He died on vacation, Palmiro Togliatti, exactly 55 years ago, on August 21, 1964. The then secretary of the Italian Communist Party, of which he was the historical leader, was in Yalta, a city in the Crimea (now Ukraine, at the time Soviet Union), famous for the conference that was held almost 20 years earlier, at the end of the Second World War (in February 1945), on the occasion of which the political leaders of the three main Allied countries took very important decisions on the continuation of the conflict, on the future structure of Poland, and above all on the establishment of the Organization of United Nations.
Yalta was therefore a symbol of the rebirth from the world conflict and of the division of the world into two blocks: in Italy, after the liberation struggle and the support of the Americans, it accompanied the beginning of the Republic and the restoration of democratic institutions. The communist party, which Togliatti already led in the years of the advent of the fascist regime (from 1927 to 1934, preceded by Antonio Gramsci who was then imprisoned and died in 1937), was one of the most representative political forces in that period and was led from Togliatti, uninterruptedly since 1938 after a brief interlude entrusted to Ruggiero Grieco.
The funeral of Togliatti, who was born in Genoa in 1893, was oceanic, testifying to a strong bond with the electorate, comparable with that demonstrated many years later for the last farewell to another leader of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer.
That Togliatti should die in the Soviet Union was perhaps fate, given the strong bond that existed especially in those years between the Italian Communists and the Moscow regime. The leader, also known for his ability as a mediator between the various souls of the party, had been the Italian representative within the Comintern, the international organization of communist parties active from 1919 to 1943. For this he deserved the pseudonym of "jurist of the Comintern", attributed to him by Lev Trotsky himself, while later Stalin even offered him the position of general secretary of the Cominform (the new body that replaced the Comintern), in 1951.
Togliatti, however, refused, preferring to remain at the head of the party in Italy and beginning to have doubts about the Soviet leader's policy, which will make him fully approve the line of Nikita Khruščëv at the XX congress of the PCUS. To testify to his strong bond with Russia (moreover much discussed at the time) there is also a curious fact: in Russia there is in fact a city named after him, called Togliatti (in Cyrillic Тольятти) and in Italy erroneously known as Togliattigrad. Founded in 1737 with the name of Stavropol'-na-Volge, the city which today has almost one million inhabitants was changed to Togliatti, immediately after the death of the Italian politician. At that time, a Fiat production plant was also built there.
The history of Togliatti is also linked to that of the Lingotto: culturally it was formed in Turin in the first decades of the 900s, when the first Fiat workshops arose and the working world began its battles.
Going back to Italian politics, from 1944 to 1945 Togliatti held the position of Deputy Prime Minister and from 1945 to 1946 that of Minister of Justice - who got the famous amnesty approved for the former fascists - in the governments that ruled Italy after the fall of fascism.
Member of the Constituent Assembly, after the general elections of 1948 (the year in which he miraculously survived even an attack on the exit from Montecitorio) he led the party in opposition to the various governments that succeeded one another under the leadership of the Christian Democrats, proposing the famous “Italian road to socialism”, that is the realization of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Italian Constitution in all its parts.
From 1948 Togliatti was romantically linked (among a thousand controversies, due to the fact that he was already married and to the moralistic austerity that distinguished the PCI at the time) to his party colleague Nilde Iotti, the first woman in the history of republican Italy to hold one of the three highest offices in the state at the end of the 70s, the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies.
On August 21, 55 years ago, one passed away prominent figure in political history Italian, a controversial figure (for his relations with the USSR) but unquestionably a leader of the first magnitude.
