Word: cucchi
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Valdo Magnani's closest friend was his fellow deputy from Bologna, Aldo Cucchi, in private life a surgeon who also specialized in studies of hemp workers' diseases. Cucchi had led an Italian partisan unit against the Nazis and Fascists, won his country's highest gold medal for bravery. In the Chamber of Deputies, he acted as a bodyguard for Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti...
...different times in the past year or so, Friends Valdo and Aldo paid visits to Russia and to satellite Soviet East Europe. Both were disturbed by what they saw. Confided Cucchi: "That country doesn't interest me half as much as it used to." Agreed Magnani: "My honesty has been too much exploited. Between what I saw in Poland and what I have been told in the Communist propaganda sheets, there is an abyss...
Fear to Defiance. But Magnani still wanted to hammer on the steel wall. He told his family: "If you hear that I have committed suicide, don't believe it." His old friend Aldo Cucchi joined him in heresy. In Rome, the two declined to see the party fathers. Instead, they resigned as Communists and as Deputies. Said Cucchi: "In the Italian Communist Party, there is no freedom to express one's own opinion . . ." Said Magnani: "I can no longer remain representative of a party which does not share my views." Last week they issued a joint call...
...overwhelming vote, rejected the Deputies' resignation. The Red vilification apparatus clawed at the heretics: They were "traitors . . . automatically expelled." They were trying to smear "the patriotic and peace-defending line of the Communist Party in order to slander the Soviet Union." Party goons threatened Magnani and Cucchi on a train from Rome. Anti-Communist groups gleefully plastered up slogans: "Magnani and Cucchi Chose Italy...
...sounded more than a bit like whistling in an unplumbed dark. Magnani and Cucchi were symptoms of party dissension, which is still largely subsurface. They were a crack that could become a chasm, with effects of unforeseeable consequence. The two heretics, it was said, would next issue a manifesto for an independent Italian Communist Party. Already, in the heart of the country's Red Belt, they had adherents. On Reggio Emilia's grey stone walks were chalked: "Long live Valdo and Aldo...