Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Western Europe and Canada, Volume XXVII

111. Letter From the Chargé in Italy (Jernegan) to the Director of the Office of Western European Affairs (Jones)¹

Rome, June 26, 1956.

Dear Johnny: In my letter of June 4,² I said that we were making a study of what had happened to the Left in the administrative elections and depending on what we found, might have some recommendations as to our policy regarding the SocialCommunists here.

The present letter includes our analysis of the election results as regards the Left and some recommendations based on this analysis. It was drafted prior to the beginning of the currently very confused situation which has resulted from the shock caused by the publication of the text of the Khrushchev report.³ On the basis of the development of this situation we may have some additional recommendations, particularly in regard to possible ways of contributing to the PCI’s difficulties.

We think that, if anything, the events of the last two weeks make the initiation of something along the lines we suggest additionally urgent. In the light of these it seems possible that currrent Soviet policy (see our telegram No. 4314)⁴ and the pressures of PSI–PCI competition may, repeat may, result in the PSI trying to commit us to something in the nature of a “winner take all” battle in regard to “Socialist unification” on terms quite disadvantageous to us.

What we did by way of investigation was to make a case-by-case examination of the results in the eighty-eight provincial capitals in which elections were held. We tried to see, insofar as possible, to whom the PCI and the PSI had lost, from whom they had gained, and the exchange between the parties. We have also compared these results with those obtaining in the other communal council elections and in the provincial council elections to see whether the processes which we found in our study of the provincial capitals appeared also to have taken place in the other elections.

The overall totals in the provincial elections and in the communals outside the provincial capitals were somewhat different, especially where linking obtained, and perhaps also in the provincials as a result of the more political and less local character of the elections. It also seems to have been true that organization per se counted far more in the smaller towns and villages than it did in the larger centers (which tend to be more literate and more politically conscious). Despite these variations, however, certain general facts regarding the Left did emerge with considerable clarity.

1) Although the elections took place after one of the outstanding ideological volta faces of Communist history, the Moscow-controlled Left here as a whole maintained its position intact in most areas and improved them in many. The rather heavy loss of votes which the PCI sustained in many areas (in most cases fully or at least largely recovered by the PSI) seem to indicate, however, that the Twentieth Party Congress and “deStalinization” and the deeper seated processes in both the Communist and the free worlds which led to these events were not without their impact on the Italian Left. By and large, nevertheless, the Italian voters who in the past had voted for either the PCI or the PSI did not appear to see any acceptable alternative to voting again for one of the two parties.

2) With the exception of a very few places where other center, or, as in Naples, right elements scored gains at the expense of the SocialCommunists, the only party which took votes from them in individual communes was the PSDI. Far more important in the PSDI’s performance, however, than the taking of these relatively few votes away from the SocialCommunists were the facts that: a) what appears to have been a majority of former UP and USI voters, whose votes Nenni had hoped to get for the PSI through his agreements with these splinter parties, bolted their parties’ agreements and cast their votes for the PSDI not the PSI; and b) when votes were moving to the Left, in case after case the PSDI short-stopped a substantial number, often more than half, before they got to the PSI.

While not, generally, an acceptable substitute for the PCI or PSI in the eyes of Leftist voters, the PSDI is thus the nearest thing that there is to one. Even in its present state—somewhat lacking in consistency and deficient in organization—it plays a critical role in retarding the growth of the SocialCommunists, and, in particular, of the Socialists. The comparative success with which it played this role in the recent elections was perhaps enhanced by the ideological confusion recently caused by Moscow. This does not, however, diminish the need for the role to be played or imply that some other party can play it. The attempts to do so, actually far more leftist in implication than recent PSDI policy, that the DC has made—witness La Pira in Florence and Dosetti in Bologna—have been unsuccessful.

