Word: secchia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Secchia has been named to fill the post of regional secretary of the party for Lombardy...
...offender was Comrade Pietro Secchia, the party's deputy secretary general and one of Togliatti's two topmost lieutenants. As chief of the party's organizational apparatus, and the late Lavrenty Beria's representative in Italy, Moscow-trained Comrade Secchia had long possessed authority, secret dossiers and generous allocations of funds with which to build a personal machine within the party. But at the national party conference a fortnight ago, he rashly got himself identified with party diehards, who want to discard Palmiro Togliatti's "soft" policy for tough methods (TIME, Jan. 24). Because Moscow...
...Communist Party strength (some 340,000 of the total claimed Italian membership of 2,500,000). A recent drop in party membership there, and a more serious decline of 75,000 membership in Lombardy's Red-run trade unions, shows the need for a tough, driving organizer of Secchia's caliber. But it is also the kind of job in which an out-of-favor Communist can be made to look bad. If the Communists intended to honor Secchia with the appointment, they would hardly have removed him as deputy secretary general or taken him off the politburo...
Suppressed Demands. The sentiments were those that Party Dogmatist Secchia is known to hold; the words were probably those of his male secretary and close confidant, Aldo Seniga. The letter itself was reportedly inspired by Bruno Fortichiari, one of the founders of Italian Communism, now 62 and out of favor with Togliatti's blue-suit Communists for his long insistence on militant tactics. Several days before the conference opened, Secretary Seniga suddenly disappeared. Apparently afraid that he might turn up somewhere with a damaging story, the Communists characteristically accused him of absconding with 8,000,000 lire and some...
...spread of dissent, wide as it was, apparently was not strong enough to break Togliatti's hold. In the course of the conference, he summoned party brass into a private meeting to consider disciplinary measures against the rebels, Pietro Secchia among them. Some demanded expulsion from the party, but Togliatti talked Secchia into suppressing his demands for sterner policies in return for a promise of no reprisals against the rebels. Then, Palmiro Togliatti strutted back into public view to pretend, by sarcasm and ridicule, that such a thing as dissent had never existed. "Comic . . . ridiculous . . . grotesque," said Togliatti. "These...