ITALY: What News from the Peasant?

In the old days, Italy's Palmiro Togliatti amazed everyone by his cocksure confidence about Moscow's ways. For more than three decades the unquestioned leader of Italian Communism, he built the party into the largest outside the Iron Curtain, formed a leftist front that captured the votes of one of every three Italians. He had spent long years in Moscow, was a big wheel in Stalin's Comintern, won such confidence from the Kremlin that he was allowed to pursue his own "Italian line" of Communism. And he knew them all personally—Stalin, Beria, Molotov,...