bringing to maturation. Togliatti’s lack of preconceptions about the regrouping of the Italian bourgeoisie after Mussolini’s March on Rome was evident in the almost weekly reports that he sent to the Comintern from the beginning of May to September 1923. In these, an evaluation of fascism emerged that related its character to the historic divisions within bourgeois hegemony in Italy, underlining the ‘inexorable developments’ that forced it ‘to eliminate steadily all the residue of the past regime and shut itself into an intransigence that will make its dictatorship ever more bitter and tyrannical’. So much so, that – and here his disagreement with Bordiga was clear – ‘it cannot be understood how the legend of a certain affinity between fascism and labourism could have found so much currency’, from the moment that ‘an armed fraction could not transform itself into a rough copy of reformism without totally renouncing its power, that is to say without condemning itself to disappearing’.35 On the whole, the understanding of fascism as no longer just a mass movement capable of interpreting at least momentarily the moods and aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie, but as a force of government, took hold in Togliatti. Symptomatic was the attention with which he followed the process of electoral reform, well known as the ‘legge Acerbo’. This was approved in parliament in the summer of 1923, with the only votes against being those of the two socialist parties and the PCI (and with part of the PPI abstaining). The substantial abolition of the proportional system and the conspicuous prize of seats it predicted for the majority list represented for Togliatti the formal crowning of the objective pursued by Mussolini since the March on Rome, that is the unification of the forces of the bourgeoisie around a single party. In his report to the Comintern of 10 September, Togliatti summarised the measures which cemented support for Mussolini’s government amongst the ruling forces of the Italian economy. These included the abolition of inheritance tax, the institution of new customs tariffs and the ceding to private industry the state telephone and telegraph companies. He also recognised the ‘restoration of all capitalist privileges to the detriment of not only the working classes but also of the middle classes’. Even so, he had little faith in the anti-fascist credentials of the latter.36 The reasons for this scepticism were founded in a frank analysis of the opposition forces, which in the debate on electoral reform law had demonstrated their inconsistency. The fact that ‘the foundations to begin a bourgeois anti-fascist movement with revolutionary character are absent’ in the end induced him to concentrate entirely on the task of reinforcing the organisation of the PCI.37 So Togliatti clearly distanced himself from the hypothesis of political ‘blocades for the defence of liberty’ considered with interest by Avanti! The call for the ‘united front’ that he offered the socialists on 14 May in the name of the PCI was clearly instrumental: ‘we conceive of […] the tactic of blocades and of the single front – he declares – as a means precisely to continue to wage on new ground the battle against the traitors of the proletariat’.38

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‘ HALF-WAY’ BETWEEN

BORDIGA AND GRAMSCI

It is likely that Togliatti’s statement was directed against the Comintern’s line of united action between the PCI and PSI. Nevertheless, he began to realise what risks would be involved in, as he wrote to Gramsci on 1 May 1923, ‘entering into open battle with the Communist International, putting ourselves outside of it, finding ourselves without powerful material and moral support, reduced to a tiny group held together by almost solely personal ties, […] losing all real and practical immediate influence on the development of political struggle in Italy’. He hesitated, therefore, to accept the proposal that Bordiga made from prison: that is, of drafting, as a ‘political group that up to now directed the PCI’, a manifesto where all the disagreements with the Comintern were made explicit. The disciplinary ties to the Comintern were important to him, but ‘not to the point that it stops us developing the programme that was the reason for the birth of the communist party in Italy’. The only way out, it appeared to Togliatti, was to find ‘an agreement [with the Comintern] that allows our political group substantially to continue on the road it has taken up to now’.39 Gramsci was apparently more determined than Togliatti to pay the price that taking a line distinct from Bordiga might entail. However, he shared Togliatti’s concern about handing the party into the hands of the ‘right’ opposition of Tasca and Graziadei. This outcome appeared more likely after the Third Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI (held on 12–23 June 1923), which imposed two exponents of the minority, Tasca and Vota, on the new party executive. In addition, Fortichiari, Scoccimarro and Togliatti were selected to represent the old majority. Bordiga, from prison, immediately made known his opposition. If the PCI altered its position in line with the Comintern, then it was the right, and only the right, which would gain the leadership of the party. He recommended that members of the majority appointed to the EC not accept: ‘don’t make the most foolish mistake of your lives.’ Togliatti did, in fact, appear inclined to refuse the appointment, and not even Gramsci’s impassioned appeal (‘I confess to you that it is absolutely incomprehensible to me that revolutionaries […] convinced of their programme should now abandon their place, which today, given the general situation, is a barricade to be defended and not only from the opposing enemies’40) moved him initially. He nurtured strong reservations above all towards Tasca, whom he criticised for ‘petit-bourgeois pseudoidealism’ and ‘all-embracing political confusionism’, and retained a faith in the possibility of re-establishing Bordiga in a leading role.41 During the whole summer, thanks to the complicity of a prison guard, Bordiga and Togliatti entered into a close coded correspondence.42 During this, he showed himself willing to underwrite the manifesto in which Bordiga intended to make public the party’s disagreement with the Comintern, concerned only to smooth out the most bitter points. It is thus clear that, while developing a much more detailed analysis than Bordiga’s of the Italian political situation and of fascism in particular, Togliatti continued to be worried about losing the inheritance of Livorno and protecting the continuity and compactness of the left PCI group that managed it. In the meantime, the work of reorganising the party was interrupted by the arrest of all EC members present in Italy

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(along with other important leaders) on 21 September 1923. Togliatti, too, was denounced for plotting against state security and imprisoned in San Vittore, thereby learning for the first time the harshness of prison existence. 43 The profile drawn of him on this occasion by a police informer underlined his central role in party life: Palmiro Togliatti. I had the opportunity to observe him repeatedly and to single him out for all the care and attention called for by the situation. He is the despot of the Communist Party of Italy. Sole and absolute member of the Executive Committee after the arrest of Bordiga, Grieco and the fleeing of Misiano and Fortichiari. Everything was in his hands. Monies, orders, codebooks, etc. I reported his presence repeatedly but he always managed to escape. And only the small Milan meeting offered the means to take him out of circulation. Of the current prisoners he is the most shrewd and most fierce. I have known him well for many years and I can affirm and render him the notoriety of being the most cunning of the Italian communists […] With the sensational arrest of Togliatti the movement to reorganise the communist rank-and-file has irremediably halted.44

Togliatti spent three months in San Vittore, during which he nevertheless managed to keep up to date with the political situation through reading newspapers. He also maintained ties with the party. Cleared in a preliminary hearing on 20 December 1923 of the charge of conspiracy against the state, he was released. Having had sight of the document which Bordiga had drafted to inform the PCI about the disagreement with the Comintern, he then wrote to Gramsci on 29 December. In the meantime, Gramsci had moved from Moscow to Vienna with the objective of following the PCI more closely and retaining links with other European parties. Togliatti’s move away from the positions of the previous months now became more clear-cut: the sheltering behind the communist ‘tradition’, the ‘titles of nobility’ of the party, were replaced by an awareness of the need to measure up to ‘present conditions and necessities’. 45 Nevertheless, it seemed to Togliatti that the document could have a positive function, and therefore he was inclined to sign it. It was impossible, he said, ‘to not present to the party something that is, if not an explanation of the differences of these years, at least […] a place to stop and look around and move’. Gramsci reacted against Togliatti’s wavering and hesitation with a certain bitterness. ‘Togliatti cannot make up his mind, as was always somewhat his habit,’ he wrote to Leonetti on 28 January 1924. ‘Amedeo’s “vigorous” personality has hit him strongly and holds him mid-point in an indecision that seeks justifications in purely juridical quibbles.’ Almost a month passed before Togliatti’s indecision was overcome. Even when, with the Chamber dissolved on 25 January 1924 and parliamentary elections called for 6 April, Togliatti found himself acting as ‘majority secretary’ of the PCI and invested with the responsibility for making important choices, he moved with caution. While he surely had a frontline role in the PCI’s decision to participate in the elections ‘to exploit every possibility of legal action’, he appeared hesitant about the initiative pushed by Tasca and Humbert-Droz (the Comintern representative) of inviting the two other socialist parties to ‘adhere to an agreement for the presentation of a common list of proletarian unity and for an action in which electoral battles must not represent other than the initial moment’. 46 In the report that he sent to the

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Comintern on 19 January, he moved away from ‘every opposition to fascism that rests on the ground of demands of constitutional freedoms’, and sought to specify the different aims with which the proposal of the blocade must be addressed to the two socialist parties, the PSU and the PSI.47 The refusal of the first he took for granted – and this was, in fact, duly communicated in a terse letter from Matteotti on 25 January. But such a proposal was, in his opinion, an opportunity ‘to develop a vast polemical campaign’ against the reformists. Similarly, the likely refusal of the PSI was seen as a chance to place, as Spriano put it, ‘a tombstone on the fusion’, 48 forcing the left of the so-called ‘terzini’49 to come out into the open in favour of an electoral alliance with the communists and thus lay down the promise of their rapid incorporation within the PCI. In practice, things went as he predicted. The PSI declined the invitation to participate in the blocade, while the terzini adhered to the ‘Alliance for Proletarian Unity’, which presented itself to the electorate as a manifesto drafted by Togliatti, in which it was affirmed that the fascist dictatorship could be brought down only by the working and peasant class.50 According to the testimony of Humbert-Droz, Togliatti maintained a good dose of indifference towards the new partners. At the same time, he made every effort to prevent Bordiga’s refusal to present himself as a candidate, for fear it would give rise to disciplinary measures from the Comintern. 51 Bordiga’s refusal, incidentally, must have definitively convinced him that it was no longer possible to recompose the unity of the majority around the person who had been its undisputed and most prestigious leader. On 23 February he wrote Gramsci a long letter in which he announced that the manifesto drafted by Bordiga would not be published, and that instead it had been decided ‘to begin a discussion on the problems and the general direction of the party, in which every person will be free to assume, at the outset or during the course of debate, the attitude he wants’. Behind this new direction was his reflections on the ‘political work’ undertaken during the election campaign.52 THE COMO CONFERENCE

The outcome of the elections of 6 April was partly unexpected. The fascist ‘large list’ did obtain wide success, amply sufficient to guarantee the majority expected by the Acerbo legislation. But despite the campaign of violence waged against adversaries, it gathered fewer votes in the North than the opposition lists. The Alliance for Proletarian Unity elected 19 deputies, just five fewer than the reformists, and two less than the maximalists. Togliatti could thus affirm, on 12 April, in the new party daily L’Unità, that ‘the elections have proved that fascism is an army that sets up camp in enemy territory, and that it can snatch no other consensus from the majority of the Italian population than that given to the strongest violence’, and even predicted a few days later that ‘the Italian masses tend to place themselves on the ground of active resistance’.53 He was worried, however, in this favourable situation by ‘the tendency that still prevails in many of our comrades to willingly and artificially restrict the cadres of our political organisation’. 54 Keeping a clear distance from the Bordighian

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conception, he anticipated that ‘the idea take flesh and blood in an organisation of work and battle’ and that ‘the “faithful” would cede the place to the “militant”’.55 To translate this aspiration in practical terms, it was necessary to continue renovating the party, constituting a ‘centre’ group that benefited from the full trust of the Comintern. At the beginning of May, a consultative conference of the party was convened: a kind of CC extended to the federation secretaries and to those responsible for the inter-regional committees, which took place under cover near Como with the participation of 67 militants.56 For the newly-constituted ‘centre’ group, it was the occasion to present its platform to the party and win over the majority of cadres to it. Both the theses of the ‘left’, drafted by Bordiga, and those of the ‘right’, the work of Tasca, insisted above all on a punctilious analysis of the past, reaffirming the righteousness of their respective positions. The document of the majority, set out by Togliatti,57 instead placed the accent above all on future prospects. And the emphasis which it gave to the analysis of the politics of the Comintern reflected the decision to locate itself ‘on the basis of the International’, not for discipline but, as Togliatti would say in debate with Bordiga, ‘for conviction and with eyes open’. Certainly, this choice was facilitated by a turn to the left within the Comintern after the defeat suffered by the German Communist Party (KPD) in October 1923, which in some way legitimised a posteriori the resistance of the PCI to the politics of the united front and thus meeting Togliatti’s preference for ‘continuity’. He also included in the ‘centre’ theses some concession to Bordiga’s fear of ‘an opportunistic and social democratic degeneration of communist political thought’. More thoroughly articulated than in the theses of the ‘left’, however, was the analysis of the Italian situation, particularly those distinctions that made the unification of the forces of the bourgeoisie around fascism more important than had been anticipated. On this point, Togliatti’s introductory report contained at least one significant idea. He stated: We recognise that in Italy no bourgeois forces exist which are disposed to fight armed against fascism […] but that does not exempt us from having to examine what is the physiognomy and the current structure of all groupings of bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and semi-proletarian forces. [Our] action will have to seek to take advantage of all these groups and all their attitudes to open the road to the revival of the workers’ movement.58

The course of the discussion revealed, as Spriano noted, ‘a state of mind and a reaction largely indicative of the mood of the rank-and-file: irritation at the birth of fractions in the party, surprise at the internal dissent which previously had been almost entirely ignored, hostility towards the “right”, and scepticism towards the ambivalent attitudes of the “centre”’. 59 This was confirmed in the final vote, in which a good 41 delegates out of 67 supported the theses of the ‘left’, while 9 pronounced themselves for the ‘right’ and only 8 for the ‘centre’. And it was, perhaps, this very full discussion and disappointing vote that convinced Togliatti to venture further into the open. In his concluding intervention he decisively attacked ‘the senseless verbalism that pushes many, even if they are in agreement with the things that we say, to side against us because they believe that the duty of a good militant communist is that of being always

