The Italian CP Debates Its Future

With a sigh of relief, the Italian Communist party (PCI) laid to rest the “Soviet Question” in the early 1980s. For more than two decades, the leadership of this massive party (29.9 percent of the vote in the 1983 parliamentary elections) had been gingerly stepping away from the Soviet Union and reinforcing its doctrine of independent, national roads to socialism. What was seen in Italy as the definitive break between at least the leadership of the PCI and the Soviet Union came in...