Italian Communist Party

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian Communist Party, known by its Italian initials PCI, was born in a moment of rupture. On the 21st of January 1921, in the Tuscan port city of Livorno, a faction of the Italian Socialist Party walked out and declared a new organization into existence. Three names drove that founding moment: Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, and Nicola Bombacci. What emerged from that walkout would grow, over seventy years, into the largest communist party in the Western world. How did a party born underground, hunted by fascists, and frozen out of national government manage to win nearly a third of Italy's votes? And how did a party shaped by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy eventually dissolve itself, voluntarily, into something closer to European social democracy?

• 2. Born in Livorno

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  Livorno's congress of 1921 cracked the Italian left apart over a single demand: whether to expel the reformist wing of the Socialist Party, as the Communist International required. The congress refused. So Bordiga, Gramsci, and Bombacci's supporters walked. They established the Communist Party of Italy as an explicit section of the Comintern, which Vladimir Lenin had conceived as a single unified world party rather than a loose federation.

  In its first national election in 1921, the new party won 4.6% of the vote and 15 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, a modest beginning for a party that considered itself the vanguard of international revolution. By 1922, the party had registered 43,000 members, swelled partly by the near-total entry of the Socialist Youth Federation.

  The party's internal structure was thin by design: a Central Committee of fifteen members, five of whom also sat on the Executive Committee. Among those five were Bordiga, Bruno Fortichiari, Ruggero Grieco, Luigi Repossi, and Umberto Terracini. From the start, the dominant voice was Bordiga, leader of the Left current. Gramsci led the Centre, and Angelo Tasca spoke for the Right.

• 3. Fascism and the Underground

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  The Comintern's 1924-1925 Bolshevisation campaign forced every affiliated party to conform to Moscow's discipline. At a clandestine conference held in Como in May 1924, a vote was taken to ratify party leadership: 35 of 45 federation secretaries backed Bordiga's Left, four backed Gramsci's Centre, five backed Tasca's Right. The result was not what Moscow wanted.

  By 1926, the Comintern had managed to shift power to the Centre at the Lyon Congress, largely because Left members could not attend due to fascist controls and lack of Comintern support. That same year, Bordiga and Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned on the island of Ustica. In 1927, Palmiro Togliatti took over as secretary in place of Gramsci. Bordiga was expelled from the Comintern in 1930, accused of Trotskyism.

  Despite being outlawed, the party maintained a clandestine network through the entire fascist dictatorship. More than three quarters of all political prisoners between 1926 and 1943 were communists. The party distributed propaganda, infiltrated fascist unions and youth organisations, and in 1935 led a campaign against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

  In 1943, after Joseph Stalin dissolved the Communist International, the exiled leadership in Moscow formally renamed the party from the Communist Party of Italy to the Italian Communist Party on the 15th of May.

• 4. The Resistance and Its Aftermath

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  The fall of Benito Mussolini's regime on the 25th of July 1943 returned the party to legal existence. Togliatti arrived back in Italy in March 1944 after eighteen years in exile, and at the Svolta di Salerno he made the pivotal decision to cooperate with King Victor Emmanuel III and Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio rather than insist on immediate republican transformation.

  The Garibaldi Brigades, promoted by the PCI, became among the largest partisan forces in the Resistance. Their ranks included future party leaders like Giorgio Amendola, Pietro Ingrao, Luigi Longo, and Giancarlo Paietta, as well as trade union figures Luciano Lama and Bruno Trentin. Writers Italo Calvino and Gianni Rodari fought alongside them, as did film directors Carlo Lizzani, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Luchino Visconti.

  From June 1944 to May 1947, the PCI served in the national government. The Gullo decrees of 1944, named after Agriculture Minister Fausto Gullo, aimed to improve conditions for sharecroppers. Togliatti served as Deputy Prime Minister. The party's contribution to the new republican constitution was described as decisive.

  Then came May 1947. Ambassador James Clement Dunn directly asked Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi to dissolve parliament and remove the PCI. Secretary of State George Marshall told De Gasperi that anti-communism was a precondition for American aid. On the 31st of May, all left-wing ministers were expelled from the cabinet. The PCI would not hold national office again.

• 5. Cold War and Red Regions

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  The 1948 general election saw the PCI join the PSI in the Popular Democratic Front, but the DC won decisively. The United States spent between $10 million and $20 million on anti-communist propaganda and covert operations during that campaign, much of it channeled through the Economic Cooperation Administration of the Marshall Plan and laundered through individual banks.

