Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI)

Italian political party, founded with the name Partito comunista d'Italia in 1921 following a split within the Socialist Party at the Livorno Congress. Its first leader was Amadeo Bordiga. The party's structure was clarified at the Lyon Congress in 1926, when Antonio Gramsci's ideas triumphed. After the Fascists arrested many of its leaders, among them Gramsci and Terracini, the party maintained a presence through its Paris centre. A pact with the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) in 1934 secured unity of action, and the party was one of the leading organizers of the International Brigades in Spain. Communist clandestine cells were behind the great strikes of March 1943, and the Communist Garibaldi brigades led the resistance. Togliatti, the PCI's leader, agreed to take part in a coalition government to rebuild the country. The PCI-PSI's Popular Front was defeated in the 1948 elections, and the PCI opposed the centrist governments that followed. It was successful in local government elections in N and C Italy. Togliatti's theory of ‘the national routes to Socialism’ (Yalta memorial, 1964) was expanded by his successor, Luigi Longo (1964–72),, who condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). Enrico Berlinguer (1972–84) formulated the ‘historical compromise’ between Communists, Socialists, and Catholics. The international crisis of Communism led the PCI's last party leader, Achille Occhetto, to dissolve the party in 1991. The majority went on to form the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), while the minority formed the Partito di Rifondazione Comunista.

The Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) or Italian Communist Party emerged as Partito Comunista d'Italia or Communist Party of Italy from a secession by the Leninist comunisti puri tendency from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) during that body's congress on 21 January 1921 at Livorno. The communist tendency, led by Armando Cossutta, left the party to form the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) or Communist Refoundation Party. In 1998 the PDS, with several smaller parties, the Laburisti (liberal socialists), the Cristiano Sociali (christian socialists), the Comunisti Unitari (right-wing split of the PRC), the Sinistra Repubblicana (left republicans) and the Riformatori per l'Europa (social democratic trade unionists), co-founded the "Democratici di Sinistra" (DS) or Democrats of the Left party. Later in the same year the Armando Cossutta tendency left the PRC to form the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (PdCI) or Party of Italian Communists. In 1926 its left wing led by Bordiga was defeated and replaced by a new leadership around Antonio Gramsci at a conference in Lyon which issued a set of theses expressing the programmatic basis of the party at that point. Togliatti would lead the party until it emerged from illegality in 1944 and relaunched itself as the Italian Communist Party.

The party took part in every government during the national liberation and constitutional period from June 1944 to May 1947. In the first general elections of 1948 it joined the PSI in the Democratic Popular Front but was defeated by the Christian Democracy party. The party gained considerable electoral success during the following years and occasionally supplied external support to center-left governments, never joining directly. The Party leadership including Palmiro Togliatti and Giorgio Napolitano (who in 2006 became President of the Italian Republic), regarded the Hungarian insurgents as counter-revolutionaries, as reported in l'Unità, the official PCI newspaper. However Giuseppe Di Vittorio , chief of the communist trade union CGIL, repudiated the leadership position, as did prominent party member Antonio Giolitti and Italian Socialist Party national secretary Pietro Nenni, a close ally of the PCI. Napolitano later hinted at doubts over the correctness of his party's position, and he would eventually write in Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica (From the Communist Party to European Socialism. A political autobiography) that he regretted his justification of the Soviet intervention, but quieted his concerns because he believed in Party unity and the international leadership of Soviet communism. Napolitano became a leading member of the miglioristi faction within the PCI, which promoted a social-democratic direction in party policy. Giorgio Amendola formally requested Soviet assistance to prepare the party in case of such an event.

In 1969, Enrico Berlinguer, PCI deputy national secretary and later secretary general, took part in the international conference of the Communist parties in Moscow, where his delegation disagreed with the "official" political line, and refused to support the final report. At the time the PCI was the biggest Communist Party in a democratic state, obtaining a score of 34,4% in the 1976 general election.

Relationships between the PCI and the Soviet Union gradually fell apart as the party moved away from Soviet obedience and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the 1970-80s, definitely embracing eurocommunism and the Socialist International. The PCI sought a collaboration with Socialist and Christian Democracy parties (the historic compromise).

During the "anni di piombo" the PCI strongly opposed the terrorism and the Red Brigades, who, in turn, murdered or wounded many PCI members or trade unionists close to the PCI. According to Mitrokhin, the party asked the Soviets to pressure the Czechoslovakian State Security (StB) to withdraw their support to the group, which Moscow was unable or unwilling to do. In 1980, the PCI refused to participate in the international conference of Communist parties in Paris.

In 1991 the Italian Communist Party split into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), led by Achille Occhetto, and the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista), headed by Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the PCI since 1988, stunned the party faithful assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now called in Italian politics the Bolognina. The collapse of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had convinced Occhetto that the era of eurocommunism was over, and he transformed the PCI into a progressive left-wing party, the PDS. Cossutta and a third of the PCI membership refused to join the PDS, and instead founded the Communist Refoundation Party.