Communism in Italy is big business. The party spends $40 to $48 million a year; to run its elaborate headquarters on Rome's Via delle Botteghe Oscure (The Street of Dark Shops) costs another million a year. Although the U.S.S.R. always contributes some funds, the Italian Reds last year passed along 300 million lire ($480,000) to their hard-up comrades in France. There are Communists in the Army signal corps, in the public utilities, in the railroads, in the government bureaucracy, among the magistrates.
These are among the facts about their own Communists that Italians were learning for the first time last week. They were set down by Luigi Barzini, 45, one of Italy's outstanding correspondents (trained at Columbia School of Journalism), in a series of articles that were running in Milan's influential Carriere della Sera (arc. 450,000). His was Italy's first serious journalistic analysis of the Italian Communist Party, an eloquent comment on the present state of Italian journalism. Barzini went to the Reds themselves for facts and figures, and after some stalling they gave him at least part of what he asked for. His pieces are not roars of rage or compendiums of gossip; they are quiet and factual, but because his digging was so unprecedented, they have pay dirt in almost every paragraph.
Tomorrow's Salvation. Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, when he goes to work, dresses and acts like a big industrial executive. Writes Barzini: "Togliatti knows that nobody likes really militant Communism. He knows that such Communism always ends tragically, causing powerful defense coalitions to be formed against it. Togliatti will make any sacrifice and concession just so the party can survive. There are only two things that he is afraid of: isolation and unwavering anti-Communism."
Under this "soft policy," Italian Communism has become a "serious, dangerous and learned party." It has virtually rid itself of Bolshevist fanatics, irrepressible terrorists and chronic barricade jumpers. As a result, older Italians find it hard to believe that Togliatti's suave, businesslike minions are really Communists, and younger Italians find it hard to believe that Communists are furious and disorderly men. The Reds no longer try to scare the middle classes. "Today in Italy," says Barzini, "it is neither dangerous nor uncomfortable nor damaging to be a Communist, and having been one might mean salvation tomorrow."
Please, No Adventures. Many Italian Communists, under their comfortable Red exteriors, says Barzini, are actually individualists and freedom lovers who fear to see an all-out Communist victory. "Reds in the Romagna and Emilia are by tradition liberty-loving, they scarcely tolerate discipline, they are not fond of the bureaucracy that Communism would inevitably establish. Almost all of these people are aware of the fact that freedom is useful to everybody, not only to the rich but also to the worker and farmer as well. They have, by their struggles, won rights which do not exist in Marxist countries."