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to the “left”’. But it was, above all, his renunciation of the document that perhaps epitomised the Bordighian conception of the party, the so-called Rome theses of the first party congress, that left no margin for misunderstanding. He affirmed: Today we no longer approve the Rome theses. We voted for them in 1922 almost as a theoretical formulation of the state of need in which the party then found itself. We think that their original spirit leads to conceive party development as independent from the development of real situations […]The party cannot be conceived, for us, without the working masses, but as a part of them.60

This conception of the party, entirely in tune with the one Gramsci had been elaborating, encapsulated Togliatti’s contribution to the first great ‘turning point’ in the history of the PCI. DEBUT IN THE INTERNATIONAL

At the Como conference, Togliatti was nominated as a member of the Italian delegation to the fifth congress of the Comintern, convened in Moscow on 17 June 1924. He reached the Soviet capital on the eve of the congress. This was his first journey to the homeland of the revolution, where he would spend in all nearly ten years of his life. Although no documents remain to give us his ‘on the spot’ impressions of Moscow in 1924, there is no reason to doubt that he, like most communists, viewed it as the construction of a new society and the outpost of the world revolution. Nevertheless, the circumstances in which the fifth congress opened were problematic. The international position of the Soviet republic had been consolidated, with diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and, not without embarrassment for the PCI, Mussolini’s Italy; France was poised to follow suit. But the Bolshevik party was missing Lenin’s guidance, as the cracks in the party leadership widened with the battle between the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin against Trotsky continuing to simmer beneath the surface. Prior to his attendance at the congress, Togliatti knew little of the debate within the Comintern, and was even less aware of Russian matters.61 This is confirmed by a curious detail: on 15 January 1924, he sent to Mario Montagnana, who remained in gaol, a postcard that reproduced a photo of Trotsky and stated: ‘Always hope. He will save you.’ 62 It was apparently a display of his usual ironic tone, but also a testimony to the common-sense vision that Togliatti had of the harsh conflict within the Russian party. His participation in the congress showed, for a ‘novice’, his ability to make autonomous judgements and a readiness to recognise the underlying facts of the congress agenda. It is notable that he had the courage to pronounce himself against the majority decisions of the Comintern when, at the ECCI meeting on 13 July, he was alone with Bordiga in voting against the expulsion of Boris Souvarine from the French Communist Party (PCF). Souvarine had published on his own initiative Trotsky’s leaflet The New Course. The Italians’ decisions demonstrated more than political solidarity with the expelled; their move expressed perhaps a residue of resistance to the

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over-heavy interference of the Comintern on its sections, of which the PCI had repeated experience.63 ‘Ercoli’ (the pseudonym which Togliatti adopted and by which he became famous in the Comintern)64 intervened in the plenary debate on 23 June. His position, although declared cautiously, was along the same path that he had followed over the past few months. Commenting on the general report of Zinoviev that reaffirmed the objectively revolutionary character of the world situation and denied the social democratic thesis on the stabilisation of capitalism, he suggested that the fifth congress would commit an error ‘if it stopped at an equivocal formulation of “left”, “uncritical”, “superficial”’. Rejecting the thesis of ‘synonymy’ between a workers’ government and the dictatorship of the proletariat affirmed by Zinoviev in his report, and which on the eve of the Como conference he too shared, Togliatti stated that ‘it is not a question of a problem of words’, rather ‘of different historical and political conditions, of different power relations between the working class and the bourgeois class, that force us to follow different lines’.65 In arguing for this thesis, he recalled the speech made by Radek, the principal supporter of a ‘rightist’ interpretation of the ‘workers’ government’ slogan. This was underlined in the letters that he wrote from Moscow to the PCI executive in Italy, in which he praised the speeches of the KPD leaders Brandler and Thalheimer, who were viewed as being responsible for the failed revolution of October 1923. But Togliatti also declared himself convinced that the KPD’s error was precisely to have ignored those things ‘which are the tasks that fall to the communist party in the development of revolutionary situations, such as the autonomous organisation of the vanguard of the proletariat’.66 The ‘Italian question’ absorbed most of Ercoli’s time during the fifth congress. At the beginning, an ad hoc Italian commission67 had to resolve the perennial problem of relations with the PSI. But it was precisely Togliatti who moved the focus away from previous political faultlines and onto the current political situation in Italy, which was evolving rapidly following the assassination of Matteotti.68 The picture Togliatti presented reflected and modified the assessment of fascism as a ‘united front’ of Italy’s dominant classes that had punctuated his reports to the International in 1923. The definition of fascism that he gave, as the ‘armed dictatorship of a fraction of the bourgeoisie’, clearly implied an effort to ‘isolate this enemy, provoke the detachment from it of all its temporary allies, making of them for a transitory period – perhaps for a single moment, but with some political result – allies of the working class […]’. It was significant that Bordiga reacted energetically, insisting that Ercoli ‘emphasises too much the differences that exist between fascism and the various bourgeois groups’. Bordiga also accused Togliatti of avoiding ‘the dilemma: fascism or communism, fascist bourgeois dictatorship or communist dictatorship of the proletariat’. Indeed, the distance that by now separated the analysis of the ‘left’ from that of the ‘centre’ no longer allowed for collaboration within the leading organs of the party. The Comintern could not but take note. On 2 July, Zinoviev and Manuilsky convinced the Italian delegation to adopt their proposal that the leadership of the PCI be entrusted to the ‘centre’ group, and that Bordiga transfer to Moscow to become

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vice-president of the Comintern. Bordiga’s refusal threatened to create a new crisis about which Togliatti, as his letters to comrades in Italy demonstrated, revealed himself to be extremely worried. Something of the party’s ‘exclusivism’ evidently still survived. For this reason, Togliatti appeared reluctant to accept the route proposed by Gramsci, obstinately opposing the inclusion of the ‘terzini’ on the future EC and the nomination of Serrati to joint editorship of L’Unità. In the end, thanks to the patient mediation of Humbert-Droz, the differences were smoothed over: the programme of action of the PCI approved by the Italian Commission found the ‘centre’, the ‘right’ and the ‘terzini’ in agreement, and ended up largely reflecting the orientation given by Togliatti in the discussion. From his first testing in the arena of the Comintern congresses, Ercoli emerged with an authoritativeness that was reflected in his nomination to the ECCI. THE AVENTINO AND ‘ ANTI - PARLIAMENT’

The Italian delegation returned home from Moscow in the second half of July, at which point the most acute phase of the political crisis that followed Matteotti’s murder can be said to have finished. Writing to Scoccimarro and Gramsci from the Soviet capital on 7 July, Togliatti approved ‘the line followed up until now’: that is, both the withdrawal of communists from parliament alongside other anti-fascist parliamentary groups,69 and their subsequent detachment from the committee of oppositions following its refusal to call the workers out on a general strike. Since then his attention had shifted towards the need to ‘establish an organic bond between the party and the masses already set in motion by the Matteotti affair’, through the constitution of action committees ‘naturally composed initially of our own elements, but with the aim of gathering around them the mass of workers, both those supporting other proletarian parties and those without party’.70 Immediately after his return to Italy, Togliatti – now responsible for the agit-prop section of the party – was concerned to draw a clear boundary between the proletarian and the bourgeois opposition, restoring to the former the full capacity of political initiative. Thus, ‘on one side the bourgeois, on the other the proletarian’, he summarised on 1 August, in a polemic against the PSI’s proposal to create a united, allin political committee of opposition. 71 For Gramsci, who insisted on the ‘wave of democracy that is characteristic of the current phase of the Italian social crisis’, but who did not think that a ‘victorious battle for power’ should be the order of the day for the working class, it was essential not to prejudice through a compromise with bourgeois opposition ‘the preparatory work for the following phase’. It was necessary instead, continuing in the Ordine Nuovo tradition, to galvanise a mass movement capable of acting for the ‘fundamental transformation of the democratic state’. The workers’ and peasants’ committees, which would be formed throughout the country, would be its instrument.72 Such a line provoked open reservations from the Comintern, which in September sent a letter to the PCI criticising the isolation in which the party was placing itself. 73 Togliatti, whose reports to the ECCI ensured that he was the PCI leader with the closest links to Russia, found himself in the frontline, defending the party from the increasingly insistent accusations directed against it. But, on the whole, he appeared

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less sensitive than Gramsci to the Ordine Nuovo suggestions and more attentive to the organisational role of the party.74 Togliatti also showed himself to be rather more sceptical than Gramsci about the significance that any middle-class detachment from fascism might have on the situation. Similarly, he appeared more convinced than Gramsci that the phase of democratic ‘awakening’ opened by the Matteotti murder was destined to result in a compromise between fascism and the Aventinian opposition parties. He was, nevertheless, firmly persuaded that this tendency was favourable to the PCI, because it contributed to the growing distrust shown toward the other opposition parties ‘in proletarian circles and also in some layers of the proletarianised middle class and among the peasants’. The possibility of a compromise between fascism and other opposition parties induced the communists to ask themselves whether it might not be the thing to do to wrong-foot their adversaries by reassuming their place in parliament. Before reaching such a momentous decision, however, the CC of 15 October decided to propose a continuation of the boycott to the opposition parties, on condition that this should translate into a constitution of a real ‘anti-parliament’, to which the communists would adhere, with the intention of proposing their programmatic platform that provided for the disarming of the blackshirts, the arming of the proletariat, and the constitution of ‘a worker and peasant government’.75 In truth, the proposal – as Humbert-Droz explained in his reports to Moscow – was put forward in the conviction that it would not be accepted and that after the refusal of the opposition parties ‘we will be able to re-enter parliament more easily and unmask their failure and their weakness’.76 As emerged from his report to the Comintern of 28 October, 77 Togliatti was firmly committed to this line, which was eventually accepted by Moscow. But the whole episode left a bitter taste in the mouths of the PCI leadership, primarily due to the way in which the International repeatedly intervened in the politics of the party. Togliatti, in a speech to the CC on 26 November, made his own protest: We deny […] that the function of the [ECCI] Presidium with regard to the national centres is to conduct itself as it has done in our case, by issuing a simple order not preceded by discussion, nor followed by explanations exploring its ramifications.78

Neither the reopening of the Chamber and the resumption of parliamentary debate, nor the continuation of the Aventinian secession, which still assumed the significance of a moral testimony against the regime, shook the government. The king and his advisers rejected all approaches from the opposition parties within and outside parliament, and refused to restore constitutional legality. The idea that the situation might precipitate a coup d’état, which would further restrict statutory freedoms, was repeatedly canvassed in Togliatti’s writing. In the article that he published in L’Unità on 1 January 1925, while accepting the general thesis of the Comintern of a transitional phase of capitalism in the name of ‘democratic pacifism’, he underlined that in Italy the capitalist reaction had assumed such an extreme form as to become a danger to the stability of the old style of government: ‘It is the infernal force evoked by

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the sorcerer that does not want to return to the abyss, that does not want to “serve” but to dominate.’79 Togliatti’s metaphor apparently includes an evaluation of fascism as a political force autonomous from the tutelage of that ‘fraction of the bourgeoisie’ of which it formed the armed wing. However, the act of strength performed by Mussolini with his speech of 3 January 1925, 80 and the multiplication of repressive measures against the opposition forces which immediately followed it, were interpreted by Togliatti, as by the whole of the PCI leadership, in an entirely different way. On 5 January, he wrote to Moscow that ‘the tendency of the situation’ remained that of a compromise between fascism and opposition parties. This was favourable to the PCI ‘because the relevance of the revolutionary solution and the insurrectional thesis are obvious to a far larger number of Italians than previously’.81 THE BOLSHEVISATION OF THE PCI

This optimistic prognosis was reinforced by the recruitment of new PCI members, which was in turn due to Togliatti’s capacity to aggregate the scattered forces of the workers’ and peasants’ opposition to fascism, and to encroach upon socialist party terrain. This centripetal tendency was facilitated by the profound organisational transformation that the Gramscian group was making in its application of the Comintern’s directives on the ‘Bolshevisation’ of communist parties and their restructuring on the basis of factory cells. In his responsibility for the ‘government of the party’, Togliatti was one of the principal architects and amongst the most committed to this transformation. He realised, however, that given the social and economic structure of the country, the new organisational model would be unable to entirely replace the existing one based on territorial sections. Even so, he ascribed the difficulties and delays in its application principally to the survival of a Bordighian mentality within the party.82 The PCI’s full adherence to Bolshevisation as an organisational formula was accompanied by Togliatti’s acceptance of ideological Bolshevisation which, having been commenced in the Soviet party with the renewal of the polemic against Trotsky following the publication of his Lessons of October, would extend to the whole international communist movement by the fifth plenum. In March 1925, Togliatti published an article that, taking the discussion in the Soviet party as its starting point, aimed to deny the legitimacy of factional political conflicts in the name of a dialectical conception of Marxism capable of resolving contradictory positions ‘in a unity that is their premise and their outcome’.83 Apparently detached from the more immediate aspects of the controversy dividing the Russian party, and indeed disposed to agree with part of Trotsky’s argument, this piece represented Togliatti’s principal contribution to the Bordighism-Trotskyism equation that was becoming common currency in the Italian party (even though Bordiga was never mentioned). Togliatti did not, however, participate in the PCI discussion on Bolshevisation, which opened with Gramsci’s report to the CC on 12 May 1925, for on 2 April he was arrested in Rome and accused of ‘direct association to commit crimes against the powers of the State’. The police had looked for him in vain on 1 March in Turin,