3) The Center and the DC, in general, displayed commendable stability. One must give the Italian voter credit for not letting his natural irritation with a regime which had long been in power drive him to extremes. On the other hand, the fact that the Right as a whole emerged from the elections with about the same total vote that it had had before appears in large measure to have been due to the astonishing personal success of Lauro in Naples. We should thus not let the overall figures blind us to the fact that in a number of areas the right showed more or less unmistakable signs of incipient disintegration. The very process of the passage of time since the end of the war and the lack of a revolutionary type of situation, which are taking their toll on the PCI, also affect the Right.

This would be fine if we could have any assurance that votes moving away from the Right would, in their great majority, stick to the Center. Our investigation, however, turned up cases strongly, if un-provably, suggesting that former right votes (mostly MSI, but also in some instances PNM) moved all the way across the board to the PSI.

4) The Socialists’ gain at Communist expense and their gains from other sources, which increased the PSI’s relative size vis-à-vis the PCI, were really impressive. In sixty-two of the eighty-eight provincial capitals where elections were held (which are important both as examples and as the nerve centers of the two parties) the PSI’s electorate is now more than fifty percent the size of the PCI’s and in twenty-nine it is more than one hundred percent of the latter’s size. The PSI registered percentage gains in its electorate vis-à-vis the PCI’s of 23% and 19% in such major cities as Milan and Genoa and up to 107% and 73% in other cities such as Verona and Brindisi.

The importance of this process could, perhaps, be partially discounted if it had been restricted to traditional Socialist strongholds. It was, however, not confined to such areas. It extended nearly uniformly over the whole territory of the republic, including (in the bigger cities at least) the South and the islands where it had very generally been said that the people “did not distinguish” between the two parties. They made a choice on some basis, however.

The principal exceptions to Socialist success appear to have been in areas, such as Bologna and Perugia, which had been under SocialCommunist regimes in which the Communists had the upper hand. This is something else which may “far pensare” the Socialists a little.

When one considers that the previous relations between the PSI and the PCI were based on a 35–65 relationship, the relative increase in PSI strength seems certain to have its impact on Socialist thinking. Along with the large share of UP–USI votes which were given to the PSDI and the substantial number of leftward moving votes which stopped with the PSDI rather than going to the PSI, another factor which seems likely to give the Socialists food for thought was the provincial elections. In these, as you know, the PSDI picked up a quarter of a million or more votes over what it got in the communal elections. Even Nenni, who can hardly be counted among the anti-Communists in his party, felt called on to admit that for the most part these appeared to have been votes cast for the PSDI (rather than the PSI) because the Socialists were running linked with the Communists in the provincials, but were votes which had gone to the PSI in those communal council elections in which the proportional system had been used.

There are three other factors, not directly connected with the election results, which I would like to discuss before I come to our recommendations:

1. The public controversy caused in both the PCI and the PSI by the initial impact of the Stalin affair was short lived and party discipline was soon restored. That the controversy came quickly to a halt appears, however, to have been a result of the pressure of the electoral campaign and of an agreed pre-election moratorium on the discussion of general policy or the relations between the two parties. It does not seem to be a sign that Italian leftists had lost interest in these subjects. Nenni, who has recently promised to republish his 1938 Paris articles on the Moscow trials and has recommenced his innuendo slurs on the PCI, shows his recognition of the continuing interest in and confusion about the Stalin affair and the relations between his and Togliatti’s parties and is trying to turn this interest and confusion to his own advantage. Togliatti, for his part, has shown the pressure he is under by his pledge to convoke “soon after the elections” the long-delayed Party Congress, a trial which he is, no doubt, less anxious than ever to face. Although we may have no recurrence of public breaks in party discipline like those earlier in the year, the lid on questioning within the parties seems to be coming off. The pot, while not likely to boil over, seems destined to do some pretty brisk simmering.

Even on the top party levels, particularly in regard to PSI–PCI relations, the situation under the surface appears to be far from tranquil. In the Central Committee speech that he made shortly after his return from Moscow in February, Togliatti included a paragraph in which he accused an unnamed person or persons of wanting to work toward a “defacto break” of the unity of action pact “without proclaiming it openly”. It by now seems clear that he was referring to Nenni. Togliatti’s pre-election Turin and Florence speech pronouncements about the dangers of PSI participation on municipal juntas from which the Communists were excluded—the actual texts of which, as against those published in L’Unita, we understand contained indirect but unmistakable warnings about the fate of Saragat might overtake Nenni if he did not watch out—may possibly be largely written off to electoral competition between the parties. Togliatti’s Central Committee remarks, however, should, presumably, be given credence as a serious warning.

