CHAPTER FOUR
THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS
1948
Italy had been liberated by American and British troops from the south, beginning with the invasion of Sicily in July and the landings at Salerno, Calabria, and Taranto in September 1943. Until the final surrender, on April 29, 1945, of the remnants of those German troops who had occupied the remaining parts of the country soon after the fall of the fascist regime (and the start of the Allied offensive), the Soviets played no role in the Italian campaign whatsoever. The early worries of Italian anti-communists that the Soviet army presence in Austria and the victory of Tito’s Yugoslav partisans “would mean Stalinism soon in Lombardy” were allayed by the military victories of the Western Allies in the boot of Italy.1 The absence of the Soviet army in Italy also meant that, unlike many fraternal continental parties, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) never had to explain away the violent behavior of Red Army soldiers and could instead focus on alleged, sometimes quite real, depredations of the Western forces. At the same time, the interests of the Americans and British in the Italian peninsula became more pronounced over time, as the country, dominating the north-south and east-west axes of the Mediterranean, became increasingly important geostrategically given the bitter civil war that enveloped Greece. From the West’s point of view, it was essential that Italy not fall into communist—and therefore Soviet—hands.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, did not show great interest in participating in the determination of Italy’s future for most of the war. For example, in the revealing Ivan Maiskii memorandum of January 1944, the foreign ministry official dealt with the country only in passing: “The USSR need not play an active role here.”2
Toward the end of the war Moscow surprisingly undertook serious initiatives to inherit Italian colonies in the Mediterranean, but the Americans and especially the British blocked such moves. Still, the growing strength of the Italian communists and the dynamism of the leftist partisan movement led by them during the war and liberation kindled Moscow’s hopes that a form of a people’s democratic government might win control of the country. The Soviets calculated that this would not only bring about socialist or quasi-socialist reforms in the economy but also keep Western, and especially British, interests at bay. The challenge for Moscow was that the continuing presence of British and American troops in Trieste, a part of the Allied attempt to defuse hostilities between the Yugoslavs and Italians there, meant that whatever Stalin’s designs on Italy, they had to be pursued without the threat of armed conflict.
Under these circumstances, Italy provided an early test case for Stalin’s continental national liberation strategy. Absent the presence of the Red Army, a national liberation partisan army of leftist and centrist antifascists was to destroy the Nazi forces and emerge from the underground to seize control of the government. Many groups of communist-led partisans in the north of Italy thought quite differently; they planned to capitalize on their leading role in the struggle against Mussolini to lay the bases for establishing communist power, pushing aside the (still formally existing) monarchy and its supporters, many of whom had been involved in the fascist cause. “We will do this as in Russia,” they trumpeted.3
But Stalin opposed any attempt by the Italian communists to strike for power, especially after the armistice was signed between the Allies and the new government of General Pietro Badoglio on September 8, 1943, for fear that it would provoke a sharp Western reaction. After a meeting with Stalin on March 3–4, 1944, Palmiro Togliatti, the supremely capable and inspirational head of the PCI—and a loyal executive of the Comintern—returned to Italy from his long-term exile in the Soviet Union and pronounced his famous La svolta di Salerno (the Salerno turn), which set out the surprising communist policy for years to come: cooperation with the bourgeois government (which meant, at that moment, with the Badoglio government) in the name of promoting democracy and defeating fascism and its remnants at home and on the continent.4
5. Postwar Italy
An entry in the diary of Georgi Dimitrov from March 5, 1944, offers a good picture of the arguments Stalin presented to Togliatti for conciliation rather than striking for power. A division between the left and right among the democratic forces in Italy, Stalin maintained, would help only the British, “who would like to have a weak Italy [that they could control] on the Mediterranean.” According to Dimitrov’s notes, Stalin added that “for Marxists, form never has decisive significance,” and that even “a king is no worse than a Mussolini.” Therefore, it was a positive step for communists to join the much-maligned Badoglio government and make their compromises with the despised monarchy in order to ensure that a strong and independent Italy emerge from the social and political conflict that threatened to divide the country in two. Communists should be at the forefront of defending the national cause—this was the approach that Stalin advocated all across Europe and that inherently appealed to Togliatti, if not to all or even most of his comrades.5
The communist-led Italian partisans, who were itching to seize power and institute an Italian socialist republic, were instructed by their leaders to conceal their weapons in the underground and keep their organizations intact but not to oppose the new government. Stalin essentially told the Italian (and French) communist partisans to keep their powder dry unless they needed to defend themselves against “enemy attack.”6
As Elena Aga-Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky write, “Togliatti’s personal responsibility for preventing the outbreak of outright civil war in Italy should not be underestimated. With great skill the PCI transformed the armed troops of the resistance into a political organization, persuading partisans to hide their arms and abandon violence.”7 Only Togliatti’s unchallenged authority to represent Moscow’s wishes kept the PCI grassroots organizations in line with a parliamentary strategy of coalition with the Party of Christian Democrats. At the same time, Stalin’s preference for communist leaders like Togliatti, who had been trained in Comintern circles and spent the war years in Moscow, over home-grown communists who had fought in the resistance, provided Togliatti with invaluable prestige at home. Togliatti, in short, managed to enjoy the confidence of both Stalin and the PCI rank and file.
Although the stated policy of the PCI was to use its growing power and prestige at the end of the war and beginning of the peace to contribute to the building of democratic institutions in Italy, the option of armed insurrection was never far from the surface. Moscow even eventually helped fund an underground network of former partisan units (sometimes known as the “Gladio Rossa”) led by PCI militant Pietro Secchia that was well-trained and ready to provide military force if need be.8 It was also not beyond Togliatti to allude periodically to the threat of violence in political campaigning in the postwar period as a way to impress his audience with the power of the PCI. In September 1947, for example, he repeatedly brought up the potential use of violence and boasted about having some thirty thousand well-armed partisans “at our disposal.”9 These cross-cutting signals from the PCI were matched by similar mixed signals from the Soviets, who periodically criticized Togliatti for being too docile and too committed to parliamentary methods.10
Despite the ongoing desperate economic situation in Italy and the sharpening political tensions between right and left—what orthodox Leninists would consider a “revolutionary situation”—Togliatti, who was in constant contact with Moscow either directly or through the Soviet embassy in Rome, pursued a policy of cooperation with the parties of the left and center. Until May 1947, he even participated in a series of Christian Democratic–dominated coalition governments led by Alcide De Gasperi, who had close links both to the Vatican and to the Americans, who now demonstrated increasingly serious interest in Italian politics. De Gasperi was a social progressive who believed that it was “impossible to think of a sane democracy where … the founding elements of Christianity, fraternity and solidarity, do not enter into the system of governance.”11 He was convinced that Italy’s fundamental problems were unemployment and rural poverty and that “social solidarity” should become the hallmark of Italian democracy.12 Where De Gasperi parted ways with Togliatti was his genuine attachment to the Catholic Church and Italy as a Catholic nation. Accordingly, he frequently emphasized his commitment to containing the spread of “atheistic communism.” In doing so he was able to keep both the conservative and socially progressive wings of the party acting in concert.13 Togliatti’s insistence in his speeches that “we respect popular religious convictions” did not get far with the thoroughly anti-communist De Gasperi.14
Nevertheless, at the outset of the coalition government, De Gasperi successfully enlisted Togliatti’s aid to restrain communist protests and attempts by scattered PCI activists to break up rallies and demonstrations called by the Christian Democrats.15 Togliatti’s ability to contain the impulse to seize power among many PCI veterans of the partisan movement and his unwillingness to unleash the traditional rebelliousness of large segments of what might be called the Italian underclass was essential to De Gasperi’s ability to govern.16 The two postwar Italian leaders worked together for the betterment of the Italian people more than many communists or, for that matter, Christian Democrats, would have liked. Still, there was never a genuine coalition, as CD member Attilio Piccioni observed, but rather “forced cohabitation.”17
4.1 Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi speaking at Duomo Square in Milan during the election campaign, April 13, 1945. TOSCANI ARCHIVE / ALINARI ARCHIVES MANAGEMENT, FLORENCE. PHOTOGRAPHER FEDELE TOSCANI.