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where he formally resided, suggesting that they were ignorant of the role in the party of this ‘dangerous communist’. The arrest was precipitated by the imprudence of ‘an extremely well-known communist deputy’ who, ‘having bumped into Togliatti in via Campo Marzio, had not managed to refrain from stopping him, greeting him and starting a conversation’. During the preliminary hearing, Togliatti observed the rules of the good communist, denying everything except for his personal particulars and his membership of the party. Imprisoned in the Regina Coeli, it is likely that he managed again to find a channel to keep in touch with the party regularly. Awaiting sentence, he remained in prison for four months; but before the trial an amnesty was decreed that allowed him to be released on 29 July.84 A new arrest warrant was issued against him in September, but in the meantime he had managed to disappear from police view and return to Rome where he led a wholly clandestine existence. These were, he would recall, ‘the only months of withdrawn life’ of that period, and probably, one might add, the only ones with a semblance of ‘normal’ family life. For Togliatti married Rita Montagnana in Turin on 27 April 1924. Rita, two years younger than Palmiro, was the third-born of a Jewish working-class family. First she was a seamstress, then an office worker, living her first political experiences as secretary of the Borgo San Paolo socialist group ‘La difesa’, and she had met Togliatti during the time he worked on L’Ordine Nuovo. She had shared with him other experiences of party life, first in Rome when he was editor of Il Comunista and she was responsible for the women’s bi-monthly Compagna, and then between Milan and Angera, at the centre of the illegal apparatus of the PCI. The marriage was, then, the consummation of a bond which had matured over time, reinforced by political passion and by the sense of belonging to an organ whose aims transcended individual destinies. It was a bond between two strong personalities, the ‘private’ aspects of which husband and wife never let transpire the smallest indiscretion. From the wedding a son, Aldo, was born during Togliatti’s detention, whom the father saw for the first time when, leaving prison, he audaciously reached Rome.85 THE LYONS CONGRESS

Togliatti’s return to political activity occurred whilst the third congress of the party was taking place. The pre-congress discussion had been dominated by the clash between the leading group ‘consecrated’ by the Comintern’s fifth congress and the ‘extreme left’ of Bordiga. The intense internecine conflict was accompanied by the expectation that the party would need to move quickly to a comprehensively underground organisation. An accusation of ‘factionism’ was levelled at the left, justified by the formation on the part of some of its exponents of an ‘entente committee’ which was dissolved only following an ultimatum from the Comintern. Those leading the charge favoured the concentration of the party around the majority of the rank-and-file, a party which, faced with the raging of reaction, was particularly jealous of its unity and felt, in its ties with the Comintern, an extremely strong identity that they sensed was put into question by the Bordighians. The ‘central’ – as the executive was commonly called – did not hesitate to appeal to a series of administrative measures against the Bordighian

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groups, some of which were dissolved. The attainment of iron discipline was indicated as a fundamental objective of Bolshevisation. 86 The provincial congresses were held in total secrecy: in taverns, farmsteads, sometimes in the woods or open countryside. Togliatti was present in person at those of Turin, Novara, Biella, Alessandria and Genoa, and drafted detailed reports of each. He also participated in the debate with the left in the party press, in a series of public discussions with Bordiga, from whose political and intellectual influence he seemed to have entirely emancipated himself. He attacked Bordiga again for the accusations of Hegelianism and voluntarism he had levelled against the Ordine Nuovo group. Not only did Togliatti proudly claim as entirely legitimate the ‘guiding path’ that led the youth of the Turinese magazine to reach Marxism (‘the route followed by Karl Marx, that is starting from German Idealist philosophy, from Hegel’), but he relied on the proposition that ‘a voluntary element which affects the historical process in general and the revolutionary process in particular’ ensured that it was a requirement of the proletarian party to intervene in an active way, modifying it, on ‘the basis of those forces in movement’.87 In fact, neither Togliatti nor Gramsci were applying this method to the Italian political situation. They were far from reconsidering the role of political forces that, even though the Aventinian experience had failed, still remained hostile to fascism in various ways. Hence the under-estimation, indeed the denial of the problem of democracy that was instead, as Spriano observed, ‘the very peculiarity of the battle to which Italian communists were called and which eluded them’.88 The mobilisation with which the PCI tried to oppose the advance of fascism focused increasingly on the strenuous defence of trade union organisation. The agreement of Palazzo Vidoni between the Confindustria and the fascist corporations had on 20 October 1925 given the exclusive right of negotiation to the fascist unions and suppressed factory representation. The problem of how to save the democratic unions and to enable factory cells and workers’ councils to function became the main pre-occupation of the communist leadership. Togliatti drafted the ‘theses on the union question’ presented to the Lyons congress, and he had worked on them assiduously. The line he presented recognised the necessity of defending the CGIL against disruption, safeguarding it as a point of coalition for all union activists prepared to fight against fascism and defend workers’ rights. Thus, every tendency towards a division of class union organisations was rejected.89 The union theses were the only contribution attributed to Togliatti in the platform presented by the majority to the third congress. His hand was, however, clearly recognisable in the fourth of the five theses put forward for the approval of the delegates, entitled ‘The Italian Situation and the Bolshevisation of the PCI’, the most significant document before congress.90 Throughout, the document reflected the coordinates of both Togliatti’s and Gramsci’s intellectual thought. Most notably, the breadth of reference to Italy’s post-unification history was a crucial innovation, as was the analysis of the economic situation and the current social and political forces, and the characterisation of Italian capitalism as weak and laden with imbalances but nonetheless representing ‘the predominant element in Italian society and the force that

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prevails in determining its development’. Equally, it was evident in its judgement of the forces of anti-fascist opposition, seen as so many more links in a chain of reactionary forces that contended with the proletariat for hegemony over the intermediate layers of society and above all the peasants, who to varying degrees collaborated with fascism ‘in hindering the re-organisation of the working class’. Finally, and especially, in the evaluation of fascism as an ‘instrument of an industrial and agricultural oligarchy to concentrate in the hands of capitalism the control of all the wealth of the country’, capable ‘of realising an organic unity of all the forces of the bourgeoisie in a single political organ, under the control of a single centre that should lead together party, government and state’.91 It is not easy to reconstruct Togliatti’s contribution to the congress discussions, which took place secretly in Lyons with the logistical support of the PCF and lasted a week. It is clear, however, that his leading position in the party was confirmed by the end of the congress. He was re-elected as a member of the CC, of the executive (which had begun to be called the Political Bureau (PB), and of the secretariat, and he was also recognised as the most appropriate person to represent the PCI at the ECCI in Moscow. This decision was confirmed a few days later, in a meeting that took place in Milan between Gramsci, Scoccimarro and Togliatti. Many years later, Togliatti recalled that he had only agreed this arrangement reluctantly as ‘a means to assure a reserve to the direction of the party’.92 This is not unlikely, given that within the leading group of the PCI Togliatti was, at the beginning of 1926, in a political and organisational capacity, second only to Gramsci. On the other hand, the decision to send him to Moscow may simply have been due to the principle of rotation amongst the most important leaders. In the role of representative of the party to the ECCI, Togliatti was fourth, after Gramsci, Terracini and Scoccimarro. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s appointment reflected the deepening relationship of trust with Moscow, the result of his having been the almost continuous Comintern ‘correspondent’ for the PCI since spring 1923.

3 MOSCOW, SWITZERLAND AND PARIS

A DEFINING CAESURA

Togliatti left Italy, illegally, on 10 February 1926; he would not return for another 18 years, during which time he incurred many painful personal and political wounds. 1 He arrived in Moscow on 14 February. His wife Rita and their few-months-old son were with him. They moved into the Lux Hotel, residence of most of the foreign Comintern personnel. During the summer months Togliatti and his family shared a dacha with the Humbert-Droz family in the forest a few kilometres from Moscow.2 In 1926, there was an atmosphere of tense expectancy, in the Soviet Union. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was enjoying its golden period. Even amongst its many ‘contradictions’, there were signs of an embryonic social pluralism, while the severe lack of material comforts was compensated by an atmosphere open to relatively free debate within the artistic and intellectual arenas. The political scene was active. The crisis that had been latent within the troika at the head of the Russian party for the last two years reached its peak. At the fourteenth congress, in December 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev warned about the risks of making excessive concessions to the peasants and insisted that NEP was a necessary but only temporary diversion from the revolutionary path. Against Stalin and Bukharin, they argued that ‘the definitive triumph’ of socialism was impossible in a single country, especially a country as economically backward and isolated from the international scene as Russia. Although they were defeated, both majority and opposition were agreed in wanting to avoid an internal struggle within the Russian party which could directly affect the Comintern. 3 The sixth plenum of the ECCI opened on 17 February in this climate of uncertainty. Togliatti headed a large Italian delegation, which also included Bordiga. In his opening speech Zinoviev, who was still president of the Comintern, predicted that the stabilisation of capitalism would soon be undermined, leading to a quick escalation of the ‘revolutionary conflicts’ and the victory of the proletarian revolution ‘within four or five years’. In the discussion that followed, Bordiga delivered the most notable speech and, perhaps, the last speech of open disagreement that would be heard at an official meeting of the Comintern. He reiterated his criticism of the united front tactic; he maintained that the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks could not be applied directly to western Europe; he attacked the party structure of factory cells deeming it to be insufficient to guarantee an effective political discussion and he was especially harsh against the internal organisation of the Comintern and its branches where ‘the application of the penal code has become the rule’. Bordiga concluded by confronting directly the issue of the Russian party’s role within the International,

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comparing the structure of the latter ‘to a pyramid standing on its tip’. In clear opposition to the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, Bordiga closed his speech with an impassioned declaration of the interdependence between the Russian and European revolutions.4 In the plenary session of 25 February, Togliatti felt that his address needed, firstly, to counteract the strong impression made on the assembly by Bordiga’s speech. He therefore attacked him on what he knew was his weakest ground: You have all heard Comrade Bordiga and you probably sympathise with him. Comrade Bordiga’s speech appeared to originate from the true and revolutionary strength of a leader […] We, comrades, do not believe Bordiga to be a great revolutionary leader […] If we had followed the political path that Comrade Bordiga advised us to pursue in the last two years we would have destroyed the Communist Party.

Aware that the credibility of the new PCI executive also depended on its ability to influence the general political line of the Comintern, Togliatti considered with scepticism the hypothesis of an immediate recovery of the revolutionary process. But he spoke confidently of a ‘crisis’ of the communist movement at international level, a crisis that ‘would be likely to last a few years still’. He appeared to have no doubt that ‘the expertise of the Russian Communist Party’ would be ‘the guiding force’ out of the crisis.5 Unlike the speech he had delivered a few months before at the fifth PCI congress, this address conformed to the official ‘Marxist–Leninist’ discourse taking hold across the Comintern. But, compared to Lyons, he also sounded more assured and authoritative. Togliatti evidently viewed his arrival in Moscow and attendance at the congress as an important stage in his ascent inside the international communist movement. IN THE COMINTERN WITH BUKHARIN

When Togliatti began his work on the ECCI, the latter was undergoing, on Bukharin’s initiative, a cautious (if short-lived) process of decentralisation. The young Italian leader apparently proved he had the qualities needed to be part of a leadership whose aim was to direct the International in a more collective and structured way. He showed that he could analyse problems from different perspectives, that he was level-headed, and that he had the pragmatic political reflexes needed to adapt to a changing situation. In addition to his appointments as member of the ECCI and the presidium, Togliatti was also called to join the central secretariat and the organisation bureau. Not only did he take part in the frequent meetings of these bodies, he also participated in the agit-prop section, followed the affairs of the Italian party, and presided over the ECCI’s trade union commission. What he gained from these activities strengthened his belief that the communist challenge to social democracy must be played out in the context of the influence exercised inside trade union organisations. This is confirmed, firstly, by his failure to join in the strong criticisms directed against the Communist

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Party of Great Britain (CPGB) following the British General Strike of May 1926. The CPGB’s concern at ‘not turning away from the masses’ reflected his own views. 6 Secondly, and more explicitly, he firmly opposed the dissolution of the Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Council established between the British Trades Unions Congress and the Russian trade unions, which had become the target of fierce criticism by Zinoviev and Kamenev, as well as Trotsky. At this point, a difference of opinions emerged between Togliatti and his Italian comrades on the issue of trade union politics. 7 Essentially, Togliatti – clearly influenced by the opinion of other Comintern leaders – had his doubts about the PCI line which ascribed to the factory councils, viewed as united rank-and-file organisations, an increasingly important role. He also opposed Lozovsky, the president of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU; Profintern), who was arguing in favour of forming a new revolutionary trade union movement in opposition to the CGIL. For Togliatti, the situation in Italy, where the working class was disorganised and in disarray, made this an unrealistic proposition. Thus, defending the CGIL remained valid, bearing in mind that the communist minority aimed to take over its leadership.8 The question of Bordiga, together with the problem of the trade unions, was at the core of the relationship between the Comintern and the PCI throughout much of 1926. With his speech at the sixth plenum, Bordiga had unintentionally become the focus of the left opposition within the Comintern, which had previously been disparate and divided. As representative of the PCI in Moscow, Togliatti had to execute a difficult balancing act in the campaign against the ex-secretary of the PCI. On the one hand, he was asked to discredit Bordiga as a leader of international stature. Consequently, he shifted the debate with the Neapolitan leader from the purely political level to one based on the theoretical criticism of ‘Bordighism’, defining the latter as an independent ideological system inherently alien to the Marxist dialectic. One could detect in this the influence of the rigid, schematic interpretation of Leninism gaining ground inside the Comintern and the Russian party, which manifested itself in the artificial standardisation of ‘anti-bolshevist deviations’. 9 On the other hand, Ercoli still had the problem of dealing with Bordiga at a ‘political’ level. Whilst declaring he was against the disciplinary sanctions called for by one PCI faction, and keen to avoid ‘the most dangerous of scenarios: a faction with its core outside the party and its roots left behind in the party’,10 Togliatti opposed the proposal to send Bordiga to Moscow and employ him in the Comintern central apparatus. However, the proposal had been warmly supported by the Italian party and, apparently, by Bordiga himself.11 Togliatti therefore found himself in the awkward position of having to support the PCI secretariat’s request to send Bordiga to Moscow, which Gramsci viewed as a way of bringing Bordiga back to the fold. But he was also compelled to respond to the countervailing pressures coming from the majority of the Russian party, voiced with brutal frankness by Manuilsky, who reminded him that ‘the ECCI is not a refuge for political invalids’. Resolution came at the beginning of July, with the arrival of a peremptory telegram to the PCI secretariat from the Comintern

