Palmiro Togliatti | |
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| General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party | |
| In office May 1938 – August 1964 | |
| Preceded by | Ruggero Grieco |
| Succeeded by | Luigi Longo |
| In office November 1926 – January 1934 | |
| Preceded by | Antonio Gramsci |
| Succeeded by | Ruggero Grieco |
| Minister of Grace and Justice | |
| In office 21 June 1945 – 1 July 1946 | |
| Prime Minister | Alcide De Gasperi |
| Preceded by | Umberto Tupini |
| Succeeded by | Fausto Gullo |
| Deputy Prime Minister of Italy | |
| In office 12 December 1944 – 21 June 1945 | |
| Prime Minister | Ivanoe Bonomi |
| Preceded by | Himself (June 1944) |
| Succeeded by | Manlio Brosio Pietro Nenni |
| In office 24 April 1944 – 18 June 1944 | |
| Prime Minister | Pietro Badoglio |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Himself Giulio Rodinò (December 1944) |
| Minister without portfolio | |
| In office 24 April 1944 – 12 June 1945 | |
| Prime Minister | Pietro Badoglio Ivanoe Bonomi |
| Member of the Chamber of Deputies | |
| In office 8 May 1948 – 21 August 1964 | |
| Constituency | Rome (1948–1953; 1958–1964) Italy at-large (1953–1958) |
| Member of the Constituent Assembly | |
| In office 25 June 1946 – 31 January 1948 | |
| Constituency | Italy at-large |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti 26 March 1893 Genoa, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 21 August 1964 (aged 71) Yalta, Crimean Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
| Political party | PSI (1914–1921) PCd'I (1921–1943) PCI (1943–1964) |
| Domestic partner(s) | Rita Montagnana (1924–1948) Nilde Iotti (1948–1964; his death) |
| Residence(s) | Modena, Emilia-Romagna |
| Alma mater | University of Turin |
| Profession |
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Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti (Italian: [palˈmiːro toʎˈʎatti] ; 26 March 1893 – 21 August 1964) was an Italian politician and statesman, leader of Italy's Communist party for nearly forty years,[1] from 1927 until his death.[2] Born into a middle-class family, Togliatti received an education in law at the University of Turin, later served as an officer and was wounded in World War I, and became a tutor.[1] Described as "severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base" and "a hero of his time, capable of courageous personal feats",[1][3] his supporters gave him the nickname il Migliore ("the Best").[4][5][6] In 1930, Togliatti renounced Italian citizenship, and he became a citizen of the Soviet Union.[7] Upon his death, Togliatti had a Soviet city named after him.[2] Considered one of the founding fathers of the Italian Republic,[8] he led Italy's Communist party from a few thousand members in 1943 to two million members in 1946.[3]
Born in Genoa but culturally formed in Turin during the first decades of the 1900s, when the first Fiat workshops were built and the Italian labour movement began its battles, Togliatti's history is linked to that of Lingotto.[2] He helped launch the left-wing weekly L'Ordine Nuovo in 1919, and he was the editor of Il Comunista starting in 1922. He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia, PCd'I), which was founded as the result of a split from the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI) in 1921.[1] In 1926, the PCd'I was made illegal, alongside the other parties, by Benito Mussolini's government. Togliatti was able to avoid the destiny of many of his fellow party members who were arrested only because he was in Moscow at the time.[1]
From 1927 until his death, Togliatti was the secretary and leader of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), except for the period from 1934 to 1938, during which he served as Italian representative to the Communist International, earning the il giurista del Comintern ("The Jurist of Comintern") nickname from Leon Trotsky.[2] After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the formation of the Cominform in 1947, Togliatti turned down the post of secretary-general, offered to him by Joseph Stalin in 1951, preferring to remain at the head of the PCI,[2] by then the largest communist party in western Europe.[1] His relations to Moscow were a continuing subject of scholarly and political debate after his death.[1][9]
From 1944 to 1945, Togliatti held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of Italy,[1] and he was appointed Minister of Justice from 1945 to 1946 in the provisional governments that ruled Italy after the fall of Fascism.[2] He was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of Italy.[2] Togliatti inaugurated the PCI's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism",[10] the realisation of the communist project through democracy,[11] repudiating the use of violence and applying the Italian Constitution in all its parts (that is, that a Communist government would operate under parliamentary democracy),[2] a strategy that some date back to Antonio Gramsci,[12][13] and that would since be the leitmotiv of the party's history;[14] after his death, it helped to further the trend of Eurocommunism in Western Communist parties.[1] He was the first Italian Communist to appear in television debates.[1] Togliatti survived an assassination attempt in 1948,[1] a car accident in 1950, and he died in 1964 during a holiday in Crimea on the Black Sea.[1][2]
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Palmiro Togliatti". Britannica.com. 20 July 1998. Archived from the original on 8 July 2023. Retrieved 8 July 2023. Last updated 22 March 2023
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) - ^ a b c d e f g h i "Accaddeoggi 21 agosto 1964: Togliatti muore a Yalta". WelfareNetwork (in Italian). 21 August 2022. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
- ^ a b "Palmiro Togliatti. Un eroe prudente". Rai Cultura (in Italian). January 2019. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
- ^ "Togliatti, l'abilita' de 'Il Migliore'". Rai Storia (in Italian). Archived from the original on 21 February 2014. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
- ^ "Palmiro Togliatti: Il 'rivoluzionario costituente'". Rai Storia (in Italian). August 2021. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
- ^ Romeo, Ilaria (21 August 2021). "Palmiro Togliatti, la morte del Migliore". Collettiva (in Italian). Retrieved 5 July 2023.
- ^ Montanelli, Indro (17 November 1999). "I rapporti fra Togliatti e Stalin". Corriere della Sera (in Italian). p. 41. Archived from the original on 20 December 2009. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
- ^ Rota, Emanuel (2013). A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration. Fordham University Press. p. 1. doi:10.2307/j.ctt13x057m.4. ISBN 978-0-8232-4564-2. JSTOR j.ctt13x057m.4.
- ^ Mieli, Paolo (29 October 2018). "Togliatti e Stalin, il gran rifiuto. Non accettò la guida del Cominform". Corriere della Sera (in Italian). Retrieved 8 July 2023.
- ^ Amendola, Giorgio (November–December 1977). "The Italian Road to Socialism". New Left Review (106). Retrieved 5 July 2023.
- ^ Bracke, Maud (2007). "West European Communism and the Changes of 1956". Which Socialism, Whose Détente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968. Budapest: Central European University Press. ISBN 978-6-1552-1126-3.
- ^ Femia, Joseph P. (April 1987). "A Peaceful Road to Socialism?". Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (paperback ed.). University of Oxford Press. pp. 190–216. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198275435.003.0006. ISBN 978-9-0045-0334-2.
- ^ Liguori, Guido (21 December 2021). "Gramsci and the Italian Road to Socialism (1956–59)". Gramsci Contested: Interpretations, Debates, and Polemics, 1922–2012. Historical Materialism. Translated by Braude, Richard (E-book ed.). Brill. pp. 94–123. doi:10.1163/9789004503342_005. ISBN 978-0-1982-7543-5. S2CID 245586587.
- ^ Bosworth, R. J. B. (13 January 2023). "Giorgio Amendola and a National Road to Socialism and the End of History". Politics, Murder and Love in an Italian Family: The Amendolas in the Age of Totalitarianisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 152–186. doi:10.1017/9781009280167.008. ISBN 978-1-0092-8016-7.