Compagno e cittadino: Il PCI tra via parlamentare e lotta armata (review)

François Furet’s wide-ranging analysis of left-wing European intellectuals, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), condemned Marxism-Leninism as an unparalleled scourge on the world. As an ex-Marxist, Furet could point to the power of Marxism’s ideals in his own coming of age on the French Left in the late 1940s, but the hideous practical consequences that ensued wherever Communists took power underscored the ideology’s fatal errors. Salvatore Sechi’s Compagno e cittadino: Il PCI tra via parlamentare e lotta armata is, in effect, a gigantic blowup of the Italian illusion concerning Communism.

Sechi, like Furet, went through a youthful Communist phase. This highly personal collection of essays begins with a long autobiographical introduction. An ambitious and talented intellectual, Sechi became a regular contributor to many of the leading journals of the left. For a time in the 1960s he entered the orbit of Raniero Panzieri’s legendary Quaderni rossi, the major early publication of Italy’s extra-parliamentary left, which viewed the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as insufficiently revolutionary. To gain a basic understanding of Sechi’s state of mind during his Communist period, it is enough to know that in 1972 he exulted in the terrorist assassination of the police official Luigi Calabresi. The left had denounced Calabresi for supposedly causing the death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist suspected of perpetrating the Piazza Fontana bank bombing three years earlier that inaugurated Italy’s savage reign of right-wing and left-wing terror. The accusation against Calabresi is now known to have been groundless. Sechi censures his ideologically infatuated young self, and he describes the process by which the scales of Communism fell from his eyes.

Heroes and villains crowd the pages of Sechi’s anthology of essays, which he wrote mainly in the 1990s. Among the heroes, Rosario Romeo stands out as the historian whose example inspired Sechi to think about history not in the Communist manner as a means of advancing a political cause, but as an academic discipline devoted to the pursuit of truth, no matter where the evidence might lead. Sechi draws a telling comparison between Antonio Gramsci, the guru of the Communist left, who was slavishly devoted to totalitarian Leninism, and Romeo, who was notable for his intellectual rigor and honesty. Having been persuaded by Romeo’s traditionalist principles of research and writing, Sechi became an uncomfortable presence at PCI section meetings. He began to ask awkward questions about the party line and to press for truthful answers based on evidence and facts. Amid fierce mutual recriminations, he soon ceased to be a member of the party.

Of the villains, none can compare with Palmiro Togliatti, the long-time leader of the PCI. For Sechi, Togliatti embodied all of the party’s political, intellectual, and moral failings. Relying to a significant extent on research in the Russian archives by Elena Aga-Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Sechi accuses Togliatti of having been little more than a front man in Italy for Soviet interests. Sechi asserts that after the publication of Aga-Rossi’s and Zaslavsky’s Togliatti e Stalin: Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca (Bologna: Il mulino, 1997), the verdict against “Il Migliore” (The Best), as the Communist faithful called Togliatti, cannot be disputed. (An expanded edition of Togliatti e Stalin appeared in 2007.) Nonetheless, with unflagging imperturbability, Communist and semi-Communist historians go on publishing vindications of “that Stalinist functionary implicated in the horrors of Communism who was Togliatti” (p. 243).

Sechi has compiled much research of his own, primarily from U.S. government archives. In general, he praises the U.S. diplomatic personnel based in post-1945 Italy for their pragmatic style and their accuracy in describing the turmoil and dangers facing the country. James C. Dunn...