Within the PCI itself, Togliatti tended to downplay the models of the Soviet Union and of the “new democracies” of eastern Europe and to focus on the need to build the political and economic influence of the communists in Italy. In his speeches and writings after returning from the Soviet Union, Togliatti underlined his goal of making the PCI “a big party, a mass party” that would, in addition to representing the working class, of necessity, find a way to work “with the Catholic peasant masses.” He added, “The unity of the anti-fascist resistance of liberal and democratic forces should not be broken” but “rather extended and reinforced.”18 His view was that communist strength was too heavily concentrated among factory workers in the northern industrial centers and that the PCI needed to expand its influence among agricultural workers in the south as well as among social groups such as women and youth. Togliatti encouraged his comrades to develop their relationships with allied parties in the government and to perform their functions conscientiously as members of the ruling elite on behalf of the Italian people.19 With a strong partner in De Gasperi on his right, Togliatti could then concentrate his efforts on marshaling the forces on the left under communist leadership.20 He was exceptionally proud of having built the PCI into a 2.3 million–member party, which made it the biggest Communist Party in any European country, east or west, and of having deep influence on the nearly seven-million-member United Trade Union Confederation. In an interview with an American journalist, the “short and shrewd” PCI chief stated,
At present, we don’t want communism in Italy. We stand simply for an end to foreign intervention, for the control of industry, and for agrarian reform. We want an advanced democracy to prevent the return of fascism. We want to nationalize chemical production, mining, electricity, the banks, about as much as in Britain.21
The emergence of Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union mooted Togliatti’s ideas of progressively increasing the communist penetration of Italian society and control over the making of government policy. The Americans increased their influence on the Italian government, which alienated both the Kremlin and Togliatti. Stalin and Molotov made it clear to Pietro Quaroni, the first postwar Italian ambassador in Moscow, that they did not believe his protestations that the De Gasperi government sought a middle ground between east and west. “You Italians reserve your words for us and your deeds for the Americans,” Molotov said to Quaroni in a December 1945 conversation, adding that Italy should not expect as much interest from Moscow as, for example, Romania for simple geographical reasons.22 Moscow’s growing frustrations with the De Gasperi government overlapped with those of Togliatti.
At the end of 1946, De Gasperi signaled to the Americans at the Paris Peace Conference that he would be glad to visit the United States. Having received reassurances that his visit would be welcomed and that he would not return empty-handed, De Gasperi accepted an invitation to a world affairs conference in Cleveland sponsored by Henry Luce, editor of Time magazine. He was met by outgoing Secretary of State James Byrnes and shepherded around Washington by the energetic Italian ambassador, Antonio Tarchiani. High-level meetings between Italian and American financial and commercial officials produced a significant loan from the Export-Import Bank and assurances of American payments for the stationing of U.S. troops in Italy. According to his daughter, who accompanied him, De Gasperi was thrilled with the traditional ticker-tape parade on Broadway, sponsored by Italian-Americans.23
The Italian prime minister returned to Italy on January 17, 1947, determined to expand cooperation with the Americans. This would require considerable convincing of opponents within his own party, where Catholic activists expressed frequent misgivings about Washington’s policies. More crucially, it meant the step-by-step undermining of the role of the communists and socialists in the ruling coalition. De Gasperi understood that a pro-American policy could well be compromised by Togliatti and his PCI comrades. The pro-Moscow head of the Italian socialists, Pietro Nenni, wrote about the Christian Democratic prime minister, “The trip to America has changed De Gasperi more than I could have believed. At one point, he said to me, ‘I am not the same man.’ We shall see what he meant by that.”24
Already in December before going to the United States, De Gasperi had reshuffled his cabinet by introducing ministers from small moderate left parties, which he calculated would reduce the influence of the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) on the Italian workers.25 De Gasperi had spent the war years working in the library of the Vatican and was a thoroughgoing anti-communist, if progressive, Christian Democrat, as were many similar European Christian Democrats (and founding fathers of the European Union) at the time, most notably Konrad Adenauer of Germany and Robert Schuman of France. He required little encouragement from the Americans to dispense with the communists in the government. But first he needed the cooperation of Togliatti and the PCI to get the unpopular Peace Treaty signed on February 10, 1947, and article 7 of the constitution, which renewed the Lateran Pact with the Vatican (which Togliatti supported against the wishes of many in his party) approved by the parliament. With these goals achieved, De Gasperi resigned from the government on May 13 in order to form a new one without the PCI and PSI. The accompanying negotiations must have been painful for Togliatti, who seemed willing to compromise on almost any issue in order to continue in the ruling coalition, even in a greatly diminished role. PSI leader Pietro Nenni even got the impression that the PCI leader suffered from an excess of political “cynicism,” which others have called “cold realism,” not unlike that often attributed to his ostensible mentor Josif Stalin.26
Togliatti’s preparedness to compromise notwithstanding, De Gasperi understood that in the long run he could not hope to secure American capital for and engagement in Italy while maintaining an alliance with the PCI and PSI. Besides, for the Christian Democrat, this was also a matter of principle. He was convinced that the communists and socialists had never abandoned the goal of “the conquest of power, albeit through elections,” and he had no illusions that their victory would mean a different kind of democracy that would be “non-Western” and untenable for the Christian Democrats.27 He was therefore happy to put behind him the uncomfortable situation of sharing power with parties that, in his view, followed a “dual track” policy of participating in the government while simultaneously remaining opposed to it.28 Eliminating the PCI and PSI from the coalition also freed De Gasperi’s hand for launching a number of financial reforms led by the renowned liberal economist and Bank of Italy director Luigi Einaudi, and, more generally, turning for support to what he called “ ‘the fourth party,’ those who have money and economic power.”29
The announcement of the Marshall Plan in June 1947, which in its broadest outlines De Gasperi had known to be coming, put the Italian communists in an even more difficult situation. Togliatti knew as well as anyone that Italy desperately needed funds to rebuild industry, and therefore he did not initially criticize the overall program. But he had hoped—no doubt naively—that it would be possible to make “selective” use of the Marshall Plan, attracting investment to Italy, while rejecting the debt repayments demanded by Washington.30 To no avail: neither the Soviets nor, for that matter, the Americans, would countenance partial allegiance.