Angelo Rossi (Tasca), perhaps the most qualified observer of the Italian Left around, has stated his opinion that Nenni, whom he visualizes as a very ambitious politician firmly believing in Moscow as the “wave of the future,” sees a great role for himself as a new type of loyal ally but relatively free adviser to Moscow (and not as an old-style Comintern functionary, in which slightly derogatory category Nenni may put Togliatti). Togliatti, for his part, according to Rossi, is faced with the exceedingly difficult job of converting the relatively inflexible PCI (many of whose activities are of militant partisan-period origin) into a highly flexible political instrument suited to the present fluid distensione and “parliamentary way to Socialism” period. Togliatti, still according to Rossi, can succeed in this job only if he has no competition for the role of primary leader and principal authority on the Left here. And that, if one believes either Rossi or the by now accumulated mass of evidence, is just the role in which Nenni visualizes himself.

Togliatti is naturally reluctant to see the PCI reduced to minor importance as a relatively small party on the extreme Left. Any tendencies in this direction are what he has been inveighing against for years in his fight against Secchia and “sectarianism”. He may, moreover, fear that in seeing formerly Communist votes pass to the PSI ( a much less tightly organized party than the PCI and one in which a single man plays an overwhelming role) he may be seeing them pass to what will eventually turn out to have been merely a half-way house to their complete loss.

2) The second general factor that I want to mention is the likelihood that, barring a recurrence of heightened and obvious East-West tension, there will be increasing pressure within the PSI and the PSDI for the two parties to merge. Their present negotiations regarding reunification were undertaken largely for tactical reasons and seem certain to break down without tangible result. It is also true that the leadership of neither side apparently wishes to run the risk to its control which a merger would present. As far as the base goes, however, more than anything else it was the cold war which caused the division of the old Socialist party and which has kept the two sections of it apart.

The PSDI is, we realize, a proletarian party pretty well without proletarians and includes a substantial share of the petty-bourgeois and more-or-less intellectual Marxist element of the old Socialist party while the PSI retained by far the greater number of the old party’s working class elements.

One might think that this would render the two fragments incompatible. We are not sure, however, that this is so. For one thing, the party did not break cleanly on class lines, the PSI retaining a share of the intellectual Marxist types. It is, moreover, precisely the petty bourgeois element that the PSI (or, for that matter, the PCI) needs to capture if the Left is to reemerge from political isolation. Nenni, in his usually equivocal role and now spurred on by current Moscow policy, can play-act at “socialist unification” hoping thereby to take the PSDI apart from the base and swallow it up. This game, certainly, in the long run may have its potential since much of the PSDI base is, apparently, still quite conscious of being Socialist and feels uncomfortable about its party’s present unproletarian, pro-government role.

A fair slice of the electorate, however, as I have pointed out above, showed that it made a distinction between Nenni’s pretended autonomism and the real thing. As a result of the consciousness that a unified party would have a high potential for growth among the petty bourgeois as well as strength among the proletariat and could almost immediately play a great role in Italian politics, a relatively substantial element in the PSI may come to feel impatient at the slowness at which the party is moving toward unification. Nenni may have to prove his case for delay and many may wonder in whose interest the delay is being undertaken. It may thus, in the long run, prove easier for the two parties to have started (or continued, for it is not new) the reunification game, each party having done so for reasons of internal party politics and vaguely hoping to win the game on its own terms, than to stop the process short of completion.

(As I said in the beginning of this letter, events taking place since the above paragraphs were drafted make it seem possible that the PSI may decide to move toward “Socialist unification” sooner than we previously visualized. Togliatti would presumably be strongly opposed to such a development as highly dangerous to PCI interests. Present Moscow policy, however, is far from being tailor-made to suit PCI interests and it is not certain that he would be able to stop Nenni if the latter decided to attempt the maneuver.)

