Could this really be a congress of Italy's Communist Party? There sat the 1,200 local delegates, bourgeois and beaming, as their leader talked tolerantly of compromise with the capitalists and collaboration with the Catholics. But for a lonely little bust of Lenin on the podium and the presence of Moscow's cadaverous Ideologue Mikhail Suslov (who brought it), not a single picture, statue or reference to Russia's Communist heroes, past or present, could be seen or heard. Instead, what hook-nosed Secretary-General Luigi Longo, 65, was promoting was something that he styled "the Italian road to socialism."
His line was tailored to the...
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