The Cominform and the Italians
Although the French and Italian communist parties followed scrupulously Moscow’s directives regarding their political and economic programs, Stalin was increasingly unhappy with the results of the parliamentary strategies pursued by both parties. He also was concerned about the attractiveness of the Marshall Plan to French and Italian communists, not to mention to the governments of eastern Europe. He was upset that the various European parties did not coordinate their stances on the Marshall Plan with Moscow. The French communists, he said, had unjustified fears that “France would collapse without American credits.” It would have been better to leave the coalition governments than to wait to be thrown out.31 He no doubt thought the same about the Italians. In an era of growing hostility demonstrated by the capitalists, the Italian and French communists should feel in no way constrained about agreements within their respective coalitions, just as Stalin felt little constrained by the agreements with Great Britain and the United States about Europe. As he had noted already in a speech in October 1938 regarding the possibilities of a coming conflict in Europe, “All states adopt masks: if you live among wolves, you must behave like a wolf.”32
As a result of his growing lack of confidence in the communist parties of western and eastern Europe to represent Moscow’s interests, as well as those of their own countries as he saw them, Stalin initiated in September 1947 the founding meeting of the Cominform in Szklarska Poręba, a resort town in western Poland, as a way to deliver a number of important, essentially radicalizing, messages to the assembled party leaderships. Although the initial idea for such a meeting came from Władysław Gomułka, the leader of the Polish party, and was strongly supported by the Yugoslav communists, the real impetus behind the meeting came from Moscow and from Stalin himself.33 Anticipating that his conciliatory moves in the spring of that year would be subject to severe criticism at the meeting, Togliatti declared that his health would not permit him to go on such a long trip and sent his deputies Luigi Longo and Eugenio Reale in his place. “Should they reproach you for not having been able to seize power or for letting us be ousted from the government,” Togliatti instructed them, “tell them that we could not turn Italy into a second Greece.”34
Led by the Yugoslav delegation, the attacks on the Italian and French parties at the Cominform meeting were indeed sharp and unremitting. The Western communists were accused of harboring parliamentary illusions and of having been unprepared for the counterattacks both had suffered at the hands of the ruling parties. They were charged with having lost their revolutionary spirit and with making illegitimate concessions to the bourgeoisie.35
After his return to Rome, Luigi Longo passed on Moscow’s message to his comrades at a meeting of the PCI directorate in early October. The PCI “did not have a sufficiently aggressive attitude and did not fight after its exclusion from the government, and did not succeed in mobilizing the masses against it.” Moreover, the PCI had failed to take the lead in the struggle against Anglo-American imperialism and instead had allowed Italy to take a neutral stance “towards the two blocs.”36 This issue became particularly important for Moscow when the respected Italian communist Umberto Terracini, president of the Constituent Assembly, was rebuked by the PCI for the “even-handed” suggestion that both the United States and the USSR refrain from intervening in Italian domestic affairs.37
The sharp criticism of the Italian (and French) parties at the Cominform encouraged radicals in the PCI like Pietro Secchia to engage in “active resistance,” encouraging strikes and violent confrontations with the police by the PCI’s increasingly restless armed supporters in the north. Togliatti seemed to go along with this ramped-up radicalism in the fall of 1947, calling for the working people to “go into the piazzas for the defense of democracy and the republic.” There were temporary seizures of towns, like that of Perugia in November, and hundreds of bomb-throwing incidents and impromptu strikes. In Bitonto, near Bari, the communists took over the city hall for one night. A temporary strike of transport workers in Rome brought the city to a halt for several hours. Given their brevity, these communist-led actions seem to have been intended to remind the government and society of the PCI’s strength but not to prompt civil war.38 According to the Italians socialist leader Pietro Nenni, the increasingly anti-American tone of Togliatti’s public utterances during this period made it almost impossible for him to rejoin the government even if he wanted to; it was clear that De Gasperi also noted this shift in PCI aggressiveness.39
In the face of these radical street actions and sharp propaganda attacks, Stalin, in a meeting with the militant Secchia in December 1947, once again urged caution. There should be no uprising, which would inevitably, in his view, arouse the Western powers, especially the Americans, and potentially lead to full-scale military intervention. The Soviet leader repeated his fundamental advice to the West European communists: “We maintain that an insurrection should not be put on the agenda, but one must be ready, in case of an attack by the enemy.”40 When Secchia responded that the PCI’s activities were not a matter of an uprising but of conducting “a determined economic and political struggle,” Stalin rebuked him with the observation that the result would be the same. “This is not due at this time. You must, however, become stronger, and prepare yourselves well.”41
In a similar meeting with Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party, Stalin also urged preparations for an active defense, as a way to avoid inviting counterrevolution and of repulsing it if it occurred, but not—under any circumstances—to initiate an armed uprising. The main message Stalin tried to impress upon the French leader was that one should not be vulnerable to attack. “It is important to remember,” Stalin lectured Thorez, “that the enemy takes no pity on the defenseless, the weak.”42
Even more so than the meeting with Stalin, Secchia’s meetings with Zhdanov in December 1947 proved delicate and difficult for the Italian. Parliamentary elections were coming up in April, and the PCI’s hopes were high for a victory at the polls. Given the rising economic dissatisfaction of Italian workers and peasants from ongoing poverty and unemployment, not only did the party see itself rejoining the government, but it counted on winning the election outright and leading a new popular front government of the PCI and PSI. But for this to happen it was important that a majority of the Italian public perceive the communists as pursuing a policy of responsible government and independent national goals—which conflicted, as both Secchia and Zhdanov were aware, with the admonition from the PCI’s critics at Szklarska Poręba to raise the level of struggle and communist partisanship. The Hungarian delegate Mihály Farkas had criticized the Italians for “parliamentary cretinism,” and the Yugoslav Edvard Kardelj denounced them for “opportunism and parliamentarism.” Secchia understood that such criticism did not go over well with Togliatti or with the greatest number of PCI-PSI voters. To navigate the treacherous waters between advancing the PCI’s electoral interests and agitating for social revolution could destroy the PCI’s chances in April. Given the contradictory signals, Moscow appeared willing to let the PCI leadership deal themselves with the inevitable internal arguments about how to proceed.43
The December 1947 meetings with Stalin, Zhdanov, and other members of the Soviet leadership also gave Secchia the opportunity to ask directly for financial aid for the party’s propaganda efforts in the election campaign. Secchia mentioned the quite substantial sum of $600,000 as needed for keeping the party’s various publication efforts up to speed.44 Although there is no record of the actual delivery of such funds, the U.S. ambassador James Clement Dunn got the impression that the PCI election campaign was extremely well funded. The communists, he wrote, seemed to have “unlimited” resources for “posters, leaflets, buses, flags, banners, and general paraphernalia” to entice the masses to their cause.45 In fact, over the next several decades the PCI was probably the best-funded Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc, though help from the Soviet Union usually did not come in cash payments (the dollars the Secchia requested) but in the delivery of raw materials from Yugoslavia (at least until mid-1948) and the other people’s democracies that the PCI would then sell for Italian lira.46
If Secchia entertained any ideas in December 1947 of using Moscow’s support for him to gain control of the Italian party from Togliatti—and some think that was his intention—he was quickly disabused of any such notions. During Secchia’s meeting with Stalin, the Soviet leader provided a clear signal that Togliatti remained the Kremlin’s favorite to continue to lead the PCI by demonstrating elaborate and solicitous concern about Togliatti’s health and about his eating and sleeping habits. Stalin also demonstrated a certain prescience when he pressed Secchia on making sure that the PCI provided sufficient personal security for their leader. The party, he told Secchia, should form its “own security service, a small guard of experienced people. The opponent tries to murder the best party leaders.”47
In March 1948, in the edgy international atmosphere provoked by the February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, Togliatti sent a secret message to Stalin stating that the PCI was prepared to stage an uprising. In the same message, though, Togliatti underlined that he personally was against doing so, given the bloodshed that would result and the possibility of unleashing a new world war. Stalin and Molotov agreed. They also let Togliatti know that he should resist Yugoslav pressures to become a more “revolutionary” party. It was increasingly clear that Moscow disagreed politically and ideologically with Belgrade’s advice and was deeply annoyed with Tito’s cheeky interference with the Italians.48 Tensions between Stalin and the Yugoslavs grew markedly in the spring of 1948, and Togliatti was pointedly advised not to mediate.