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instructing them to postpone Bordiga’s departure. The secretariat expressed its disagreement to no avail. Togliatti’s role in the affair shows that his evaluation of the PCI was influenced by the ongoing conflicts within the Russian party and the interests of its majority. 12 He also recognised that the debate inside the Russian party had to be replicated in the Comintern’s affiliates. The alliance between the opposition, represented by Zinoviev and Kamenev on the one hand, and Trotsky on the other, which was identified by the Soviet CC in July 1926, convinced him that the PCI had to enter the fray immediately and without dithering. On 28 June, he wrote to the Italian comrades that ‘taking a standpoint on the issues that are debated internationally’ would increase the status and authority of the party.13 In mid-July, at the CC of the Russian party, he put aside all hesitations and delivered a speech that contrasted the thesis of the opposition on the potential of the international communist movement with an analysis that left little room for optimism about the prospects for worldwide communist revolution. Togliatti was aware of the profound fissure that was continuing to widen in the old Bolshevik leadership and of the repercussions this could have at international level. However, he was sufficiently confident to take and express a very clear position on the contentious issues.14 GRAMSCI ’ S ‘ ILL- TIMED’ LETTER

The escalation of the fight inside the Russian party caused growing concern in the PCI, which was exacerbated by the aggressive campaign in the Italian press about the ‘degeneration’ of the Russian revolution. The impact of such a campaign, the PCI leadership believed, was very damaging to the militants’ morale. Consequently, the Italian PB sent a letter to the Russian CC, written by Gramsci. He wrote that witnessing the harsh battle taking place the Italian communists felt an ‘overwhelming anguish’ and thought it was their duty to intervene somehow in order to prevent a split. The unity of the ‘Leninist nucleus’, which had guided the Bolshevik revolution, was the foundation of the Russian party’s hegemony in the international communist movement. If this unity shattered, severe consequences would follow. The letter did not refrain from pronouncing on the issues which divided the Russian party and expressed support to the political line of the majority. However, it concluded with the hope that not only a split could be avoided, but also that the majority ‘would not inflict a humiliating victory’. In a short accompanying note Gramsci gave Togliatti permission to ‘revise the text, as far as detail and form’ according to the preference of ‘those with more responsibility’ among the leaders of the Russian majority, whom, he stressed, the PCI wanted ‘to help’. But he also insisted that the ‘essential terms [of the letter] must be kept intact’.15 By the time the letter arrived in Moscow on 16 October, the situation had evolved. The opposition had signed a document that was more or less an act of unconditional surrender, committing its members to completely abandon factions within the party. A truce was in sight and Togliatti, Bukharin, Manuilsky, Humbert-Droz and Kuusinen agreed not to deliver the letter to the Russian CC.

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First, in a telegram on 16 October and then at more length in a letter two days later, Togliatti explained the reasons for this decision to the Italian PB. He reported on the emerging situation and declared that delivering the letter to the CC would have been ‘extremely ill-timed’: ‘in the hands of the opposition it would have become a weapon against the CC’. The Italian PB accepted this view, as the letter from Camilla Ravera to Togliatti on 26 October made clear. Their readiness to acquiesce in Togliatti’s actions is clear, and provides evidence against the myth that Togliatti betrayed the PCI’s mandate. Yet, there was serious political discord inside the Italian party, and Ercoli himself was apparently aware of it, so much so that on 18 October he felt compelled to accompany his letter to the PB with a personal note to Gramsci, whom he believed to be the author of the document. The tone was vibrant, sometimes terse, and it definitively echoed the negative reaction that the Italians’ view had had on the Russians leaders who had been informed of it. But it also expressed a personal evaluation, reached after protracted self-searching: It isn’t so much the unity of the leadership (that in any case has never been complete) that has made the Russian party the organiser and the thrust of the revolutionary movement worldwide after the war, but more the fact that the Russian party led the working class in taking and then consolidating state power. Does the present line of conduct make it guilty or not guilty of fulfilling its historical duty? This is how the position of the Russian party within the international working-class movement should be questioned if we don’t want to end up using the arguments of the opposition.

Gramsci replied on 26 October reaffirming point by point his own position. He believed that there was ‘a duty to appeal and appeal vigorously to the political conscience of the Russian comrades, to make them aware of the dangers and weaknesses that their actions are going to cause’; ‘we would be pitiable and irresponsible revolutionaries if we merely let events take their course with the caveat, given in advance, that they were necessary.’ Gramsci’s answer was bitter and resentful in tone. ‘This reasoning of yours […] I find pathetic, your analysis is vitiated by bureaucratism.’ He concluded with a reproach betraying sadness for such a serious disagreement with his closest political collaborator and friend: I am very sorry that you first didn’t understand our letter, and then, on the basis of my personal note, didn’t reconsider your misunderstanding; our letter was entirely an indictment against the opposing stances, presented in non-demagogic terms, and thus sincere as well as serious.

Besides issues of methods, the correspondence of 1926 may have revealed a divergence of opinion emerging between Gramsci and Togliatti on the evaluation of the international situation. Gramsci thought that, although capitalism had regained control over the forces of production and the global market, the world revolution was still as likely as previously, it had changed qualitatively. The focal point of

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revolutionary action had moved to a national arena and was dependent on the individual Bolshevised communist parties. This argument enabled him to put into perspective the significance of the ‘relative stabilisation’ of capitalism. By contrast, Togliatti argued that there had been a historical defeat of the working class and, in real terms, that meant a postponing of the world revolution. The only goal around which communist parties could realistically converge was the ‘building of socialism in one country’, i.e. the defence of the Soviet Union. 16 There is no doubt, however, that the letter of October 1926 left a mark on the two men’s relationship. The indelible divergence of opinions was ‘dramatically crystallised by Gramsci’s arrest and the impossibility of continuing the discussion’. 17 Because of this tragic coincidence, some historians have seen the divergence of opinion as the paradigmatic expression of two opposing views on internationalism, or even an opposition between political ends and political means. Such a characterisation is not helpful in understanding the substance of the issue. Nevertheless, the differences that emerged between Gramsci and Togliatti had touched on crucial issues, and these might not have been settled in an atmosphere of sedate, reflective discussion, had that been possible. Gramsci saw very clearly the serious consequences which followed from the break up of the old Bolshevik leadership and the dangers constituted by the new internal party regime which was taking hold in the Soviet Union. In this respect, contrary to Togliatti, he was aware of the qualitative shift that the autumn events of 1926 represented, and how they compared to previous tense moments in the struggle of the Russian party. Togliatti concentrated his efforts on bringing their divergence back to its political kernel, that is the relationship between factory workers and peasants. His analysis was an indication of the ‘iron’ logic that was increasingly gripping the communist movement.18 If the ultimate success of world revolution was determined by the making of socialism in Russia, and if the needs of the latter were represented and expressed in the choices made by the Soviet party and its majority, then to ally with the opposing factions or simply not to contest them vigorously would have been to fall short of one’s duty as a communist. With hindsight we might observe that Gramsci grasped better than Togliatti the inherent risks of that logic; that Togliatti, totally aligned to Bukharin’s position – whose main concern during this phase, in accord (even in method) with Stalin, was to defeat the left – made a fatal error in judgement. Together with Bukharin, Togliatti found himself in the difficult position of having to oppose a system which he had helped establish. Nevertheless, Togliatti’s assessment of the balance of power was in its pessimism more realistic. One wonders whether the disclosure of the letter would not have reopened the dispute between the Comintern and the PCI just when the latter was confronting its toughest hour. Gramsci’s reference to the responsibility of the Russian leadership as the vanguard of the communist movement represented both a high moral expression and a prophecy. However, it would be unrealistic to think that it could have influenced the ongoing struggle and given it a different and less dramatic course. It was for good

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reason that the leadership of the PCI, which had endorsed Gramsci’s letter during a clandestine meeting that took place simultaneously with the enactment of Mussolini’s ‘special laws’ (and which the party secretary could not attend because of police surveillance)19, was also united in pushing into the background the issues of ‘method’ and in affirming its full support for Stalin and Bukharin. 20 A FIRST ESSAY ON ‘ DIFFERENTIATED ANALYSIS’

In his speech on Stalin’s report to the seventh plenum of the ECCI on 10 December 1926, Togliatti seemed to echo some of the statements that Gramsci had made in his letter (more specifically, the comments on the opposition’s social democratic and syndicalist tendencies, understood in terms of working-class corporatism). The speech, however, did not attempt to call the collective Russian leadership to account, nor did it express any concern over the ‘strong passions’ roused by the Russian issues, an essential aspect of Gramsci’s argument. On the contrary, Togliatti’s speech was dominated by those strong passions, especially in the concluding invective against Zinoviev. 21 In discussing Bukharin’s report on 27 November, he praised his frank acknowledgement of capitalist stabilisation and did not share the reservations of other delegates, such as Thälmann and Lominadze, who were closer to Stalin. 22 The speech designated Togliatti as one of the key men in Bukharin’s ‘team’, which for a period had assumed the management of the Comintern. Significantly, Togliatti was called to present a short report on the reorganisation of the managing bodies of the Comintern, which reflected Bukharin’s more articulate vision of the international revolutionary process.23 These proposals for organisation ended up – in the main – as paper exercises. Their strength was diminished by a secretariat that, in addition to Bukharin, also included Manuilsky and Molotov. These appointments ensured that Stalin was able to exercise as much influence as Bukharin on the Comintern apparat. Togliatti also spoke on the issue of fascism at the seventh plenum. He had during the year made a considerable effort to keep up with and analyse the phenomenon. After his arrival in Moscow, Togliatti tried to integrate the findings of his previous research, which had only Italy as a point of reference, within a more general debate taking place in the Comintern on the shape of capitalist stabilisation. In an article published in May 1926, in which he tried to avoid discussing the phenomenon as exceptional or typically Italian, Togliatti nevertheless criticised ‘the habit of employing the term “fascism” in such broad terms that it encompassed the most diverse forms of reactionary movements of the bourgeoisie’. He also insisted on the need to identify the peculiarities which differentiated individual movements close to fascism.24 Because he thought that a ‘differentiated analysis’ was crucial, Togliatti had no inclination to agree with the tendency that put fascism and social democracy on the same level – on the mere basis that both provided mass support for capitalist restoration. This tendency had emerged at the fifth congress of the Comintern, with a resounding echo in the KPD. In the report to the plenum on 12 November, Ercoli attributed the specific character of Italian fascism to the unresolved contradiction between mass support, rooted largely in a strata of the middle classes, and a policy of economic stabilisation controlled by the interests of the higher bourgeoisie. He

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identified the ‘ongoing escalation of terror’ against anti-fascists on the one hand, and ‘the expansionist–imperialist campaign’ on the other, as the ground where the contradiction between these two components was, at least temporarily, resolved.25 The dangers represented by fascism at the international level became one of the leitmotifs of Togliatti’s analysis; he discussed it at length at the beginning of 1927 in an article ‘Fascist Italy: Breeding Ground of War’. 26 However, during the weeks in which the seventh plenum took place, he focused mainly on the ‘escalation of terror’ aspect. In a speech commenting on Bukharin’s report to the plenum, he maintained that the escalation of terror was caused by the radicalisation taking place among the workers and peasants, and the significant results achieved by the PCI in organising their resistance. The reason for this positive diagnosis was clearly to give the party a vote of confidence, to equip it with the essential means to withstand the test of systematic persecution and totally clandestine existence. HOVERING BETWEEN COMINTERN AND PCI

In fact, the Italian communists reacted to the ‘special laws’ of 25 November 1926 and the disabling of their leading cadres with a kind of arrogant activism, determined to prove that the party was more than ever alive and in rude health. It was a reaction full of pride, but it also ignored the extent to which clandestine operation differed from functioning semi-illegally, and underestimated the state’s growing repression. Togliatti was affected by this show of pride. The previous November he had told his comrades that he was prepared to go back to Italy and be of use to the party. 27 But on 1 January 1927, Camilla Ravera who was carrying out, practically on her own, the clandestine reorganisation, wrote to the comrades in Russia that it was best for ‘Ercoli to stay put’, since he could follow the work of the party from Moscow. She also added, ‘he will be useful to the core workings of the Comintern, which will also be extremely useful for us.’28 Meanwhile, throughout January, a series of meetings took place in Moscow to evaluate the political and organisational future of the PCI under the changed circumstances. The Italian communists, supported by Humbert-Droz, were in favour of keeping the gravitational centre of the party inside Italy. Russian comrades warned them of the danger of ‘burning out’ immediately all available energies in what looked like being a long-term struggle. The Russian comrades also proposed the establishment of an ‘exiled leadership’, which would be in charge of providing the party with general political direction, a link to the ECCI, and ‘ideological education’. Their proposal was formalised in a document approved by the ECCI presidium on 28 January, along with a political motion discussed below. The exiled leadership subsequently established its base in Paris. In March, the review Lo Stato Operaio started publication. In Italy, a secretariat office remained, managed by a member of the PB (Ravera), along with three departments: agit-prop, trade unionism, and the ‘sporty’ one – i.e. those working in the army.29 The ECCI motion had been approved by the PCI in Italy at the beginning of February, when Gramsci was transferred from the confinement in Ustica to San Vittore’s gaol in Milan. Plans to organise his escape had to be set aside in order to

