Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (review)

On 16 December 1981, Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the most powerful Communist party in Western Europe (Partito Comunista Italiano—PCI), announced in a television interview that he considered the “propulsive force” of the Bolshevik Revolution and of the Eastern regimes “terminated.” The Soviet-backed imposition of martial law in Poland, repressing the Solidarity trade union movement, was the last straw in a series of events and ideological turns causing the rift between Soviet Communism and the Communist reform forces in the West. Silvio Pons tackles the important question of how the PCI understood (only to a limited extent) the prospect of Communist collapse in the East, and, even more crucial, the question of how the international actions of the PCI affected the transition to a post-Communist Europe in the West as well as in the East.

Pons has no doubt that Eurocommunism, the PCI-led movement of West European parties that in the late 1970s pursued a “third way” between Soviet Communism and social democratic reformism, was, in Anatolii Chernyaev’s words, the “tombstone of the international Communist movement.” Even more, Pons adds, Eurocommunism was “one of the factors that contributed to modifying the international environment in Europe: its political message, connected to other factors and events, actively helped bring the Cold War to an end” (p. 247).

Does this statement give too much credit to the short-lived and rather inconclusive political experience of Eurocommunism? Or does it reveal the much overlooked international role of opposition forces that relied on several factors—popular support, a charismatic and innovative leadership, and even unresolved ideological contradictions—to influence the crucial political and strategic choices of the world’s main leaders? Or do the PCI’s choices reveal inescapable inner contradictions of Communism, even in its most reformed expression in the West?

Pons does not ignore the profound limits and even isolation of the PCI and Berlinguer, whom Pons describes as a “tragic figure . . . inadequate to confront even the crisis of Italian Communism” (p. xi). But Pons also partly endorses the party’s own assessment of Berlinguer as a “disarmed prophet” (p. xii) who prepared Europe’s Marxist left to reinvent itself in the post-Communist world.

The record supporting both conclusions is abundant. Pons, who benefited from his privileged position as director of Rome’s Gramsci Institute, which houses the PCI’s archive and releases its rich files with exemplary speed, bases his account on a vast collection of documents spanning from the late 1960s to the death of Berlinguer in 1984. This remarkable record is complemented by significant recent literature (in English, Russian, and other Slavic languages) on the Soviet and Eurocommunist experiences in the last decades of the Cold War.

The impact of Eurocommunism was minimal in the West and limited in the East. But this account shows it was stronger than has generally been believed. Pons’s general conclusions about its failures deserve special attention. Contrary to common wisdom and the trends in the PCI’s own historiography, Pons argues that the party’s defeat (failing first to enter the Italian government through a “historic compromise” with the Christian Democrats, then to become the national and international guide of the “third way”) was due much less to external constraints (the U.S. veto or the persistent exclusion of the PCI from a government role) than to the party’s inner contradictions. The PCI’s own “political culture” and its persistent identification with the Soviet legacy despite its own discerning criticism of Soviet conduct predated and even caused the party’s political isolation. The PCI’s failure to establish a workable relationship with Europe’s social democratic forces and its “ambition to reform Communism” in the East as well as the West were perhaps the “most influential and decisive” (p. 161) causes of its political defeat.

The book’s title emphasizes “the end of Communism,” and Pons’s main focus is on the persistent ambivalence of the PCI toward Moscow and toward the Soviet legacy that still constituted the...