The Elections of April 1948
Notwithstanding the Cominform’s criticisms of the Italians’ parliamentary tactics, Stalin encouraged Togliatti’s efforts to garner support among the Italian middle classes for the Popular Democratic Front, the electoral alliance of the PCI and the PSI, led by the socialist Pietro Nenni. The symbol of the Popular Democratic Front was the Italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the PCI’s strategy was to appeal to Italian patriotism, the heritage of the Risorgimento, and the unity of Italians in the face of alleged threats to their sovereignty from the Americans.
Despite De Gasperi’s high level of popularity in the beginning of 1948—it was never stronger, before or after—Stalin was still confident in the PCI’s success. There were, however, some signs of trouble for the Popular Front from the outset. The widely admired anti-communist socialist Giuseppe Saragat led a splinter group, the Italian Workers’ Socialist Party, which seceded with a small group of dissidents from the Nenni-led PSI because it had joined the Popular Front.49 The formation of this group of independent social democrats proved consequential, since it sapped support from the popular front.
The Czechoslovak coup had a powerful effect on the Italian left, in part because of the proximity of the country, in part because the political systems of the two democracies were seen as comparable. In both, the communist parties attracted a substantial minority of the electorate; in both the labor movement was heavily dominated by the communists, and not the social democrats; and in both the Soviet Union enjoyed considerable popularity for its defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet the Italians were in a weaker position to engage in the kinds of country-wide demonstrations and parliamentary machinations that characterized the Czechoslovak coup. Moreover, unlike the Czechoslovak case, the Italian army and police, especially the Carabinieri, the Italian militia, were firmly in the hands of anti-communists. Some PCI and PSI radicals no doubt thought that the Italian communists should follow the lead of their Czechoslovak comrades and instigate a process of striking for power, an alternative suggested in Togliatti’s message to Stalin above. But there were also significant segments within the PSI that were disturbed by the coup and concerned about its meaning for Italy’s future. PSI leader Riccardo Lombardo noted that when Jan Masaryk fell to his death in a Prague courtyard—either having been pushed or, more likely, committing suicide—“his body plunged into the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, the Piazza Castello in Turin, the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. There are many Socialist workers who can no longer turn their heads.”50
Interestingly, the effects of the Czechoslovak coup were profoundly ambivalent. U.S. ambassador Dunn, for example, believed that, besides frightening some Italians away from supporting the PCI, it could also “increase the prestige of the local communist party” in the eyes of others and encourage some workers to join “the Communist bandwagon.”51 The PCI’s positive official reaction to the coup deepened the differences between the “soft” and “hard” left, exacerbating the already poor relations between the Popular Front of the PCI-PSI and Saragat’s Independent Socialists, who were outraged by the Prague events.52
Togliatti still had legitimate grounds for optimism in the coming election. In addition to their traditional strong support among Italian factory workers in the north, the communists had made considerable inroads among landless and poor peasants in the south since the previous election in 1946. In Sicily, the Popular Democratic Front demonstrated surprising electoral prowess on April 20, 1947, by winning the plurality of the vote in local elections with some 30 percent versus 21 percent for the Christian Democrats. Ten days later, on May Day, a criminal mafia gang opened fire on an assembly of communist farmers who were celebrating the electoral victory at Portella della Ginestra (in the municipality of Piana degli Albanesi), killing eleven demonstrators and wounding twenty-seven others. The exact political motives behind the “massacre of Portella della Ginestra” remain unclear to this day, but the publicity surrounding it, in which the victims figured as saints and martyrs for the left, gave the communists even greater confidence that they would garner an unprecedented victory in the south during the April 1948 elections.
In addition, there was the powerful Italian labor confederation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), led by the PCI veteran Giuseppe Vittorio, which was one of the few united labor unions of its type in Europe and was heavily influenced by the communists. Togliatti had also fashioned an appealing political platform for Italian intellectuals and academics, “half Croce and half Stalin” as he called it. One historian of postwar Europe writes, “The PCI gathered around itself a court of like-minded scholars and writers, who gave to the Party and its politics an aura of respectability, intelligence and even ecumenicalism.”53 Thus with support from intellectuals and peasants, workers, and, increasingly, civil servants, the PCI could claim a nationwide and multiclass basis of support.
The Italian communists were not the only ones who predicted their victory in the upcoming elections. George Kennan was so worried about the PCI coming to power through the ballot box that on March 15 he wrote a panicky memo, suggesting that rather than take the chance of losing the elections to the communists, which would inevitably mean the end of democracy in Italy, the U.S. government should advise the Italian government to outlaw the PCI, provoking a civil war and using American troops to reoccupy parts of Italy. Kennan wrote, “This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy,” meaning the north would fall to the armed communists while Rome and the south would be democratic and protected by the Americans. But to him, even this would have been preferable to a “bloodless election victory” by the communists, which would have constituted a disastrous political defeat in Italy and Europe as a whole.54
Kennan’s worries about Italy were shared by the American government, including its highly engaged ambassador in Italy, James Dunn. The ambassador, however, seemed more concerned about a communist uprising and a subsequent civil war in case of a PCI election defeat than about a possible communist victory at the polls, and he drew up plans for the protection and potential evacuation of American citizens in Italy in the event.55 The U.S. leadership interpreted the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 as confirmation that communist parties could not be trusted to participate in democratic parliamentary politics without taking advantage of them by attempting to seize political power for themselves. The Americans were convinced, as exemplified by a March 1948 intelligence report, that a communist victory in the April elections would set Italy on the same path as the East European countries. With its victory, the PCI
would demand and receive the ministries of control such as those of the Interior, Justice, Communications, and Defense. There would follow a discreet, but rapid, Communist infiltration of the armed forces, the police, and the national administration. The time required to complete the transition might be a matter of months or of years, but the end would be a fully developed police state under open and exclusive Communist control.56
The pattern of “takeover” in eastern Europe left a deep impression on American officials. The Soviets understood this as well. Molotov wrote decades later in the spirit of the first generation of Cold War historians, “What does the ‘Cold War’ mean? We were simply on the offensive. They became angry at us, of course, but we had to consolidate what we conquered.”57
U.S. foreign policy, military, and intelligence leaders mobilized their resources to try to influence the upcoming election. Their efforts were justified by a series of National Security Council documents that emphasized Italy’s centrality to American security interests in the Mediterranean. National Security Council (NSC) document 1 / 1 of November 14, 1947, stated unambiguously that “the United States has security interests of primary importance in Italy … and the measures to implement our current policies to safeguard these interests should be strengthened without delay.”58 Italy was deemed a key object of American policy, and according to NSC 1 / 2 of February 10, 1948, the United States “should be prepared to make full use of its political, economic, and if necessary, military power” to assure that Italy took a democratic and anti-communist path.59 The document went on to recommend the deployment of U.S. troops to Sardinia, Sicily, or both if a communist-dominated government were to take over the peninsula.60 NSC 1 / 3, which was issued on March 8, less than two weeks after the Czechoslovak coup, was even more darkly foreboding in language and tone, suggesting that the potential electoral victory of the PCI would mean that U.S. interests in the Mediterranean were “imminently and gravely threatened.”61 At the same time, the U.S. military, already stretched thin by its commitments in Europe and Asia, was extremely hesitant about using force in Italy and expressed the view that military action was not a serious option.62
Motivated by these assessments of the upcoming election as an important test for the fate of postwar Europe, the American government initiated a broad campaign of propaganda and economic measures to support De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats. On De Gasperi’s urging, the Americans also aided the other non-communist parties, including liberals, anti-clerical urban elites, and Social Democrats like Saragat’s independent socialists as an additional way to erode support for the Popular Democratic Front. American ambassador Dunn likewise urged his superiors in Washington not to focus exclusively on the Christian Democrats, given the “historic Italian distrust of clericalism.”63 If the Americans were overly reliant on the Christian Democrats, there was a danger that anti-clerical liberals, especially, would be drawn to the communists.