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address the problem of the political leadership of the party. Ravera wrote to the ECCI asking for Ercoli to be recalled from Moscow and put in charge of the exiled leadership in Paris.30 The request was granted, with the proviso that Togliatti’s commitment to the Italian party would not go any further than the next ECCI plenum. Thus, Ercoli was in the position of being a Comintern leader who had been ‘lent’ to the Italian party and, as we shall see, his future posting would be unresolved until the middle of 1929. From this point, Togliatti framed his depiction of the Italian situation and the PCI’s tasks in the fight against fascism within a comprehensive analysis of the revolutionary struggle on a global scale. This approach had much in common with Bukharin, whose report to the seventh plenum identified three principal driving forces of the international situation: the struggle of the European proletariat against capitalist stabilisation; the struggle of colonial peoples against imperialist exploitation; and the struggle of the Russian proletariat to build socialism. The latter was ‘the most important sector in which we are now struggling to destroy capitalism’, Togliatti said. This did not mean, however, ‘that we should not keep up at all costs the struggle in the other sectors of the world revolution’.31 The Comintern’s eighth plenum, which took place in Moscow between 18 and 30 May 1927, considered the problems of all three ‘sectors’ simultaneously. The central issue, which in some way affected all of them, was the impending danger of a war of aggression against Soviet Russia, which had in recent months become a major preoccupation of the Russian leadership. During the proceedings, it became known that Great Britain had severed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The obsessive fear of war escalated, nurtured also by the majority to create a climate of ‘sacred union’ which would make easier the task of defeating the opposition (which had resumed its attacks on Stalin and Bukharin’s domestic and international politics). In the ECCI debate that followed the theses presented by Otto Kuusinen and Tom Bell, Togliatti proposed that the Comintern adopt as a central slogan ‘the struggle for peace’, which he considered best suited to make ‘a direct connection between the politics of the workers’ state and the undercurrents of feelings in the masses who are against the war and want to stop it’.32 His position was embodied in an amendment to the theses, but was rejected. The main slogan became the defence of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. At a later date, Togliatti told the PB of the PCI that his proposal had had the direct support of Bukharin,33 although the records of the committee proceedings show that he was totally isolated and that Bukharin had intervened to have the amendment rejected.34 Nevertheless, if Togliatti was correct and the ‘struggle for peace’ was the most effective means that the European communist movement had to defend Soviet Russia, then this meant mobilising disparate sectors of the masses and public opinion which were not themselves inclined to revolution. It meant making contact with other political forces and, in line with a broad interpretation of the politics of united front, with social democracy. This strategic perspective, which had initially been Bukharin’s, was discredited for many in the Comintern by the outcome of the British General Strike (1926). In response, Bukharin himself made partial amendments to his line,

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thereby facilitating a shift to the left within some sections of the Comintern, particularly the PCF. The Swiss communist Jules Humbert-Droz played an important part in the fierce criticisms that were directed in 1927 at the PCF, whose electoral tactics had included a coalition with other parties of the left. Humbert-Droz had maintained a close political and personal relationship with Togliatti, who was also very critical of the French party. He was particularly concerned that the party, even when confronted with the repressive measures, including the imprisonment of high-profile leaders, was ‘falling with its eyes closed into the trap of respecting the law’.35 However, the harsh criticisms directed towards the PCF were more a manifestation of the – by now customary – negative evaluation of the party’s modus operandi than any sign of a substantial change in Togliatti’s outlook. Throughout 1927 and thereafter, all observers agreed that Togliatti appeared reluctant to conform to the left trend that was gaining ground in the Comintern. He might occasionally have approved of it, for instance in the French case, but he regularly tried to soften and limit the practical impact of the left position.36 In addition to the issue of the ‘war danger’, debate at the eighth plenum was also concentrated on the development of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Following the great hopes of 1925–26, defeat was now a real prospect. Indeed, on 12 April, Chiang Kai-shek unleashed in Shanghai a bloody repression of the trade unions and the communist party, killing thousands of people. As a result, the Comintern’s Chinese political strategy – based on the alliance with the Kuomintang – was increasingly questioned. Trotsky and Zinoviev, who had formed a united opposition, were deeply critical of it. Presented with the new situation, the majority – headed by Stalin and Bukharin – reasserted the need of an alliance with the left inside the Kuomintang and involvement with the Wuhan government. The establishment of soviets was excluded, as they would have created a situation of dual power and therefore compromised the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, so playing into the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and foreign imperialism. Intervening in the debate, Togliatti stressed the important role of the agrarian revolutionary movement and its ‘plebeian’ ways. Their objective had to be the seizure and distribution of the land, and the destruction of the bureaucratic machine exercised feudal power in the countryside. Togliatti believed that the Wuhan government still had a role to play if the communists could develop the mass movement ‘as widely as possible’. Clearly reluctant to reject a political line which the opposition had been attacking for over a year, he underestimated the close links that existed between the left of the Kuomintang and the system of class power in force in the countryside. He did not fully realise that it was impossible to safeguard the interests of Wuhan’s ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ whilst at the same time developing a mass movement that would challenge the very basis of its social power. 37

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THE LAST REMAINING QUALMS AGAINST THE OPPOSITION

Togliatti conducted his critique of the opposition in relation to the need to mould Comintern tactics to the specifics of the Chinese revolution: that is, on a political level. However, since the beginning of the eighth plenum it had been evident that the majority of the Russian party was employing other non-political means to stop the minority from taking part in the debate. A resolution of the eighth plenum had forbidden Zinoviev from being active in the Comintern: two policemen actually stopped him from entering the meeting room, whilst Trotsky was continuously interrupted and ultimately forbidden to speak by the chairman. That the atmosphere was poisoned is evident from the testimony of Ignazio Silone, who had arrived in Moscow with Togliatti to represent the party’s ‘internal leadership’.38 Even before the plenum began, and during a meeting of the more important Comintern and party leaders, Stalin had tried to compel the affiliated parties to agree on a resolution condemning a document by Trotsky on the question of Chinese policy. Stalin recommended his expulsion from the ECCI. Moreover, the delegates could not read Trotsky’s contribution, having been told that it contained confidential intelligence on the politics of the Soviet state in China. Togliatti was against Stalin’s proposed resolution, and did not give in to the pressure to support it exercised covertly by several Comintern representatives. He managed to convince other delegations, including the Belgian and the French, to reject the motion. Stalin was too experienced a politician not to realise that a non-unanimous vote would have been counterproductive; he therefore withdrew the resolution. 39 At later plenum discussions, however, Togliatti’s initial show of independence disappeared. In the meetings of 18–30 May, he declared he was against the participation of Zinoviev in the plenum. He entered into a harsh polemic with Trotsky on the issue and even presented a resolution ordering Trotsky and Vujovic, as surviving members of the opposition within the ECCI, to either stop participating in the opposition faction or face expulsion. 40 Togliatti stated that ‘there are times when there is the need to go past the rules of the party in the interests of revolutionary work.’41 Nevertheless, he then wrote to Bukharin and Piatnitsky that it would have been appropriate to have ‘preliminary contact between the Russian delegation and those from other countries (or at least present the issue to the CI secretariat)’ and that it had been ‘a mistake to set the issue [of Zinoviev’s expulsion] on a purely “procedural” level supported by argument of questionable value’.42 But it would be mistaken to read into this letter a belated acknowledgement of the warning which Gramsci had issued a few months before, when he urged the Russian majority ‘not to inflict a humiliating victory’. Togliatti gave the reasons behind his conduct to the Italian PB a few months later: the disciplinary measures against Trotsky were inappropriate because for the masses he was still ‘one of the leaders of the October Revolution and the organiser of the Red Army’. Moreover, it was not very helpful to give to the sections of the Comintern the impression ‘that every lively discussion would end in disciplinary organisational measures’.43 These were important scruples but they did not withstand the events that

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followed. Faced with the exclusion of Trotsky and Zinoviev, first from the Russian CC and then from the party, Togliatti reasserted the criteria that had shaped his answer to Gramsci thirteen months before. When the choice was ‘between some men and a political line they should have adhered to, because that line would determine the success of the proletarian revolution’, then all doubts should be cast aside. According to Togliatti, the crux of the matter was ‘socialism in one country’, a conception of the revolutionary process to which he was now completely won over. 44 Nevertheless, his gradual alignment with the ‘left’ tendencies prevailing in the Comintern – which were confirmed in the proceedings of the ninth plenum (9–25 February 1928) – did not take place without resistance on his part. For instance, he still disagreed with the politics of widespread splitting of the social democratic trade unions and the setting up of ‘independent’ organisations under the control of the communists.45 As a reflection of his status as primarily a PCI leader, Togliatti submitted an important report to the Italian commission at the ninth ECCI plenum in early 1928. In fact, his position was far from clear.46 After the eighth plenum, in May 1927, Camilla Ravera had asked the Comintern to allow Ercoli to return to his party, as authorised a few months earlier. In August 1927, however, the ECCI decided that Togliatti should take on the direction of the Western European Bureau (WEB) based in Berlin, thus delaying his return to PCI work for a few months. After the ninth plenum, the decision as to Togliatti’s future could not be postponed any longer. On 15 March 1928, therefore, the WEB demanded the fulfilment of the ECCI decision to send Togliatti to Berlin. They told the PCI Direzione that without comrade Ercoli’s experience, political foresight and influence, the bureau could not work.47 But despite the fact that Togliatti had initially consented to go, he was now resolutely against it, realising that it would mean ‘a total and permanent uprooting’ from his work with the PCI. He justified his opposition mainly as a procedural issue in a letter of 17 March to Humbert-Droz. Between the lines, however, one can detect a personal act of rebellion: It is not possible to think of the party’s leaderships as if they were dummies and tear away their arms or legs at will without thinking of the consequences […] It is a serious mistake to think of the development of those responsible for the workers’ and communist movement only in terms of their use to the apparat. But I feel this is what is happening in my case. No attention has been paid to the need of employing me where I can be most useful, of making me work to solve problems that I understand, feel, and for which I would work with all necessary efforts and passion. I am thought of as a pawn that can be moved to any place and in any direction.48

In the end, thanks also to the solidarity of the PCI leadership group that opposed his departure and the vital support of Humbert-Droz, Togliatti won. The political secretary acknowledge that the PCI could not do without him and his role in the WEB was refashioned in more flexible terms so that his tenure in Berlin was not indefinite.

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LEADING THE PCI : THE DISAGREEMENT WITH THE ‘ YOUTHS ’

In March 1928, Togliatti justified his refusal to take on a full-time commitment within the WEB in political terms: all available energies needed to be geared towards the leadership of the Italian party in order to prepare for an objective reality that might evolve positively if organisational weaknesses could be overcome. Togliatti’s appraisal of the opportunities available to the Italian communist movement in the wake of the special laws had already come to the fore with sufficient clarity in the meetings held in the Comintern in January 1927. In substance, the Comintern’s and Togliatti’s political orientation with regard to Italy did not change until at least the end of 1928. It is best to start from the resolution ‘On the political and economic situation in Italy and on the duties of the PCI’, approved on 28 January 1927 by the ECCI presidium. The document made two main claims: on the one hand it stated that ‘the fascist regime will only disappear under the blows of a popular revolution of the workers and the peasants, with the alliance of some strata of the middle classes.’ On the other hand, it said that ‘the development of the people’s revolution into a proletarian revolution is not predestined and automatic.’ All would instead depend ‘on the trust that it [PCI] could gain as leader of the revolutionary, anti-fascist activity’.49 The implication that the Italian revolution would not be tout court a proletarian revolution, but could have two stages, was animatedly challenged by some leaders of the International such as Manuilsky and Lozovsky, as well as by Longo, the representative of the Italian Federation of Communist Youth (FGCI). Togliatti, however, supported by Humbert-Droz, maintained that it was not possible to ‘give our party a rigid outlook at a time when the masses are passive’. 50 Nearly a year and a half later, in a speech to the CC in June 1928, Togliatti reaffirmed his position.51 Between January 1927 and June 1928, a lengthy controversy developed within the PCI. The main protagonists were, on the one side, Togliatti and his close collaborators in the new leadership, Tasca and Grieco. On the other side were Longo and the leaders of the FGCI, notably Secchia and D’Onofrio. 52 The ‘youths’ deemed the concept of a ‘people’s revolution’ dubious, and any immediate short-term demands to be unrealistic: the class identity of the revolution and the socialist outcome of ‘worker and peasant rule’ (a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat) had to be made explicit. Togliatti conceded that in Italy there was no space for ‘a second bourgeoisdemocratic revolution’, and that a proletarian anti-capitalist revolution was on the agenda. He agreed that it was impossible to ‘make two different things of fascism and capitalism’. He maintained that Italian capitalism could not restore democracy and freedom, because that ‘would inevitably be the prelude of a new mass insurrection, more widespread and more determined than the post-war one’.53 He did, however, challenge the youth’s assertion that the PCI had already built up a bloc of revolutionary forces sufficient to defeat fascism. Though ‘middle-ground’ political forces – democratic and social democratic – had disappeared in Italy, that did not mean that social classes, currents of public opinion and the aspirations they embodied no longer existed. On the contrary, reactionary political pressure intensified ‘the

