Abstract
Traditionally, historians described the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as primarily a national party whose strategies had always been largely, if not exclusively, determined by the Italian socio-political environment. Scholars tended to emphasize the merits of the PCI in the construction of Italian democracy and its abiding commitment to the defence of the republican government throughout the postwar period. This view was seriously challenged after the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the PCI (January 1991), when a strand of ‘revisionist’ literature questioned the PCI’s national character and its democratic credentials. At the same time, the polemical use of these new interpretations in the political arena, along with a new range of historical evidence from the Soviet archives, contributed to turn the debate about the role of the PCI in Italian democracy into a never-ending diatribe. This article is aimed at chronicling the politicization of PCI history and discussing how this affected historiography, in a period characterized, more than ever before, by the political and public use of history.
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