National Communism Vs. the National Way To Communism — an Italian Interpretation

Abstract

SHE BREAK-AWAY of Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the Polish revolt which led to the successful (until the present, at least) seizure of power by Gomulka in October, 1956, all have served to shake the traditional Leninist-Stalinist conceptions of the relations between the Soviet and other Communist states, between the Soviet Communist and other Communist parties. These traditional relationships could be summed up, perhaps, in the phrases guiding state and guiding party. The Soviet Union was the guiding state for all other socialist (communist) states; the Soviet Communist was the guiding party for all Communist parties. Marshall Tito was the first to raise the standard of Subsequently, in various states of eastern Europe a series of purges removed from power Communists who, whatever their real sins, were accused of advocating national communism, condemned by Stalinists as being basically anti-Soviet and therefore, by definition, harmful to the interests of the working class. The emergence of a powerful Communist China, the death of Stalin, the rise of Khruschev, the subsequent attacks on Stalin's memory and misdeeds, and the efforts to woo Tito back into the Soviet fold, culminated in 1956 with the elaboration by Khruschev, and its acceptance by the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U., of the concept that the road to socialism might take different forms in different countries, and that violent revolution was not a necessary prerequisite to success. In other words there were legitimate national ways to communism, to be distinguished from illegitimate national communism. Throughout all this the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.), the largest in the Western world, has had a hard time. The initial reaction of its leadership was to criticize the Khruschev line openly and then to fall back into a more or less formal acceptance of it, but not with much grace. Within the Palmiro Togliatti, the Secretary General, has had to fight off both the hard-core Stalinists who accused him of being too revisionist, and a group of younger, more flexible leaders who accused him of being intellectually fossilized, of being holier than the Pope, of being incapable of understanding and realizing the significance of developments in the Soviet Union, of combining extreme tactical flexibility and possibilism at the level of