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illusions and hopes of democracy’ in these social classes, particularly as one of the characteristics of fascism was, contrary to other European reactionary movements, that it excluded not only a compromise with social democracy, but actively persecuted it. As Togliatti would later point out in June 1928, ‘Matteotti, the greatest anti-fascist martyr in the people’s perception, was not a communist’.54 The communist party, therefore, had to implement a political strategy to gain hegemony for the proletariat in the struggle against fascism, which could not be taken for granted. The PCI had to point to short-term political objectives which were ‘democratic’, and reclaim some of the freedoms which fascism had suppressed, for instance the freedom to elect local councillors (or the right of workers to appoint those bodies that represented them). For most of 1927, these ideological differences, though serious, were still contained. More pressing was the problem of party reorganisation, which dominated the debates of the party leadership. In the second half of February 1927, the exiled leadership was set up in Paris with Togliatti in charge. He was also a leading contributor to Lo Stato Operaio, the ideological review of the party, collaborating regularly in editorial work and contributing several articles in every issue. The publication, which became invaluable in the training and education of clandestine party cadres, not only provided information on the debates in the Comintern and the Russian party, but also furnished comprehensive analysis of the Italian economic and social reality, which made it unique among the Italian anti-fascist press abroad. Meanwhile, the internal leadership of the party was operating from a suburb in Genoa, managed by Camilla Ravera and assisted by Leonetti and Silone. Undoubtedly, Togliatti continued to place great importance on this work. When Ravera, in June 1927, suggested the temporary relocation of the secretariat and press and propaganda office abroad, Togliatti voiced his reservations that such a step would ‘move the fulcrum away from Italy’.55 In the end, he agreed to the proposal, which resulted in relocating with his family to Lugano. Ercoli was at the same time very critical of the impatience of the youth. The first conflict emerged at the PB in 1927, when Togliatti defended the position he had adopted at the eighth plenum in support of the slogan ‘struggle for peace’. Longo argued that, on the contrary, to agree to the proposal of the Italian delegation was ‘to simplistically juxtapose war and peace, taking away from the issue any social content of class’, and in so doing weaken the effectiveness of the work of the party in Italy, which should be aimed towards ‘bringing down the capitalist regime’. Togliatti rejected this line of reasoning as wholly ‘wrong’, because it did not take into account actual power relations.56 The PCI was brought back to the crude reality of these power relations in the summer of 1927 by the arrests which affected its apparatus. On 17 August, in a meeting of the PB, Ercoli made a number of serious criticisms of the organisational work already carried out. They had much in common with those of the youth, who complained that party cadres faced inevitable defeat without proper support from the party. But, contrary to Longo and Secchia, who attributed the organisational debacle mainly to abstract slogans that failed to speak to the working-class and peasant base, Ercoli supported still the line defined at the Lyons congress. He accused Longo of an

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ideology and a method that were ‘a long way from that method of objective analysis of events and understanding of the duties in relation to them, to which [method of analysis] our party was called by the International after the first two years of its existence and that it is nowadays striving to adhere to’. 57 This was in substance an accusation, barely disguised, of Bordighism. The PCI’s organisational conference, held in Basel in January 1928, marked something of a truce between the PB and the youth. Longo agreed not to speak during the debate so as not to exacerbate the controversy. Togliatti left it to Grieco to report on the Italian situation, though he did point out that if a mistake had been made by the party, it was to have set for the masses objectives that were impossible to realise. In his report to the CC in June 1928, he stressed that ‘the organisation of the state, the mobilisation of those sections of the masses which are not yet part of the working-classpeasant bloc, takes place around the objective of the struggle for a republic and a Constituent Assembly.’58 Togliatti’s intervention was making the same political point as Gramsci. It may not have been a coincidence that he made it at a time when Gramsci was on trial in Rome where he was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. Undeniably, the relationship between Togliatti and Gramsci, affected by the episode of the letter of October 1926, had been abruptly curtailed. Togliatti had not tried to communicate with the leaders of the party who had been arrested. He just signed with other representatives of the PCI and Comintern a letter of greetings which was sent to Scoccimarro ‘for everybody’ in October 1927, when their trial was expected to be imminent. Grieco was the one who sent the comrades in prison more detailed information on the latest events and, in particular, on the expulsion of the Russian opposition in a letter of 10 February 1928.59 Interestingly, Grieco’s initiative irritated Gramsci who saw it as a dangerously thoughtless action which could worsen his legal position. Later, worn down by anxiety and solitary confinement, Gramsci saw the letter as the first step of a manoeuvre aimed at harming him.60 Did this hypothesis have a foundation? Research tends to exclude the possibility. 61 However, one has to cite the explicit accusation included in a biographical note on Togliatti, obviously drafted by the cadre section of the Comintern and dated 21 September 1940: In 1939 the [ECCI] received an accusation directed at T.[ogliatti] by the widow of the deceased leader of the PCI, Antonio Gramsci, according to whom Gramsci believed T. to be a double-dealer who didn’t deserve to be trusted. To sustain it [the claim] the fact was cited that T. never expressed his opinion before the official decision on an issue, and was shown to be uncertain in the past: at crucial times in the party’s internal struggle, by disrupting the attempts to free Gramsci through the exchange of prisoners, and finally in a number of other episodes whilst Gramsci was in prison, episodes that Gramsci himself has taken as provocations on the part of the Direzione of the PCI with the objective of preventing his liberation.62

The note made explicit reference to the ‘communications by Gramsci’s widow and her sisters to the cadres section’ of the ECCI, which have only recently been found.

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They are evidence of a considerable hostility towards Togliatti, especially from Giulia Gramsci’s elder sister, Eugenia Schucht. It will be shown below that the entire biographical note on Togliatti dated 21 September 1940 was apparently intended to show him in a bad light. It will also, however, be evident that the reliable facts reveal that the hypothesis of a ‘plot’ does not stand up to scrutiny. Undoubtedly Togliatti refrained from direct contact with Gramsci. He observed the rule of not writing to imprisoned party leaders. Because of this, he became the target of Terracini’s bitter sarcasm. In reply to Grieco, who had made some ironic comments about Togliatti’s ‘stinginess’ with regard to his reluctance to write, Terracini said: Give my regards to Palmiro. If in order to have a letter from him it sufficed to defeat and overcome his rabbinism, I would set up a credit with my bankers of fourteen kopeks; but to write one needs, in addition to a stamp, also a certain amount of feelings and impulses that are not transferable and interchangeable, therefore I renounce the pleasure of reading him.63

It is well known, however, that an indirect communication was kept up by Togliatti and Gramsci via an intermediary: Piero Sraffa, the great economist, who was Professor at Cagliari University and later at Trinity College in Cambridge. 64 But above all, as far as 1928 is concerned, there is no evidence that Togliatti intended in any way to undermine Gramsci’s leading role. Nor did he seem embarrassed by the fact that the letter of October 1926 would have shown Gramsci in a ‘bad light’ in Moscow. For example, the article that Togliatti wrote for Lo Stato Operaio in October 1927: a truly felt tribute to the ‘place of honour’ that Gramsci held in the history of the PCI.65 No less significant were the steps that Togliatti took with Comintern and Soviet diplomats in order to obtain Gramsci’s release. First, in September 1927, via the discreet intervention of Pacelli, the papal nuncio in Berlin, he explored the possibility of an exchange with high-ranking priests held prisoner in Russia. Then – in the summer of 1928 – he asked Bukharin to urge the crew of the Soviet icebreaker Krassin, which had rescued an Italian Arctic expedition, to ask for Gramsci’s release. 66 These attempts came to nothing, probably because of Mussolini’s resolute personal opposition. They were, however, testimony to a commitment that was significant also at the level of human solidarity with the friend who had ‘fallen’. After all, Gramsci’s political line was not then under discussion: Togliatti went to the Comintern’s sixth world congress determined to defend a stance that was essentially consistent with Gramsci’s thought. NO TO A STRUGGLE WITHOUT PRINCIPLES

At the sixth congress that opened in Moscow on 17 July 1928, the atmosphere was uneasy and tense. Increasingly, worrying rumours filtered through to the delegates of a new fissure in the Russian leadership, that had continued to deepen both about the analysis of the international outlook and domestic political economic choices. 67 A complex realignment was taking place among the various factions. Part of the Trotskyist group was keen on a rapprochement with Stalin in the struggle against the ‘right’, in support of a political line that included parts of the opposition’s

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‘industrialising’ programme. Bukharin, on the other hand, had a secret meeting with Kamenev on 11 July. He proposed to him and Zinoviev that they form a bloc against Stalin, whom he accused of being ‘a schemer without principles, capable of doing anything to preserve his power’. Togliatti, who had arrived in Moscow a few days before the start of the congress as head of the Italian delegation, was baffled and uncomfortable. He was summoned by Bukharin and listened to what a few months later he would describe as ‘his outpourings’. Judging by what an anonymous informer said about Togliatti to Trotsky, who was trying to discover the mood of the foreign delegates from exile in Alma Ata, the Italian leader was worried: The tragedy of the situation is that it is impossible to speak the truth on the more important and vital problems at hand. We cannot speak. In this climate to speak the truth would have the same effect as a bomb explosion. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the majority of those who are taking part in the congress were swept away from the face of the earth. I am seriously worried. It is a pity that Bordiga is not here. He would have had an important historical role. He would have told us all the truth.68

It may be the case that the informer embroidered and exaggerated Togliatti’s declarations. Nevertheless, the statements attributed to him revealed a widespread uneasiness. The theses on the international situation presented by Bukharin should have shed meaningful light on the climate of the congress: they were delivered to all delegations without being first approved by the Russians. The latter, moreover, disagreed with their content and made at least four crucial amendments. The first amendment stressed more strongly the precarious character of capitalist stabilisation. The second stressed the need to fight against social democracy, and particularly its left wing. The third insisted on the need to fight against not only the ‘right deviation’ inside the communist movement, but also against ‘conciliatory’ tendencies towards such a deviation. Finally, the fourth insisted explicitly on the unavoidable ‘iron discipline in the party’. In the long ‘impromptu’ speech that Bukharin delivered to the congress, with a style that revealed both his skilfulness and his limits as a political leader, he formally accepted the amendments, but blurred their political significance and largely stripped them of substance. Togliatti’s speech, read on 28 July, welcomed the fact the Bukharin had spoken of ‘capitalist stabilisation’ without resort to one of the many adjectives employed by other delegates to counterbalance it. The speech put into perspective the meaning of the alleged ‘radicalisation’ of the masses, seeing in it the sign of ‘a greater resistance to the political and economic offensive by the bourgeoisie’, but not yet the signal of a struggle for power. Above all, the speech warned that this struggle should not be viewed as a spontaneous and automatic process, but was rather fostered by the proactive and continuous intervention of the communist parties. In his closing remarks, Togliatti – the only one among the participants to follow up on the points that Bukharin had made on the subject – discussed energetically the issue of internal democracy within the affiliated communist parties and the Comintern. He complained that in many

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instances the system of open political debate had been replaced by ‘that of the fight without scruples, and of compromises among different groups’. Referring to the last words by Goethe on his deathbed (‘more light’), he did not hesitate to issue a warning that sounded quite dramatic. ‘The proletarian vanguard cannot fight in the dark! The leadership of the revolution cannot be moulded in a struggle devoid of principles!’ But Togliatti could not make this final plea to the delegates. His speech was cut short for having overrun the time assigned to those on the platform. Later he was pressured not to include the sentences quoted in the official version of the minutes. His speech was apparently received with coldness; the stenographer’s record does not register any applause. It was a courageous and non-conformist speech given that the prevailing climate at the congress was one of marked radicalism and triumphal unanimity, with little inclination for restrained reasoning and nuance.69 It was not only in the debate on Bukharin’s report that Togliatti showed himself to be out of synchrony with the prevailing mood inside the Comintern. Simultaneously with the sixth congress, he published in the theoretical review of the International a very important article on fascism, which went against the prevailing analysis. Though not denying that there was, in general terms, a process of reactionary transformation of the bourgeois state, he argued that this process could assume the contours of fascism only under specific conditions, namely in the presence of a weak economic structure that forced the bourgeoisie to exercise more intense pressure in order to keep ‘total control’ on the political and economic life of the country, and ‘of a shift and mass movement of the urban and rural lower and middle classes’. Togliatti therefore concluded that ‘fascism is a particular, specific reactionary form’, indeed ‘altogether more coherent reactionary system than has been in existence in countries where capitalism has reached a certain degree of development’. He identified as basic traits of the ‘fascist typology’ the abolition of the parliamentary system and the destruction of ‘the democratic formal freedoms’ which implied the refutation of any compromise with social democracy. 70 On this point he distanced himself from the trend gaining ground in the Comintern of ranking fascism and social democracy as equivalents, not only as ideological tendencies but also in practice. The former was ‘a movement of the lower and middle classes dominated by the upper class and the landowners’, whereas the latter ‘is a movement that has working-class and lower-class support and […] is acknowledged by large masses of workers as the traditional organisation of their class’.71 In the debate about the programme of the International, Ercoli stressed that it should not weaken or conceal ‘the fundamental idea that “the new economic politics” is the typical politics in a transitional period’ and therefore ‘the assertion that in this period the economic growth of socialism is gradual’. Such a precise formulation did not lack significance: it gave support to Bukharin’s theses against Stalin at a time when the question as to whether or not NEP would continue was the main point of contention in the Russian party.72 Togliatti’s speech was also notable for being the first that he delivered on a subject of general interest (and not a specifically Italian issue) since becoming a member of the ECCI. This was undeniably a sign of his authority as a leader of the Comintern. He

