Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (review)

In 1994, Elena Aga-Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky gave a paper criticizing Palmiro Togliatti, who for nearly forty years, until his death in 1964, served as the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). This husband-and-wife team of historians had gained access to the recently opened Soviet archives. They claimed in their paper that the archival records irrefutably proved how Togliatti had followed Iosif Stalin's lead in implementing the 1944 policy known as the "svolta di Salerno," the turn at Salerno, whereby the PCI had abandoned its revolutionary strategy and had adopted a moderate and cooperative policy with the other anti-Fascist parties. Historians by and large had accepted the Communist interpretation of this policy as the creation of Togliatti, whose independence from the Soviet Union, it was said, became the precondition of his successful effort to build a genuinely national and democratic Communist Party in Italy. Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky contended in their paper that the Soviet archives told a completely different story about the svolta di Salerno from the one recorded in conventional histories. In fact, Stalin made the decision to have the PCI cooperate with the other anti-Fascist parties in a government of national unity. The Soviet leader thought of Italy at this time strictly as a bargaining chip, to be sacrificed to the West for bigger prizes in Eastern Europe. Togliatti, as he always had done in the past, loyally supported Stalin. Such a thesis gravely offended the Togliatti priesthood. Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky lamented that their paper "thus gave rise to a long debate, often conducted in polemical form, at times far removed from scientific discussion" (See the Italian version of the book, Elena Aga-Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Togliatti e Stalin: Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca, 2nd ed., Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007, p. 9.)

The polemics grew much louder when their book appeared in 1997. They claimed that the pattern of Stalin's dominance over the PCI in all matters of serious concern to the Soviet Union, as manifested in the actual history of the svolta di Salerno, continued unabated until the dictator's death in 1953. The Soviet documents proved that Togliatti, in the manner of Stalinists everywhere, aspired above all "to satisfy the interests of the Soviet Union" (See Elena Aga-Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Togliatti e Stalin: Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), p. 149.)

Devoted to Stalin, Togliatti defended the Soviet Union and the people's republics of Eastern Europe as the most democratic societies on earth. While compelled to adapt his tactics and rhetoric to the democratic context made unavoidable by Italy's inclusion in the U.S. sphere of influence, he had a thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist mentality, which meant that for him the freedom to oppose government could exist only in a non-Communist society. Togliatti praised, as the political fulfillment of Communist philosophy, Stalin's methods for disposing of those who opposed the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat.

In their 1997 book, Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky characterized Togliatti as a moderate Stalinist. Brilliant, learned, and intellectually nimble, he was not the worst of the breed. Nevertheless, the archival documents revealed that on issue after issue of Stalin's foreign policy the Italian leader worked as a loyal servant of the Soviet Empire: chiefly—in addition to the svolta di Salerno policy—the disposition of Trieste and of Italian prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, as well as the decision to oppose the Marshall Plan and the formulation of PCI strategy during the watershed 1948 elections. For each of these issues, Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky followed the paper trail from the Kremlin to Rome and back. The documents, they said, left no doubt that the PCI did as it was told and put Soviet interests above those of...