Background
Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa, Italy, on March 26, 1893.
General Secretary politician statesman
Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa, Italy, on March 26, 1893.
He attended high school in Sardinia and then studied law at the University of Turin.
During World War I he did military service until his release in 1917, when he returned to Turin. As a student Togliatti experienced a wide variety of ideologies and intellectual currents, ranging from Marxism to neo-Hegelianism and syndicalism.
His war experiences and the example of the Russian revolution turned him more and more toward Marxism.
A bitter struggle over control of the PCI followed.
Bordiga wanted to continue the schism with the Socialists.
Others such as Togliatti and Gramsci, supported by the Soviet Union, favored a "united front" with the Socialists.
By 1926, at the Congress of Lyons, the Gramsci-Togliatti faction triumphed, and Gramsci assumed leadership of the party. Togliatti, however, succeeded Gramsci in November 1926 when the latter was arrested and imprisoned by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Togliatti avoided arrest only because he was in Moscow at the time.
In addition to heading the PCI, Togliatti became a major figure in the Third International.
Despite personalmisgivings, by 1929 Togliatti did bring the PCI into conformity with the International's increasingly hard line.
Togliatti, however, disagreed with many of Stalin's ideas and actions.
Just as the French Communists had joined the Socialists and left radicals in an anti-Fascist pact, Togliatti led the PCI into forming a similar alliance with the Italian Socialists.
In 1930 he became a citizen of the Soviet Union.
He was among the Republic's last defenders until he fled to Algeria in March 1939.
During the early months of World War II he was imprisoned in France, where he remained until his release and return to the Soviet Union in May 1940.
From June 27, 1941, to May 11, 1943, using the pseudonym of "Mario Correnti, " he delivered more than 100 radio broadcasts to Fascist Italy.
In his programs he kept his audience abreast of military developments and urged armed resistance to Fascism. In July 1943 the Fascist regime fell, and on March 27, 1944, Togliatti was finally able to end his long exile and return to Italy.
For the first time, the PCI emerged as a significant national party (1, 770, 896 members at the end of 1945).
During the next several years Togliatti served as minister without portfolio in several cabinets and ministries (under Badoglio and Ivanoe Bonomi), as vice-president of the Council of Ministers with Bonomi, and as minister of justice with Ferruccio Parri and Alcide De Gasperi.
Togliatti's policy failed, however.
The Communist-Socialist bloc was defeated in the 1948 elections, and the Communists were isolated.
In the same year an attempt on Togliatti's life scandalized the nation, and only his insistence on calm prevented a bloody insurrection. The Cold War years from 1947 to 1955 were difficult for Togliatti.
He took over the Italian Communist Party and built it into one of the strongest in Western Europe, with some 2 million members.
Under his leadership the party became the largest Communist Party in the West and a major factor in Italian politics after World War II
In 1914 he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).
He took up journalism for the Socialist cause and joined Antonio Gramsci, Angelo Tasca, and Umberto Terracini in founding the Turinese weekly L'Ordine Nuovo.
In 1921 he and the Ordine Nuovo group joined Amadeo Bordiga and others in splitting from the Socialists and founding the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
He found the anti-Fascist policies of the Popular Front in France far more congenial.
In his Lectures on Fascism given at the Leninist School in Moscow and at a major speech before the Seventh Congress of the International (1935), Togliatti presented his case for a popular front policy. From 1937 to 1939 Togliatti served in Spain as the International's representative to the Spanish Communist Party.
He directed the Communist Party to collaborate in the formation of the Badoglio government, the successor to Mussolini, and to join the armed struggle against Fascism and the German occupation.
Just before his death he argued that there were many roads to socialism and urged the PCI toward greater independence from the Soviet Union.
Togliatti was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy.
He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies.
(1924–1948; separated)
(1944–present; adopted)
(1925–2011)
General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Italian Minister of Justice
