Older & Paler

In Rome's Teatro Adriano, where Mussolini used to hold Blackshirt rallies, Italian Communists gathered last week for a long-delayed seventh national party congress. Peace--Red style--was the battle cry of 748 delegates and more than 1,000 special guests.

The party had come a long way--mostly downgrade--since the sixth congress three years ago. It had been crushed in the 1948 national elections. Its dominance over Italy's trade unions had been seriously challenged by the rise of the anti-Communist CISL (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Liberi); its recent attempts at political strikes had fizzled miserably; its strong-arm squads had been routed and its hidden arsenals uncovered by Interior Minister Mario Scelba's security forces. Internal defection, led by Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi (TIME, Feb. 12), had rocked it to its heels. What the party needed at an obviously low ebb was a shot of optimism. The No. I comrade, Palmiro Togliatti, just back from a cure in Moscow, gave it to them.

Old Line. Togliatti, like the party itself, looked older, paler and far less robust than three years before. "Never mind a few misguided defections," he counseled. "Comrades, we have immense potential allies: the whole Italian proletariat and the population of the Italian South. We will find allies even among the lower echelons of the bourgeoisie, now faced with economic annihilation."

Togliatti denounced the Christian Democratic government of Premier Alcide de Gasperi as "the government of war, of no social reform, of rising prices . . ." Then Togliatti turned his attention to foreign affairs.

"The United States," he cried, "have become the emergency states, and have oriented everything towards preparations for war, and have forced and are forcing the whole world, and particularly the nations under their direct control, such as Italy, to follow the same path."

He loved the new Red China: "Its strength of 450 million men, comrades, 450 million men powerfully organized--politically, economically and militarily organized--with a huge military organization hammering at imperialism in Asia and elsewhere . . . brings a message ... of redemption to the downtrodden masses of Asia and throughout the empires." Soviet Russia, too, had a message of redemption: it had achieved "grandiose strides of socialist economy . . . [and] capitalist nations have lagged far behind . . ."

New Line. All this sounded like a stereotyped harangue of Communism anywhere. It was apparently an attempt to show that Togliatti was leading from strength--the strength of the Red world bloc--for a new Italian political and propaganda line. In place of opposition to the government, the party boss offered cooperation--at a price. "We are ready to withdraw all opposition to the government," he proclaimed, "if it will modify its foreign policy." Specifically, Togliatti demanded Italy's withdrawal from the North Atlantic defense alliance and from its support of U.N. action in Korea.

The comrades applauded lustily and showered Togliatti with gifts. For his adopted daughter, seven-year-old Marisa Malagoli, Genoa dockworkers gave a doll which closed its eyes and pronounced "Peace, peace." For Marisa's father himself, the Genoese donated a grey, five-passenger, 30-knot motorboat ("Fast as any boat in the Italian navy," boasted the comrades). A delegation of Red youth contributed a rowing machine, to help

Togliatti become "as strong physically as you are in guiding your party."

Togliatti was followed by another speaker, Renato Guttuso, who had a message of optimism on the cultural front for the comrades. The Communist Party, Guttuso declared, could save European culture from American commercialism. "America," he added, "is the great leveler of European culture. An American publishing house which could lay claim to distinction for having published Steinbeck, now, for purely commercial reasons, has debased itself by publishing Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a despicable book."*

Guttuso was quite happy about the Italian cinema and the Communist contribution thereto. He was disturbed, however, by the state of painting and sculpture. "We must have something that all can understand, some realism, but at the same time it must be something artistic--not anything like a Coke advertisement or the statues of the Sacred Heart."

*Guttuso had his facts awry. Harcourt, Brace & Co., which published Nineteen Eighty-Four, never published any Steinbeck books. John Steinbeck's publisher is Viking Press.

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