Shouted a party member from the rear of the crowded ballroom: "Let's talk about Stalinists and anti-Stalinists!" The challenge shocked the 4,000 comrades who jammed Bologna's ornate 13th century Palazzo del Podestá. For as long as he could, the speaker, Italian Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, ignored the interruption and continued his prepared address on national politics. Just before he finished, Togliatti replied to the heckler: "We are for the socialist revolution, which has opened the road to a new society. This society has been built by the Soviet Union. Who built it—the Stalinists or the anti-Stalinists?"
If the answer was ambiguous, the demand for debate had been uncomfortably clear. The doubts and divisions raised by
Khrushchev's destalinization drive and the Sino-Soviet conflict have plunged the Italian Communist movement into bitter internal quarrels.
This week the party's central committee meets to cope with a fresh factional split brought on by the apertura a sinistra (opening to the left), the parliamentary alliance between Christian Democrats and left-wing Socialists (TIME, Feb. 9). One group of militant Communists fears that successful center-left cooperation would weaken the party by weaning away thousands of rank-and-file supporters, favors discrediting the alliance before it is launched (by demanding more radical reforms than the new coalition can support). A more moderate group, which includes Togliatti, argues: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, on the theory that the apertura can later be widened to include Communists as well.
Roads to Power. The Communist Party's 1,700,000 members, 6,700,000 electoral supporters (one-fifth of the total Italian vote in 1958), and an income of $50 million a year from dues, investments and Soviet subsidies make it the largest, most influential Communist Party in the free world. It is also the fattest and most bourgeois, charge its critics. Years ago, Togliatti's double-breasted suits had become the symbol of Italy's "respectable" Communism, seeking power not through revolution but in Parliament and at the polls. These days, more and more Italian comrades wear well-cut grey flannel, while their women appear at party functions in modish sweaters with tasteful single strands of pearls. But right now there are some bad rips in the party's grey-flannel respectability.
At one extreme are a minority of diehard Stalinists, longing for the early postwar years when Communist partisans expectantly scrawled signs, "Ha da veni' Baffone"—Big Mustache (Stalin) is coming. They blame Khrushchev's coexistence politics for shattering the unity of the Soviet bloc. Togliatti's support of Khrushchev, says Senior Stalinist Mauro Scoccimarro, 66, has "created confusion within the party." Scorning Togliatti's parliamentary tactics, the Stalinists still prefer the revolutionary road to victory. Like Scoccimarro. most of the old guard are veterans of Mussolini's jails, but some are young toughs who shouted at a recent meeting: "Khrushchev is a madman who belongs in a padded cell!"