Word: togliatti
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Down the Red Flag. March 1944 is the beginning of Togliatti's experiment in "respectable" revolution. Mussolini's regime is dead, and the Italian people squirm to the light-dazed, vaguely jubilant, cheering the U.S. as liberator. This is a unique opportunity for the West to establish a healthy Italian democracy. But the Communists see an opportunity, too. Many of them want to start a revolution immediately. Under the heavy March rains, Italy's mud seems like the very clay of history...
...grey sky, flying in from Algiers, after an 18-year exile, appears Palmiro Togliatti-and proceeds to mold, the clay. He announces that there must be no antiroyalist agitation. It might even be advisable to roll up the Red Flag for a while, in favor of the national green, white & red. Moscow recognizes Marshal Ba-doglio's royalist government and Palmiro Togliatti enters it as Minister without Portfolio. Less ductile Communists, who still want to rush to the barricades, are pushed out of the party, many by the "respectable" device of being refused support by the Communist machine...
...this sweetness-&-light campaign conies when "Father Palmiro" and his Communist Curates vote for the reaffirmation of the Lateran Pact (TIME, April 7), thus depriving the Christian Democrats of their most effective antiCommunist weapon-the charge that the Communists fight Christianity. Says a Communist observer: "You might say that Togliatti decided for the moment to dispense with the crude sickle in favor of the more delicate rapier. And instead of the hammer, we find Terracini's parliamentary gavel more effective...
Nowadays, Atheist Togliatti firmly clutches the palm branch. Recently, in the Italian Assembly, one of his Christian Democrat opponents ended a bombastic speech with an appeal to the Blessed Virgin; the next speaker windily invoked the Holy Ghost. Communist Togliatti did not reply with dialectical materialism; instead, his steady voice crackled out the First Commandment-"lo sono il Signore Dio tuo. . . ." His fellow legislators cheered...
...scholarship. Later he went into Socialist journalism. In 1921, he was among the men who led the left wing's secession from the Socialist Party and founded the separate Communist Party of Italy. Five years later, when Musso lini's police were beginning to make things hot, Togliatti fled to France...