  Excluded from Rome's corridors, the party built its real power in the centre of the country: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria, the regions that came to be called the Red Belt. Bologna was the flagship. The party held the city continuously from 1945 onward. Between 1946 and 1956, the communist city council built 31 nursery schools, 896 flats, and 9 schools. Eight thousand children received subsidised school meals. In 1972, Mayor Renato Zangheri introduced a traffic plan imposing strict limits on private vehicles and redirecting resources toward cheap public transport.

  In the mid-1960s, the United States Department of State estimated party membership at approximately 1,350,000, roughly 4.2% of the working-age population, making it the largest communist party in per capita terms in the capitalist world. Yet even as the party governed Bologna with a reputation for clean and efficient administration, it was also receiving substantial Soviet financial support. Declassified information confirmed ongoing cash flows from Moscow, with Luigi Longo writing to Leonid Brezhnev personally in 1972 to request and receive an additional $5.7 million, on top of the $3.5 million the Soviets provided in 1971.

• 6. The Hungarian Crack

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  The Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 opened a fracture in the PCI that would take decades to fully widen. The party leadership, including Togliatti and a younger official named Giorgio Napolitano, sided with Moscow and described the Hungarian insurgents as counter-revolutionaries in the pages of l'Unita, the official party newspaper.

  Giuseppe Di Vittorio, chief of the communist trade union CGIL, publicly rejected that position. Antonio Giolitti and Italian Socialist Party national secretary Pietro Nenni, a close PCI ally, also broke with the party over the issue. Napolitano himself, who in 2006 became President of Italy, later wrote in his political autobiography that he regretted his justification of the Soviet intervention but had suppressed his doubts at the time for the sake of party unity.

  That episode pushed Napolitano toward the miglioristi, a social-democratic faction within the PCI that would grow in influence through the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, the party leadership, alarmed by the 1967 Athens coup that installed a military junta in Greece, requested Soviet assistance in preparing an intelligence and clandestine signal network. From 1967 through 1973, PCI members were trained by both the Stasi and the KGB in East Germany and Moscow. The fear of a similar coup in Italy, after two actual attempts, Piano Solo in 1964 and Golpe Borghese in 1970, was not without foundation.

• 7. Berlinguer and the Break with Moscow

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  At a 1969 international conference of communist parties in Moscow, Enrico Berlinguer, then PCI deputy national secretary, delivered a speech that startled his hosts. He refused to excommunicate the Chinese Communist Party and told Brezhnev directly that the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia had exposed deep differences within the communist movement over national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and cultural freedom. He called it "the tragedy in Prague".

  By the 1976 Italian general election, the PCI reached its peak vote share: 34.4%, amounting to 12.6 million votes. It was the largest communist party in any capitalist state. Yet Berlinguer was guiding it away from both Soviet obedience and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The party's stated goal shifted toward what it called the Historic Compromise, seeking cooperation with Christian Democracy and the Socialists through democratic means.

  The kidnapping and murder of DC leader Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in May 1978 broke that prospect apart. The PCI itself was a regular target of the Red Brigades; many party members and CGIL-affiliated trade unionists were murdered or wounded. According to former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, the PCI asked Moscow to press Czechoslovakia's State Security to withdraw support from the Red Brigades. Moscow declined. Combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this produced a complete rupture with Moscow in 1979. The Proletarian Unity Party merged into the PCI in 1984, the same year cash payments from the Soviets finally ceased.

• 8. Dissolution and Legacy

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  Achille Occhetto became general secretary in 1988. In 1989, at a conference in the working-class Bolognina district of Bologna, he announced his intention to dissolve the party and reconstitute it under a new name, a moment that came to be known in Italian politics as the svolta della Bolognina.

  The Democratic Party of the Left that emerged joined the Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists, the destination that Luciano Canfora had anticipated when he wrote that the PCI had followed a path requiring it to occupy the space of social democracy in the Italian political panorama. But roughly a third of the membership refused to follow Occhetto. Led by Armando Cossutta, they seceded to form the Communist Refoundation Party.

  The PCI's peak membership had reached 2.3 million in 1947. Its highest electoral result was 34.4% in 1976. For seven decades, it was simultaneously the largest party in the Western communist world and a permanently excluded opposition at the national level in Italy. The last European Parliament result before dissolution, in 1989 under Occhetto, was 27.6% and 22 seats. The party's Bologna model of local governance, built from 1945 onward, remained a concrete and studied example of what its members had argued was possible.