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was also asked to criticise social democracy’s position on the colonial issue; not, in truth, a subject he was familiar with. 73 Even so, his polemic was merciless and focused on demolishing the thesis of ‘good colonialism’ by pointing out the contrast between the declaration of principles contained in the resolution of the Socialist International at its Brussels congress and the actual stances taken by individual socialist parties. These parties were blamed for performing an ideological cover up of imperialism, hiding the real face of colonialism in order to ‘break the forces of the national revolutionary movement and prevent its development’.74 Italian issues were not singled out for special attention during the congress debates. However, they were addressed soon after in a commission held by the Latin Secretariat, to which Togliatti presented a long self-critical report. 75 For the first time, the Italian communist leader admitted explicitly that the PCI, after the special laws, had not immediately grasped the changing situation and carried out the necessary ‘organisational retreat’. The main mistake had been ‘not to understand in time that we could and should have taken advantage of every legal and semi-legal opportunity still allowed by the Italian situation’. It was necessary to utilise the fascist unions to disseminate basic demands (the right to elect workers’ commissions, the observance of agreements, a basic level of internal democracy) with the aim of inoculating them ‘with the virus of the class struggle’. However, Togliatti refused quite bluntly to widen the self-criticism to the overall political line the party had pursued since the Lyons congress. He maintained support for making ‘gradual political demands’, first and foremost that of the Republican Assembly. Indeed, he directed criticism at Longo, who – as part of the Italian delegation at the sixth congress – had again expressed his open disagreement with the prevailing PCI line. 76 Crossing swords with him, Togliatti endorsed ‘the method’ that distinguished the Italian party, a method based on open debate and on everyone’s right to express his or her opinion, together with the duty ‘that when there is a outcome, this is an agreement that holds for everyone’. 77 For the time being, this endorsement was not challenged and the Comintern reaffirmed their full confidence in Togliatti and the leading group gathered around him in the PCI. TASCA IN MOSCOW , TOGLIATTI IN PARIS

The Comintern’s sixth world congress confirmed Togliatti in his posts as a member of the ECCI and the presidium. Eventually, the proposal of employing him permanently in the Comintern apparatus, either in Berlin or Moscow, was abandoned altogether and his activity focused on leading the Italian party. The most pressing objectives were to overcome the protracted organisational crisis that had beset the PCI for over a year and to restore reliable links with Italy. Togliatti’s analysis of the country’s situation, which he put to the party’s CC in October, did not challenge the political line that had developed over the past two years. But he did suggest that, given the Italian situation, ‘sudden changes [could] quickly come about’.78 Come the world congress, however, and the Comintern’s attention reverted to the problems of the Soviet party and the new line of the International. The crisis originated, once again, within the KPD, wherein the so-called group of the

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‘conciliators’ – in other words, the most moderate wing of the KPD – tried to change the ‘left’ course prevailing in the party by taking advantage of an embezzlement issue in the Hamburg federation, which had, it seemed, been ‘covered up’ by the KPD chairman, Ernst Thälmann. On 26 September, the CC decided to take the measure of suspending him from his duties until the case had been looked into further. Concerned that the ‘conciliators’ – potential allies of Bukharin’ – might be able to take over the leadership of the KPD, Stalin succeeded in blocking the suspension. On 6 October, the Comintern presidium met without Bukharin and Humbert-Droz (among others), and forced the KPD PB to go back on its decision. The presidium further urged the removal of the ‘conciliators’ from the party’s governing bodies. Although always implicitly acknowledged, the supremacy of the Russian party had never before manifested itself in such a blatant way and beyond all statutory rule inside the Comintern.79 From September 1928, the PCI representative in Moscow and member of the ECCI was Angelo Tasca, also known as ‘Serra’. He had been nominated by the Italian delegation to the sixth congress, and the choice had left some people puzzled, given that Tasca had almost always been in the opposition group and consistently critical towards the majority. It was only from the beginning of 1927 that he had started to appear fully integrated within the leadership group, when he made a major contribution to the elaboration of the party line. Specifically, he distinguished himself for an in-depth analysis of the fascist economic policy. It is possible that Togliatti, who was instrumental in the choice to keep him as a delegate to the Comintern, really believed that the experience of working within the International’s executive bodies would lead to the ‘absorption [of Serra] into the leading nucleus of the party and of the employment of his political and leadership skills’. This, Togliatti continued, would enable him ‘to overcome and tone down’ his past disagreements with Serra.80 When the crisis of the KPD broke out, Tasca had not yet left for Moscow. In a ‘confidential and personal’ letter of 6 October, Togliatti revealed himself to be very concerned and warned Tasca ‘not to let himself be dragged, in any way, over the tumultuous and unsafe ground of the struggle of one group against another’ because ‘on this ground one can get lost’. However, by keeping ‘to the ground of general method of direction’, he added, ‘we may look, perhaps, provincial or cautious, but we can ensure the ability of exercising a minimum amount of influence, today, or tomorrow’.81 Tasca at first seemed to abide by the warning. But the situation evolved in an unexpected way. At the end of September, Bukharin took a stand against the ‘hyperindustrialising’ trends in the Soviet party and attacked (though obliquely), Stalin’s line. The latter’s response was immediate: a harsh campaign was promoted against the ‘right deviation’, still unnamed but easily recognisable to the rank-and-file of the Soviet party. Meanwhile, in the space of a few weeks, Bukharin and his supporters were divested of many key positions in the press and the party. Togliatti was by now experienced enough to pick up these signs of a renewed crisis and to realise that it would not leave the Comintern unaffected. His conduct was very prudent; on the one hand, he did not disavow Tasca’s reservations about the internal

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regime of the Comintern and supported his criticism of the ECCI’s intervention into the German question. On the other, he distanced himself from Bukharin on the issue of the timing of the development of socialist growth, showing that he shared Stalin’s theory about the ‘danger of the right’ which could hinder it. 82 Moreover, Togliatti informed Tasca that a meeting of the Italian CC had taken place in mid-December in Switzerland, which Manuilsky had attended. Because the minutes of this meeting are missing, its significance can only be pieced together on the basis of Togliatti’s detailed summary. According to this, the meeting resolved to write two resolutions on the German issue: a public one ‘that in essence would have given support to the German CC in its fight against the right’ but expressed reservations as to its conduct toward the ‘conciliators’. The other, a private one, would have expressed criticism of the way in which the Comintern ‘tends to settle issues internal to the KPD’ and from this ‘go back to an evaluation of the poor internal conduct of the parties and the communist International more generally’. This system is bad and is getting worse [Togliatti allegedly said to Manuilsky]. Group and faction struggle is spreading to all parties. When the faction struggle rages, internal democracy ceases to exist. We therefore have a situation that distorts the development of our parties and in addition prevents a clear resolution of political problems.83

This must be reported as an alleged comment because, in a subsequent letter from Tasca to Togliatti on 25 December, Manuilsky ‘has here announced a great victory: he has won you over’.84 Indeed, the ‘private’ resolution – which later became a letter, equally ‘private’ to the Russian PB – seems to have disappeared from the archives, whereas the ‘public’ resolution considerably diluted the reservations that Ercoli had confided to Tasca.85 Perhaps already in the meeting with Manuilsky in Switzerland Togliatti had been confronted with a stark choice of either-or: side with the position already prevailing in the Comintern, or be openly against it. As it happened, the situation became more complicated following a meeting of the ECCI presidium on 19 December, in which Tasca – who had abstained from voting on a proposal outlining disciplinary action against certain leaders of the KPD – was accused of ‘mobilising’ the PCI against the Comintern. Stalin himself attacked Tasca with extreme harshness and accused him and Humbert-Droz of ‘cowardly opportunism’.86 On 27 December, Togliatti, probably still unaware of this incident, wrote to Serra to confirm that Tasca’s position ‘did not meet, after all, our disagreement’, while simultaneously taking definite steps to distance himself from any ‘deviation’ which Tasca might express. Moreover, he warned Serra about the tone of the letters that he had sent to the party (and on the too ‘public’ use he had made of them), which made clear that he was not prepared to follow Tasca down a blind alley.87 It may be an exaggeration to talk of a ‘u-turn’ by Togliatti. 88 It can be argued, however, that until he thought it was possible to aim fire at the ‘German target’ (Tasca’s words) without affecting the Russian party, he did not withdraw his support for Serra, although he always expressed it in prudent tones. But as soon as the dissent

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turned towards the direction of the Russian party, Ercoli reacted automatically in the same manner that had brought him into conflict with Gramsci in 1926. He defended at any cost the political line embodied by the Bolshevik majority as being the compass of the international communist movement and sole guarantee of the possibility of world revolution. His stand in relation to the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union in January was a clear example of this: In judging the conduct of the Trotskyites we cannot stand ‘above the rabble’ and be impartial observers. We are not impartial observers. We are actors in the revolution and we must consider ourselves all citizens of the Soviet State, champions of the legitimacy of the Soviet system, the only legitimacy we recognise.89 A FIRST RIGHTING OF COURSE

Between the end of 1928 and the beginning of 1930, Tasca became more and more critical, not only of the ‘regime’ that the majority of the Russian party had put in place in the Comintern, but also of its domestic economic policy and its analysis of the international situation. This was the substance of the very long memorandum that he handed to the Italian CC that met in Paris between 25 February and 3 March 1929. 90 The shortcoming of his analysis, for in other aspects it was extremely precise, was that it did not offer alternatives. Tasca knew, after all, that the PCI could not afford the luxury of a rupture with the Comintern. Indeed, if we go by what Togliatti wrote to Tosco (Germanetto) on 21 February 1929 after his arrival in France and meeting the secretariat, ‘the first thing that [Serra] said was that he did not think the party could take the same attitude that he had taken’.91 In Togliatti’s view, a moral stand separated from, and indeed incompatible, with a concrete political struggle – although more and more difficult to fight – seemed totally sterile. His irritation was evident in a letter to Grieco on 28 May, following Serra’s refusal to be part of the Italian delegation to the tenth ECCI plenum. ‘But should we […] let him, after he has put the party in the position it now occupies with respect to the International, stand aside and wait for the judgement of history?’ 92 This behaviour was unacceptable to Togliatti, perhaps because he had and would continue to have to fight the same temptation within himself. Ignazio Silone would perceptibly observe in January 1930: From 1927 to 1929 … Ercoli and Garlandi [Grieco] proved to be much more skilful than they are reputed to be. But in this situation (and there was no alternative) they have been victims: they have been condemned to an enduring role of conciliation; they have worried more about the party than their own biography (for intellectuals, this is virtue taken to a degree of heroism and this is what has distinguished them from Tasca), but it is my impression that what happened has crippled their political ability and reduced their authority in the Centre.93

It will soon become evident that this last comment was appropriate. In the CC of 3 March 1929, Togliatti had notably changed his position. He criticised the interpretation (that was in essence Bukharin’s) of a ‘third period’ that stressed the so-

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called ‘evolutionary’ elements of its process and underestimated ‘the development of the components that characterised the present time from others’. He adopted Stalin’s position on the ‘radicalisation’ of the masses. He supported, in clear contradiction to what he had contended in his debate with the youth that transitional programmes should be employed only in an ‘acute revolutionary situation’. He also aligned himself without hesitation to the politics of the Soviet majority on the issue of the collectivisation of the land and of forced industrialisation. 94 In the same vein, Togliatti’s attack on Tasca was carried out mercilessly; no blows were spared. ‘The way comrade Stalin has described Serra, by saying that he is an opportunistic hypocrite, reflects the truth.’ Tasca’s aim ‘is to succeed, by any means, in cracking the unity of our CC, to sow uncertainty and doubt, which would allow him to smuggle in, without obstacles, his opportunistic merchandise’.95 None of the other speeches that followed, although unanimous in condemning Tasca’s position, contained such harsh words. This animosity can only be explained by Togliatti’s eagerness to distance himself from a comrade with whom he had, between 1927 and 1928, collaborated closely and with the determination, soon to be vindicated, not to be involved in his ‘political disgrace’. But a more subtle element reinforced his new hostility: the study of the human psyche argues that we fight against behaviour that we have repressed and removed from our consciousness. Concluding his damning speech, in which he asked for Tasca’s expulsion, Togliatti enunciated what had been his own internal reasoning, revealing how difficult it had been for him to disavow so much of his own political and theoretical work of the previous three years: If you feel you are worthless beside the united will of the party and of the International, then do what the party and the International ask you to do, say: I acknowledge, I humble myself before the will of the International and of the party. I will shut up and sign. This you must do if you are aware of the situation’s need.96

It was a line of conduct that had a negative influence on the party’s ability to analyse the Italian situation, which itself did not give rise to optimistic predictions. On 11 February 1929 , the Lateran pacts were signed between the Italian state and the Catholic Church, and a parliamentary general election was called for 2 March. 97 This was clearly, and it is hard to believe that it escaped Togliatti, compelling evidence of the strength and stability of the fascist regime. But his public reading of the new situation conformed to the Comintern’s diagnosis of the growing radicalisation of the working class and ‘putrefaction’ of capitalist stabilisation. The agreement between the Vatican and Mussolini in his view represented ‘the temporary widening of the social support’ of the regime through the assimilation of the organisational and propagandistic instruments of the Church. However, the firm coherence of the capitalist ‘power bloc’ also exacerbated its contradictions by getting rid of not only a potential Catholic opposition, but also intermediate liberal and social democratic formations.98 The PCI was essentially in agreement with this analysis. Tasca was unanimously accused of ‘opportunism’, but the PB also rejected his resignation. Was it a last attempt

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to ‘rescue’ him? More likely, the PCI leaders made it a point of honour to avoid employing organisational sanctions against political dissent, a method which, at the sixth congress, Togliatti had criticised the major communist parties for deploying. However, the communist parties’ ability to sustain ‘diversity’ became a major issue inside the Comintern. In February, the Russian PB severely condemned Bukharin’s ‘deviation to the right’, and he was summarily divested of all his power within the Comintern. The new course now predominated inside all the major communist parties, especially the KPD, wherein Thälmann and Remmele took control by expelling the representatives of the ‘right’ and removing the ‘conciliators’ from all positions of office. The ban preventing demonstrations on 1 May, issued by the social democratic chief of police in Berlin, Zörgiebel, was defied by communists taking to the streets. In the ensuing clashes, the police killed 25 people and injured 36 more. The KPD leadership interpreted these bloody events as a confirmation of the ‘fascisisation’ of social democracy. Togliatti, who had gone to Berlin to take part in a KPD congress (afterwards postponed), drew from the attitude of the German party, as he wrote to Grieco on 14 May, ‘a conclusively favourable impression’, 99 evidence that the widespread extremist fever had, by this time, affected him too. UNDER INDICTMENT AT THE TENTH PLENUM

The tenth plenum of the ECCI (3–9 July 1929) represented, as is well known, a turning point in the history of the communist movement. All the ‘elements that were present at the sixth congress, albeit blurred and projected onto a long-term historical scale, were here repeated and reasserted in a brutal schematic manner, impoverished and trivialised’.100 The same happened to the analysis of capitalism, with the definite emergence of a purely catastrophic concept of the ‘third period’. A similar bastardisation occurred in the thesis on the ‘fascisisation’ of the bourgeois state and the transformation of social democracy into ‘social fascism’. Togliatti’s speech, delivered in plenary session on 8 July, conformed to the prevailing climate. He still devoted a fairly in-depth analysis to Italian fascism, encapsulating the changes that had occurred in its social basis and organisational structure. But he appeared to think that it was changing into ‘a reactionary regime similar to those whose development we can witness in countries where social democracy exists with substantial mass support’. In contradiction to what he had declared in 1927–28, he acknowledged that ‘all intermediate elements disappear’ and he did not talk at all of the ‘people’s revolution’ but instead of a ‘proletarian revolution [that] is on the agenda’. He was extremely harsh towards Tasca. In answer to Manuilsky, who criticised Togliatti severely for not having yet pushed the PCI to expel him, he explained that this step had not been taken because the PB thought it should involve ‘the masses of our party’ in the fight against Tasca, but he pledged that disciplinary measures would soon follow.101 As a further proof of the ‘day of reckoning’ climate that had emerged in the Comintern towards the PCI, not even this self-criticism was deemed sufficient.

