On the night of August 21, 1968, with a very rapid and treacherous operation, the Warsaw Pact troops (Soviet, Polish, East German, Hungarian and Bulgarian; Romania refused to take part with its own) occupied Czechoslovakia without encountering any resistance other than the passive and hostile one of the population. Jan Palach, a young Czech, at the beginning of 1969, set himself on fire in protest and became the symbol of resistance to that tragic event which interrupted militarily the so-called Prague Spring or the attempt of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and its leader Alexander Dubcek to launch a profound reformist program with the restoration of civil and political liberties.
The new course of Prague did not question the alliance structure nor did it propose (like the Hungarian revolution of 1956) to overthrow the communist regime. There were therefore no reasons of international politics or of security of the Soviet block that justified an armed intervention (according to a ruthless logic of realpolitik in the logic of the Yalta Pact). Moreover, in that same period Romania was engaged in a foreign policy characterized by significant differences from Moscow. But internally, Nicolae Ceausescu's communist party maintained control of the country with its usual iron fist.
Leonidas Brezhnev, the leader of the Pcus, justified the military aggression with the need to save ''the achievements of socialism'', enunciating the principle of ''limited sovereignty'' which remained from then on at the basis of Moscow's policy on Eastern Europe, with the consequence of blocking any attempt at renewal.
History took its revenge by fully applying the rule of ''simul stabunt, simul cadent'' to the countries of real socialism. It took, however, another twenty years to arrive at November 9, 1989 et al collapse of the Berlin Wall.
THEPolitical office of the PCI (the party had welcomed, with favor and hope, the experience of the Prague Spring) expressed a ''grave dissent'' (later confirmed at the XII Congress) on the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The stance – different from the solidarity with the Red Army flaunted twelve years earlier, in Parliament, by the communists in the days of the Magyar repression – was greeted in Italy as a radical turn in the politics of that party to which everyone was willing, at the time, to give a lot of credit.
But there is another important August 21st in the history of Communism. At 13,30 pm on that same day, four years earlier, Palmiro Togliatti died in Yalta, historic leader of the PCI and for many years prominent personalities of the Communist International of which he was second secretary to the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov. In this role he took part, from exile and as a direct representative of the International and of Stalin, in the most important events that occurred between the two world wars of the last century, including the crucial Spanish Civil War.
On July 14, 1948, upon leaving the Chamber Togliatti suffered an attack by a Sicilian named Antonio Pallante. Violent protests and strikes followed for at least three days; then the leadership group of the PCI (to whom Togliatti from the hospital bed had advised not to lose his head) managed to recover the situation.
A few years before he died (in 1953) Stalin had insisted on appointing Togliatti as director of the Cominform. In justification of this choice, the ''Little Father'' said: “Our Ercoli (the surname that Togliatti used in hiding, ed.) knows us all very well, he knows who we are, how we work. There is no other like him. You see comrades – he continued – sometimes the most intricate political issues can be resolved if the right man is found. Ercoli looks like that man to me''. Togliatti did not like the proposal; however, he had to refuse on his own, because the Italian leadership group declared itself so willing to accept Stalin's proposal that Togliatti felt betrayed.
In the summer of 1964, the leader of the PCI had accepted the invitation to stay in Yalta (which was the vacation spot of the communist nomenclature) with the aim of meeting Nikita Khrushchev and present him with critical remarks on his political action. Togliatti and Khrushchev had not ''caught'', starting from the famous Report carried out by the second al XX Congress of the CPSU, which Togliatti had judged unbalanced because the emphasis attributed to the "cult of personality” for Stalin, as the origin and cause of the horrors of the regime.
Togliatti, with essays and speeches, had tried to historicizing Stalinism and to point out the limits of a system that had allowed the arbitrators of a dictator. And he had collected these reflections in a memorial that he wanted to deliver personally or send to Khrushchev if he was unable to meet him (the Soviet leader continued to deny himself).
He fell ill on August 13th while he was visiting a pioneer camp with Nilde Jotti, he was treated with all the means available and operated on in an emergency but all was useless. The body was transported to Italy where the funeral rites were an apotheosis.
The leaders of the PCI, who had received the Memorial from Jotti, decided to make it public. Of Togliatti it can be said that he was a “son of the century“. He went through the events of the "short century" with a new vision, which he brought - from Salerno breakthrough, at the time of his arrival in Italy in 1944, onwards - to change the nature of a closed and sectarian cadre formation, into that of a popular party (we could even define it as interclassist) and larger and more important Communist Party of the West, capable of keeping together (where the PCI established itself permanently in local power) the practical sense of government, proper to the "hated" social democracy, without abjuring the myth of the revolution and of socialism: a myth which, over time, was increasingly projected in a rarefied perspective, like a sort of universal judgment without God.
