The Italian communist who turned down Stalin to stay in democratic politics
In 1951 Stalin offered Palmiro Togliatti the top job at the Cominform. He said no, preferring to keep leading Italy's Communist Party, by then the largest in Western Europe. His supporters called him the Best, and his insistence on reaching socialism through parliament later fed the Eurocommunist trend.
Togliatti was born in Genoa on Palm Sunday in 1893, hence the name Palmiro, to two schoolteachers who were observant Catholics. After his father's death in 1911 left the family poor, a scholarship carried him through a law degree at Turin, where Benedetto Croce's idealism and his friendship with Antonio Gramsci shaped him. Unusually for a socialist he backed Italian entry into the First World War; though first rejected for severe short-sightedness, he volunteered, served and was wounded.
In 1919 he helped launch the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo with Gramsci, pushing it towards revolutionary politics and factory councils modelled on soviets; it went daily in 1921. That year he co-founded the Communist Party of Italy after a split from the Socialists. When Mussolini banned opposition parties in 1926, Togliatti escaped the arrests that caught many comrades only because he happened to be in Moscow. He led the party from 1927 until his death, apart from 1934 to 1938, when he represented Italy at the Communist International and Trotsky nicknamed him the Jurist of the Comintern. In 1930 he gave up Italian citizenship for Soviet citizenship.
After Fascism fell he served as deputy prime minister from 1944 to 1945 and minister of justice from 1945 to 1946, and sat in the Constituent Assembly, earning a place among the founders of the Italian Republic. Under him membership soared from a few thousand in 1943 to two million by 1946. His Italian Road to Socialism renounced violence and committed the party to working within the constitution and parliamentary democracy.
He was the first Italian communist to take part in televised debates. He survived an assassination attempt in 1948 and a car crash in 1950, and died in August 1964 while on holiday in Crimea. A Soviet city was then named after him. How closely he answered to Moscow remains debated by scholars and politicians alike.
Source: Palmiro Togliatti
