ITALY: Reds on the Run

Italy’s Communist Party, the largest outside the Iron Curtain, assembled in Rome’s marbled Hall of Fascism last week to try to pick up the pieces. Gone were those reassuring symbols of unquestioned authority—the looming portraits of Stalin and his archangels. Gone, too, was the unshakable confidence of the rank and file in the pyrotechnic brilliance of Palmiro Togliatti, the man whom Italian Communists call // Migliore (The Best).

Under the watchful eye of Soviet “Observer” Ekaterina Furtseva, the only woman member of Russia’s ruling Presidium, stoop-shouldered Palmiro Togliatti played it safe, confined himself to abstruse analyses of Marxist doctrine and repeated pledges of allegiance to the Kremlin. Only a few dissident notes were heard, most of them sounded by 41-year-old Antonio Giolitti, a grandson of Giovanni Giolitti, who was five times Premier of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. Said Antonio Giolitti: “In Poland and Hun gary the party has been best defended not by those who keep silent, but by those who openly admit the mistakes of the past … If the men who now lead are incapable of changing, we must change them, too.”

But if Togliatti could subdue the party regulars inside the hall, a more resounding verdict was delivered outside. Workers of Turin’s Michelin tire plant, voting as the eighth congress was about to adjourn, registered a drop in Communist strength (from 60% to 26% of the total vote), to throw the Red-dominated union out of control of its shop stewards’ committee for the first time since World War II.