Doing What Is Possible

Palmiro Togliatti will be remembered as the Communist leader who came closer than any other to seizing power for the Reds in Western Europe -- and failed.

His first chance came when he returned to Italy from Moscow after World War II and resumed leadership of the party he had helped found. Italy's Reds, who had played a big part in the resistance, were well armed, and To gliatti might have seized power if he had risked civil war. He did not, and Stalin later sneered, "Togliatti will never make a revolution. He's a professor."

His next chance came when he tried to win at the polls in the 1948 election. The Communists polled 30% of the popular vote, and were turned back by the strong leadership of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy's great Christian Democratic Premier, who was backed by the forceful anti-Communist intervention of Pope Pius XII.

Thereafter "II Migliore" (The Best), as his comrades called Togliatti, presided over a movement that gradually lost members, though it continued to win over a great many of Italy's intellectuals and artists, who make it a point of honor to be at least cafe Communists -- and sometimes more than that. Without ever coming really close to power again, the Italian Communist Party exerted a continuing influence -- sometimes merely a veto -- in Italian politics.

Embattled Shopkeepers. Writhing, maneuvering and often split, the party tried to adjust to the new Communist world that was born with Stalin's death. Though he had been an ardent follower of Stalin -- and had even at Stalin's orders betrayed the Italian Socialists to the Fascist police -- Togliatti now enthusiastically embraced "polycentrism" -- that is, the right of each national Communist Party to follow its own course. When criticized from the outside, Togliatti would merely give a vastly expressive shrug: "Siamo italiani [We are Italians]."

Freed from the damaging image of the Oriental despot in the Kremlin, Togliatti tried harder than ever to make Communism look as respectable as his own blue serge suits and as jovial as his sweaters. Long before Khrushchev invented goulash Communism, Togliatti invented spaghetti Communism. He no longer concentrated the Red appeal only on the masses, but turned to shopkeepers battling supermarket competition, housewives trying to balance the family budget, and small businessmen in need of tax relief.

After the Russians brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, Togliatti was deserted by his longtime allies, Pietro Nenni's left-wing Socialists. When Nenni last year joined the ruling Christian Democrats in the unstable center-left coalition government, the move in effect isolated the Communists. But Togliatti kept predicting that the coalition would fail to solve Italy's economic problems, that the Communists would benefit in the end.

The son of a poor government clerk, Togliatti now was building himself a villa among the rich near fashionable Porto Santo Stefano, and--politically--continued his do-gooder tactics. If filling-station attendants were underpaid, if a bridge fell down, if water was cut off from Rome, it was the Communists who led the protest. Faced with a milk shortage, Togliatti could be heard to say earnestly: "For a whole week now, there has not been enough milk in the cafes to make a cappuccino. That is terrible." He kept insisting that he had no intention of imposing Communism on Italy, that he only wanted benevolent socialism. "This means improving agriculture, raising the level of the masses and so on," he would say reassuringly. "In Italy, to nationalize everything would be madness." This soothing line brought about a resurgence of sorts at the polls. In Italy's last national election in 1963, the Reds won 7,700,000 votes, fully 25% of the total.

Undrummed China. In the Sino-Soviet schism, Togliatti strongly supported Khrushchev, and he had to deal with some pro-Peking splinters in his own party. But he believed it would be a tactical mistake to try to drum China out of the Communist bloc. That was perhaps what he hoped to talk about to Nikita Khrushchev when he started on a Black Sea vacation early this month. Near Yalta, two weeks ago, he suffered a stroke while visiting a Communist youth camp. Soviet doctors said he was too ill to be moved from the camp infirmary, and there last week, at 71, Togliatti died after exploratory brain surgery.

As an Ilyushin-18 plane brought his body home to Italy, amid national honors and prayers from the Pope, there was no doubt that Italian Communism had been weakened. His successor is tough, ex-Partisan Luigi Longo, 64, a fighter much less suave or plausible. Longo will probably be supplanted by younger "innovators," who in the past criticized Togliatti for being too subservient to Moscow, or too old-fashioned in his methods, but now have no very clearly defined policy beyond the fact that they want power.

The Italian Communist Party remains formidable, but it is not likely that Togliatti's heirs will succeed where he failed. To the end, he insisted that he was a democrat and a parliamentarian, and over a glass of wine he seemed convincing. But what he truly was Italians call "possibilista"--one who does whatever is possible. And no matter how hard he had tried, the seizure of power in Italy had not been possible to Palmiro Togliatti.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.