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Kuusinen invited Togliatti to put aside ‘this sentimentalism, this non-political tact’ shown towards Tasca, and reminded him that he had employed the same ‘tact’ with regard to Trotsky at the eighth plenum. To this, the KPD’s Ulbricht insinuated that ‘perhaps it is something more than tact’, while Heinz Neumann commented ironically on the fact that Serra ‘has gone beyond the Ercoli’s columns of opportunism’.102 Although Togliatti had retreated, he continued to defend some of his earlier formulations, e.g. with regard to trade union tactics. On 16 July, he made a speech on the reports of Thälmann and Lozovsky, challenging their analysis that it was now superfluous to take over the trade union apparat because there was an irreversible process of fusion in place between the reformist unions and the machinery of the bourgeois state. The machinery of trade union organisation, he argued, was not constituted merely by its top, but also by its intermediate and lower levels. The latter could, by patient labour, be controlled, by the communists.103 On 19 July, Togliatti delivered the plenum’s closing address. This was evidence of his continuing importance inside the Comintern and, perhaps, a way of tempering the criticism moved against him. Yet, it was also a means of compelling him into a public and unconditional alignment with the new political line. His speech, bland and without enthusiasm, made the required obeisance. Nevertheless, the proceedings of the Italian commission, taking place that same day, showed him in a different light.104 Here, Togliatti’s introductory report focused mainly on organising the clandestine work performed by the PCI and the difficulties met in trying to rebuild the party in Italy. But the following debate was intense and fractious. The failure to expel Tasca had become a minor point, whereas the issue of revising the entire political line of the PCI as formulated from the start of the Gramscian leadership now came to the fore. Manuilsky aimed his fire at the overestimated and unsuitable employment of transitional slogans, notably the one for a Republican Assembly based on workers and peasants’ committees. In particular, he criticised the lack of clarity with regard to the need for proletarian hegemony. Vasiliev echoed him and emphasised, in particular, the requirement to apply the label of ‘social fascism’ to Italian social democracy. The Italian delegates objected, pointing to the importance of their experience in relation to the position adopted during the Matteotti crisis. They did not agree with the (overly simplistic) equation of fascism and social democracy. ‘We cannot say that Matteotti got into power and then had the workers shot in the streets,’ retorted Togliatti to Vasiliev, and soon after he anticipated that, although a section of Italian social democracy could make a pact with fascism, the rest would hold on to an anti-fascist stance. Above all, this highlighted the need for a differentiated analysis for different situations in different countries. On the quality of the Italian revolution, Togliatti replied to Manuilsky: Is it or isn’t it right to debate these issues with the comrades within the party? If the Comintern says that it isn’t, then we will not do it any more; everyone of us will think about them and will not talk about them any more; we will just say that the anti-fascist revolution is a proletarian revolution. But any one of us will think that it is not at all certain that we will be

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Soon after, in reply to Manuilsky who had attributed to the PCI the fault of ‘particularism’, he said: We have always said that it was the duty of our party to study the specific Italian situation […] If the Comintern asks us not do it any more, we won’t do it any more […] If doing this is to be ‘particular’, we won’t do it any more, but since we cannot be stopped from thinking, we will keep it to ourselves and we will limit ourselves to generic statements.106

These exchanges were a telling sign of the climate that had taken hold in the Comintern and, indeed, marked out the constraints limiting the PCI’s political discussion in the subsequent period. The price paid for observing Comintern discipline was obviously very high. But a small, illegal party, relying financially on the help of the Comintern, did not really have any other choice but to abide by this discipline, even though sacrificing its own margin of autonomy in the process. Togliatti understood this and, perhaps, thought that only by avoiding an open break in the Lyons’ leadership could the party keep alive the continuity of spirit that had guided them in the struggle against fascism. In November 1929, Tasca – now expelled from the party – would reveal he had gleaned from ‘a comrade member of the PCI secretariat’ (a confidential remark made by Ercoli): ‘We must give in on the Russian and international issues in order to save the Italian politics of the party. Otherwise, Moscow will have no scruples in putting together a left leadership with some boys from the Lenin School. This would spell disaster [for] our work of many years.’107 What was retained of the political line of 1926–28 will be discussed below. Togliatti knew very well that after the dressing down to which the PCI had been subjected at the tenth plenum, the dissent harboured for a long time by the youths (and not only by them) in the party, would come to the fore. Soon after his return to Paris from Moscow, and after meeting some comrades of the PB who were obviously critical towards him, he apparently told Camilla Ravera that he had thought about standing aside and going back ‘to an in-depth study of the problems, with a mind free from petty intrigues, resentments [and] suspicions that are mortifying and upsetting’.108 If he had really felt this temptation, he overcame it much more quickly than in 1923. Even so, it was not without difficulty that Togliatti admitted at a PB meeting on 29 August to having made a ‘bigger effort to stifle any feeling of vexation and amour-propre.’109 Indeed, Togliatti had a dark and troubled period ahead of him, one of the most complex and problematic in his long political career. A comment – which would not be appropriate to describe Togliatti’s entire political life – by Massimo Salvadori described this specific moment aptly: ‘a strong personality that recognises in conformism the vital prerequisite of international communism and who directs his actions in accord with an ethic of Stalinist-internationalist responsibility.’110

4 THE NIGHT OF SOCIAL FASCISM

THE TURN

On his return from the tenth plenum, Togliatti could observe from private conversations that a number of comrades were losing confidence in him. Then, at the meeting of the PCI PB held in Paris on 28–29 August 1929, all the party’s most authoritative leaders, with the exception of Ruggiero Grieco and to some extent Camilla Ravera, engaged in a fierce and concerted attack against his political leadership. It is not easy to sum up the nature of their accusations, which were varied and also contradictory. It is not surprising that the youths, whose criticisms of 1927– 28 about ‘democraticism’ had been validated by the ECCI, asked for a change of political line based on open self-criticism. It was more difficult to understand the position of Leonetti, Tresso and Ravazzoli, who accused Togliatti of ‘opportunism’ even though they held divergent opinions. Leonetti, and especially Ravazzoli, were nominal supporters of the view that the Italian situation could be radicalised towards greater democracy. Tresso, on the other hand, explicitly accused Togliatti of ‘Tascaisms’ and seemed to agree, even more enthusiastically than the youths, with the tenth plenum theses on the ‘fascisisation’ of social democracy. Personal resentments probably also played a part; resentments that had been harboured and repressed for a long time, fed by Togliatti’s work ethic and personality. At work, he demanded as much from others as he did from himself. He was reserved and distant, and could sometimes appear irritatingly arrogant. The suffocating atmosphere within a small executive group increasingly detached from the masses, along with its inclination to cling to Byzantine arguments, also made the confrontation even more unpleasant. At the PB, Togliatti was up against a wall of cool indifference, if not open hostility. Nevertheless, he was determined not to make himself vulnerable to criticisms. Although he realised that the party’s ‘change of direction’ would have to be based on deep political analysis and radical choices, he himself seemed little inclined to self-criticism. He did, however, acknowledge that the situation in Italy had changed dramatically to become more radical. He also conceded that the slogan of the Republican Assembly based on workers’ and peasants’ committees was no longer relevant. He recognised the serious organisational crisis affecting the party and the need to find new solutions to resolve it. But he also energetically defended the PCI’s past practice, emphasising that ‘it would be an error to say that the political line of our party during these past three years was wrong.’ Nor did he spare the Comintern, which he said ‘can criticise everything, having for years approved of everything’. Not surprisingly, the delegate

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from the Comintern present at the meeting commented that ‘the tone of comrade Togliatti’s self criticism, yesterday, […] was rather inadequate.’1 Togliatti’s skilful self-defence took his opponents by surprise. A week later, when the PB reported to the CC, it was apparently united. The meeting was called mainly to close the ‘Tasca case’. Tasca had refused to sign a humiliating declaration of selfcriticism about his alleged ‘deviations’. As a result, he was unanimously expelled from the party. Togliatti, whose addresses to the ex-comrade from L’Ordine Nuovo had become harsher in the past few months, also distanced himself explicitly from Bukharin whom he criticised for having overestimated capitalism’s ability to overcome its contradictions and solve the general crisis that would determine its inevitable collapse. However, he focused mainly on those aspects of ‘opportunistic deviation’ which affected the Italian situation. He now tried to identify in Italy the nascent symptoms – present at the level of ‘general and confused aspiration’ – of a revolutionary radicalisation. 2 A clear and unequivocal correction to the line maintained by the PCI since the Lyons congress emerged from this meeting of the CC in early September. Circumscribed by the criticisms of the Comintern and a growing internal opposition, Togliatti went down a path that led him to abandon ‘shreds of his political standpoint with every meeting’, although he made this manoeuvre reluctantly and by continuing to draw distinctions and caveats on points of detail. 3 He eventually stated unequivocally, however, that the party ‘would commit a serious mistake in believing that the Italian situation is an exceptional situation in which one could not recognise the same features that the ECCI had delineated as occurring worldwide’. 4 Afterwards, in an article for Lo Stato Operaio in November 1929, he offered an official renunciation of the PCI’s support for the slogan demanding a Republican Assembly. To the question ‘are we moving towards an acute revolutionary situation in Italy?’,5 he answered yes without hesitation. He also accepted the theory of ‘social fascism’ completely and without reservations: ‘fascism and social democracy go the same way […] Trend, programme and aims are the same.’ Even on the trade union issue, he complied without resistance with the directives sanctioned by the tenth plenum: the clandestine CGIL broke away definitively from the social democratic Amsterdam federation and affiliated to the RILU. Togliatti’s position within the leadership was, at least temporarily, consolidated by this CC meeting. Meanwhile, a decisive new site of conflict emerged: the problem of the party’s activity in Italy. At the end of December 1929, Luigi Longo (Gallo) submitted to the secretariat a project that envisaged that ‘all the party organisation’ should return to Italy and have the country as its fulcrum. The project caused a deep fracture in the PB: Leonetti, Ravazzoli and Tresso (who presented a ‘counter-project’) believed that it was dangerous to rebuild politically operational internal leadership. They argued that it was necessary ‘to avoid wasting energies, or wearing them out or destroying them in objectives that can be achieved with less waste’ and as an alternative suggested strengthening the already existing regional committees.6 This difference of opinion was not about evaluating the radical potential of the Italian situation, which was now accepted by everyone on the PB, nor about the need

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to address the problem of reorganisation. The differences were initially about methods of reorganisation. However, after the political and personal antipathy exhibited towards Togliatti at the August PB, they took on an additional significance, becoming part of a more general internecine conflict. Togliatti thus sided immediately with the ‘Gallo project’. In a long letter to Grieco on 25 December 1929, he wrote ‘the Italian situation is changing and we may find ourselves in the presence of a completely new situation sooner than we think.’ Thus, the need for ‘a systematic activity of politicalorganisational leadership within the party’.7 In the secretariat discussion, Longo and Secchia supported this position, whereas Tresso opposed it. Togliatti this time was not inclined to mediate; in fact, he took the initiative to force the situation. ‘You understand,’ he wrote to Grieco on 7 January 1930, ‘how the issues will become extreme in the CC and it won’t be easy to find a unanimous solution, as we have previously been able to do.’8 The following day, he delivered a speech to the CC of the FGCI that was to all effect a manifesto for the ‘svolta’ (the turn). Togliatti’s view was concise: ‘We are moving towards an insurrectional situation, we are moving towards civil war.’ He excluded ‘the possibility of a so-called “transitional phase”, or in other words a period of a bourgeois-democratic revolution that would precede the proletarian revolution’. Hence, the party in Italy was called to assume ‘new duties’. Even though the situation was ‘inexorably driven forward by a number of objective factors’ it was mistaken to suppose that the shift of the masses towards revolutionary conciousness could happen ‘spontaneously’ without political mass work carried out daily and locally. THE BATTLE AGAINST THE ‘ THREE’ AND BORDIGA ’ S EXPULSION

Togliatti’s speech of 8 January completed the revolution in his political position. But how can his unconditional alignment to the theses o