3) The last general factor that I want to mention, although implicit in much of what I have said above, is the nature of the SocialCommunists’current difficulties, and, consequently, of their vulnerabilities. Their difficulties are those of contradiction—contradiction between the interests of the PSI and the PCI, between the PCI’s interests and those of Moscow, between the positions of the filo-Communists, the Nenniani and the autonomists in the PSI, between Togliatti’s need to keep his leftist militants satisfied and his need to cover Nenni’s opportunistic tactics, between the authoritarian control exercised (in varying degrees) in both parties and their pretenses of democracy, between reformism and revolution, etc.

Now that distensione is the order of the day and Khrushchev has so blithely ripped the lid from Pandora’s ideological box with his denunciation of Stalin, dealing thereby a fatal blow to Stalinist orthodoxy, everyone can now quote some authority in the support of almost any argument.

Whatever one may think of the Italians’ refusal to adopt very clearcut measures against their SocialCommunists in the past, and while one may perhaps think that sweeping measures might, even today, succeed in reducing the problem almost to zero, it is by now apparent that the Italians are not going to do what they are not going to do. Under present conditions, moreover, it seems quite possible that hostile but half-way and largely vocal attack might give the SocialCommunists just the rallying point they need to prevent their present tensions from developing into serious lines of fissure. We are not suggesting, as you will see below, that we leave the problem entirely to the Italians. Just that we think the internal tensions of the Left are adequate to make Jujitsu a promising form of attack and that we should therefore leave any ideas of the battering ram for other occasions.

I am not suggesting that any more public blurring of the line between what is and what is not under Moscow control would be helpful. It would not. The maintenance of a fairly clear-cut line is to our mind essential in keeping the forces already at work going. One thing for which we can be thankful is that the Stalin affair and the recent electoral campaign produced, at least temporarily, a rather distinct definition of this line.

Our recommendations regarding our policy toward the SocialCommunists are as follows:

1) We should do everything we can to promote discussion within the Left of its contradictions and problems, hoping thereby to further their development.

2) We should make an attempt further to strengthen the PSDI, always with the purpose in mind of keeping it from merging with the PSI until such time as we are convinced such a merger would be in our interest. We should, however, be sure that we have done everything we can to have the PSDI in as good shape as possible prior to the day that Nenni dies or otherwise disappears from the scene politically, at which time we can expect some kind of crisis in regard to the control and orientation of the PSI to arise.

3) We should make a very careful study of the PSI to find out which federations, in the size of their electorate relative to the PCIs, in their organization and in their leadership, have what might be called the objective prerequisites for autonomism. We should then consider having less-than-first rank European (not Italian) Socialdemocrats develop informal and unpublicized but close personal relations with the leaders of those federations to establish a channel of communication and, if possible, gently to influence their thinking. [4 lines of source text not declassified]

We should, in our opinion, not visualize an operation designed to get part of the PSI to break, rather one intended merely to assist parts within the formal framework of the PSI to develop in an autonomous direction. We would thus be preparing for the day of Nenni’s disappearance. Any progress we cold make in helping to develop autonomism in the several parts of the PSI would in the interim tend to commit Nenni, in order to maintain control over his party, further in the direction of autonomism than his own inclinations or the needs of the PCI’s situation might dictate.

We do not mean to imply that we should deliberately seek a reunification of the Socialist Party in the hopes of taking the reunited party away from the Communists. The steps we suggest would not, we believe, make such a reunification any more likely. What we have in mind is to do everything within our power to see that a reunification, if one proves inevitable, takes place at as opportune a moment as possible and under conditions as favorable as possible.

