Palmiro Togliatti

Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti (Italian: [palˈmiːro toʎˈʎatti] ; 26 March 1893 – 21 August 1964) was an Italian politician and statesman who led the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) 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 il Migliore ("The Best"). In 1930, Togliatti renounced Italian citizenship, and he became a citizen of the Soviet Union; upon his death, a Soviet city was 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 1900s and 1910s, 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 of Italy's Communist party, except for the period from 1934 to 1938, during which he served as Italian representative to the Communist International, earning the nickname il giurista del Comintern ("The Jurist of Comintern") 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.