Still, the Christian Democrats were the main beneficiaries of U.S. assistance and largesse. The newly created Central Intelligence Agency delivered large sums of money to them for their campaign coffers—according to ex-CIA agent Mark Wyatt, at the astronomical level of $8–10 million a month—helping them match up to the communists’ extensive propaganda efforts funded in good part by Moscow.64 The American embassy served as “election central,” with Ambassador Dunn traveling all over the country by train on a whistle-stop tour, distributing American goods and foodstuffs while touting the benefits of American friendship and good will.65 The fundamental idea was to win votes for the anti-communists. But the Americans also campaigned to convince the Italians that it was in their interests to join the American-backed Organization for European Cooperation, formed on April 16 to plan for the investment and distribution of Marshall Plan funds; and the West European Union, which was being formed at the time of the elections by Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg to coordinate their collective defense programs. (On March 17, 1948, these countries had signed the Brussels Treaty.) The Italians were also enticed by U.S. support for Rome joining the United Nations, and, of course, by the financial aid they would receive through the Marshall Plan. By the end of the election campaign, the message that none of this would be possible if the communists won became increasingly explicit.66 De Gasperi stated,
I would not like to see that day when those who attacked the Americans entered into the government. I would not like to see that day because I would fear that the Italian people, waiting on the shore for ships loaded with coal and wheat, would see them turn their bows to other shores.67
Hundreds of copies of Greta Garbo’s darkly anti-Soviet Ninotchka were dubbed in Italian and distributed throughout the boot of Italy for popular viewing. The movie became even more in demand after the Soviet ambassador protested to the Italian government against its showing.68 The U.S. government also encouraged Italian-American groups to engage in a widespread letter-writing campaign to their relatives in Italy, warning them of the dangers of communism and promoting the cause of liberal democracy. Italian-American letters, packages, and promises of more aid if the elections turned out right were apparently most successful in the south of Italy, which remained buried in endemic poverty and unemployment.69 The “Sons of Italy,” which was heavily involved in the letter-writing campaign, also raised substantial sums for the anti-communist efforts of the Christian Democrats. Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra were recruited to the effort to stimulate support for the pro-American cause in Italy. Stepped-up visits of American warships to Italian ports were designed to demonstrate Washington’s resolve, as well as ability, to resist Soviet or Yugoslav intimidation.70 A month before the elections, Washington also carried out a major publicity campaign around handing back twenty-nine merchant marine vessels to the Italians, another gesture to demonstrate the benefits of American friendship.71
Perhaps most important, the Americans made a series of barely veiled threats about the curtailment of Marshall Plan aid to Italy if the elections turned out in favor of the communist-socialist coalition.72 As much as the Italian communists tried to soft-pedal this threat and suggest that the Americans—capitalists to the end—would surely continue the Marshall Plan help in any case since they needed markets to sell their products, already the implicit threat proved very effective. But just to make sure, Ambassador Dunn and the State Department convinced the secretary of state to make a public statement to the effect that American aid would be suspended and all Italian communists denied entry into the United States if a Popular Front government were elected. On March 19, 1948, in a speech widely reported in the Italian press, Secretary of State Marshall stated at the University of California, Berkeley, that in that case, “This Government would have to conclude that Italy had removed itself from the benefits of the European recovery program.” The communist newspaper L’Unità noted in its editorial: “Marshall’s language clearly shows how the U.S. intends to use aid as an electoral weapon of blackmail against Italian people.”73 The liberal Milan paper Corriere della Sera stated essentially the same in its headline about Marshall’s speech: “Italy will decide with its vote whether it accepts aid plan.”74 The same newspaper noted on the day before the election that “another eight million dollars of Marshall Plan [aid had been] given to Italy.”75
The American electoral tactics were so successful, and worried Togliatti so much, that he urged Stalin, initially with limited results, to bolster the cause of the left by initiating high-level USSR-Italian trade talks and promising shipments of Soviet grain and coal to Italy in case of a communist election victory.76 In a meeting with Secchia on December 16, 1947, Zhdanov responded to the PCI requests by saying that one should avoid the impression that the USSR was mixing into Italy’s affairs and that Italy was therefore not an independent state. If the Soviets intervened in the politics of a sovereign state like Italy, Zhdanov noted at a second meeting, they would “look like the Americans.”77 Stalin at least feigned confidence that the Italian communists would do well regardless of the outcome of the election: “In Italy and France our position is so strong that we need not fear any election or any change of government. In time of necessity, the majority of the population of the country will be with us, notwithstanding all the contriving in selling themselves out to the American capitalist bourgeoisie.”78 The Soviet leader also backed Togliatti’s hard-driving and effective propaganda tack of counterposing Italian nationalism and the interests of the Italian people to the outside interference of the Americans and their West European marionettes.79
With that said, the Soviets made some last-minute concessions by concluding new trade and commercial agreements with the government in Rome and withdrawing reparation claims, steps that were noted positively in the Italian press.80 Perhaps most critically, the Soviets also made several important concessions to the Italians regarding their claims on their former colonies—in contrast to the Americans and British, who insisted that these territories be turned over to UN and British trusteeships until they would be “ready” for independence, as the Italian Peace Treaty demanded. For the Soviets, this was not just election politics. They were convinced that it would be better if the Italians kept their previous colonies than placing them under what would effectively be British and American control.81 (Molotov’s initial efforts to negotiate Soviet control of Tripolitania after the defeat of the Italians at the end of the war were resolutely and successfully opposed by the British and Americans.)
