Drake, Richard 1942-
The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism
Journal of Cold War Studies - Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 115-119
The MIT Press Project MUSE
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_cold_war_studies/v006/6.3drake.html
Journal of Cold War Studies 6.3 (2004) 115-119 _________________________________________________________________
The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism Richard Drake Valerio Riva, Oro da Mosca:
I Finanziamenti Sovietici al PCI dalla Rivoluzione d'Ottobre al Crollo dell'URSS. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1999. 879pp. Gianni Cervetti, L'Oro di Mosca: La Veri sui Finanziamenti Sovietici al PCI Raccontata dal Diretto Protagonista. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1993; 2nd ed., 1999. 210 pp. Mikhail Suslov, a powerful member of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) during the era of Leonid Brezhnev, declared in 1967 that Communism had grown faster than any other ideology in history.^1 Even the great religions of the world, he argued, could not match the speed of Communism's expansion. In the fifty years since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Communism had spread from Russia to the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe and to China. Moreover, in the non-Communist world the forces of revolution appeared to be gaining momentum. By Suslov's count, seven million Communist militants were active in twenty-seven developed capitalist countries and in forty-seven national liberation movements. He concluded that the egregious excesses of capitalism would continue to push the historical dialectic in the direction of Communism, as Karl Marx had foretold. Suslov, who died in 1982, did not live to see the demise of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself. The collapse of Communism and its virtual eradication as an alternative system to capitalism have closed an era in history. With the end of the Cold War came the dramatic opening of some of the Soviet archives, which for the past dozen years have been disgorging their secrets about the ways the Soviet leadership exercised power. New biographies of...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summer 2004, Vol. 6, No. 3, Pages 115-119
Posted Online March 13, 2006.
(doi:10.1162/1520397041447355)
The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/1520397041447355
Richard Drake
This essay reviews two books that provide diverging views of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Soviet Union. The first book, a lengthy collection of declassified documents from the former Soviet archives, provides abundant evidence of the PCI's crucial dependence on Soviet funding. No Communist party outside the Soviet bloc depended more on Soviet funding over the years than the PCI did. Vast amounts of money flowed from Moscow into the PCI's coffers. The Italian Communists maintained their heavy reliance on Soviet funding until the early 1980s. The other book discussed here a memoir by Gianni Cervetti, a former senior PCI financial official seeks to defend the party's policy and to downplay the importance of the aid provided by Moscow. Nonetheless, even Cervetti's book makes clear, if only inadvertently, that the link with the Soviet Union helped spark the broader collapse of Marxism-Leninism as a mobilizing force.