Silvio Pons, one of the most prominent historians of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), has given us an account of the Party’s “transnational” relations from its founding in 1921 to the end of its life as a Communist party in 1991. Published in Italy in 2021 as I comunisti italiani e gli altri (The Italian Communists and the Others), the book inevitably focuses primarily on the PCI’s relationship with the USSR and its Communist Party (the CPSU). This relationship was both complex and highly unusual for the degree to which the Party’s nature, identity, and positions were shaped by it, while remaining specifically Italian. Pons has been able to take advantage of many sources that have been made public or published since 1991, such as the minutes of the PCI’s Executive Committee (Direzione) and the memoirs of several of the protagonists, which have enriched his account with significant new details, though without changing the broad outlines of previous accounts. This history traces the evolution of the PCI’s relationship with the CPSU over time. If there is a guiding thread, it is the stubborn insistence of the PCI leadership on guarding and asserting the Party’s distinctive character – first in their own analysis of the Italian situation, even when it diverged from Moscow’s general line, and later in their increasingly public assertions of autonomy after the beginning of de-Stalinization in 1956.

As early as the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci – while inserting his analyses of Italy in an international context, and recognizing the significance of the CPSU as the founder of the Comintern – maintained his own positions on both the immediate revolutionary potential outside the Soviet Union, and, as is well known, the totalitarian tendencies of the Soviet state.

Palmiro Togliatti, who led the Party from Gramsci’s arrest in 1926 until 1964, submitted to Moscow’s directives, and even became a leading functionary of the Comintern. Yet, like Gramsci, he continued to insist on the specificity of the Italian situation, which did not fit the general formulae promulgated (and from time to time replaced) by the Soviet Party and the Comintern. For example, his Lectures on Fascism (1935) stressed the mass bases of Italian Fascism. During the Resistance and immediate post-war period, Togliatti strongly advocated for the possibility of a peaceful class struggle in Italy, leading eventually to socialism, while opposing more radical actions that, he feared, would lead to civil war and/or the banning of the Party, as had happened in Greece. In 1951, he refused the Soviet offer to lead the Cominform, precisely because he feared leaders such as Pietro Secchia, who were more inclined to extra-parliamentary action, would succeed him in Italy.

After the XX Congress of the Soviet Party in 1956, Togliatti began to more openly promote an “Italian road to socialism” and envision a “polycentric” Communist movement. After his death in 1964, events triggered a further distancing from the CPSU. The PCI openly condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, though it took steps to ensure this did not bring about a total rupture with the Soviet Party. In 1973, international considerations of another kind (the example of the Chilean coup d’état) weighed heavily on Party Secretary Enrico Berlinguer’s decision to seek an “historic compromise” with the ruling Christian Democrats. This strategy led to the PCI’s indirect support for Andreotti’s second cabinet (1976–79), since the US continued to veto Communist participation in the Italian government. At the same time, the PCI was seen as the leading force in a new “Eurocommunist” movement that envisaged a peaceful road to socialism (though Pons suggests Eurocommunism had less substance than appeared at the time). The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Jaruselski’s coup in Poland in 1981 led to further condemnations by the PCI and a near-public rupture. When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his reforming course, the PCI – consistent with its previous calls for reform in the Communist bloc – was one of the few foreign parties to support him. But the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 set off a rapid chain of events that put paid to the notion of gradually reforming and democratizing the Communist states. It also sparked the call by the Secretary, Achille Occhetto, to reconstitute the PCI as a new party (the Democratic Party of Socialism [PDS]) that would look to the Socialist International as its reference point.

This book has the merit of telling this complex story with a wealth of detail about the positions of the Party and its principal leaders, and the way in which their relations with Moscow evolved. Standing over this history is the broad framework of the unique relationship between the PCI and the CPSU. The observer of today is tempted to step outside the “just so” assumptions of the Cold War period and ask why the PCI remained linked (albeit in a very complex relationship) for so long to the CPSU, particularly when the relationship damaged it in front of domestic public opinion and led to the long-standing veto on PCI participation in the national government (which was not lifted until it became the PDS). There are, of course, myriad answers to this question, and Pons, to his credit, includes several brief passages where he discusses the bases of the link in the post-war period. He mentions its role in anchoring the identity of the PCI, which some feared would otherwise be indistinguishable from a social-democratic party (though the Socialist Party remained the smaller and weaker party in Italy, rather than offering strong competition). There was also the financial support that the USSR channelled to the PCI, which Pons mentions but does not discuss in any detail. All these analytical passages are illuminating, and it would have been welcome if they had been longer, even at the expense of some of the more detailed discussion of specific events. For instance, the USSR was an undeniable part of the history of the Party, from which so many militants drew their inspiration and self-conception, and it was difficult to completely separate the PCI’s glorious domestic history from the role of the Soviet state and party, though the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes inevitably opened up such a process. It would have been valuable to have more insight into the way PCI militants actually viewed the USSR and the Soviet link. Pons’s argument (p. xi) that the rank and file and the leaders had essentially the same views of the USSR disposes too quickly of the issue, though it is true that a different answer would imply a somewhat different type of book. Again, an analytical section on Togliatti’s conception of the road to socialism in Italy, in addition to the insights given by his positions in particular situations, would have been valuable. Addressing some of these broad issues that the book raises may also have given the author an idea for a stronger leitmotiv, or at least a more explicit version of the guiding thread identified above, which, at the risk of imposing a “grand narrative” on an undoubtedly complex story, would have given it a clearer shape. It may also have allowed Pons to integrate more tightly his discussions of the “diplomatic” activities of the PCI, such as the formation of ties with Third World liberation movements and the promotion of contacts between the Italian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which occasionally seem an adjunct to the main narrative.

While the principal focus of the book is the influence of the international Communist movement and the CPSU on the PCI and its domestic strategy, the discussion of domestic strategy remains at a fairly generic level (the “peaceful road” vs. more radical strategies, including the possible resort to violence). This Cold War-type conceptualization does not reveal some of the more profound connections. To mention what is probably the most important, the VII Congress of the Comintern (1935) initiated the Popular Front strategy, which remained at the root of the PCI’s own Italian road until the end. This strategy enjoined Communist parties to form a broad front of anti-fascist forces, and entailed an intermediate step of a progressive democratic government that would eradicate fascism and lay the bases for the transition to socialism. However much the earlier analyses of Togliatti were confirmed by the Popular Front strategy, the Comintern’s imprimatur was essential. In more concrete terms, this strategy meant an openness to alliances with the middle classes and with other anti-fascist political forces (including Catholics); if nothing else, this “frontist” political orientation and mindset foreclosed other strategic options throughout the PCI’s history. As Berlinguer saw it, the situation in 1973, after the Chilean coup, fitted the Popular Front schema very closely, and his response was perfectly in line with this key strand of the PCI’s ideological and political history, which, in turn, owed so much to the Comintern’s turn of 1935.

In this connexion, the book could also have included more on the Soviet conception of the Western Communist parties’ role after World War II.

The Rise and Fall of the Italian Communist Party is an excellent history of the PCI’s relationship with the international Communist movement, particularly the Soviet Communist Party, authoritative and rich in detail. The fact that it leaves readers asking for further exploration of crucial issues testifies to the interest it stimulates. It will become the essential reference for this key aspect of the Party’s history.