Soviet support on the colonies issue, however, could not completely offset the poor image of the communists in the Italian public that resulted from the Soviets’ continuing resolute backing of Yugoslav claims to the city of Trieste, which set off a serious international crisis in May and June of 1945. This issue was especially important in Venice and the Veneto region, where anti-communist propaganda related to it was further fueled by the many stories that circulated about Yugoslav partisan massacres of Italian civilians and mass burials in the foibas, the karst crevices that cover Dalmatia and the border regions of Istria and Veneto.82 In this context, the Soviet rejection, announced just one week before the election day, of a U.S.-British-French proposal to return Trieste to Italy was interpreted by some as “evidence that the Soviet Union had given up hope of a Communist victory in Sunday’s election.”83
A later CIA study, which assessed the American propaganda efforts in Italy at that time as more effective than anywhere else in Europe, emphasized the central importance of the March 20, 1948, declaration on Trieste: “The statement caused a tremendous sensation in Italy, and contributed substantially to the Center victory.”84 Manlio Brosio, Italian ambassador to Moscow from 1947 to 1951, was more skeptical, writing on March 22, 1948, “The Soviets offer us the colonies that the English do not want to give us, the English and Americans propose Trieste to take the initiative away from the Russians. But in the meantime nothing is decided, what will the promises come to after the election?”85
The PCI understood that the Americans had made important inroads into the Italian media outlets. American attitudes dominated Italian cinema, radio, and the press, complained Secchia at the second meeting of the Cominform in Belgrade, June 21, 1948. The American-led anti-communist “campaigns of lies” were supported, he maintained, by the Vatican and the Christian Democrats. He recognized as well that the PCI’s propaganda failed to communicate the many accomplishments of the Soviet Union and the “new democracies.” Secchia urged his Italian comrades to be bolder in juxtaposing Moscow’s peace policies to the “danger of the division of Europe” posed by the Marshall Plan and its advocates.86 In the PCI’s postmortem discussions of the April 1948 election catastrophe, the attractiveness of the Marshall Plan was brought up repeatedly. Even communist workers assessed its benefits for their own factories and industries.87 Personally, Togliatti would probably still have welcomed Marshall Plan aid to improve the conditions in and productivity of Italian factories, yet he had no choice but to follow Moscow’s rejectionist line.88
Perhaps even more important for the outcome of the competition between the Soviets and the Americans to win support for their respective clients among the Italian population was the intense campaign by the Catholic Church to mobilize the faithful to vote against the communists in the election. Pope Pius XII was convinced that the vast majority of nonpolitical Catholics were anti-communist. The Vatican therefore launched a get-out-the-vote campaign that would use the local churches’ lay leaders and priests as voting agents.89 Having worked in the Vatican library during the war to escape fascist repression, De Gasperi himself had excellent ties with the church. The increasing evidence of the persecution of priests in communist eastern Europe and especially the specter of the Prague coup in February 1948 motivated the Catholic Church and its social organizations to hold electoral campaign meetings and to publish and distribute anti-communist literature. Sunday sermons focused on the potential disaster for Italy if the Popular Democratic Front won. The archbishops of Milan, Turin, and Palermo even threatened to deny communist voters absolution, never mind that it would have been hard to know who these were.90 In a post-election discussion of what had gone wrong in the election campaign, communist leaders would later complain about the use of “terror and intimidation” by priests and monks against the Popular Front.91 While such language might sound like an exaggeration, in some parishes the election was framed as a vote “For or against Christ.”92 Holding an election audience with sixteen hundred Roman tram workers, the Pope emphasized that “the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of truth and faith, is irreconcilable with materialistic maxims, the acceptance of which means to desert the Church and cease to be Catholic.”93 Just as he did with the issue of the Marshall Plan, Togliatti tried in the election campaign to soft-pedal the actual risk of Church sanctions against communist voters. His comrades also tried to portray themselves and their PCI-PSI front as supportive of Catholic believers, much to the disgust of more militant PCI members.
In any case, the PCI attempts to present themselves as moderates fell short among the electorate. The Church campaign for “Christianity” and against “godless Communism” was met with a groundswell of popular support. Christian pilgrimages wound their way to Rome from various parts of the country to pray for an outcome of the election that would be agreeable to God. One priest stated that “our Lady … will not allow the enemies of religion to prevail.” Marian visions of a bleeding, weeping, or levitating mother of Christ appeared to both young and old in various parts of Italy, though mostly in the south. Carlo Ginzburg noted that “only after the victorious outcome of the election did this Marian fever gradually die down.”94
In the end, the communists were much more soundly defeated than anyone anticipated. The Christian Democrats won 48 percent of the vote, an increase from 35.2 percent in 1946, which secured them an absolute majority in the House of Deputies. The PCI-PSI Popular Democrat Front dropped from 40 percent to 31 percent, some of its loss explainable by the creation of the independent anti-communist Social Democratic Party, which won 7 percent of the vote.95 The anti-fascist academic Mario Einaudi noted that the communist front (the PCI and the PSI) polled eight million votes, while the Independent Socialists, a pro-government party which represented for the PCI little more than “traitors to the cause of the working class,” received some two million.96
As the Americans and the Christian Democrats became increasingly confident of victory by early spring, they started to worry about whether the communists would stage an uprising either before the elections, to preempt a loss at the polls, or afterward, to disrupt the Italian political system with the goal of conquering power. “If, as seems probable, the communists fail to secure representation in the new government,” predicted an April 9, 1948, CIA report, “they will then launch a new program of strikes and sabotage to wreck the recovery program and discredit the government.”97 That the electoral campaign was characterized by a lot of small-scale violence, mostly incited by the left but also involving the government and the right—fistfights, attacks on deputies, shootings, beatings, police excesses, sometimes leaving dead and wounded—fueled concerns that more serious violent uprisings could be in the offing.98 Minister of Interior Mario Scelba claimed to have uncovered a communist “Plan K,” dated April 21, 1948, that supposedly outlined the stages of a Bolshevik-style coup d’état in case of a communist election victory. He deployed carabinieri to strategic points around the country to make sure that this did not happen. Already the previous fall Scelba had issued directives to track the movements of “foreigners” in Italy, to assemble reliable lists of Soviet citizens in the country, and to develop police methods of controlling demonstrations and strikes.99
The communists did indeed make preparations for an armed uprising in March 1948, but eventually both Togliatti and Stalin concluded that such a move could provoke another war.100 The communists’ hard-worn tactics were consistent with those of the early postwar period: they made sure they could defend themselves should the government declare them illegal, but they would not violently seize control of the government. In secret meetings with the Soviet ambassador, M. A. Kostylev, Togliatti received the same message from Moscow; pay no attention to the Yugoslavs, who were encouraging the PCI to strike for power, and engage in armed conflict only if attacked. Clearly, the danger of a military confrontation with the Americans was very much on Moscow’s mind.101
The De Gasperi government understood the potential threat from the PCI and prepared itself, with American help, for the eventuality of an uprising. Italian army and carabinieri units were strategically deployed around the country in anticipation of a civil war.102 In addition, the Christian Democrats created their own skeleton paramilitary structure which was supposed to mobilize anti-communist social forces in the case of civil war, though these units were nowhere as well organized and numerous as those of the communists.103 Moreover, there is some indication that Rome used the specter of a communist insurrection as a way to increase American resources and commitment.104 Still, the threat was real, and the Christian Democrats needed and received American help to counter it. The delivery of weapons for the Italian police and militia was especially important, and at the same time a delicate issue prior to the elections because De Gasperi worried that the revelation of the delivery of American arms could be used against him by the communists.105
Togliatti reportedly boasted of having thirty thousand well-armed partisans at his command in the so-called apparato, and electoral rhetoric by the communists that matters in Italy would soon be settled one way or another, made De Gasperi and his advisors even more nervous.106 Meanwhile, Cominform activists in Belgrade talked about the “huge implications” of the Italian elections and planned to set up support points and train specialists in sabotage techniques in the case of a civil war in Italy.107 The atmosphere in Washington was tense, not least because of the February 1948 Czech coup, which had left everyone on edge about the possibility of a dramatic shift in communist fortunes on the European continent.
