Italian Communist Party
이탈리아 공산당
Party founded in Livorno on 21 January 1921 as the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) by the communist faction that broke away from the Italian Socialist Party. It worked underground under fascism and became central to the Resistance, and after taking the name PCI in 1943 it became the largest communist party in the Western world. In 1991 it dissolved itself and was relaunched as the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).
In depth
The party was founded when the communists walked out after the Socialist congress at Livorno refused to expel the reformists as the Communist International required. Its official name was Communist Party of Italy – Section of the Communist International; its main components were Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo group in Turin and Nicola Bombacci's Maximalists, and Amadeo Bordiga was elected secretary. It won 4.6% and 15 seats in the 1921 election. At first Bordiga's Left, which rejected any alliance with the Socialists, held the majority, but during the Comintern's Bolshevisation campaign the Third Congress at Lyon in January 1926 adopted Gramsci's theses and changed course.
The Fascist regime dissolved the party on 5 November 1926. Gramsci and Bordiga were arrested in 1926, and according to the English-language source Palmiro Togliatti was elected secretary in place of Gramsci in 1927. More than three quarters of political prisoners between 1926 and 1943 were communists; the party kept a clandestine network and campaigned against the Ethiopian war in 1935. On 15 May 1943, after the dissolution of the Communist International, it took the name Italian Communist Party (PCI). Returning in March 1944, Togliatti took the party into government through the 'Salerno turn', putting the anti-fascist struggle before the question of the monarchy, and rebuilt it as a mass party.
It won almost 19% in the 1946 election and, after being excluded from government in May 1947, remained in opposition. Its membership peaked at 2.3 million in 1947. Its support for the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 ended the alliance with the Socialists. Under Enrico Berlinguer the party criticised the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968, pursued Eurocommunism and a 'Historic Compromise' with Christian Democracy, and reached its highest vote, 34.4%, in the 1976 election. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan it broke completely with Moscow in 1979. In November 1989 Achille Occhetto announced the 'Bolognina turn', and on 3 February 1991, at the 20th Congress in Rimini, the party voted by 807 to 75 with 49 abstentions to dissolve itself and found the Democratic Party of the Left. Opponents formed the Communist Refoundation Party.