CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Verde, Aniello |
|---|---|
| Title | The Italian Communist Party and the Hungarian crisis of 1956 |
| Summary | Despite a vast research about the impact of the Hungarian crisis of 1956 on the legacy of Communism in Italy, the controversial choices of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) have been often considered to be a sort of negative exception in the progressive path of Italian Communism toward modern European socialism. Instead, the main idea of this research is to reconstruct the PCI’s decision-making within the context of the enduring strategic patterns that shaped the political action of the party: can the communist reaction to the impact in Italy of the Hungarian uprising be interpreted as a coherent implication of the communist preexisting and persisting strategy? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to reconstruct how the news incoming from Hungary left an imprint on the “permanent interests” of the PCI, and how the communist apparatus reacted to the crisis. Therefore, this research is going to demonstrate that the Italian Communist Party was not just a “passive” agent in the context of the Hungarian crisis, but it operated as an “active” one. The reaction of the PCI resulted into a confrontation between emerging dissent and authoritative imposition of the party-discipline. This issue interjects the historiographical controversy over the ambivalent role of Communism in Italy: between Stalinist-type practices and the emerging “Eurocommunism”. |
| Supervisor | Siefert, Marsha; Rieber, Alfred |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/verde_aniello.pdf |
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