Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti (Italian: [palˈmiːro toʎˈʎatti] ; 26 March 1893 – 21 August 1964) was an Italian politician and statesman who led the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) for nearly forty years, from 1927 until his death. 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. Described as "severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base" and "a hero of his time, capable of courageous personal feats", his supporters gave him the nickname il Migliore ("The Best"). In 1930, Togliatti renounced Italian citizenship, and he became a citizen of the Soviet Union; upon his death, a Soviet city was named after him. Considered one of the founding fathers of the Italian Republic, he led Italy's Communist party from a few thousand members in 1943 to two million members in 1946.
Born in Genoa but culturally formed in Turin during the 1900s and 1910s, when the first Fiat workshops were built and the Italian labour movement began its battles, Togliatti's history is linked to that of Lingotto. 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. 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.
From 1927 until his death, Togliatti was the secretary of Italy's Communist party, except for the period from 1934 to 1938, during which he served as Italian representative to the Communist International, earning the nickname il giurista del Comintern ("The Jurist of Comintern") from Leon Trotsky. 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, by then the largest Communist party in Western Europe. His relations to Moscow were a continuing subject of scholarly and political debate after his death.
From 1944 to 1945, Togliatti held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, and he was appointed Minister of Justice from 1945 to 1946 in the provisional governments that ruled Italy after the fall of Fascism. He was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of Italy. Togliatti inaugurated the PCI's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism", the realisation of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Italian Constitution in all its parts (a Communist government would operate under parliamentary democracy), a strategy that some date back to Antonio Gramsci, and that would since be the leitmotiv of the party's history; after his death, it helped to further the trend of Eurocommunism in Western Communist parties. He was the first Italian Communist to appear in television debates. Togliatti survived an assassination attempt in 1948, a car accident in 1950, and he died in 1964 during a holiday in Crimea on the Black Sea.
Togliatti was born on 26 March 1893 in Genoa, the capital city of the Italian region of Liguria, in the Kingdom of Italy, into a middle-class family, the third son of two school teachers. His father Antonio was also an accountant in the public administration, while his mother Teresa Vitale was an elementary school teacher. Togliatti later described his mother as "the central figure of the family". His father's job forced the family to move frequently to different cities. Before his birth, they moved from Turin to Genoa. He was named Palmiro because he was born on Palm Sunday; Togliatti's parents were observant Roman Catholics. Togliatti had one sister (Maria Cristina) and two brothers (Enrico and Eugenio Giuseppe). Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti became a mathematician and discovered Togliatti surfaces.
Education and military service
In 1908, Togliatti studied at the Azuni classics high school (classical lyceum) in Sassari, where he was recognised as the best student in the school. After a series of studies concluded with an average of 30, the highest vote, Togliatti graduated in November 1915 with the thesis Il regime doganale delle colonie ("The colonial customs regime"), which was discussed with Luigi Einaudi. He also enrolled in the faculty of letters and philosophy. When his father died on 21 January 1911 of cancer, his family ended up in poverty; it was only thanks to a scholarship that Togliatti was able to graduate from the University of Turin with a degree in law in 1917. In 1914, Togliatti had entered politics by joining the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) prior to the First World War; however, he focused on his studies rather than activism. The war and his political activity prevented him from obtaining a second degree, and he fullt dedicated himself to politics starting in 1923.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Togliatti declared himself in favour Italy's intervention on the side of the Entente powers, a minority view among socialists who distinguished, in the words of Battista Santhià, "between the imperialist war and the just national claims against the old imperialisms; they did not consider it right that some Italian provinces should remain under the dominion of a foreign state [referring to Austria-Hungary's control of regions in northeastern Italy], moreover a reactionary one." According to Togliatti's brother Eugenio Giuseppe, Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci were "both hypercritical of the government's neutralist attitude and harshly anti-Giolittians".
The precise intellectual path of the young Togliatti is not clear. In the cultural climate of those years, the neo-idealistic and Hegelian currents were prevailing, and they ranged from the teaching of Benedetto Croce to the most exasperated expressions of nationalism and spiritualism. Togliatti would always declare that he remained a stranger to the latter; it is certain that Croce in particular, then La Voce of Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, and Gaetano Salvemini and Romain Rolland had no small part in his youthful formation. The first approach to Marxism would have occurred all through the writings of Antonio Labriola; the decisive elements that led Togliatti to Marxist socialism were his friendship with Gramsci and the concrete social reality of Turin, which saw the development of a strong and organised workers' movement.
Initially permanently discharged from military service due to physical incapacity (a severe short-sightedness), Togliatti served as a volunteer army officer during the war, and he was later wounded in action and sent home to recuperate. In 1915, he had volunteered for the Red Cross, serving in various hospitals, including at the front. Meanwhile, wartime needs led the military commands to review the enlistment criteria, so he was declared able and enlisted in 1916; he was assigned to the 54th Infantry Regiment and then moved, at his request, to the 2nd Alpini Regiment. In 1917, Togliatti was admitted to the official cadet course in Caserta; he passed it but did not obtain the appointment as an officer due to a serious pleurisy that had occurred in the meantime. He gained the rank of caporale maggiore (major corporal) in health care, and he was discharged in December 1918 at the end of a long leave.
Returning at the end of the conflict, Togliatti was a part of the group around Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo paper in Turin, while working as a tutor. Like the other founders of L'Ordine Nuovo, Togliatti was an admirer of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and strongly supported the immediate creation of soviets in Italy. He believed that existing factory councils of workers could be strengthened so that they could become the basis of a communist revolution. Initially, the newspaper, which was founded with union backing, focused on cultural politics. In June 1919, the month following its founding, Gramsci and Togliatti pushed out Angelo Tasca and re-focused as a revolutionary voice. The newspaper reached a circulation of 6,000 by the end of the year and its reputation was heightened by its support of the April 1920 general strike, while the PSI and the affiliated General Confederation of Labour did not support it. On 1 January 1921, the paper began to be published daily.