What News from the Peasant?

In the old days, Italy's Palmiro Togliatti amazed everyone by his cocksure confidence about Moscow's ways. For more than three decades the unquestioned leader of Italian Communism, he built the party into the largest outside the Iron Curtain, formed a leftist front that captured the votes of one of every three Italians. He had spent long years in Moscow, was a big wheel in Stalin's Comintern, won such confidence from the Kremlin that he was allowed to pursue his own "Italian line" of Communism. And he knew them all personally--Stalin, Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin, Zhukov. All except one.

In 1954, after Stalin's death, when "somebody named Khrushchev" beckoned Togliatti and other Red leaders to a secret meeting of the Cominform in Prague, Togliatti refused to go, sent a deputy instead. How much further this disdain went was described last week in the magazine Azione Comunista, by Giulio Seniga, once a key man in Togliatti's Communist Party. Togliatti did not even meet Khrushchev until the famous 20th Party Congress in Moscow, wrote Seniga. On his return to Italy, Togliatti said of Khrushchev's famed outburst against Stalin: "He was like an elephant walking on eggs."

Togliatti "never bet a cent on Khrushchev," continued Seniga. "He thought he was worth very little." Togliatti's newspaper L'Unita called the turn wrong on Zhukov, thinking the marshal was about to be promoted instead of sacked. Each morning for three years, Togliatti reportedly walked into Communist Party headquarters in Rome with the same question: "What news from the peasant?" Whenever the reply was "Nothing new." Togliatti would sigh, "Then today we can work in peace." After Hungary brought a flood of desertions from the Italian Red Party, Togliatti told an intimate: "See where Khrushchev has brought us."

Last week, ill with influenza, obviously out of favor with the new master of the Kremlin, Palmiro Togliatti, 65, was sitting out the campaign for Italy's general elections, coming late this month. Luigi Longo, wartime Red partisan organizer, postwar street fighter and a recent visitor to the Kremlin, has taken over as acting party chief. But Communist membership is down from 2,500,000 to 1,700,000; one-fourth of the party's Senators and Deputies have been dropped as unsuitable candidates for reelection; the Communists are having a hard time finding vote-winning issues in an Italy basking in a record national prosperity; and they no longer have the flashing oratory of Palmiro Togliatti, who once knew all the answers.

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