Palmiro Togliatti

Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti (; 26 March 1893 – 21 August 1964) was an Italian politician and statesman, leader of Italy's Communist party for nearly forty years, from 1927 until his death. Born into a middle-class family, Togliatti received an education in law at the University of Turin, later served as an officer and was wounded in World War I, and became a tutor. Described as "severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base" and "a hero of his time, capable of courageous personal feats", his supporters gave him the nickname ("the Best"). In 1930, Togliatti renounced Italian citizenship, and he became a citizen of the Soviet Union. Upon his death, Togliatti had a Soviet city named after him. Considered one of the founding fathers of the Italian Republic, he led Italy's Communist party from a few thousand members in 1943 to two million members in 1946.

Born in Genoa but culturally formed in Turin during the first decades of the 1900s, when the first Fiat workshops were built and the Italian labour movement began its battles, Togliatti's history is linked to that of Lingotto. He helped launch the left-wing weekly ''L'Ordine Nuovo'' in 1919, and he was the editor of ''Il Comunista'' starting in 1922. He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy (''Partito Comunista d'Italia'', PCd'I), which was founded as the result of a split from the Italian Socialist Party (''Partito Socialista Italiano'', PSI) in 1921. In 1926, the PCd'I was made illegal, alongside the other parties, by Benito Mussolini's government. Togliatti was able to avoid the destiny of many of his fellow party members who were arrested only because he was in Moscow at the time.

From 1927 until his death, Togliatti was the secretary and leader of the Italian Communist Party (''Partito Comunista Italiano'', PCI), except for the period from 1934 to 1938, during which he served as Italian representative to the Communist International, earning the ''il giurista del Comintern'' ("The Jurist of Comintern") nickname from Leon Trotsky. After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the formation of the Cominform in 1947, Togliatti turned down the post of secretary-general, offered to him by Joseph Stalin in 1951, preferring to remain at the head of the PCI, by then the largest communist party in western Europe. His relations to Moscow were a continuing subject of scholarly and political debate after his death.

From 1944 to 1945, Togliatti held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, and he was appointed Minister of Justice from 1945 to 1946 in the provisional governments that ruled Italy after the fall of Fascism. He was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of Italy. Togliatti inaugurated the PCI's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism", the realisation of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Italian Constitution in all its parts (that is, that a Communist government would operate under parliamentary democracy), a strategy that some date back to Antonio Gramsci, and that would since be the leitmotiv of the party's history; after his death, it helped to further the trend of Eurocommunism in Western Communist parties. He was the first Italian Communist to appear in television debates. Togliatti survived an assassination attempt in 1948, a car accident in 1950, and he died in 1964 during a holiday in Crimea on the Black Sea. Provided by Wikipedia