[2] Born into a middle-class family, Togliatti received an education in law at the University of Turin, later served as an officer and was wounded in World War I, and became a tutor.

[1] Described as "severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base" and "a hero of his time, capable of courageous personal feats",[1][3] his supporters gave him the nickname il Migliore ("the Best").

[3] Born in Genoa but culturally formed in Turin during the first decades of the 1900s, when the first Fiat workshops were built and the Italian labour movement began its battles, Togliatti's history is linked to that of Lingotto.

[2] After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the formation of the Cominform in 1947, Togliatti turned down the post of secretary-general, offered to him by Joseph Stalin in 1951, preferring to remain at the head of the PCI,[2] by then the largest communist party in western Europe.

Togliatti would always declare that he remained a stranger to the latter; it is certain that Croce in particular, then La Voce of Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, and Gaetano Salvemini and Romain Rolland had no small part in his youthful formation.

[23] Initially permanently discharged from military service due to physical incapacity (a severe short-sightedness), Togliatti served as a volunteer army officer during the war,[6] and he was later wounded in action and sent home to recuperate.

[37] The policy of Bolshevisation moved Gramsci to write a letter in 1926 to the Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of Joseph Stalin.

"[46] In the 1924 Italian general election, the National List of Mussolini (an alliance with liberals and conservatives) used intimidation tactics,[47] resulting in a landslide victory and a subsequent two-thirds majority, while the CPd'I gained 3.7% of votes and 19 seats.

[49] During World War II, he broadcast messages of resistance to Italy, and he also tried to appeal to fascist rank and file in order for them to join forces with liberal and left-wing anti-fascist elements.

Throughout the dictatorship, the party was able to maintain and feed a clandestine network, distribute propaganda leaflets and newspapers, and infiltrate fascist unions and youth organisations.

Togliatti returned to Italy in March 1944,[61] after 18 years of exile in Switzerland, France, Soviet Union, and Spain where, with the cover name of Alfredo, he represented the Comintern in the Garibaldi Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

[14] This was a compromise between anti-fascist parties, the monarchy of Italy, and the then prime minister Pietro Badoglio to set up a government of national unity and to postpone institutional questions.

[70] Later less publicised pardons and releases on parole between 1947 and 1953, when Togliatti was no longer the Italian Minister of Justice, further reduced sentences for political crimes committed during the war and turned Italy's amnesty into an amnesia.

According to Togliatti, the relationship with the middle classes was essential, both for the rooting of the PCI and for the realisation of that pact between producers that was at the heart of the economic policy proposal he launched in August 1946 in l'Unità with an explicit reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

[84] The 1948 Italian general election resulted in a loss to Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, DC)[85] Allied with the PSI in the Popular Democratic Front,[86] the coalition achieved 31% of the votes,[87] and the PCI returned 131 deputies to Parliament.

[6] On 14 July 1948, at about 11:40 am,[88] Togliatti was shot three times,[89] being severely wounded by Antonio Pallante,[90][91] a neo-fascist student,[1] who had strong anti-communist views and was a militant of the Common Man's Front.

Upon regaining consciousness, Togliatti himself was instrumental in calling for calm and a return to normalcy; from his hospital bed, he reassured his comrades and tried to pacify spirits, averting the danger of an armed insurrection.

[104] In December 1951, within the context of the birth of the Gladio anti-communist organisation, spy microphones were set up in Togliatti's house by the head of the Supervisory Commission, and were intended to also monitor his partner, Nilde Iotti, who was suspected of being in contact with Vatican circles.

[6] Despite his close relationship with the Soviet Union, Togliatti's leadership remained unscathed after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was in most countries a cause for major conflicts within the political left.

"[116] The new policy proposed by Togliatti was opposed to any revolutionary means of gaining power and aimed at accompanying institutional action with the extension of social and trade union struggles, and supported the concept of peaceful coexistence.

In a 1963 speech in Bergamo, titled "The Destiny of Man", he called for a common front between the religious and communists against consumerism and the commodification of life, and that this opposition must act as a bridge between them.

[126] The party's newspaper l'Unità described him as "a great son of the Italian people, a brilliant leader of international communism, a fighter who spent his whole life in a hard and tireless struggle for socialism, for democracy, for peace.

[1][128] One of the main town squares in the Croatian city of Rijeka (Italian: Fiume) was named after Togliatti while Croatia was part of SFR Yugoslavia, until it was renamed to Jadranski trg (Adriatic Plaza) in 1994.

[1][135][136] While its motives have been widely discussed and argued about by scholars,[137] the national peculiarity of the PCI is not limited to Togliatti and is well-founded by the fact that it was a co-founder of the Italian Republic and its constitution, as well as its significant contribution to the resistance against Nazi–fascism and its mass base.

[143] According to one estimate, the United States spent about $10–20 million on anti-communist propaganda and other covert operations, much of it through the Economic Cooperation Administration of the Marshall Plan, and then laundered through individual banks.

[144] Fearful of a possible electoral victory for a left-wing coalition, the British and American governments also undermined their campaign for legal justice by tolerating the efforts made by Italy's top authorities to prevent any of the alleged Italian war criminals from being extradited and taken to court.

[147] Liberal and left-wing critics saw Togliatti's policy of the Salerno Turn as an example of frontism, or common front, that was orchestrated by Stalin to conform to his deals with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

[154] Canfora saw the Salerno Turn and 1944 as a rebirth of Italy's Communist party, and said that "the PCI had gradually followed a path which required it, as a historical task, to occupy the space of social democracy in the Italian political panorama.

[41] In February 1992, during the electoral campaign for the imminent general election, the historian Franco Andreucci published an incomplete and manipulated version in the weekly news magazine Panorama, the excerpt of a holographic letter from Togliatti (then known as Ercoli, a Soviet citizen since 1930, member of the military commission of the executive committee of the Comintern) from the Moscow archives, in a correspondence sent from Ufa on 15 February 1943 and written in response to a letter from the PCI leader Vincenzo Bianco who asked Togliatti to intercede with the Soviet authorities to avoid death of prisoners of the Italian Army in Russia.

Andreucci had corrected a photocopy that came badly and in part incomplete given to him by the historian Friedrich Firsov, dictating it via telephone to the director of Panorama from home of the journalist Francesco Bigazzi, correspondent in Moscow for the newspaper il Giorno, as a result of which he had to resign from the position of consultant held at the publishing house Il Ponte alle Grazie, which, due to the loss of credibility suffered, soon suffered a collapse in sales and was absorbed in 1993 by Edizioni Salani.