This book by Silvio Pons, arguably one of the foremost scholars of the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI), can in many respects be regarded as a further contribution to the long-running historiographical dispute over the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the PCI in relation to the Soviet leadership. The question of the party’s external direction generated particularly heated debate in Italy from the early 1990s and until the early 2000s, not least because of what was at stake: the political legitimisation or de-legitimisation of the post-communist left.
Pons’s book therefore returns to the history of the PCI with the declared aim of offering a new, explicitly international perspective. The central question is no longer how autonomous or ‘national’ the PCI was. Rather, Pons argues that the PCI acquired distinctive and highly influential characteristics precisely because of its international, rather than merely national, identity. It was this transnational dimension, the book suggests, that helped make the PCI such an important player in both Italian and global history.
The early interwar period, which also witnessed the birth of the PCI at Livorno in January 1921, is reinterpreted as a conflict between Wilsonian democratic nationalism and communist internationalism. The newly founded Communist Party of Italy presented itself as an expression of the latter, particularly through the figure of Antonio Gramsci, who emerges as Chapter 1’s central protagonist. Pons rightly reminds us that, at the time, communist internationalism appeared the more innovative of the two principles. In the short term, however, both projects were defeated.
By the early 1930s, the PCI’s internationalism had largely been reduced to loyalty to the Soviet state and to the defence of its interests above all other considerations. As Chapter 2 shows, that loyalty became increasingly unquestioning during the decade, a development for which Pons assigns particular responsibility to Togliatti, by then the undisputed leader of the Italian communists. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Pons offers a careful and nuanced analysis of the period.
Chapter 3 examines the nationalisation of the communist parties from 1943 onwards as the result of a deliberate political strategy promoted by Stalin. The chapter pays particular attention to episodes suggesting a degree of autonomy on Togliatti’s part in relation to the Soviet leader. On the central issue that so animated the historiographical debates of the 1990s – namely, the ultimate authorship of the Salerno Turn, through which the PCI agreed during the war to co-operate with the Badoglio government – the book offers no definitive verdict. It suggests that this course ultimately received Stalin’s approval, as could hardly have been otherwise, while also reflecting Togliatti’s autonomous political elaboration (p. 99).
In Chapter 4, Pons provides evidence that Togliatti could be regarded as a champion of greater autonomy from Soviet leadership for the PCI and for communist parties more generally. This approach was encapsulated in his notion of polycentrism. The end of Stalinism created new space for such autonomy. Yet Togliatti himself also contributed to define the limits of de-Stalinisation by firmly supporting the Soviet intervention that crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Towards the end of the Togliatti era, the PCI began to develop a broader conception of internationalism, one that increasingly embraced the newly decolonised countries of the Third World. Terms such as ‘neocolonialism’ consequently entered the party’s political vocabulary. By the time of his death in August 1964, Togliatti himself had become one of the most respected and authoritative leaders of the international communist movement.
As Chapter 5 explains, political divisions within the communist world increasingly undermined the very possibility of an effective PCI internationalism. Over time, even the PCI’s anti-imperialism became less a basis for international action than a tool of electoral propaganda at home. The repression of the Prague Spring dealt a further blow to the PCI’s international aspirations. From that point onwards, its foreign policy became increasingly contradictory. Unable to break with the Soviet leadership for both ideological and historical reasons, the party sought instead to promote a quite generic humanistic form of socialism. At the same time, the PCI discovered the European Community as a new arena for political action, thus reversing its earlier negative assessment of the process of European integration.
Indeed, Europe became the principal arena of the PCI’s final version of internationalism (Chapter 6). This rested, on the one hand, on a rapprochement with the European social-democratic parties and, on the other, on the Eurocommunist project, which ultimately reaffirmed the essential distinctiveness of communism from socialist reformism.
The book’s final section, its ‘Epilogue’, shows how the PCI remained committed until the end to the belief that communism was both workable and ultimately just. Gorbachev’s perestroika was therefore warmly welcomed and supported by the party, precisely because it appeared at last to demonstrate that the communist regimes of Eastern Europe could be reformed. It was, as we now know, the final brief and unsuccessful phase of communist internationalism.
The book has many strengths, beginning with the impressive range of sources on which it draws. Its principal limitation is evident: this is an almost exclusively political history and, in that respect, a rather traditional one, explicitly uninterested in the social and cultural dimensions of the PCI and of communist militancy in Italy.
After reading the book, one is left once again with an unresolved judgement on the PCI. It is difficult to escape the impression that, when assessed in relation to the ultimate purpose of its existence, and therefore also to its international dimension, the party had already lost much of its raison d’être after the elections of 1948 (if not before) – that is, once it had become clear that there would be no communist revolution in Italy. Pons himself appears to suggest that Togliatti’s greatest achievement in this phase was his success in preventing civil war (pp. 125–134). This was unquestionably of enormous and lasting importance, but it remained a limited outcome for a party that had originally set itself the goal of bringing about a communist revolution in Italy.