We think, moreover, that in our further contacts with the PSDI our purpose of preventing a merger from taking place on unfavorable terms would not be well served by an entirely negative attitude on our part. A disturbingly large number of members of the PSDI Directorate, just less than half, are apparently already so attracted by the idea of “Socialist unification” that their judgment regarding the conditions under which it could safely take place may be more than a little clouded. We think that the best way to help the Saragat–Paolo Rossi group prevent a further drift in this direction would be to put Saragat in a position to say to the leaders of the PSDI Left: The Western Socialist parties and our other friends agree that the PSDI may have a good chance of bringing the PSI into the democratic camp. They think that we have a lot to do in the way of improving our base organization before we can face a merger without disastrous results; and in this they are right. They are, however, enthusiastic about our prospects and are willing to help us. The consciousness of a purposeful strengthening of the party’s base organizations, if we could help the PSDI to initiate one, might also influence the base to have a little patience.

In regard to point one of our recommendations, our idea is that while the highly polemic approach probably had its value prior to the elections, especially during the first shock of the Stalin affair, our efforts now should be primarily directed toward defining and raising the really serious questions that face the SocialCommunists (revolution or reformism, dictatorship or democracy, Soviet interests or Italian interests, etc.). We believe that in our method of presenting these questions we should give full credence to the motives which made our target audience Leftists in the first place. A hostile and highly polemic approach is just what the Leftists here expect from the so-called property interests, and, if continued into the post-election period, might call into play all the Left’s deep-seated defensive instincts of solidarity.

We do not, as a matter of fact, have any confidence that Italians of the Center or those ex-SocialCommunists available here are capable of overcoming their polemic habits to an extent that would permit them to put their fingers on exactly those problems most troubling the Left. [4½ lines of source text not declassified]Just how one could best handle the question of media and dissemination, we have no very clear ideas at the moment, but do not believe that these problems should prove insuperable. The quasi-philosophic questions would have, of course, to be translated into terms simple enough and familiar enough for the target audience to understand. The important thing to our mind, however, is that the approach be a serious one and eschew using sensationalism for its own sake.

[2 lines of source text not declassified] Possibly the encouragement of “sectarianism” and extreme leftism in the PCI might make Togliatti’s job of keeping Nenni covered more complicated or further aggravate PCI–PSI relations. Any challenges to Togliatti’s leadership also seem likely to come from the Left and its “Italian” (as against the “Soviet”) group. The important thing, however, is that the people concerned should not be made to feel that they are under unusual attack from the outside and thus be impelled to rally once more around the flag of “working class unity”.

In this letter I have discussed the Left and what we may be able to do about it more or less as a separate subject. The policies we are recommending should not, of course, be considered out [of] the general context of the Italian political scene as a whole, in which, obviously, the maintenance of a strong Center is of the utmost importance to us. The Right also, for that matter, is an integral part of the organism and, although one would be happy to see some center gains at its expense, appears to play a certain role by providing a non-Communist extreme to which people inclined toward the extremes can go. Moreover, as I have said, we have no way of being sure that anything in the nature of a collapse on the Right might not benefit the SocialCommunist Left more than it did the Center.⁵

Sincerely,

JACK

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 765.00/6–2656. Top Secret; Official–Informal.
2. Not found in Department of State files.
3. On June 4, the Department of State issued a press release containing the text of a document purporting to be Khrushchev’s February 25 speech before the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin.
4. In telegram 4314 from Rome, June 19, the Embassy transmitted an account of a press interview given by Togliatti. (Department of State, Central Files, 765.00/6–1956)
5. On July 9, Deputy Assistant Secretary Beam addressed a memorandum to Jones, which reads as follows:

   “I found Jack Jernegan’s letter most interesting and from my limited knowledge of the Italian political scene, I would endorse his recommendations, both as to substance and as to manner of application.

   “It may be that in Italy we have a greater opportunity than in many other countries to bring about a split within the Moscow-controlled groups of a kind similar to the split within the old Second International. It would seem that the approaches to autonomist elements in the PSI would have to be very selective, in order to obviate the PSI from swallowing up the PSDI. It is discouraging that the majority of workers apparently still give their votes to the PSI and PCI.” (Ibid., 765.00/6–2656)