An intimate and political memoir from a party in transition

A really tasty behind the scenes look. Which tells us, more than many historical reconstructions, what those times were like, beyond official reports, and what the Soviet Union was at the stage when it was no longer – after Prague – the indisputable reference power in the eyes of European computers. And above all, it tells how the most important communist party in the West knew how to deal with its increasingly thorny relationship with the Kremlin.

Here’s the episode: Brezhnev with a gesture of great courtesy accompanied us to his office with a table occupied by a series of telephones, including the legendary red one. He asked us to relieve ourselves, gave some directions to those present and left us alone. With a complicit look between the three of us – Pavolini and Berlinger – me – with our eyes fixed on the black phones and Brezhnev’s recommendation to use them if we thought so, we thought it was time to find out how Sunday’s matches ended, which we still don’t know and which has kept Pavolini, a big Lazio fan, worried. Finally in Brezhnev’s room we managed to leave. Pavolini dictated a phone number to melonliness And I asked to call. Calling Roma was very fast, a little slower than dialing from a keyboardlonliness to the Sports Editorial Board. When they finally called, I handed the phone to Pavolini who asked anxiously about the outcome of Sunday’s Lazio game. His face lit up at the news that they had won 2-0. Berlinger asked at that point what Cagliari had done and only after a certain time was Pavolini able to whisper the score in his ear, which I didn’t get, but, based on Berlinger’s facial expression, I thought it must be a draw, neither good nor bad. I also asked what SPAL did, and here the wait was even longer because my team was still in the third division at that time, and therefore we had to go and look for the last page. I seem to remember it was another draw, perhaps with sanbeneditis. Not happy that Pavolini wanted to know who registered from Lazio and here the search was longer before I thought the names of Chinaglia and Garlachelli arrived ».

the ring It is framed in the story, moreover, a very serious and precise one, of a delicate mission to Moscow at a period when the PCI, recently led by Enrico Berlinger, has begun to march away from the Kremlin with a certain determination, made obligatory by the still open wound of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the growth of the Italian Communist Party’s weight in Italian and European political dynamics. The difference between PCUS, starting with its number one, Leonid Brezhnev, and PCI, starting with its new young secretary, Berlinguer, is now not only political. One might say anthropology. And indeed, from then on, the Pcus-Pci relationship would prove increasingly ambivalent until it became little more than formal, waiting, too late, to appear on Gorbachev’s stage.

But what makes the episode even more interesting is who said it: Antonio Rubi. Rubi was a national leader of the Italian Communist Party and one of the chief directors of its international politics. For the reporters who followed PCI—the shopkeepers—Rubbi was, until his appearance, the emblem of communist sternness towards the media: mouth shut, only official press releases talking. Above all, however, my Rabbi was the exemplary PCI exclusivity executive in the early decades, in his will and ability to build high-level cadres, selecting them, in many cases, from the working class, to the point of promoting them to the highest roles of national responsibility.

Rubbi has recently written a series of autobiographical books that are very useful for understanding how PCI, his legendary regional organization, operates with the power to boot a peasant’s son from the region of Ferrara, then a land of poverty and emigration, all the way up to the upper floors of dark shops and Montecitorio. They are books that “work” because they are written with originality and clarity, from a pen that, apparently, doesn’t look like the ruby ​​book buttoned up at the exit from Oscur Potigi. However, upon closer examination, the background it reveals is not like changing what is known about PCI and its troubled relations with Moscow, but gives more credence to some choices that were not only purely political, but related to the concept of democracy, which is irreconcilable between the two parties.

The last bookAnd Infinite sixty-eight (La Carmelina, p. 466, Euro 20) He tells in great detail the inner life of the Chinese Communist Party, in one of its most solid settlements, Emilia-Romagna, and gives an account, starting with the narrator’s personal experience, of what it was like to organize a mass “party” on a national scale. Suffice it to say that in the Ferrara Confederation there were 175 departments and 22 municipal commissions. Protector of the capillary region. Unimaginable today.