Though there were advocates of an uprising among the northern partisan groups, Togliatti was firmly opposed and was able to maintain discipline. The PCI Central Committee communiqué about the elections of early May 1948 spoke only of the “religious terror” to which the communists were subjected, “distortions” of their platform propagated by the government, the “anti-Soviet and anti-communist calumnies” resulting from the interference of the imperialists, and the “falsification” of the electoral results.108 In a party meeting of April 26, after the results were apparent, Togliatti also spoke about problems in the cooperation between the PCI and PSI, where some socialist rank-and-file members, especially in more remote areas of the country, did not go to the polls at all because of poor communications and a lack of cooperation from party headquarters.109
The lessons of the April elections were not lost on Togliatti or Stalin. It now seemed highly unlikely that the Italian communists would come to power by legal means, and neither the Soviet nor Italian party leaders were ready to force an armed confrontation that would provoke a civil war, like in Greece, if not a wider conflict that would involve the Americans, British, and Soviets. Instead, both Stalin and the Italian party leadership continued to think defensively. Togliatti sought to strengthen the role of the PCI in local affairs. By penetrating the decentralized and sometimes chaotic Italian local and provincial government institutions, the party, he hoped, would be able to foster its social and political programs. Although remaining loyal to Stalin and the Cominform, Togliatti gradually, if perceptibly, developed his own strategy for preserving the PCI’s role in Italian politics and society. He always seemed to keep one eye on the communists’ ability to contribute to the development of Italian democracy and to participate in governing it. He also maintained the alliance with the PSI, though the Popular Democratic Front, about which he had never been terribly enthusiastic, was soon formally disbanded. Pietro Nenni, the leader of the PSI, likewise continued to maintain good relations with the PCI, although he was now less willing than he had been during the election campaign to compromise his own socialist principles, especially if he thought that this required holding back criticism of the USSR. Meanwhile, Stalin, according to Italian ambassador Brosio in Moscow, still hoped for an election victory at some point that would put Italy in the anti-imperialist camp and reverse the country’s approach to the Marshall Plan.110
Still, the disappointing results of the elections affected Stalin’s view of the West European communists. The strongest Communist Party in western Europe had proven incapable, even under seemingly fortuitous circumstances—including forging a functional alliance with the socialist party, something the French communists were unable to accomplish—to overcome the stalwart resistance of established social forces like the church, centrist social organizations, and some anti-communist labor unions, especially when these were backed by American money and interests. Not only that, Stalin seemed to have learned that the communist parties would not be able to stop the process of West European economic and political association promoted by the European Recovery Plan. Counter to Moscow’s declared interests, Italy, like France, would soon become part of a larger western European community with the strong encouragement of the United States. Italy joined the West European Union in late 1948 and was an original signatory of the NATO alliance treaty in 1949. Stalin’s influence over Italian politics would remain minimal and restricted to state-to-state diplomatic relations, apart from the still-vibrant ties between the Italian and Soviet communist parties. Meanwhile, the Soviets would pay more attention to their own “realm,” the countries of east central and southeastern Europe, one of which—Yugoslavia—was causing myriad problems for Moscow’s ambitions of a hegemonic role in the communist world.
The Assassination Attempt on Togliatti
As Togliatti left the Chamber of Deputies on the morning of July 14, 1948, in the company of his PCI comrade and lover Leonilde Iotti—but by chance not with his usual bodyguard—he was shot three times in the chest with a .38 caliber pistol. The lone assassin was a young neo-fascist student by the name of Domenico Pallante, who carried among his possessions a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and sundry fascist scribblings of his own.111 Pallante confessed that he was upset that Togliatti had brought Italy into the Cominform.112 Reportedly, when questioned by the police, Pallante calmly defended his actions with the accusation that the communist kingpin “was an enemy of the country and has ruined Italy.”113 Meanwhile, Togliatti was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Most likely, he did not expect to survive. But although his injuries were severe—one of the bullets had entered his left lung and had to be extracted in a dangerous two-and-a-half-hour operation—they did not prove fatal. Ultimately, Togliatti recovered and returned to political life.
Stalin responded almost immediately to the assassination attempt with a telegram sent to the PCI. Aside from the obligatory mention of distress, his message to his Italian comrades was downright insulting. It read, “The CPSU is grieved that Comrade Togliatti’s friends were not able to protect him from the foul underhanded attack.”114 While the PCI wanted to place the responsibility for the assassination attempt squarely on the Italian government, Stalin blamed the Italian communists themselves. Secchia, who took over the party leadership during Togliatti’s surgery and hospitalization, could do little else but raise the “problem of vigilance” within the party. At a meeting of the party directorate in August, he called for the formulation of a document that would establish the party’s position on the need to mobilize the masses in the defense of the party itself and the country’s democratic institutions. Longo added that the party also needed to engage in serious self-criticism for not having provided sufficient personnel for Togliatti’s protection.115
4.2 The assassination attempt on Palmiro Togliatti outside the Italian parliament, July 25, 1948, as portrayed in the communist illustrated magazine Illustrazione del Popolo. NATIONAL LIBRARY, FLORENCE.
The Italian government took the dangers posed by possible reactions of the PCI and rank-and-file communists to the attempt on Togliatti’s life quite seriously. Already in his first public response De Gasperi did what he could to defuse the crisis:
I hope my colleague the Honorable Togliatti can quickly resume his activities and his fight for the ideas that inspire him by exercising his rights to free debate and [participating in] the parliamentary democracy. The attack, abhorrent in itself, is meant not only against the person of the Honorable Togliatti but in the end targets the democratic system, creating an atmosphere of hatred and resentment, in which the call to force, to violence, to revolt makes impossible every effort to reconstruct a peaceful democracy in Italy. Facing this deplorable attack we reaffirm our faith in the democratic system and in the fair competition of parties for the progress of liberty and social justice.116
What the Christian Democratic–led government could not know then was that the communists faced total disarray in their ranks about how to react. The attempt on Togliatti’s life brought a number of tensions on the Italian left to a head. For many communist workers in the northern regions, the act marked the ultimate insult to the PCI and its work toward improving the status of Italian labor within the framework of Italian democracy. Many union members immediately took to the streets in protest, occupied their factories, and proclaimed a strike. The labor actions had a spontaneous character, and the episodic violence that accompanied them in some places could be attributed both to the behavior of local worker groups and to the more or less aggressive reactions of the local authorities. Due to the strikes and demonstrations, Milan was paralyzed; Genoa’s factories and city districts were seized by militant workers; and many cities in the north of the country came to a standstill. Some of the clashes between workers and police were extremely bloody. Generally, however, the government was well-prepared for a potential uprising, and the civil strife did not presage a seizure of power.
