[2] Opposed to Achille Occhetto's 1991 proposal to dissolve the PCI,[3][4] Cossutta founded, together with Sergio Garavini, Nichi Vendola, and others, the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC),[1] of which he became the president.

[3] Cossutta was targeted for decades by political opponents, including allegations that he personally received Soviet money and of being a KGB spy, both of which had been viewed with scepticism or were dismissed in two parliamentary commissions (one by the centre-right coalition in 2002, the other by the centre-left coalition in 2006) about the Mitrokhin Archive, one of the main sources of the allegations, which was also viewed with scepticism; a Supreme Court of Cassation ruling held that it was defamatory to refer to him as a Soviet spy, and awarded him damages.

He never hid or regretted his role, and claimed its legitimacy in a bipolar world, in which all involved parties, from the United States to the Soviet Union, had their international lenders.

[1] His tendency to consider the Soviet Union as the leading state of the international Communist movement led him often and willingly to argue with Enrico Berlinguer, especially when the latter came to hold the position of general secretary.

[3] In the 1990s, he engaged with some self-criticism with those from the il manifesto group that he expelled from the party in 1969, and accepted some of their objections to his pro-Soviet views; in this sense, Cossutta's pro-Sovietism came from the fear that condemnation would have put an end to any possible alternatives to capitalism, and that rather than representing full support or praise of real socialism, it was a way to keep the party, while respecting liberal democracy, revolutionary and thus maintain the objective and possibility of a post-capitalist, socialist society.

[8] The left wing of the party represented by Cossutta, named after him (cossuttiana),[11][12] also consisted of various ex-workerist militants and he himself was close to the demands of their movement, even though he never detached himself from the PCI.

"[14] In 1981, Cossutta opposed the Eurocommunist perspective promoted by Berlinguer, who had stated that the progressive driving force of the October Revolution had run out and that the PCI should have severed its historical relations with the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc.

[1] Apart from the merits, Cossutta criticized the method by which this political line was arrived at, which he defined as lo strappo (the tear),[1][3] due to its gestation extraneous to internal discussions and the history of the party itself.

I have many to reproach myself for, I too am ready to take the scourge, the ashes, the hair shirt, but if I think back to the great choices in my eyes they still appear right today.

[16][17] Following the 1996 Italian general election, in which he was re-elected a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the PRC was part of the majority that supported the first Prodi government.

[19][20] In 1998, Fausto Bertinotti, the then secretary of the PRC, withdrew confidence in Romano Prodi's government, and caused its subsequent crisis and fall.

Cossutta, who disagreed with this choice and more generally with the political profile assumed by Bertinotti,[1] decided to detach himself from the party and to found, together with other exiles close to his own area, such as Oliviero Diliberto and Marco Rizzo, the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI);[21][22] it is recounted that Cossutta did so through a fax sent by Pro Loco di Bonassola, near La Spezia.

[1] In 2000, he participated, along with other politicians like Walter Veltroni, at the Gay Pride in Rome, where he took the opportunity to demonstrate his position in favour of same-sex marriage.

During the second Prodi government, he was a member of the Third Commission for Foreign Affairs, Emigration, from 6 June 2006 to 28 April 2008;[27] in his earlier senatorial terms, he held many parliamentary positions.

[1] On 21 April 2007, Cossutta presented his resignation from the membership of the party, as he no longer renewed his card, and effectively left active politics.

[1] In 2008, he took side against what he described as the cultural revisionism that, in his view, was tended to obscure the anti-fascist resistance, the Italian Civil War, and the Liberation of Italy.

[1] He was also opposed to the naming of a street in Rome after the founder of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, Giorgio Almirante, whom he described as "a politician who was not simply a member of the First Republic but a partisan shooter and supporter of racism.

I'm celebrating my 80th birthday, but at 19 I found myself secretary in Sesto San Giovanni where the PCI had 18,000 members in a huge concentration of workers.

"[1] Among the leaders who guided the growth of the party, Cossutta named Giorgio Napolitano in Naples, Emanuele Macaluso in Palermo, Alfredo Reichlin in Rome, Ugo Pecchioli [it] in Turin, and Guido Fanti in Bologna.

[1] In 1991, the Russian journalist Alexander Evlakhov, citing documents from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, stated that Cossutta had received $824,000 million from Russia for propaganda reasons during the 1980s.

Il Tempo called him a "man of the KGB", and wrote that he traveled "frequently to the USSR to develop strategies against the deviationist drift" of Berlinguer.

[50] In November 2009, Cossutta was awarded €30,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article by Roberto D'Agostino [it], the founder of Dagospia [it],[51] in which it was alleged that he was involved in the 1973 attempt on Berlinguer's life.

[52] In January 2015, the publisher of Libero in the legal entity Editoriale Libero s.r.l., the director Maurizio Belpietro, and the author of the 2003 article were definitively sentenced by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation to compensate Cossutta to €50,000 for moral damages as a result of the defamatory content of an article in which the newspaper,[1] "in relation to the so-called Mitrokhin case, identified him as a spy for the Soviet Union".