Italy: Grey-Flannel Communism

Shouted a party member from the rear of the crowded ballroom: “Let’s talk about Stalinists and anti-Stalinists!” The challenge shocked the 4,000 comrades who jammed Bologna’s ornate 13th century Palazzo del Podestá. For as long as he could, the speaker, Italian Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, ignored the interruption and continued his prepared address on national politics. Just before he finished, Togliatti replied to the heckler: “We are for the socialist revolution, which has opened the road to a new society. This society has been built by the Soviet Union. Who built it—the Stalinists or the anti-Stalinists?”

If the answer was ambiguous, the demand for debate had been uncomfortably clear. The doubts and divisions raised by

Khrushchev’s destalinization drive and the Sino-Soviet conflict have plunged the Italian Communist movement into bitter internal quarrels.

This week the party’s central committee meets to cope with a fresh factional split brought on by the apertura a sinistra (opening to the left), the parliamentary alliance between Christian Democrats and left-wing Socialists (TIME, Feb. 9). One group of militant Communists fears that successful center-left cooperation would weaken the party by weaning away thousands of rank-and-file supporters, favors discrediting the alliance before it is launched (by demanding more radical reforms than the new coalition can support). A more moderate group, which includes Togliatti, argues: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, on the theory that the apertura can later be widened to include Communists as well.

Roads to Power. The Communist Party’s 1,700,000 members, 6,700,000 electoral supporters (one-fifth of the total Italian vote in 1958), and an income of $50 million a year from dues, investments and Soviet subsidies make it the largest, most influential Communist Party in the free world. It is also the fattest and most bourgeois, charge its critics. Years ago, Togliatti’s double-breasted suits had become the symbol of Italy’s “respectable” Communism, seeking power not through revolution but in Parliament and at the polls. These days, more and more Italian comrades wear well-cut grey flannel, while their women appear at party functions in modish sweaters with tasteful single strands of pearls. But right now there are some bad rips in the party’s grey-flannel respectability.

At one extreme are a minority of diehard Stalinists, longing for the early postwar years when Communist partisans expectantly scrawled signs, “Ha da veni’ Baffone”—Big Mustache (Stalin) is coming. They blame Khrushchev’s coexistence politics for shattering the unity of the Soviet bloc. Togliatti’s support of Khrushchev, says Senior Stalinist Mauro Scoccimarro, 66, has “created confusion within the party.” Scorning Togliatti’s parliamentary tactics, the Stalinists still prefer the revolutionary road to victory. Like Scoccimarro. most of the old guard are veterans of Mussolini’s jails, but some are young toughs who shouted at a recent meeting: “Khrushchev is a madman who belongs in a padded cell!”

Also opposing Khrushchev and Togliatti, but for different reasons, are a growing number of young radicals who almost captured control of the party in 1960 and who, since the Moscow Congress last fall, have returned to the attack. Charging the Italian Communist leadership with “coresponsibility” for Stalin’s crimes, the so-called “renovators”‘ demand democratization of internal party affairs, greater freedom from Soviet dictation. Leader of the renovators is burly Giorgio Amendola, 54, a skillful organizer who has never visited Russia or its satellites and has no desire to do so because, he says, low living standards “depress me.” Adds Amendola: “We must acknowledge the diversity of positions of the U.S.S.R. and China, of Yugoslavia and Cuba, of Italy and France” (whose Communist Party, along with Czechoslovakia’s, has denounced the Italian party as “revisionist”‘ and “opportunist”). Such diversity, says Amendola, is ‘ an inevitable consequence of the Communist advance in the world.”

To some, Amendola is not a liberalizer but merely an opportunist who seeks to oust Togliatti. “He wants neither a Stalinist nor an anti-Stalinist party.” says one critic. “He wants a nice, homemade Communism that knows how to play the game in the Italian manner—that is, with a card up its sleeve.”

Balancing Act. Most of the aces are still held by Togliatti. 68. He too advocates Communist diversity—in fact, he coined a word to describe it: “poly-centrism”—but he does not go so far as Amendola. Once an ardent Stalinist, Togliatti smoothly switched to supporting Khrushchev, and the Italian party was one of the first to denounce Khrushchev’s ideological enemies, the Red Chinese and the Albanians. Not that there is much personal warmth between him and the Kremlin boss. Several years ago, Togliatti routinely began his day by asking his staff: “What new mess has our peasant got us into today?”

Dexterously balancing between the Stalinists and the renovators, Togliatti has retained his hold on the party leadership, which seems less interested in protecting Marxist purity than in pursuing, along with much of the nation, a middle-class standard of living. Bologna’s Communist Mayor Giuseppe Dozza, for instance, speaks not of overthrowing capitalism, but of inviting Christian Democrats into the city administration, repairing roads, luring new private industry.

Serenaded by such unrevolutionary slogans, the factory workers who make up 38% of the Communist Party’s rolls are showing some loss of political ardor. The Communist Party is offering television sets and typewriters as prizes for comrades who sign up the most recruits. The party merchandizers also give away six-month subscriptions to the Red newspaper. L’Unità,* at the end of the free-trial period, a copy of L’Unità arrives with an unsolicited gift—a party card made out to the head of the family. But the party’s drive for new members is uphill most of the way. Example: in the Red stronghold of Genoa, the number of registered party members has dropped from 90,000 in 1956 to 55,000 last year.

* Which last week was redder than usual after its Moscow correspondent reported a rumor that Khrushchev had been the target of an assassination attempt. After a Kremlin spokesman denounced the story as a “provocative lie,” L’Unità tried to pin the rumor on Western newsmen. Khrushchev, meanwhile, was relaxing at his Black Sea villa near Sochi and joked with a visiting Brazilian diplomat about the reported attempt on his life.