Pietro Secchia, who had been itching for a fight with the authorities, especially since losing the election in April, almost immediately after the assassination attempt proclaimed a general strike on behalf of the party directorate of the PCI. Secchia claimed that the government response to the strikes and demonstrations constituted a systematic attack on the working class, threatening “democracy and liberty” among the Italian people and designed “to provoke [a] civil war.”117 Labor confederation leader and PCI member Giuseppe Di Vittorio, who arrived back from the United States the night of the attempt on Togliatti’s life, was unhappy about the fait accompli of the general strike. He believed, as did many of his comrades in the union leadership and in the PSI and PCI, that the unions were not properly prepared for it, and that it might therefore well fail and result only in bloody repression. The Italian army and the carabinieri were known to be loyal to the government and could easily be mobilized to crush the workers. In a tense meeting with De Gasperi on the morning of July 15, Di Vittorio promised to call off the general strike but demanded a guarantee of amnesty from the Italian president Luigi Einaudi for the thousands of strikers who were under arrest and faced potential prosecution. Unlike some members of his government, De Gasperi understood that the general strike was not a communist conspiracy intended to overthrow the government. He agreed to guarantee that individual workers would only be tried for specific crimes.118
In meetings of PCI leaders at the Soviet embassy it quickly became apparent that the Kremlin also disapproved of the general strike, fearing that it might provoke a larger conflict.119 Tensions with the West were high already, given the February Czechoslovak coup, the Soviet walk-out from the Allied Control Council for Germany on March 20, and the increasing restrictions on Allied access to Berlin in the spring and early summer of 1948. Problems with the Yugoslavs were coming to a head, and while the prospect of a Soviet intervention to aid the Italian communists was unlikely, to say the least, Moscow worried as much as the Italian government about potential Yugoslav military intervention in Italy in the case of an uprising. Even Secchia thought, as he told the Soviet ambassador Kostylev, that the best possible outcome of an all-out struggle with the government was communist control of the north and middle of Italy, “while the forces of reaction will keep Rome and the territory south of Rome.”120 The American assessment of the balance of forces was very much the same, and neither side relished the scenario. As a consequence, the PCI directorate, which was coordinating its activities with Di Vittorio, called off the strike on July 16, declaring that it had accomplished its goals of demonstrating that the working class could assert its rights against the government.
With scattered exceptions of continuing worker militancy, the situation in Italy returned to normal. Ninety-two thousand people had been arrested, with some seventy thousand of them slated to be brought to trial. Fourteen people, seven of them policemen, had been killed during the disturbances, and 206 were wounded, 120 of them policemen.121 While Minister of Interior Scelba could finally assure De Gasperi that the situation was under control, the prime minister fretted that the communists could always stage an uprising that would establish a dictatorship. At the same time, De Gasperi was unwilling either to outlaw the PCI, convinced that it had not sought the overthrow of the government, or to create a “second De Gaullism” of the right, which would have meant the erosion of Italian democracy and of the Christian Democratic Party itself.122
As he emerged from his hospital bed, Togliatti himself made it clear that the policies of the party would not change. “Calm down,” he told his comrades, “don’t lose your heads.”123 Togliatti recovered quickly and continued his advocacy of a gradualist strategy in domestic politics. He had to accept one important defeat, when Catholic workers led by Giulio Pastore denounced the general strike, seceded from the communist-dominated labor federation, and formed their own Catholic union in mid-October 1948—the first serious break in the unity of the Italian labor movement. Togliatti’s determined efforts to overcome the disappointment of the lost election and the failed general strike were complemented by his attempts within the Cominform to reach an accommodation with the Yugoslav comrades, who had been expelled from the organization by the resolution of June 28, 1948. But his efforts to find points of rapprochement between the Yugoslavs and Moscow, like those of Władysław Gomułka in Poland and Czechoslovak party leader Klement Gottwald, ran afoul of Stalin. Already on July 4, 1948, Stalin had sent Togliatti and Gottwald a note in which he had ordered them not to talk to the Yugoslav “political acrobats” and to let the Cominform resolution condemning Tito and the Yugoslavs speak for itself. As for the invitation to the Yugoslav party congress which Tito had issued to the Italians and a number of European communist leaders shortly before in an obvious attempt to break out of the isolation imposed by Moscow, Stalin instructed them that they should turn it down in any way they wanted.124 The Soviet leader was determined to deal with Tito and the Yugoslav renegades in his own fashion—including, as access to former Soviet party archives has revealed, a series of planned assassination attempts on Tito.125
Stalin was not particularly happy with Togliatti, yet he could not find a graceful way to remove him from the leadership of the PCI, especially because of the wide popularity and respect the senior Italian communist enjoyed within the Italian party as well as in broad leftist circles of Italian society. At the end of 1950, when Togliatti was in Moscow to recover from an automobile accident, Stalin suggested to the Italian leader that he take over the leadership of the Cominform. But Togliatti would have none of it and did not hide his pique at being asked to step down from the helm of the party he had worked so hard to turn into a mass organization.126 In a letter to Stalin of January 4, 1951, Togliatti stated his reasons for staying at the leadership of the PCI as follows: First, he did not want to weaken the PCI, for which his own person was of major symbolic importance. Second, he did not want to undermine in any way the “national” character of the PCI by his moving from Italy to Moscow. And third, he wanted to stay where his work would have the greatest effect and that was, he was convinced, in his own country.127
Under the impression of the fears of an insurrection that had accompanied the election and the threat of a nation-wide uprising led by the PCI which had become palpable in the wake of the assassination attempt on Togliatti, the American government stepped up its already considerable presence in Italy. Since the country was seen as critical to NATO’s position in the Mediterranean, the United States was committed to supporting the Italian government in every way possible to keep the PCI from gaining power and influence in the Italian peninsula.128 When the Italian municipal elections of 1951 yielded a voter breakdown similar to that of the national elections of April 1948, Washington was distraught that all the economic aid and political advice that had been lavished on Italy in the years since the momentous national election had accomplished so little in changing voting patterns. The United States experienced the same disappointment in the elections to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1951, when the PCF showed consistent support among the electorate. American government officials decided that it was not enough just to support the Italian and French anti-communist parties and military institutions. The deputy director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, went so far as to suggest in September 1951 that the purpose of American and NATO policy should be “to cripple” the communist parties of Italy and France, “to uncover their true intentions, to sow discord in their ranks and promote defection, to deprive them of privilege and respectability, and to drive them underground.”129 On the part of the Americans, this was no longer a matter of competing propaganda claims, but an all-out covert attempt to dislodge the communists from western Europe, as the Soviets had eliminated the noncommunist opposition from eastern Europe in the late 1940s, though without the same level of violence.
The Italian elections of April 1948 represented an important new stage in the development of the U.S. commitment to countering communist influence in western Europe and the coming of the Cold War. The victory of the Christian Democrats gave Washington the confidence that it could combat communist subversion with its own form of clandestine struggle. U.S. policy was now committed to fighting communism in Europe and eliminating potentially crippling internal civil strife in Italy and France, in particular. Meanwhile, both De Gasperi and Togliatti, though from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, continued their commitment to Italian democracy. Togliatti’s goal was to increase the PCI’s influence at the local and provincial levels as a way to build electoral strength for new national elections. Stalin wanted more from Italy, counting on the PCI’s electoral strength and Moscow’s own subversive activities in Italy to advance Soviet interests in Europe. The elections of 1948 and the events surrounding the attempt on Togliatti’s life indicated that they still had much to hope for from the country and its Communist Party.