The Goat

At 61, Giovanni Roveda is still a child of revolution, has spent almost all his life on the barricades of Italy's reddest and most aggressive union movement. Roveda was leader of the workers who occupied the Turin factories in the uprising of 1921. Mussolini put him in jail for eleven years. In the wartime Italian resistance he was captured by the Fascists, escaped a firing squad at Verona. He became a Communist Senator and mayor of industrial Turin (pop. 726,618). Then in 1946 he was instructed to resign as mayor, and became instead secretary-general of the powerful, Communist-run Metallurgical Workers Union, whose biggest branch is Italy's biggest employer, the Fiat automotive works.

Communist Party strength among the workers is now waning (it has fallen off nationally 10% to 15% in the last six months), and the most staggering defeat of all was its defeat at Fiat (TIME, April 11). Recriminations filled the air. "Time after time," charged Communist Deputy Agostino Novella, "the party had no adequate warning of what was happening." The Communists were hungry for a scapegoat. A meeting last week of the five national secretaries of the party found one. They decided "to liberate Comrade Roveda" from his onerous duties and told him to go take a health cure. To succeed the ousted comrade, they appointed 50-year-old Novella, the man who put the finger on Roveda.

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